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Max Horkheimer

On the Sociology of Class Relations (September-November 1943)


According to Marxian theory the power of the ruling class has been based upon its
monopolization of the means of production. Legal ownership was the ideological expression
of the fact that a minority of people occupied a position which enabled them to exclude the
rest of society from freely using the land or other instruments necessary for the continuation
of social life on a given scale. The ruling class has absorbed the gifts of culture, that is to say,
the difference between the total product of consumer goods and the bare necessities of life of
those who produced them, and, though guided by uncontrolled social forces, has decided
which kinds of goods are desirable and by which methods they have to be secured: either by
hard labor alone or by the use of arms.
The privileges thus held by the ruling minorities throughout the ages were not altogether
irrational. It is true that, in the last instance, they were conquered and maintained by force.
But the fact that the groups which enjoyed them were able to make use of that force for the
organization and stabilization of some form of society capable of living was an expression of
economic superiority. In the later periods of their reigns, when the principles of organization
which they represented were made obsolete by the progress of other parts of the population,
their power grew, though more convulsive and terroristic, but at the same time became
imbecile. They were transformed into a purely repressive factor, the social and cultural forms,
wearily maintained by their administrative apparatus against new possibilities of human
association, exercise a mutilating effect upon the minds and faculties of mankind.
The notion of class as it underlies this theory of history needs further elucidation. At least
during the most typical periods property of the means of production was not identical with
their well-planned use, or with the existence of a unified will and determination. The various
groups which formed the ruling class understood each other fairly well whenever the
necessity occurred to crush the resistance of the exploited masses or of any forces threatening
to set up a new social rule. When it came to punitive measures against the progressive
burghers in Southern France or even against proletarian elements in Flanders, the worldly and
spiritual powers of the Middle Ages, emperors, kings, and popes forgot their traditional
conflicts for the time being and united for the defense of the prevailing hierarchical system of
society. However, medieval history offers in no way a picture of solidarity among the rulers
of the Christian world. On the contrary, there is a never ending fight going on over the booty
among the different hierarchical groups. Each one wants to assume authority over large areas
in order to be nourished and housed and served by as large a population as possible. The
ruling class, held together by the common interest in its specific mode of exploitation, has
always been characterized by its internal struggles, by the effort of one of its parts to secure
the spoils that others might have appropriated. And since the most efficient way to be sure of
the continuous flow of goods and services has always been the command over those who
render them, the struggle for security among the elites has been a run for as far-reaching a
command as possible, in other words, for the control of production.

For several reasons this nature of the ruling class was obscured during the 19th century. The
emancipation of the bourgeois from the restrictions of the guilds and the release of the laborer
from serfdom seemed to have abolished the unsurmountable differences between the various
sectors of humanity. Economic competition embracing all parts of the population was more
peaceful although more involved than the quarrels and discords of the great in times past. It
was one of the achievements of Marx’s writings that he, while stressing the changes and
progressive features brought about by the new form of exploitation, unveiled the oppressive
character of modern economic relations, the old issue of power behind the apparently rational
set-up of liberalism. In Fascism this identity of bourgeois society in its different periods has
become so obvious that economists who, in opposition to materialistic interpretation of
liberalism clung to a narrow concept of market economy, purged from all political and
historical implications, are now throwing the ideas of economy overboard altogether
replacing it by a more than simple political or psychological explanation of present-day
events.
In fact the idea of competition as it was conceived in liberalistic theory was misleading in
many respects, two of them being particularly important for the theory of class relations. First,
the nature of competition between the workers and the capitalists was essentially different
from the nature of competition among the capitalists themselves. Competition among
workers, at least during the heydays of liberalism, meant nothing else but that there were so
many of them that the wages could hardly rise above the cost of bare living and, as in many
cases, often even dropped below it. Fascism has only revealed what was already inherent in
liberalism: the delusive nature of the labor contract as a deal between equally free partners. It
would be a grave theoretical mistake to denounce that contract in modern totalitarianism as
mere formality, and stress its genuine authenticity under liberalism. In both phases of the
economic system the aim of the contract may well be considered as the maintenance of that
same basic inequality which is shrouded in its democratic language.
