What follows is my contribution (with a few minor corrections and additions) to a discussion organized by Todd Cronan on nonsite.org of Max Horkheimer’s 1943 manuscript “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” I am much indebted to Todd for transcribing the original English version of a text that was previously available only in an edited German version in volume 12 of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften and for his invitation to join John Lysaker, Chris Cutrone, Nicholas Brown and David Jenemann in a discussion of it.
Like the other discussants, my contribution focused on the so-called “racket theory” of society. My particular interest was in trying to understand the relationship of the manuscript to Horkheimer and Adorno’s work on the 好用的fq — the 1944 version of what would become Dialectic of Enlightenment — and to the subsequent deletions of much (but as I stress, not all) of the language associated with the racket theory in the 1947 version of the book. There is a lot more to be said about the editing process that produced the final version and what follows doesn’t deal with certain interesting material that I’ve come across in Horkheimer’s unpublished correspondence with Lowenthal that suggests that the chief motivation for the decision to eliminate many of the occurrences of “monopoly” from the final version of the work were political, rather than theoretical (I hope to say more about that soon).
“RACKET,” “MONOPOLY,” AND THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT
The Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) concluded with a brief discussion of the collection of “notes and sketches” that closed the book, explaining that — though they formed “part of the ideas” explored in the book — they had not “found a place in them.” The 1944 draft of the work, which had been circulated in hectograph under the title Philosophical Fragments among friends and associates of the Institute for Social Research, went on to specify a group of texts that had been excluded in the interest of maintaining a “unity of language.” The list included a variety of works that had been written in English during Horkheimer and Adorno’s California sojourn. The second item on the list was “On the Sociology of Class Relations” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 254).
One of the consequences of the exclusion of “On the Sociology of Class Relations” was that the so-called “racket theory” of society became a ghost in the machinery of Dialectic of Enlightenment. It had played a role in the initial formulation of the book, but vanished by the time of its publication. “On the Sociology of Class Relations”, a text that offered one of the more extended discussions of the role of “rackets” in modern society, was banished from the 1944 edition on linguistic grounds. The word “racket” itself was, in turn, eliminated from the version of the book that was published in 1947. It shared that fate with a few other terms that, while used repeatedly in the 1944 hectograph, were replaced in the 1947 book by somewhat more circumspect formulations.1
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr maintains that these alterations were a consequence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s effort to bring the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment into line with a revised understanding of the nature of contemporary capitalism. He argues that, persuaded by a line of argument sketched by their colleague Friedrich Pollock, they concluded that “monopoly capitalism” had been replaced by the new social formation that Pollock dubbed “state capitalism.” In the wake of this shift, they found themselves forced to make adjustments in the text.2 Noerr concludes that “the racket theory held an ambiguous position” in this transformation.
On the one hand, the identification of fascist rule as an unmediated form of power and at the same time the legitimate heir of bourgeois monopoly capitalism prepared the way for a generalized racket theory of domination which went beyond the limited model of the criminal gang. On the other hand, however, such a theory was in danger — as Horkheimer himself was aware — of merely replacing an oversimplified economic concept (“monopoly”) by an oversimplified political one (“racket”). (Noerr, 240-241)
Horkheimer and Adorno found a solution to their theoretical quandry by eliminating both “monopoly” and “racket” from the text that appeared in 1947.
There are, however, a few problems with this account. First, it runs the risk of overstating the degree to which Horkheimer and Adorno accepted Pollock’s discussion of the transition to state capitalism. Second, by focusing on internal discussions within the Institute for Social Research, it overlooks both the role that discussions of rackets and racketeering had played in American legal theory and social thought during this same period and the Institute’s long-standing interest in these discussions. Finally, it fails to address the continued presence of the terms monopoly and (to a lesser extent) 目前能用的梯子in one crucial part of the book.
