On the Sociology of Class Relations

Essay by Max Horkehimer | Edited by James Crane


This is a critical edition of Max Horkheimer’s 1943 essay “On the Sociology of Class Relations” edited by James Crane. The passages enclosed in [square brackets] are variants. The full typescripts can be found at MHA Na 1 639, [39]-[218].

On The Sociology of Class Relations (1943)

According to the [critique of political economy],1 social power has been based upon the 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 itself by controlled social forces, has determined the kind of goods to be made and the methods to be used.

The privileges thus held by the ruling minorities throughout the ages were not altogether irrational. It is true that, in the last analysis, 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 robust form of society was a sign of their being economically more advanced. Their rules promoted and conserved a mode of production which, at its hey-day was not inadequate to the developmental status of the productive forces. In this respect, the rulers represented a higher rationality than the rest of the population. 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 became more convulsive and terroristic but, at the same time, became weaker and hence more irrational, finally approaching blind despotism. They were transformed into purely repressive factors. The social and cultural forms for which they stood, wearily maintained by their administrative apparatus against new possibilities of human association, exercised a mutilating effect upon the minds and faculties of mankind.

The notion of class as it underlies the materialistic theory of history needs further elucidation. It does not refer to a consistent and homogenous unity. At least during the most typical periods, property of the means of production was not identical with their well-planned social use, nor with the existence of a unified will and determination. The various ruling groups understood each other fairly well whenever it was necessary to crush the resistance of the exploited masses or of any forces threatening to set up a new social rule. Thus, when it came to punitive measures against the progressive burghers of Southern France or even against the 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 no picture of solidarity among the rulers of the Christian world. On the contrary, there was a never ending fight over booty going on among the different hierarchical groups. Each wanted to assume authority over large areas in order to be nourished and housed and served by as large a population as possible. The same holds good for the ruling groups of Greek antiquity, as represented by the city-states and factions. 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 efforts of one of its parts to secure the spoils that others might appropriate. The struggle for security among the elite has been a race for the most far-reaching command possible, in other words, for control of production.

For several reasons this nature of class was obscured during the 19th century. The emancipation of the bourgeoisie from the restrictions of mercantilism and the release of the laborer from serfdom seemed to have abolished the insurmountable differences among the various sectors of humanity. Economic competition embracing all parts of the population was more peaceful although more thorough and universal than the quarrels and discords of the great in times past. [It was one of the achievements of Marx’s writings that he,]2 while stressing the progressive features of capitalism, unveiled its oppressive character and showed the old issue of power behind the apparently rational set-up of the market system. Today the similarity of the different historical phases of the bourgeois economy with regard to the principle of exploitation tends to become manifest. Even academic economists are shifting from the optimistic concept of an economy gravitating towards sheer harmony to a pessimistic power theory. Formerly they blamed Marx for the introduction of the “non-economic” concept of exploitation. Now they go much too far in the vindication of non-economic factors. They tend to replace economy 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 among workers was essentially different from the nature of competition among capitalists. Competition among workers, at least during the heyday of liberalism, simply meant that there were so many workers that wages could hardly rise above the cost of bare living, and in many cases even dropped below it. This comes to the fore in the nature of the labor contract. Fascism has only revealed what was already inherent in liberalism: the delusive nature of the labor contract as a deal between partners equally free. It would be a grave theoretical mistake to denounce the contract in modern totalitarianism as a 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, the monopolization of certain key positions within capitalist competition is much older than the monopolistic economy. Competition among the entrepreneurs themselves was never quite as free as it seemed. Here we are not thinking of state interference with industry, which economists are wont to [reproach]3 as long as big business does not take the state under its own management. We have in mind rather the inequality resulting from the different degrees of social power exercised by various industries. Such differences depend largely upon the stage of economic concentration and centralization of the respective industries, upon its importance for the regular functioning of the economic life of the nation, and upon its affiliation with the military and administrative power apparatus. Therefore, the groups which by birth or deceit, brutality or shrewdness, expertness in engineering machinery or human relations, by marriage or adulation, have come into control of a part of the total capital invested in industry, form a hierarchy of economic power which has limited the free play of competition at each of its stages. The discovery that the national economy of various capitalistic countries depended upon 200, 60, or even a smaller number 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 traits of competition to disappear. It severed the link between the needs of consumers and the profit-interest of the individual entrepreneur; it diminished the possibility, slight as it was, of an independent mind gaining 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 in its impartial administration. All this vanishes in the later stages of capitalism and allows society to revert to more direct forms of domination, which in fact never had been quite suspended. Yet this process is not only a reactionary one. While the inequalities among the entrepreneurs are shifting into monopolistic and eventually totalitarian control of national life, the relation between Capital and Labor undergoes a most characteristic change. During the latest phase of capitalism, the working class has entered competition by adapting itself to the monopolistic structure of society. It has assumed a form which fits into the monopolistic set-up. Consequently its relationships to the different capitalistic groups are no longer radically different from those prevailing among the capitalistic groups themselves.