Second, competition among the entrepreneurs themselves was never quite as free as it seemed
to be. Here we are not thinking of the interference with industry by the liberalistic state,
which economists are used to brand with reproach as long as big business does not take it
under its own exclusive management; we rather have in mind the inequality resulting from the
different degrees of social power which various industries are able to exercise. Such
differences depend largely upon the more or less advanced stage of economic concentration
and centralization of the respective industry, upon the mass of machinery which its particular
branch of production requires, upon its importance for the regular functioning of the
economic life of the nation. Therefore, the groups which by birth or deceit, brutality or
smartness, expertness in engineering, management of human relations, marriage or adulation,
have come to control a part of the total capital invested in industry, from a hierarchy of
economic power by which the free play of competition has been limited at each of its stages.
The discovery that national economy in various capitalistic countries depended on 200, 60, or
even smaller numbers of families, brought this situation into a clear light which eventually
made the veil of free competition transparent.
The development of capitalistic society according to its own inherent tendencies, caused the
progressive elements of competition to disappear: it secured the link between the needs of
consumers and the profit-interest of the individual entrepreneur, it diminished the possibility,
slight as it was, that an independent mind gained access to an independent position, it reduced
the number of relatively autonomous economic subjects, who by the very fact of that plurality
had an interest in the functioning of general law and its impartial administration. Such
elements vanish in the later stages and allow society to revert to more direct forms of
domination which in fact never had been quite suspended. This process, however, is not only
a reactionary one. While the inequalities among the entrepreneurs are spilling over into
monopolistic and eventually totalitarian control of material life the relation between capital
and labor undergoes a most typical change. In recent history of capitalism the working class
has entered competition {the struggle for power} by adapting itself to the monopolistic
structure of society.
Up to the early 20th century the fight of that class had a more or less spontaneous and radically
democratic character. Their memberships, composed of workers who in the factory
experienced every day their antagonism to the individual entrepreneur, were more or less
active. Their executives, whose offices had not yet become quite stabilized expressed at least
partially the ideas and hopes of the oppressed individual concerning a better society rather
than to impress their own ideology as administrators, struggling for a big share in social
domination upon the minds of their followers. (This, by the way, does not mean that the
revolutionary functionaries of the past did not try to influence the workers. On the contrary,
their efforts to open the eyes of the workers were much more intensive and outspoken. The
difference of their psychological structures with those of their followers was perhaps much
greater than that between the workers of today and their prominent representatives, yet the
latter, once established, rest much heavier upon the souls, their sway over the life of the
association much more powerful than the appeal to theoretical reason made by the older type
of functionary.) The figure of the individual, trying to defend its qualities as a human being
against becoming, in and outside of the factory, a mere accessory to the apparatus of
production, had not yet been replaced by the figure of the member defined exclusively by its
standardized material interests. Today, the transformation is complete. It [labor] has assumed
a form which fits into the monopolistic set-up and, consequently its relations to the different
capitalistic groups are no longer so radically different from those prevailing among the latter.
The new situation is expressed in the concept of labor as it is a guiding intellectual principle
not only in the minds of workers but also with the general public. Labor like Agriculture or
Industry, or even sections of Industry, such as Steel, Rubber, Oil, are collective terms which
are not ordinary abstracta or generalia. Their logical structure resembles more a totality like a
State, Nation, Church with regard to their components rather than a generality like color or
animal with regard to their specimens. They emphasize the concreteness of themselves as
universal concepts, not as much one of the elements they comprise. The logical structure
indeed mirrors exactly the mold of their objects. The elements of labor, primarily the mass of
ordinary members, are not the forces which, by their own ideas and spontaneity, determine
the course of the whole; they are not so much, to use a mathematical term, the constant value
with regard to the whole as the fluctuating one. On the contrary, the whole, i.e., the
organization in which the leaders, with their specific materialistic and power interests, with
their philosophy and character structure, have an infinitely greater weight than the ideas of
any plain member, determines and even overawes the individual.