The Reception of Pollock’s “State Capitalism”
Shortly before Horkheimer and Adorno began work in earnest on the manuscript that would eventually be published as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Friedrich Pollock — Horkheimer’s lifelong friend and the book’s dedicatee — published a pair of articles in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung arguing that a new social order had begun to emerge in Europe and America.3 These articles proposed that the transition from monopoly capitalism to what Pollock called “state capitalism” marked “the transition from a predominantly economic to an essentially political era” (Pollock, “State Capitalism,” 207). The first article sketched a “model” or “ideal type” of this new order. It focused on the authoritarian form of state capitalism that he saw emerging in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, but entertained the possibility that ways might be found to bring this new social formation “under democratic control” (Pollock, “State Capitalism,” 224). The second article applied this model to Nazi Germany and argued that while the National Socialist State might not be “a fully developed state capitalism or a total command economy,” it nevertheless “comes closer to these economic concepts than to those of laissez faire or of monopoly capitalism.” While Pollock was confident that “Germany will suffer military defeats and that the National Socialist system will disappear from the earth,” he stressed that there was no reason to suppose that “inherent economic forces…would prevent the functioning of the new order.”4
virmach圣何塞fq合租--VPS服务器租用测评:2021-7-25 · 求目前能用的批量发whatsapp消息的程序,开源的最好 2021-04-27 前天开的plus今天就送了 2021-11-09 开心小站长部分页面使用网络爬虫技术及AI写作技术生成,如发现不良信息或侵犯到了您的权 …
in the mid-1940s Horkheimer and Adorno, in keeping with Pollock’s analyses, had distanced themselves definitively from a form of Marxism which assumed the primacy of economics. Instead, the importance of control though politics and the culture industry moves clearly into the foreground.5
Van Reijen and Bransen argue that evidence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s agreement with Pollock’s argument can be found in revisions made prior to the publication of the 1947 version of the book. These revisions include the replacement of such terms as “ monopoly,” “capital,” and “profit” — terms that had “become charged with specific meanings thought the debate over state capitalism” — with “less charged expressions” (van Reijen and Bransen, 251).
It is, however, not clear that the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment were entirely persuaded by Pollock’s argument. Indeed, Adorno’s reaction Pollock’s initial article was overwhelmingly negative. He found its talk of “models” and “ideal types” too far removed from material reality (its style reminded him of Husserl, a comparison that, coming from Adorno, was no compliment) and warned that its publication would be a blow to the Institute’s reputation. Anticipating the reaction of Franz Neumann (who had emerged as the best-known figure in the New York branch of the Institute) and the economist Alfred Löwe (a major figure at the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research), he cautioned Horkheimer that it would “unleash a malicious cry of triumph from all the lions [Löwen], new men [Neumänner] et tutti quanti.”6
Adorno was unconvinced by Pollock’s vision of a society that, having transformed the crises that plagued earlier form of capitalism into “mere problems of administration,” could hold out “the promise of security and a more abundant life for every subject who submits voluntarily and completely.” Though he conceded that Pollock might be correct in his pessimistic assessment of the ubiquity of political domination throughout history, he rejected what he characterized as Pollock’s “optimistic” belief that the new order would be any more stable than the one it replaced. He saw such a conclusion as resting on the “undialectical assumption that in an antagonistic society a non-antagonistic economy would be possible.” What Pollock had produced struck him as an “inversion of Kafka”: “Kafka presented the hierarchy of bureaucrats as Hell. Here Hell transforms itself into a hierarchy of bureaucrats” (Horkheimer, Briefe, 54).
Adorno’s prediction that Pollock’s article would draw fire from Neumann proved correct. Two weeks later Neumann sent Horkheimer a blistering evaluation (much of which would later reappear in Behemoth, his 1942 study of the Nazi state) arguing that the article “contradicts from the first to the last page” the theory the Institute had been developing since its arrival in the United States and that it represented nothing less than “a farewell to Marxism” that “documents a complete hopelessness.”7 Horkheimer succeeded in placating Neumann and (presumably) Adorno by crafting a Preface to the volume of the 安卓免费fq工具 in which Pollock’s essay appeared (an issue that also included contributions from A. R. L. Gurland, Otto Kirchheimer, Horkheimer, and Adorno) by characterizing the articles as offering different perspectives on “problems implied in the transition from liberalism to authoritarianism in continental Europe.” In summarizing what was at stake in this transition, Horkheimer emphasized the political implications of the replacement of independent entrepreneurs by monopolies, a development that he saw as leading to a triumph of ruling elites and “cliques” whose cynical shuffling of ideologies translated “into open action what modern political theory from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Pareto has professed.”8 In the course of this discussion, Horkheimer managed to avoid (even when discussing Pollock’s article) the use of the term “state capitalism” at all. Neumann was pleased enough by the result to send Horkheimer a letter that praised him for having rendered Pollock’s contribution “completely harmless” by offering a “reinterpretation” of the article that wound up undermining its central argument.9
In framing his introduction to the issue in this way, it is conceivable that Horkheimer was merely attempting to play down the differences that separated Pollock (and, perhaps, Horkheimer himself) from other members of the Institute. But it is worth nothing that the Preface’s emphasis in on the role of “elites” and “cliques” was a faithful reflection of what Horkheimer himself seems to have regarded as the defining characteristic of monopoly capitalism. For the aspects of Pollock’s argument Horkheimer chose to emphasize were precisely the parts that meshed with the account of the transformation of the relationship between the individual and society that he had been elaborating ever since his 1936 article “Egoism and Freedom Movements.”10 He would take up this theme once again in “The End of Reason,” the lead article in what proved to be the journal’s final issue.11 Though published under Horkheimer’s name, it had been edited and revised by Adorno, and was, in effect, the first product of their California collaboration. The “racket theory” played a central role in it.