The new situation is expressed in the concept of Labor (with a capital L) as it is recognized as a guiding intellectual principle not only in the minds of workers but also with the general public. Like Agriculture or Industry, or even sections of Industry, such as Steel, Rubber, and Oil, Labor is a collective term which is not an ordinary abstractum or generale. With regard to the individual elements included in their logical structure, such entities resemble a unit like State, Nation, Church, rather than a generality like Color, or Animal. They emphasize the concreteness of themselves as universal concepts, and disregard the elements of which they are comprised. Their logical structure mirrors exactly their objects. It stresses the collective individualities at the expense of the single individuals absorbed by them. The logical elements of the collective concept of Labor, i.e. the mass of ordinary members, are not the forces which, by their own ideas and spontaneity, determine the course of the whole. To use mathematical terminology, they are not so much the constant value with regard to the whole as the fluctuating one. On the contrary, the whole, i.e., the organization, determines and even overawes the individual, for the leaders, with their specific materialistic and power interests, with their philosophy and character structure, have an infinitely greater weight than any plain member.

There is a decisive difference between the social units of our monopolistic society and those of earlier periods.4 All these older units are totalities in the sense that they are thoroughly organized, integrated, and ruled by a hierarchy. In contrast to modern totalities, however, 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 mythological patterns which had assumed their shape in long historical developments. The patterns had become fixed images and models for the totalities, as did the Gospel for the church. True, such patterns, magical, religious, or philosophical, were intellectual authorities of the then present forms of domination. They reflected, as it were, the hierarchical stratification of society. 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 objectified spiritual structures. Any system of ideas as far as it’s written in meaningful language, whether religious, artistic, or logical, has a general connotation and pretends to be true in a universal sense.

To be sure, the objectivity and universality of the older collective units formed an ideology which constituted an essential condition of their parasitic existence in the body of society. But the patterns of organizations such as the medieval church did not directly coincide with the forms of material life. Organization in the strictest sense applied mainly to the hierarchy itself and to the ritual functions of both clergy and laity. Apart from that, neither life itself nor the intellectual framework by which it was reflected was completely integrated. The basic spiritual categories were not entirely fused with pragmatic considerations. Thus they maintained a certain element of independence and autonomy. They were not ready-made factory products, no plastic molds simply superimposed by the organization. The participation of the layman in the activities of such bodies remained separate from his daily work and life. There was still a cleavage between culture and production. This cleavage left more loopholes than the modern type of super-organization which virtually reduces the individual to a mere center of reaction. Modern universals, such as Labor, are integral parts of a unified social and economic system controlled by monopolies. By the very means of such universals, monopolies absorb the individual entirely and transform him into an element of the mechanism of production in which the so-called culture is only a cog. In short, the older forms of totalities which professed to comply with an aloof spiritual model, contained an element which is lacking in the purely pragmatistic totalities of monopolism. The latter also show a hierarchical structure – and are strictly integrated and despotic totalities but the ascent of their functionaries to the upper grade has nothing to do with any quality of theirs with regard to an objective spiritual content but almost exclusively with their ability to impose on people, to handle people, to be clever with people. Purely administrative and technical qualities define the human forces governing modern totalities. Such traits were by no means lacking in leaders of the different sectors of ancient classes, but by their radical separation from any autonomous idea. These traits give the modern totality its particular character.

The concept of labor as a pragmatic totality becomes quite clear when compared 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 of their individual fates, each of them, on the whole, had the same outlook on life: periods of employment would become shorter, the pressure of the “reserve army” on wages grow stronger, and misery, in the midst of an ever wealthier society, become unbearable. Marxian theory predicted that the capitalists would become less and less able to grant even a 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 his 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 the formation of a party which would finally change the world. This party would spring from the similarity of the conditions of the workers all over the world. Its principles and structure would not be so much concerned with the temporary differences in their financial situation in various branches of production or various geographical and national settings. It would not express so much the actual conscience of the individual worker as affected by all the mutilating influences of exploitation. Essentially, it would embody the resistance against the frustrations imposed upon man by social forms which had become purely oppressive. It would not be based upon psychological factors but upon the objective tendency of the economic system. The efforts of this party would be inspired by the fulfillment of just those human aspirations, material and spiritual, which were suppressed and distorted by the modern industrial process which has made the individual a kind of accessory to machinery. The party’s aims were to be connected with the plight of the individual and the masses, and had no special affinity to any particular category of workers at the expense of others. It represented the oppressed masses as a whole. Since the reason for the laborer’s frustrations was not considered to be found in any specific defect of capitalism but in the very principle of class-rule, the efforts of the workers’ party were to be guided at each stage by the objective idea of abolishing that rule and the establishing of true community.