There is, however, a most typical difference between the social totalities of our monopolistic
society and those of earlier periods. The life of the totemistic tribe, the clan, the church of the
Middle Ages, the Nation in the era of the bourgeois revolutions, took their course according
to patterns which had assumed their shape in long historical developments. They had become
fixed images and models. True, such patterns—magical, religious or philosophical—were
intellectual sediments of their present forms of domination, they reflected the hierarchical
stratification of society as it were, but while they formed a cultural binding-substance which
maintained a social formation even when its role in production had become obsolete, they
also preserved the idea of human solidarity. This they did by the very fact that they had
become objectivized spiritual structures: any system of ideas as far as it is wrought in
meaningful language, be it religious, artistic, or logical, has a general connotation and
pretends to be true in a universal sense. Therefore, the older forms of totalities which tried to
comply with a spiritual, idealized model, contained an element which is completely lacking in
the purely pragmatic totalities of monopolism. The latter also show a hierarchical structure,
the wholly integrated and despotic totalities, but the ascent of their functionaries to the upper
grades has nothing to do with any quality of theirs regarding an objective spiritual content but
almost exclusively with their ability to impose on people, to handle people, to be smart with
people. Purely administrative and technical qualities define the human forces toward which
the modern totality gravitates. Such traits were in no way lacking in leaders of the different
sectors of ancient classes, but by their radical separation from any autonomous idea today
they give to the modern totality its particular character.
The concept of labor as a pragmatic totality becomes quite clear when confronted with the
proletariat as conceived by Marx. For him the workers were the masses of all exploited
people in industrialist society. In spite of all the minor differences in their fate, each of them,
on the whole, had the same outlook on life: the periods of employment would become shorter,
the pressure of the unemployed on the wages grow stronger, the misery, in the midst of an
ever wealthier society, become unbearable. More and more the capitalist would be unable to
grant even the bare existence to the majority of the population. This trend would be expressed
in the life of the average worker by a decay of his whole situation, by a deepening of its
poverty, by growing hopelessness and despair. The economic pressure resulting from this
state of affairs together with the enlightenment of the workers achieved by their role in the
modern productive process, would lead to the formation of a party which would finally
change the world. This party would spring from the similarity of the situation of the workers
all over the world, its principles and structure would abstract from the temporary differences
in the financial situation in different branches of production as well as in different
geographical and national settings. It would not express so much the actual conscience of the
individual worker which may be affected by all the mutilating influences of exploitation, but
the resistance against the frustrations imposed upon man by social forms which have become
purely oppressive. The effort of this party would be inspired by the fulfillment of just those
human aspirations, material and spiritual ones, which were suppressed or distorted by making
the individual a kind of accessory to machinery as it is achieved in the modern industrial
process, the parties aims were connected with the situation of the individual and the masses
and did not have a special affinity to a particular category of workers at the expense of other
ones. It represented the oppressed masses as such. Since the reason for the laborers
frustrations was not considered to be found in any specific defect of capitalism but in the very
principle of class-rule the workers parties efforts were to be guided in each stage by the
subjective idea of the abolition of that rule and the establishment of a true community.
It was decidedly not concerned with the increase of its members’ income, nor the income or
career or social position of its leaders. Working for and even adhering to that party meant the
renunciation of all such things. Members, by the very reason that such principles could be
understood and assimilated only by relatively advanced elements of the working class, were
an avant-garde of the working class. They were supposed to control the leaders very closely
and the criterion of that control was not supposed to be the avant-garde’s own wishes and
needs but the common interest of the working class in all countries, as the avant-garde was
able to understand it. Since the working class, the proletariat, in its tremendous majority was
composed of individuals who, in their own psychology, expressed rather the mutilating effect
of exploitation than the idea of a free humanity, the party, in spite and even because of its
antagonism to the majority of masses for whom it stood, thought of itself as the genuine
conscience of that same majority. The true interest of the masses, which they were unable to
formulate themselves, guided the party’s decisions as the theory of capitalist society.