From Class Struggle to Gang Warfare
Near the close of “The End of Reason,” Horkheimer suggested that the so-called “gangster theory” of National Socialism merited more serious consideration than it had received from those who saw Hitler’s triumph as a momentary deviation from a norm that would be restored “as soon as the fester has been removed” (Horkheimer, “End of Reason,” 374) He argued that the relations that had defined competitive capitalism, far from constituting the normal state of affairs, might better be understood as an “interlude” in a history defined by the reign of “procurers, condottieri, manorial lords, and guilds” engaged simultaneously in the protection and exploitation of their clients (Horkheimer, “End of Reason,” 374). The transition to monopoly capitalism had brought with it a regime of “rackets” that, like previous forms of domination, provided a measure of protection, but only at the price of individual autonomy. For this reason, alleged “border phenomena” such as “ racketeering” might, in fact, offer “useful parallels for understanding certain developmental tendencies in modern society” (Horkheimer, “End of Reason,” 375).
It was left to Adorno to work out the implications of Horkheimer’s conjecture and, sometime prior to the circulation of “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” he sent Horkheimer a series of “Reflections on Class Theory.” Adorno text appears to have served as a preliminary draft for Horkheimer’s “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” which was subsequently circulated to Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse for comment. While the two texts are similar in substance, their style—as might be expected—diverged markedly.
Adorno’s manuscript opened with what amounted to a striking revision of Marx’s famous formulation from the Communist Manifesto:
In the image of the latest economic phase, history is the history of monopolies. In the image of the manifest act of usurpation that is practiced nowadays by the leaders of capital and labor acting in consort, it is the history of gang wars and rackets.12
Pace Marx, far from functioning as the motor of history class struggles might better be understood as the creature of a particular economic order: the “interlude” of liberal capitalism. With its passing, the struggles between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat took on a markedly different form.
Horkheimer’s manuscript was considerably more guarded in its assessment of the implications of triumph of monopoly capitalism for Marxian theories of class struggle. It stressed that the “concept of racket” was intended “only to differentiate and concretize the idea of the ruling class” and “not meant at all to replace it.” Yet, the very next sentence — which suggested that the racket theory promised “to overcome the abstract notion of class as it played a role in older theory” —betrayed that something more was afoot than an exercise in differentiation and concretization.
Horkheimer went on to argue that the transition from “liberal” to “monopoly” forms of capitalism forced the working class to find ways of “adapting itself to the monopolistic structure of society.” In this process, the “more or less spontaneous and radically democratic” struggles that had defined the labor movement of the nineteenth-century were replaced by struggles between “pragmatic totalities” in which the working class — abandoning its “fight against exploitation as such” — sought to find ways of integrating itself into a society populated by “wholly integrated and despotic totalities.”
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.
Direct struggles between labor and capital had now been supplanted by a process of mimetic adaptation in which labor sought to beat capital at its own game. As support for the claim that labor unions mimicked large corporations in both their organizational structure and in their quest to prevent government regulatory agencies from “mingling in their affairs,” Horkheimer offered an oblique reference to the testimony of Samuel Gompers before the Lockwood Committee (i.e., the 1922 New York hearings on union activities in the building trades).
Horkheimer and his colleagues had a long-standing interest in both the history of the American labor movement and in the implications of New Deal legislation. Earlier discussions of Gompers in the Institute’s journal had noted the “dictatorial” control he exercised over the American Federation of Labor. His testimony before the Lockwood hearings had been presented as evidence that Gompers, like the heads of corporations, was committed to resisting public scrutiny of or interference in his activities.13 For Horkheimer, then, the chief difference between labor leaders and corporate heads was that the leaders of “the big capitalist trusts” were more adept at these tactics than labor leaders like Gompers. They were capable of exercising a degree of control over public opinion that enabled them to shield their activities from public discussion.