This plan, however, was burdened from the very beginning of labor movements with an intrinsic difficulty. While the workers had to bear the full pressure of this society, whose tendency was to keep them below the minimum standard of living, they had to struggle daily in order to keep themselves alive. This meant that they kept alive a society whose rulers became stronger and stronger through the appropriated labor of the proletariat. Thus, the concept of class struggle always had these two connotations: the abolition of the wage system as such, and the attainment of higher wages within that system. It was the latter down-to-earth activity which once was conceived as the necessary stepping stone to revolution, as, for instance, through the general strike. The obsolescence of the latter idea is only one symptom of the fundamental change that has occurred. The class struggle has been transformed into a system of trade between monopolistic units, into a means of class adaptation, and into wars. Formerly, the relationship between daily struggle and revolutionary aim determined the whole labor movement, at least in continental Europe. Critical theory decided which way was to be taken in each situation. However, the struggling class was never “integrated” into one more competitor in the hunt for surplus value. The party was decidedly not concerned with the increase of its members’ incomes, 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. Party members were an avant-garde of the working class for the very reason that such principles could be understood and assimilated only by relatively advanced elements of the working class. They were supposed to control the leaders very closely, and the criterion of that control was supposed to be not 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. The tremendous majority of the proletariat was composed of individuals who, in their own psychology, expressed the mutilating effect of exploitation rather than the idea of a free humanity. The party, in spite of, even because of its antagonism to the majority of the masses represented, thought of itself as the genuine conscience of that same majority. Because the masses were unable to concretize their true interests, the party, in its decisions, had to rely on the theory of capitalistic society.

Social theory was the heir to the older systems of thought which were supposed to have set the rules for past totalities. These older systems had vanished because the prevailing forms of solidarity proclaimed by them had proven 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 subject. It looked upon capitalism as the final form of domination. In no way did it justify the established ideas and superstitions of those whom it guided. In contrast to the tendencies of today’s mass culture, it did not sell the people their own way of living, which they unconsciously abhorred, but overtly acclaimed. Proletarian theory was the critical analysis of reality including the worker’s own warped thoughts. The locus of theory was the difference between the objective interest of the exploited class and the immediate interest of the individual workers: The more this difference is obscured by the existing social set-up, the more theory tends to vanish. Even when the actual masses were hostile to the party, they felt its theory linked them with their own ultimate interests. The party was not above the masses as the labor-leaders of today are above the laborers whom they integrate into their organizational patterns. The proletariat itself remained somewhat amorphous and chaotic, composed of individual subjects. Although deprived as they were of their human qualities by being transformed into mere elements of production, they had not yet become statistical figures of organizations. The character of the individual was not quite replaced by that of the member, defined exclusively by its standardized interests. Around the middle of the 19th century, the non-integrated nature of the individual worker as a part of an amorphous proletariat of the disinherited peasant or artisan, and his retrogressiveness in terms of the ever increasing rational “socialization” (Vergesellschaftung) of society was inseparably bound up with his “progressiveness” in the sense of revolution. [It is significant that, even today, worker’s organizations which are with some justification labeled as “backward” both theoretically and economically have proven to be the most spontaneous elements in critical situations, such as the Spanish Civil War.]5

However, the clock cannot be put back nor can the organizational development be revoked or even theoretically rejected. The hope of the proletariat today does not consist of sticking to traditional party and civil war patterns. Rather, it must recognize and fight the monopolistic set-up of society infiltrating into the proletariat’s own organizations and infesting the minds of its individuals. In the 19th century concept of a future rational society the traits which expressed the planning, organizing, and centralizing functions in opposition to “chaotic” liberalistic economy prevailed over the traits expressing the plight of the individual. The workers’ parliamentary parties, which themselves were a product of liberalism and denounced liberalistic irrationality and promoted socialist economy in opposition to an anarchic capitalism. Under monopolism the other side of rationality has become manifest by its increasing suppression: the participation of all in the shaping of social life, equal chance to develop one’s own potentialities, equal security for all. Together with the rationalization of production, the idea of democracy calls for laying aside all fenced off economic positions, for establishing a world free from monopolies. The amorphism, by which the proletariat in the era of Marx and Engels 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, though its role was not to be underestimated, had to subordinate its actions to the party’s strategy. The amorphism of the masses and its complement, theoretical thinking, both expressed in the party’s fight against exploitation as such, formed the contrast to the pragmatic totalities of today. The rise of workers from a passive role in the capitalistic process has been paid for with their complete integration.