Theory, therefore, played an essential role in the proletarian party. It was the heir to these
older systems of thought which had been the models for past totalities. These older systems
had vanished because the then prevailing forms of solidarity proclaimed by them had proved
to be treacherous. Unlike the medieval doctrine of the Church or the liberalistic apology of
the market system, proletarian theory of capitalism did not glorify its object. It looked at
capitalism under the aspect of its being the last form of domination. In no ways it justified the
established ideas and superstitions of those whom it guided. In contrast to the tendencies of
mass culture, none of those doctrines undertook to “sell” the people the way of life in which
they are fixed and which they unconsciously abhor but overtly acclaim. Social theory offered
a critical analysis of reality, including the workers’ own distorted thoughts. Even when the
actual masses were hostile to the party it felt itself related to their decisive interests by its
theory. The party was not above the masses as the labor-leader of today find themselves
above the laborers and the proletariat itself remained somehow amorphous and chaotic
composed of individual subjects, deprived as they were of their human qualities by their
transformation into mere elements. That amorphism, by which it differed fundamentally from
any kind of totality, was the reason why, despite its being split into national groups, skilled
and unskilled labor, employed and unemployed, its interests could become crystallized in a
body such as the party. The trade union whose role was not to be underestimated had
(illegible) to subordinate their actions to the parties strategy. Labor in monopolistic society is
itself a kind of monopoly. The amorphism of the masses and its complement, theoretical
thinking, both expressed in the parties fight against exploitation as such, formed the contrast
to the pragmatistic totalities of today which pay for the rise from the passive role of workers
in the capitalistic process with their complete integration. The proletariat as conceived by
Marx was no totality.1
Labor in monopolistic society is itself a kind of monopoly. Its leaders control labor supplies
as the Presidents of Big Corporations control raw materials, machines, or other elements of
production. Labor leaders trade at this kind of merchandise, manipulate it, praise it, try to fix
its price as high as possible. Labor, becoming a trade among others, completes the process of
the reification of the human mind. With religious and moral ideologies fading and the
proletarian theory, which once had expressed the ideals and hopes of the individual for a
better society, being abolished by the march of economic and political events, the conscience
of the workers becomes identical with the categories of their lenders’ trade. The idea of
antagonism between the international proletariat and any system of domination is completely
superseded by the concepts tied to the disputes of power between the various monopolies.
True, the proletarians of older days did not have any conceptual knowledge of the social
mechanisms unveiled by theory and their minds and souls bore the hallmark of oppression.
Yet, their misery was still the misery of single human beings and therefore connected them
with any exploited mass in any country and in any sector of society. Their undeveloped minds
were not kept in movement by the techniques of modern mass culture hammering the
behavior patterns under monopolism into their eyes and ears and muscles not only during the
leisure time but during the working hours from which the so-called amusement can anyway
hardly be differentiated. As it was true that many of them had to lead periodically a vagabond
life, their minds were inclined to roam and therefore were susceptible to theory. Workers
today like the public in general are intellectually much better trained, they know the details of
national affairs, the tricks and crooked means, typical of the most opposite political
movements, particularly those which live from propaganda against corruption. Despite of
their knowledge of the conditions of wealth and success, the workers will join in any
persecution, any attack on a capitalist or politician who has been singled out because he
violated the rules, but they don’t question the rules themselves. Since they have learned to
take the basic injustice of class society as a powerful fact and powerful facts as the only thing
which ought to be respected, their minds are closed to any dreams of a basically different
world and to all concepts which instead of being mere classifications of facts are formed
under the aspect of real fulfillment. Their childish belief in such things has been so drastically
wiped out of their memory that now they stubbornly believe in reality as it is; desperately
they repeat the commands which are knocked into their systems when they once tried to open
their eyes: there is only one way of living and that is the actual one, the one of hardboiled
smartness, all that seems to be opposed to it are idle slogans, lies, metaphysics, he who is
unable to adapt himself to this state of affairs, whether it is myself or any other man, the badly
adjusted, stupid one, is rightly doomed. The members have become like the leaders and the
leaders like the members and in their common positivistic attitude, fostered by modern
economic conditions, labor constitutes a new force in social life.
Not that exploitation has decreased. Despite of its accuracy, statistics cannot veil the fact that
the gap between the social power of a single worker and of a single Corporation president has
deepened and this difference is the real measure as far as social justice is concerned.
And although the unions, dealing in certain categories of labor, have been able to raise their
prices, at least during certain more or less exceptional periods, other categories, organized or
unorganized, experience the whole weight of class society. There is, furthermore, the
cleavage between the ones who are in the unions and those who cannot afford to enter or to
remain in them, between the members of privileged nations and those who, in this smaller
growing world, are exploited not only by their own traditional elites, but through the medium
of these, by the ruling groups of the industrially more developed countries. The principle of
exploitation has not changed at all, but on the one hand, the pressure of the masses who, as
Marx predicted, cannot be employed any longer as wage earners in private, competitive
industry, producing consumer goods for the purpose of profit, on the other hand the
association of the masses against universal exploitation has been made even more difficult
through the appearance of new antagonisms in the ranks of the oppressed masses themselves,
through a number of social and psychological processes which make for the destruction of
any memory concerning humanity as a whole and are inseparable from the growth of labor as
a well-organized competition in the struggle for a share in domination.