Labor’s weakness in this struggle was reflected in the history of the terms “racket” and “racketeering” themselves. The marked upsurge in the use of both terms in the early 1920s was driven, at least in part, by the efforts of pro-business publicists such as Gordon Hostetter, the long-time head of the Chicago Employers’ Association, a staunch opponent of efforts at union organizing (among the resources his organization provided to its clients was a cadre of strike breakers), and a tireless author of anti-union polemics (among them, his 1929 book It’s a Racket). As a result of his efforts, “racket,” “racketeer,” and “racketeering” — terms that had previously been associated with the activities of Chicago criminal gangs — came to be associated with the activities of union officials. The usage of these terms peaked around 1940, at which point supporters of New Deal legislation aimed at institutionalizing collective bargaining sought to limit the scope of the concept to overt criminal activity.14
When viewed within this context, Horkheimer’s rhetorical strategy becomes somewhat clearer. While Hostetter and others sought to equate labor leaders with gangsters, Horkheimer attempted to extend the scope of the concept still further by maintaining that within the structure of monopoly capitalism, fq必下appsocial relationship had begun to take on an uncanny resemblance to protection rackets. In an August 1942 letter to Paul Tillich, written in response to Tillich’s criticism of the “dictatorial” style of “The End of Reason,” Horkheimer explained that his choice of “linguistic method” was “not made frivolously.” He went on to quote a text he had written during the previous year.
The style of theory is becoming simpler, yet only insofar as it thereby denounces the simplicity that, on the basis of the style, the theory consciously becomes the reflection of the barbaric process. The style approximates rackets with the force of hatred and thereby becomes its opposite. Its logic becomes as arbitrary as their justice, as clumsy as their lies, as lacking in conscience as their agents — and in this opposition to barbarism becomes specific, exact, and scrupulous. The indiscriminate designation of monopolistic society as the embodiment of rackets is infinitely differentiated, since it summarily denounces undifferentiated brutality against powerlessness.15
The closing pages of “On the Sociology of Class Relations” more than matched the already extravagant use of “racket” to which Tillich had objected by projecting the concept backwards into human prehistory. Broaching certain of the concerns of the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer argued that the concept promised to shed additional light on “such remote and controversial problems as the initial rites and rackets of magicians in primitive tribes” and also might clarify the workings of 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.”16 The ubiquity of rackets throughout history also provided Horkheimer with a hint of the form that an emancipated society would have to take: it would be “a racketless society.”
Horkheimer’s dedication to the concept was such that, as late the autumn of 1942, he still hoped that first issue of the Institute’s projected “yearbook” (a publication intended to fill the void left with the demise of the Zeitschrift) would explore the concept further. But, plans for the yearbook were eventually abandoned, leading Rolf Wiggershaus to conclude that the “racket theory” remained “an unfinished torso.”
The most important ideas were incorporated into the Dialectic of Enlightenment, without Neumann or Kirchheimer or others having collaborated closely to check the extremely drastic, far-reaching assumptions involved against concrete economic, political and legal material.17
But it is unlikely that Kirchheimer would have been inclined to dampen Horkheimer’s enthusiasm for the term. In an article intended for the yearbook, but eventually published separately, Kirchheimer would argue that the more limited legal usage of the term served merely “as a convenient tool for bringing the guilty to account and depriving them of the sympathies of the community at large.” Like Horkheimer, he saw the term’s polemical edge as something worth preserving.
If somebody asks another, “What is your racket?,” he may intend merely to inquire about the other’s professional status, but the very form of the question refers to a societal configuration which constitutes the proper basis for any individual answer. It expresses the idea that within the organizational framework of our society attainment of a given position is out of proportion to abilities and efforts which have gone into that endeavor. It infers that a person’s status in society is conditional upon the presence or absence of a combination of luck, chance, and good connections, a combination systematically exploited and fortified with all available expedients inherent in the notion of private property.18
And (again like Horkheimer) the one shortcoming he found in the concept was that it failed to clarify what would have to be done to create a society without rackets.
Monopoly, Rackets, and the Culture Industry
There was, however, one place in fq必下appwhere the concept of racket continued to play a somewhat more circumscribed role and was grounded (albeit not always explicitly) in what would soon become an important set of legal arguments: the chapter on the culture industry. It may also be significant that this is the one place in Dialectic of Enlightenment where the term “monopoly,” while deleted elsewhere, emerged from the editing process remarkably unscathed.