Labor in monopolistic society is itself a kind of monopoly: to be more exact, it is the monopoly of its leaders. [There are some decisive differences between Labor and capitalistic monopolies. The most important arises from the fact that each capitalistic monopoly constitutes some kind of economic unity which tries to appropriate as much surplus value as possible. The term Labor, however, comprises both the leaders who appropriate the profits and the members who create them. The same process which, both in reality and ideology, has made Labor an economic subject, has transformed the laborer, who was already the object of the entrepreneur, into the object of his organization as well. At the same time that ideology has become more realistic, more down-to-earth, its inherent contradiction to reality, its absurdity, has increased. While the masses think of themselves as the creators of their own destiny, the leaders use them as a commodity. The fact that Labor is a monopoly does not mean that its members, labor aristocracy excepted, are monopolists. It does mean that]6 the leaders control labor supplies as the presidents of the big corporations control raw materials, machines, or other elements of production. Labor leaders trade on this kind of merchandise, manipulate it, advertise it, and 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. A man’s productive power today is not only bought by the factory and subordinated to the requirements of technology but rationed and managed by superior agencies of the Labor Movement. It is a double-barrelled transformation into things. With religious and moral ideologies fading and proletarian theory being abolished by the march of economic and political events,7 the conscience of the workers tends to become identical with the categories of their leaders’ trade. The idea of intrinsic antagonism between the international proletariat and any system of domination is completely superseded by the concepts connected with 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 hallmarks 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 prevalent under monopolism into their eyes and ears and muscles during leisure time as well as during working hours (from which the so-called amusement period can hardly be differentiated anyway). Workers today as well as the public in general are intellectually better trained, better informed, and much less naive. They know the details of national affairs, and the tricks and crooked means typical of political movements, particularly of those which live from propaganda against corruption. The workers, at least those who have not gone through the hell of Fascism, will join in any persecution of a capitalist or politician who has been singled out because he violated the rules; but they do not question the rules themselves. They have learned to take the basic injustice of class society as a powerful fact and to take powerful facts as the only thing to be respected. Their minds are closed to dreams of a basically different world and to concepts which instead of being mere classifications of facts are formed under the aspect of real fulfillment of those dreams. 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 the children’s systems when they try to open their eyes: there is only one way to live and that is the actual one, the one of hardboiled smartness; the things that seemed to be opposed to it are idle slogans, lies, metaphysics; he who is unable to adapt himself to this state of affairs, whether oneself or any other man, the badly adjusted, stupid one, is rightly doomed. Modern economic conditions make for a positivistic attitude in members as well as in leaders, in that they resemble each other more and more. [Such a transformation, although constantly challenged by tendencies in the opposite direction, strengthens Labor as a new force in social life.]8

Not that inequality has decreased. Even statistics cannot hide the fact that the gap between the social power of a single worker and that of a single corporation president has widened and this difference is the real yardstick as far as social justice is concerned. And, while the unions, dealing in certain categories of labor, have been able to raise their prices, the whole weight of society is felt by other categories, organized or unorganized. There is, furthermore, the cleavage between members of unions and those who cannot afford to enter 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 also through the medium of these elites, by the ruling groups of the industrially more developed countries. The principle of exploitation has not changed at all. Marx’s prediction that private competitive industry would become increasingly unable to employ the bulk of the proletariat as wage earners in the production of consumer goods or machines for consumer goods has come true. As a consequence, the association of the masses against universal exploitation has been made even more difficult by the appearance of new antagonisms within the ranks of the oppressed masses themselves. The opposing interests of farmers and workers, colored and white labor, soldiers and civilians are complicated by those of the various categories of the employed. Since it is the trend of capitalistic society that ever greater parts of the middle classes lose their economic independence. This process engulfs almost the whole population. It forms a complement 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 seem to vanish, and, wherever they become manifest, are wiped out pitilessly by ideological control mechanisms serving the monopolies both of Industry and of Labor. The conscious precautions taken by radio, press, and motion pictures are only a visible supplement to the unconscious trends necessitated by economic and social development. The persecution of any independent social thought represents none of the groups struggling for a greater share of power, and has no usefulness for any prevailing interest, is not only planned and practiced by the agencies of culture but takes place within each member of society. [There are however, some centers of resistance left within man. It is a counter-evidence against social pessimism that notwithstanding the continuous assault by collective patterns humanity is still alive, if not in the individual as a member of social groups at least in the individual as far as he is left alone.]9