Since it is the trend of capitalistic society that ever greater parts of the middle class lose their
economic independence, those processes concern almost the total population. They form the
counterpart to the emancipation of large masses from economic stagnation and pauperization.
The more the world becomes ripe for the realization of theoretical thought, the more
theoretical thought and every human trait which points to it seems to vanish, and, wherever it
becomes manifest, is wiped out pitilessly. The conscious measures of expression *that are
executed by the agencies of mass culture are only the visible supplement of the subconscious
trends necessitated by the economic and social development. The persecution of anything
which is suspected to stand for independent social thought, for a philosophy which has no
strong ties to any of the groups struggling for a greater share of power, and therefore no direct
usefulness for the prevailing interests of any of them, but sticks to truth as it regards a single
concrete individual and hence humanity in general, such (illegible) is not only a social but
also an anthropological fact; it takes place within each member of society today.
From the day in which the infant opens his eyes to the daylight, he is made to feel that there is
only one way to get along in this world: by resigning the unlimited hope which was born with
him. This he can only achieve by mimesis, he continuously repeats not only consciously—he
acquires judgment and notions much later—but with his whole being, what he perceives
around him. Long before he can even speak he echoes the gestures of the persons and things
around him and later on he echoes the traits and attitudes of all the collectivities at whose
mercy he is: his family, his classmates, his sport’s team and all the other teams which
enforces a deeper conformity, a more radical surrender by complete assimilation than any
farther or teacher in the 19th century. By echoing, repeating, imitating the surroundings, by
adapting himself to all the powerful groups to which one belongs, by transforming oneself
from a human being into a pure member of specific organized bodies, by reducing one’s
potentialities to the readiness and skill to conform with and gain influence in such bodies, one
finally manages to survive. It is survival by forgetting, by practicing the oldest biological
means of survival: mimicry. That is the reason why like a child repeats the words of his
mother and the youngster the brutal manners of his elders, by whom he has suffered so much,
today’s mass culture, the giant loudspeaker voice of *monopolism itself, the (illegible) of the
times as (illegible) would call it, in contrast to genuine art , which once confronted reality
with truth, copies and doubles reality endlessly end boringly, that is why all ingenious devices
of the amusement industry serve nothing else but to reproduce over and over and without
betraying the slightest revolt the scenes of life which are dull and automatized already when
they happen in reality, that is why the pictures, radio, popular biographies and novels shout
incessantly the same rhythm: this is our life, this is the only possible life, this is the life of the
great and the little ones, this is reality as it is and should be and will be. Even the words which
could express another hope than the one which can be realized by success have become
integrated: on the one hand, beatitude and everything which refers to the absolute has been
assimilated by confining it to thoroughly religious connotations; it has become part of Sunday
School vernacular, happiness on the other hand, means exactly the normal life of which
though and even religious thought, at certain times, contained a radical criticism. Language
has been thoroughly reduced to the function as which it is described in positivistic theory, i.e.
to just another tool in the giant apparatus of production in monopolistic society. Each
sentence, which is not equivalent to an operation in that apparatus appears to the layman as
meaningless as it is described to be by contemporary epistemology according to which only
the purely symbolic, the operational, that is to say the purely senseless sentences makes sense.
Under the pressure of the pragmatistic totalities of today, the self-expression of men has
become identical with their functions in the prevailing system. Within themselves as well as
in others men desperately repress any other impulses. Wherever they perceive it they feel an
overwhelming wrath and fury, an utter rage which crashes down on everybody and everything
which by stirring up the old and undying longing forces them anew to curb and repress it.
In the earlier periods of bourgeois society as well as in the history of other forms of society
the existence of greater multitudes of independent economic subjects who had to care for their
own individual property and to maintain it against competitive social forces, necessitated in
the culture of relatively independent thought which by its very nature is related to the interests
of humanity. Against its own wishes, the society of middle sized proprietors and particularly
the professions related to the now vanishing economic sphere of circulation and to promote
thinking which whether they liked it or not was antagonistic to class rule and domination.