Though Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of the culture industry is sometimes regarded as evidence of its authors’ “mandarian” contempt for “popular culture,” its portrait of Hollywood as a world dominated by rackets, patronage relations, and grotesque forms of self-assertion on the part of those who controlled (however fleetingly) the commanding heights was hardly unique. Much the same picture can be found in the memoirs of those émigrés who found refuge in Hollywood, accounts that Horkheimer and Adorno would likely have heard at first hand.19 It bears remembering that Horkheimer was friends with William (née Wilhelm) Dieterle, the Weimar actor and director who managed to establish himself as one of Warner Brothers’ more reliable directors. Horkheimer’s correspondence suggests that he spent a fair amount of time at Dieterle’s house and he seems to have thought well enough of his to solicit an article from him on the impact of the war in Europe on the American film industry for the Zeitschrift and to enlist him as a member of the Institute’s Advisory Committee.20
The link between “On the Sociology of Class Relations” and the chapter on the culture industry is nowhere clearer than in a passage that took up an argument that Horkheimer had made in his 1941 article “Art and Mass Culture”:
in contrast to genuine art, which once confronted reality with truth, … 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.21
Adorno had made the same point even more emphatically in his “Reflections on Class Theory” when he observed,
Under the monopoly system the process of dehumanization is perfected on the backs of the civilized as an all-encompassing reification, not as naked coercion; indeed, this dehumanization is what civilization is…. Thus domination becomes an integral part of human beings. They do not need to be “influenced,” as liberals with their ideas of the market are wont to imagine. Mass culture simply makes them again what they are thanks to the coercion of the system (Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” 99100, 109).
On the basis of such formulations, van Reijen and Bransen conclude that “in keeping with Pollock’s analysis,” Horkheimer and Adorno “distanced themselves definitively from a form of Marxism which assumed the primacy of economics. … the importance of control through politics and the culture industry moves clearly into the foreground” (van Reijen and Bransen, 252).
But, paradoxically, it is precisely in the chapter devoted to the culture industry that the term “monopoly” — allegedly eliminated from the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment as a
way of bringing the book into line with Pollock’s account of state capitalism—was 安卓免费fq工具deleted. Monopol and its various derivatives appear ten times in the 1947 version of Dialectic of Enlightenment; six of the ten occur in the chapter on the culture industry.22 The idea that the Hollywood film industry was engaged in monopolistic practices was, however, hardly radical. It had been the central claim in the extended legal battle that would culminate (a year after the book’s publication) in United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc., the Supreme Court decision mandating that studios divest themselves of their theater chains and cease other monopolistic arrangements. In this light, it is likely that the revisions of Dialectic of Enlightenment had far more to do with Horkheimer’s habitual concern during his American exile to avoid calling too much attention to the radical implications of the Institute’s work than it did with his alleged embrace of Pollock’s account of state capitalism.
While the culture industry disseminated a “culture” (and, in doing so, bound the oppressed ever closer to their oppressors), it bears remembering that it was very much an industry. As such, it was the site of struggles between labor and management in which the leaders of the former—according to the racket theory—would find itself forced to imitate many of the features of the latter.
Horkheimer was well aware that, in struggles such as these, labor operated under significant disadvantages. Indeed, in “On the Sociology of Class Relations” he speculated that
It is possible that once the strongest capitalist groups … 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 for both groups.
求助,目前mac下好用的FQ软件是什么?收费也行,天行不 ...:2021-7-18 · 刚续了一年就不能用了~~~~~ 社区 Mac 正文 求助,目前mac下好用的FQ软件是什么?收费也行,天行不能用了~ 发表于: 2021-07-18 10:01:57 来自 威锋网页版 6454 15 只看楼主 刚续了一年就不能用 …
One convenient marker for the acceleration of efforts to replace the “labor bureaucracy” with less troublesome commissioners was the 1981 strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, which culminating in the firing of the striking workers and the dissolution of their union. It would probably not have surprised Horkheimer that the chief executive officer who presided over the breaking of that strike had entered public life as the leader of one of the more important unions within the culture industry. A few months before the publication of 好用的fq, Ronald Wilson Reagan was elected President of the Screen Actors guild. During his subsequent career in Hollywood and in Washington he was a “dependable commissioner.”