The power of collective patterns of monopolistic society goes far beyond the sphere of conscious influence. From the day of his birth, the individual is made to feel that there is only one way to get along in this world: by resigning his unlimited hope. This he can only achieve by imitation (mimesis). He continuously ruminates what he perceives around him not only consciously – he acquires judgment and notions much later – but with his whole being. Long before he can even speak, he echoes the gestures of the persons and things around him. Later on, he echoes the traits and attitudes of all the collectives at whose mercy he is: his family, his classmates, his athletic team and all the other teams which enforce a deeper conformity, a more radical surrender by complete assimilation than any father or teacher in the 19th century. By echoing, repeating, imitating the surroundings, by adapting himself to all the powerful groups to which he belongs, by transforming himself from a human being into a member of specific organized bodies, by reducing his potentialities to readiness and ability to conform to, and gain influence in, such bodies, he can finally manage to survive. It is survival by practicing the oldest biological means of survival: mimicry. Modern culture is a resurrection of oppressed mimetic practices. Just as the child repeats the words of his mother and the youngster, the brutality of his elders at whose hands he has suffered much, industrialized culture, the giant loudspeaker voice of monopolism, copies reality endlessly and boringly. All the ingenious devices of the amusement industry serve but to reproduce over and over again, without betraying the slightest revolt, scenes of life which are already dull and automatized when they happen in reality. Motion pictures, radio, popular biographies and novels shout incessantly the same rhythm: this is our groove, this is the rut 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 a hope for something else than the fruits of success have been absorbed. On the one hand, beatitude – and everything which refers to the absolute – has been assimilated by confining the idea to religious edification as a leisure time function; it has become part of Sunday School vernacular. Happiness, on the other hand, has come to mean exactly the normal life of which thought, even religious thought, at certain times, contained a radical criticism. Language has been so thoroughly reduced to the function ascribed to it in positivistic theory; it has become just another tool in the giant apparatus of production in monopolistic society. Every sentence which is not equivalent to an operation in that apparatus appears to the layman just as meaningless as it is decried to be by contemporary semantics, whose doctrine actually implies that only the purely symbolic and the operational, that is, the purely senseless sentence makes sense. Under the pressure of the pragmatic totalities of today, man’s self-expression has become identical with his function in the prevailing system. Within himself as well as in others, man desperately represses any other impulse. Wherever he perceives an unadjusted longing, he feels an overwhelming wrath and fury, an utter rage which crashes down on everybody and everything which, by exhibiting the idea of complete fulfillment, forces him to curb and repress the longing anew. [It is just this spitefulness which indicates that humanity has not been completely absorbed by the repressive collectivization of man. It has a disquieting aspect for the rulers. In spite of their social and psychological victories, they sense that their hold over the masses is in jeopardy. This is why terror has to implement collectivization.]10

In the earlier periods of bourgeois society as well as in the history of other forms of society, there existed a greater multitude of independent economic subjects who took care of their own individual property and maintained it against competitive social forces. Such times necessitated the fostering of relatively independent thought which by its very nature, its “objectivity,” is related to the interests of humanity. Against its own wishes, the society of middle class proprietors and, particularly, the professions related to the now-vanishing economic sphere of [distribution],11 had 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 takes care of his rights.12 Therefore the very category of the individual, with its good and bad implications, is in a state of liquidation. Thought, unrelated to the interest of any established group, unrelated to the business of any industry, has lost its significance. It is considered vain and empty. That self same society which, in the fact of hunger and starvation in great areas of the world, leaves a considerable part of its machinery idle, that society which suppresses or shelves important inventions, and which, in the rare periods of full employment, devotes a tremendous part of its working hours to idiotic advertisements (for even what is left of culture boils itself down to advertisements and propaganda) or to the production of instruments of destruction, that self-same society to which these sinister luxuries are inherent, has made usefulness its gospel. Conversely it has stamped the only ultimate aim for which civilization could be useful, a luxury: truth as it envisages the realization of humanity instead of the domination of nature.

However, the difference of the actual situation from other chapters of history 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 most highly developed countries. The revolutionary thinkers of the proletariat came from the middle- or upper-classes. Since that time, the working class as a whole has made tremendous progress. Its rationality, at least as far as it is able to express itself, is purely pragmatic, 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 or even the mere suspicion of the existence of such thought are hated and eventually persecuted, the hectic strengthening of all reactionary organizations and movements, betray the rising fear of the abolition of fear and repression. The feverish attempt to channel the ever greater fury which develops in the masses due to the necessity of repressing their own original longings, and to prevent that furor from being conquered by eventual insight into the ever increasing senselessness of that repression and into the real identity of human interests. Such channeling which has always been the business of the rulers, of their cultural and terroristic apparatus, has also become the business of 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 – although it is perhaps better veiled there than it ever has been in society as a whole. Docilely and without a hint of any opposing interests, the workers surrender part of their money to the mammoth trusts which trade in their labor.]13

It is not so much the amount of the contributions which makes the labor leaders a kind of group of the ruling class, but the social control exercised by them on the basis of these contributions. Certainly a great part of their material interests is opposed to the interests of other competing groups but this holds true for all groups which have ever formed the ruling class: they all have fought each other. Their affinity springs from the source of their income. They all live on what they can grasp from the circulating surplus value. This also goes for the industrialist himself. The working hours under which his immediate supervision are spent on the production of surplus value do not correspond to the share he himself gets of the whole surplus value at the disposition of the ruling class. He receives his proof not as an industrialist but as a businessman; as such he has to compete with others in order to get as large an amount as possible out of the entire result 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 communications- or entertainment-industries, and all the liberal professions and activities [which are exercised by so-called ‘third persons.’]14 All of them have to develop their skill of shrewd calculation, of not giving away everything without getting as much as possible in return, of becoming acceptable to stronger groups, of using their fellowman exclusively as a tool for strengthening their grip on society. This skill is not derived from conscious determination. People are determined to assume such an attitude towards life but awareness of their willingness stirs up counter-trends in their own minds and in the minds of the people upon whom they want to impose. The qualities necessary for ascent spring from the unconscious; they have become second nature in man. Be that as it may, these psychological qualities are indispensable. The liberalistic ideology that a man’s fate depends on the economic significance of his activity demands two corrections. First, economic significance in this society means usefulness not with regard to the needs of all but with regard to essential conditions of the hierarchy of power. In order to be allowed to live, the individual must prove his value to some of the groups which are engaged in their struggle for a greater share of control over national and international economy. Second, the quantity and quality of goods or services which an individual contributes to the wealth of society is but one of the factors which determine his success.