Today the individual in the *course of his economic functions is never directly confronted
with society. It is always his group, his association, his union which has to take care of his
rights. [See Kirchheimer on compromise]. Therefore the category itself of the individual with
its good and bad implications is in the state of liquidation and thought unrelated to the
interests of any established groups, unrelated to the business of any industry has lost its
significance. The selfsame society which, in normal times, leaves a considerable part of its
machinery idle, which suppresses or files important inventions and which, in the rare periods
of full employment, devotes a tremendous part of its working hours to idiotic advertisements
even what is left of culture boils down to advertisements and propaganda, or to the production
of instruments of destruction, the selfsame society, which has made usefulness its device and
the most sinister destructive kind of luxury its real business, has stamped thinking as related
to truth, i.e. the only ultimate use for which civilization really could be useful, a hateful
luxury.
The difference of the situation from other chapters of class society should not be exaggerated.
In the earlier periods mentioned above the existence of independent thought in the middle
classes was paid for by the miserable material condition of the working class even in the
highest developed countries. The revolutionary thinkers had to come to the proletariat from
the middle- or upper classes. Since that time, the working class as a whole has made a
tremendous progress. Its rationality, at least as far as it is able to express itself, is purely
pragmatistic and therefore “particularistic” like that of the rest of society. But the tremendous
physical, organizational and cultural pressure which is necessary to keep it in this state, the
increased furor with which not only every trace of independent political practice but the
expression of any independent thought and even those who don’t express it, but by their mere
existence are suspected to harbor it, are hated and eventually persecuted, the strengthening of
all reactionary organizations and movements betray the rising fear of the abolishment of fear
and repression. With feverish haste one tries to channel the ever greater fury which develops
in the masses under the necessity to repress their own original longings, and to prevent that
furor from being overcome by the *eventual insight in the ever increasing stupidity of that
repression, and on the identity of human interests. Such channeling which has always been
the business of the ruling class, of its cultural and terroristic apparatuses, which, has also
become the business of the labor organizations which, at the same time, lead labor into the
struggle of competition and increase its strength.
The antagonism between the classes is reproduced within the structure of labor and especially
within the labor unions themselves and it is perhaps better veiled there than it ever was in
society as a whole. Docilely and without a hint of any opposing interests the workers
surrender port of their money to the mammoth trusts which trade in their own labor. It is not
so much the level of the contributions but the social situation of the labor leaders enabled by it
which makes the latter ones a kind of group of the ruling class itself. Certainly a great part of
their material interests is opposed to the interests of other competing groups but this holds
true for all the groups which (illegible) have formed the ruling class: for the worldly and
spiritual powers in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, church and court under absolutism, for the
different groups in modern production and commerce. What they have in common is the
general source of their income. They all live on what they can grasp from the surplus value
originating in the process of production. True, they draw their share not as profit from an
advanced amount of capital, but this is not of ultimate importance. Even the profits of the
capitalist don’t correspond to what the factory, in which his capital is invested, produces in
values and surplus values. His role as an exploiter is, though connected with, but different
from his role as a businessman. In the latter quality he has to compete with others in order to
get a possibly large amount out of the sum total which expresses the results of each
production period. He is in the same position as those capitalists whose business is not
directly productive like the bankers, the entrepreneurs in the communication– or amusement
industries and even all the professions and activities which are exercised by the so-called
“third persons.” The labor leaders have become an acquisitive group among others. The
conditions under which they work are more difficult, it is not so easy for them as for the
leadership of the big capitalist trusts to keep their doings from public discussion by a public
opinion which is controlled by their competition. Each the capitalist professional and labor
groups exercise a specific function in the social process on the one hand and on the other uses
that function to get as large a share of power over men, goods and services as possible. The
methods of this struggle in history have varied. They have been partly competition but partly
cheating, robbery, and war. This struggling which, as pointed out in the beginning,
characterizes the set-up of each ruling class as definitively as its role in production, has
become a trait of the labor groups. Although the leaders cannot achieve any results without
obtaining, at least temporarily, any results for the workers, their own social and economic
power, their own position and income (all of these factors overwhelmingly superior to power
position and income of an individual worker) depend on the maintenance of the class system
as such. Their economic fact holds true despite of the great services they may render to their
respective memberships. The entrepreneur’s activities too had had very often a positive effect
on the income of labor than higher incomes of the labor leaders. But there is now a new kind
of solidarity between the old and the new elites. Accordingly social history during the last
decades has brought closer cooperation between them. The attitude of the labor unions to the
state in the last decades has been similar to that of the great capitalistic organizations. They
were mostly concerned with preventing the government from mingling in their affairs. No
interference with our private business was the doctrine (cf. [illegible] instances Gompers
testimony before the Lockwood Committee). It was the “Master of the House” standpoint. In
the meantime the increasing economic power of capitalist monopoly has made an
understanding between their leaders, their participation in administrative tasks of the central
government more imperative. The development toward the integration of corporative
elements into the administration has made even greater progress during the war. Society
becomes a *reformed and regulated process not so far much with regard for the great events
(they still depend on blind forces resulting from the struggle between the classes and among
the various ruling groups), but as far as the life of the individual is concerned; not as much in
the sense of self-administration (the decisions are made as compromises among the prominent
whose interests do not correspond to those of the rest of society) but with regard to a more
streamlined performance of the material and human apparatus of production.
