Max Horkheimer on the Society of Rackets
= Horkheimer on how a society without fathers can evolve toxic brotherhoods, i.e. 'rackets', including in the world of labor; this decribed the 20th cy western society according to him
Discussion
Anton Jaeger, in American Affairs:
"As he noted in the late 1930s, “procurers, condottieri, manorial lords and guilds have always protected and at the same time exploited their clients. Protection is the archetype of domination.” In the twentieth century, this tendency to rackets now took on a specific form. “The racket pattern,” he claimed, “is now representative of all human relationships, even those within the working class. The difference between rackets within capital and the racket within labor lies in the fact that in the capitalist racket the whole class profits, whereas the racket of labor functions as a monopoly only for its leaders and for the worker-aristocracy.” Around these rackets, so it seems, several projects could then coagulate, tying together the coalitions which captured the state machines of the mid-twentieth century. With the decline of familial authority, one part was transferred to the state—the “society without fathers,” which sociologists still analyzed in the 1950s and 1960s. More importantly, however, Horkheimer’s racket society relied on the transfer of parental authority to the level of the brotherhood—the substitute association. As men left the families that had nurtured them, they found their first refuge in the trenches, the Freikorps, and the party or the association—first in arms, then in street battles fought in the 1920s and ’30s. Financed by an aristocracy hostile to modernization, their ranks swelled further and were able to invade the state. It was their project, overall, that turned the interwar state into a project state; as Horkheimer noted, “the gradual abolishment of the market as a regulator of production is a symptom of the vanishing influence of anything outside the decisive groups.” Today, Horkheimer’s rackets are no longer with us. The demise of Maier’s project state has, above all, seen a world-historic decline in associational life. This includes the “labor rackets” and parties which Horkheimer exhibited such ambiguity toward. Membership in these civil society associations—and not only on the left, the ostensible targets of the controlled deconstruction of the project state which Maier discusses—has declined dramatically in the last forty years. This controlled demolition of the public sphere has greatly reduced the administrative capacity of many states. Moreover, the Volcker shock and the ensuing era of central bank activism also emptied out the remaining associations not premised on consumption. The resulting void between citizens and states has also made it more difficult for states to construe projects per se. Instead, the repertoires of contestation and protest in the new century are distinctly fleeting and short-term, crippled by the neoliberal offensive on society, only faintly similar to the fraternities that the previous century built. The neoliberal turn required a deep reordering of civil society."