The more the economy is rationalized the more obvious it becomes that the differences of intelligence needed for the various functions could easily be overcome by adequate training. Under such conditions adaptability to the prevailing power relations rather than any other personal trait becomes paramount. It has been the fallacy of technocratic thinking from St. Simon to Veblen to underestimate the similarity of promising character traits in the different branches of production and of business and to confound rational use of the means of production with rational inclinations of certain categories of its agents.15 The engineer, indeed, embodies progress. He looks at people not exclusively as means of profit-making. His function as commander is more directly linked to the requirements of the work itself; therefore, his orders bear on the signs of greater objectivity. His subordinates recognize at least part of his commands as founded in the nature of things and therefore rational in a universal sense. But even the essence of this rationality is not reason but domination. The engineer’s understanding of things regards none of their elements by which they can be handled and transformed – their weakest points, so to speak. He is not interested in things as they really are but as they can be fitted into schema completely alien to their own nature. In fact his methods of thinking, his categories, lead necessarily to the triumph of modern technology: the smashing of atoms. No one is considered as an aim, all are mere tools. His mind is that of class society in its streamlined form, without any ornaments. His purposeful rule would make humanity a mass of utopia without any purpose.

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 leaders of the big capitalist trusts to keep their doings from discussion by a public opinion which in the last analysis is controlled by the entrepreneurs. [The large masses of members with whom the labor magnates have to deal, plus certain basically democratic patterns inherent in all non-fascist labor organizations, do not allow for the same conspiratory techniques which have been employed so successfully by big business in all its national and international undertakings. This is why the labor bureaucracy tries to dispense with membership meetings as much as possible. Every ruling minority needs secrecy as a condition of its perpetuation. Despite all these essential differences, however, the similarity between the organized totality of Labor and other monopolies should not be underrated.]16

Each of the capitalist, professional and labor groups exercise specific functions in the social process and each uses that function to get as large a share of power over men, goods and services as possible. There have been, throughout history, diverse methods employed in this struggle: competition, swindles, robbery, war. This struggle which, as pointed out in the beginning, characterizes the set-up of each ruling class as definitely in its role in production, has become a trait of the labor groups today. Although labor leaders cannot achieve any results without obtaining, at least temporarily, some advantages for the workers. But their own social and economic power, their own position and income (all these factors overwhelmingly superior to the power, position, and income of the individual worker) depend on the maintenance of capitalism. This economic fact holds true despite the great services they may render to their respective memberships. The entrepreneur’s activities too very often had a positive effect on the income of labor; higher incomes of the entrepreneurs are no more opposed to the interests 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; social history during the last decades has brought closer cooperation between them. The attitude of the great labor unions towards the State in the last several decades was similar to that of the big capitalistic organizations. They were concerned with preventing the government from mingling in their affairs. “No interference with or without our private business” was their doctrine.17 [It was the “Herr im Hause” standpoint.]18 [In the meantime the increasing economic power of monopolies has made understanding the central government imperative for labor leaders, and the same understanding is important for the government.]19 The integration of cooperative elements into the administration has made progress during the war. Society becomes a planned and regulated process, not with regard to 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 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 gain direct control of the state, the labor bureaucracy will be abolished as well as the governmental one, and be replaced by more dependable commissioners of big business. Although this could be achieved without a formal change of constitutional principles, it would mean a development similar to that in Germany. It is also possible that labor in its actual structure will acquire an even stronger portion of the set-up to come. In both cases the material condition of labor may temporarily improve in the ruler states of the future at the expense of the vanquished as well as the vassal nations 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, and the differences in wage according to sex, age, industrial and race groups will increase. This will bring about the triumph of particularistic rationality within the workers and their complete disillusionment. They will fit even more completely into the system and, at the same time, become more obstinate against its exacting requirements. Concomitant with all the labor saving devices, which the workers expertly enjoy, is an ever-increasing personal discontent and an economical attitude towards any expenditure of labor power. No one wants to be a sucker. True, the technological process has not made the workers revolutionary but refractory, insubordinate, difficult to handle. While formerly the ruling class could use sweeping ideologies which were good enough for the whole population, monopolism has had to develop quite a science of Personnel Management. Big plants today keep specialists who cater to the personal problems of the single worker. They adapt the smartest techniques, such as resort places, abridged psycho-analysis, and Tschaikowskij symphonies over loudspeakers during working hours. All this accompanies an unabated terror against anyone who seriously opposes the system as such. Workers become a more and more disquieting factor within the whole setup of Monopolism by their very assimilation to its material and cultural patterns. They threaten to gain what this period destroys, namely, in individuality. Therefore capitalism itself tends to promote pseudo-collectivistic social patterns and fascist forms of government.20