It is possible that once the strongest capitalistic groups will have gained direct control of the
state the actual labor bureaucracy will be abolished as well as the governmental one, and
replaced by more dependable commissioners of those groups. Although this could be
achieved without a formal change of constitutional principles it would characterize a
development similar to the German one. It is also possible that labor in its actual structure
conquers an even stronger portion in the set-up to come. In both cases the material situation of
labor as a whole may improve, unemployment be reduced, but at the same time the gap
between the significance of a single member and of the prominent functionaries will deepen,
the impotence of the human individual will become more marked, the differences in wages
according to sexes, age and industrial groups will increase. This two-fold process will bring
about a more thorough integration of the working class into modern society, also a unification
of psychology in the sense of the triumph of particularistic rationality behind the thin veil of
collectivistic slogans. This means a disillusionment of the masses and an increasing menace
to the class system. On the other hand, the concentrated power the ruling groups with their
centralized defense techniques will make any change more difficult.
The gradual abolishment of the market as a regulator of production is a symptom of the
vanishing influence of anything outside the decisive groups. The needs which, in the market
system, made themselves felt in a most distorted anonymous and irrational form, can now be
determined by statistics and satisfied or refused in accordance with the policy of the ruling
class. But if this new rationality is closer to the idea of reason than the market system, it is
also farther from it. Although the dealings between the ruling and the ruled were never really
decisively determined by the market but by the unequal distribution of power as it was
expressed by the property of the means of production, the transformation of human relations
into objective economic mechanisms granted the individual, at least in principle, a certain
independence, domination was humanized by dehumanized, that is to say, intermediary
spheres. Today the expression is of human needs is no longer distorted by the dubious
economic indicators of the market, but by their conscious molding in a giant system of socio-
psychological surgery. The misery of undone competitors and backward groups in a country
can no longer be ascribed to anonymous processes which permit a distinction between them
as economic subjects and as human beings; but the downfall of the vanquished opponents,
competitors as well as whole social strata, minorities and nations, is decided or convened
upon by the elites. Those who are to suffer are singled out and called by their names.
However, the small policies of economic leaders today are as private and particularistic and
therefore as blind or even blinder with regard to the real needs of society than the automatic
trends which once determined the market. It is still irrationality which shapes the fate of
humans. This does not mean that reason is not put forth by any individuals or groups at all.
There are more people who have real insight in the economic situation and the potentialities
than in any other period. But their chances, which seem to have improved by the progress of
the methods of production and planning, by the perspicuity of all social matters and the
decomposition of all kinds of superstitious have deteriorated by the progress of the methods
of domination, by the extinction of theoretical thought and by the new and strong taboos
resulting from the pseudo-enlightened philosophy of pragmatism which expresses the
resignation of unsubject [?] thought.
All the trends mentioned in the foregoing pages have to be taken into consideration when a
theory of class relations, which is on the level of our actual experience, should be drafted. The
concept of the racket serves only to differentiate and concretize the idea of the ruling class, it
is not meant at all to replace it. However, it can help to overcome the abstract notion of class
as it played a role in older theory. It may also lead to recognize that the pattern of class
relation is typical not only for the relations of the big groups of society but from there
penetrates all human relations even those within the proletariat. In the present phase of
capitalism many earlier structures of class society which have up to now been incompletely
described and explained, have become transparent. The similarity of the most respectable
historical entities as for instance the hierarchies or the Middle Ages with modern rackets is
only one of them. The concept of racket refers to the big as well as to the small units, they all
struggle for as great a share as possible of the surplus value. In this respect the highest
capitalistic bodies resemble the little pressure groups working within or without the pale of
the law among the most miserable strata of the population. Emphasis is to be laid on the fact
that the role of a group in production though determining to a great extend its part in
consumption, has been in class society just a good strategic position for grasping as much
goods and services in the sphere of distribution. This is particularly the case in periods in
which the mode of production to which its leaders stick so tenaciously has become obsolete.
They use their productive apparatuses as others hold to their guns. In the contemporary slang-
use of racket there might be no conscious thought of all these connections, but objectively it
expresses the idea that in present day society each activity, whichever it may be, has as its
content and goal that it is (illegible) by no other inferred (illegible) the acquisition of a
possible large part of the circulating surplus value. Therefore, one tries to monopolize an
economic function not for the sake of production or satisfaction of needs. The slogan used
against all sorts of activities and even against whole groups that they are unproductive,
furthermore the constant fear that anything oneself does may be unproductive or useless
seems to originate from the fact that one realizes in his inner thought that despite of all the
tremendous achievements of society, its material and mental pattern is not that of solidarity
like for instance the group of mother and child in nature but the racket and that the gulf
between reality and all the ideologies which civilization pretends to be its fundaments become
wider every day. Industry overcomes society and its own awareness of production as being a
mere stronghold in the fight for (illegible) by adopting production as a kind of religious creed,
by promoting technocratic ideas and labeling upon other groups which don’t even have an
access to the (illegible) industrial bastions as unproductive. It is a similar mechanism as the
one which made the terroristic Rackets in the 16th and 17th century Europe which tortured,
murdered, robbed hundreds of thousands of unfortunates and wiped out the female population
of whole provinces for their alleged intercourse with Satan proclaimed their Christian love all
the louder and (illegible) the tortured, murdered, robbed God on the cross more fervently and
adored the Virgin for her conception from the holy spirit more devotedly. Today the rackets
(illegible) pursue [?] each person or group who refuse to join them, and as destructive [to]
each undertaking which tries to put an end to destruction. The ones who accomplish
repression by an ocean of spoken and written words watch jealously that not a single
inappropriate [?] sentence be heard.
These remarks could serve only as a kind of introduction to a real sociological task {A real
sociology of the racket as the cell of the ruling class in history could serve both a political and
a scientific purpose. It could help clarify the goal of political practice. In a society whose
pattern is different from that of the rackets, a racketless society. It could serve to define the
idea of Democracy, as it still leads an underground existence in the minds of the independents
[?] {men} desperate distortions by which the rackets have adapted it to their economic and
political practice, despite of their sly formulation of political concepts which makes of
express political cliques dominating whole groups and states champions of Democracy and of
humanist theoreticians trying to promote and practice however inadequately democratic
contents (illegible) of (illegible). Despite all that, the meaning of Democracy deeply
connected with that of truth is not forgotten and it needs to be expressed against a world
which is more repressive and diabolic than ever and against the channels [?] {most hardened}
of tactics of stupidity. Scientifically the sociology of the racket} which could not only yield a
more adequate philosophy of history but help to throw more light on many issues in the realm
of humanities up to such remote and controversial problems as the initiation rites and rackets
of magicians in primitive tribes. It looks as though the breaking of young men at the occasion
of their entrance into such tribes was not so much meant as an acceptance into the community
as such but into a particularistic social totality in the sense described above. Very similar
observations can be made with regard to the relation of adults and children through the
Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 19th century. The adults with regard to the children
behaved as a totality. The “Racket” was also the pattern of the organization of the males with
regard to the females. The modern concept serves to describe the patriarchal relations.{The
modern concept serves to describe the past social relations. “The anatomy of man is the key to
the anatomy of the monkey.”}
NOTES

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