Gradual abolishment of the market as a regulator of production is a symptom of the vanishing influence of anything outside the decisive groups.21 True, 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 be satisfied or rejected in accordance with the policy of the rulers. But if this new rationality is in one way closer to the idea of reason than the market system, it is in another way farther from it. Dealings between the ruling and the ruled were really determined not by the market but by the unequal distribution of power as it was expressed in the property of the means of production; yet 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 of human needs is distorted no longer by the dubious economic indicators of the market, but by their conscious molding in a giant system of socio-psychological surgery. The misery of unsuccessful competitors and of backward groups can no longer be ascribed to anonymous processes which permitted a distinction between them as economic subjects and as human beings. The downfall of vanquished opponents, competitors as well as whole social strata, minorities and nations, is decided upon by the elites. Those who are to suffer are singled out and called by their names. However, the insidious policies of economic leaders today are as private and particularistic, and therefore perhaps 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 maintained by any individuals or groups at all. There are more people today who have real insight into the economic situation and its potentialities than at any other period. Their chances seem to have improved by the progress of methods of production, communication, and planning, and by the decomposition of all kinds of superstitions. Actually, the positions of thought have deteriorated by the perfection of the methods of domination, by the extinction of theoretical thought and by the new and stronger taboos resulting from the pseudo enlightened philosophy of [pragmatism, which expresses the abandoning of unintegrated thought.]22

Under monopolism and totalitarianism the perennial nature of domination, its parasitic character, becomes blatant. Each ruling class has always been monopolistic in so far as it has fenced itself off from the overwhelming majority of individuals. The structure has been that of competing rackets. Even the socially expedient functions which the ruling classes have fulfilled, have been turned into weapons against the underlying population and against the competing groups of their own class. The racket-pattern which has been typical of the behavior of the rulers toward the ruled is now representative of all human relations, even those within Labor.23

The similarity of the most respectable historical entities as, for instance, the hierarchies of the Middle Ages, to modern rackets, is obvious. The concept of racket therefore 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 extent its share of consumption, has been in class society a good strategic position for grasping as much goods and services as possible in the sphere of distribution. This is particularly the case in periods when the mode of production to which its leaders stick so tenaciously has become obsolete. They make use of their productive apparatus as robbers make use of their guns. What the petty illegal racket has been to the particular branch of business which it “protected” and fleeced, the class, which constitutes the total of its under-rackets, has been so society as a whole. In the contemporary slang-use of rackets as an equivalent for any profitable job there may be no conscious thought of these implications. But objectively, such use of the term expresses the idea that in present-day society every activity, whatever it may be, has as its content and goal no interest other than the acquisition of as large a part as possible of the circulating surplus value. The attempt to monopolize an economic function, is for the sake neither of production nor satisfaction of needs. The label of “unproductivity” used against all sorts of activities and even against whole groups belies the constant fear that anything one does may be useless, seems to originate in an unconscious fear that all the hectic activity in this pragmatic society is labor of Sisyphus. Industry overcomes its own awareness and society’s realization that production is a mere stronghold in the fight for prey by adopting production as a kind of religious creed, by promoting technocratic ideas and attaching the “unproductive” label to other groups, which do not even have an access to the big industrial bastions. It is a mechanism similar to the one which produced the terroristic rackets in 16th and 17th century Europe, which killed hundreds of thousands of unfortunates and wiped out the female population of whole counties for their alleged intercourse with Satan. These torturing, murderous, predatory rackets exalted all the more fervently the tortured, murdered, robbed God on the cross, and adored all the more devoutly the Virgin for her conception through the holy spirit. Today the rackets propagate productivity and common spirit, persecute as “racket” each person or group which refuses to join them, and as destructive, each undertaking which tries to put an end to destruction. Those who accomplish repression by an ocean of spoken and written words watch jealously, lest a single “unrelated” sentence be heard.

A true sociology of the racket as the living [element]24 of the ruling class in history could serve both a political and a scientific purpose. It could help clarify the goal of political practice: a society whose pattern is different from that of the racket, a racketless society. It could serve to define the idea of Democracy which still leads an underground existence in the minds of individuals. Today rackets have adapted this idea to their economic and political practices. They have slyly formalized political concepts and thus made expert political cliques dominating whole groups and states into champions of Democracy. Conversely they brand humanist theoreticians as advocates of dictatorship, for they have tried to promote and practice, no matter how inadequately, democratic contents. Despite all this, the meaning of Democracy, deeply connected with that of truth, is not forgotten. It needs to be expressed against a world which is more repressive and hostile than ever and against the shrewdest tactics of stupidity. Scientifically the sociology of the racket could yield a more adequate philosophy of history. Moreover, it could help throw more light upon many issues in the realm of humanities, even upon such remote and controversial problems as the initiation rites and patriarchal rackets of magicians in primitive tribes. It would show that the “breaking” of young men at the occasion of their entrance into such tribes represented acceptance, not as much into the community as such as into a particularistic social totality. Very similar observations can be made with regard to the relation of adults and children through the Middle Ages up to the beginnings of the 19th century. Adults, with regard to the children, behaved as a totality. The racket was also the pattern of the organization of males with regard to females. The modern concept serves to describe past social relations. “The anatomy of the man is the key to the anatomy of the monkey.”25


Notes


  1. (Editor’s note:) Replaced by “materialist theory of history” in (1a) ↩

  2. (Editor’s note:) Horkheimer’s substitution in (1a): “Marx has pointed out both the positive and the negative aspects of competition, (…)” ↩

  3. (Editor’s note:) (1a): “accuse” (handwritten insertion) ↩

  4. (Horkheimer’s footnote:) The term “totality” in the above sense of an organized structure will be so employed throughout this discussion. ↩

  5. (Editor’s note:) From version in (1c), crossed out in (1b) and (1a). In (1a), it is replaced with: “It is significant that even in recent history, active and spontaneous groups have emerged from just those worker’s organizations which are with some justification labeled as “backward” both theoretically and economically.” ↩

  6. (Editor’s note:) Handwritten insertion from (1a). Added in response to comments from Marcuse, Neumann, and Kirchheimer. ↩

  7. (Horkheimer’s footnote:) The decline of theory, and its replacement by empirical research in a positivistic sense, is expressed not only in political thought but also in academic sociology. The concept of class in its universal aspect, as typical for social theory, played an essential role in American sociology when it was young. Later on, emphasis was laid upon investigations in the light of which such concepts appear increasingly metaphysical. In our opinion the basis of this development is to be sought rather in the social process, to which we refer, than in the process of science itself. The time when sociology believed in its “larger task of constructing theoretical systems of social structure and social change,” the period before the first world war, was marked “by the general belief that theoretical sociology would somehow play a major constructive role in the progressive development of our society; sociology had the grandiose ambitions of youth.” (Charles H. Page, Class and American Sociology, New York 1940, p. 249). By this time its ambitions are certainly different. [*] (Editor’s Note:) Alternate last sentence cut from (1a): “The last decades were so full of social events that it matured rapidly.” ↩

  8. (Editor’s note:) Alternate formulation, crossed out in (1a): “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.” ↩

  9. (Editor’s note:) Crossed out in (1a). See: Marcuse to Horkheimer, 9/24/1943. In: MHGS, Bd. 17 (1996), 476-7. ↩

  10. (Editor’s note:) Handwritten insertion in (1a) ↩

  11. (Editor’s note:) Alternate formulation, crossed out in (1a): “circulation” ↩

  12. (Horkheimer’s footnote:) Cf. Otto Kirchheimer, “Changes in the Structure of Political Compromise.” In: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1941), 264-289. Esp: 272-273. ↩

  13. (Horkheimer’s attached handwritten note:) — instructions to insert an alternative formulation in variant (1c; to p. 23): “Some of the elements of the antagonism between classes are reproduced in the hierarchical structure of labor organizations, although the control of the union member by his boss is subject to suitability factors. The worker cannot but surrender part of his money to the mammoth trusts which trade in their labor.” ↩

  14. (Editor’s note:) From (1c), crossed out or eliminated in later drafts. ↩

  15. (Horkheimer’s footnote:) T.W. Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture. Remarks Occasioned by the Theory of the Leisure Class.” In: SPSS Vol. 9, No. 3 (1941), 389-413. Esp.: 397-399. ↩

  16. (Editor’s note:) Handwritten insertion in (1a) ↩

  17. (Horkheimer’s footnote:) Cf. for instance Gompers’ testimony before the Lockwood Committee. ↩

  18. (Editor’s note:) Sentence crossed out in (1a): ↩

  19. (Editor’s note:) Alternate formulation from (1c): “In the meantime the increasing economic power of monopolies, including labor, has made an understanding between their leaders, participation on administrative tasks of the central and vice versa, imperative.” ↩

  20. (Editor’s note:) Alternate formulation crossed out in (1a): “Conversely, the concentrated power of the ruling groups with their centralized defense technique will make any change more difficult.” ↩

  21. (Horkheimer’s footnote:) A symbol of the end of liberalism and the dying out of the individual is the almost universal prohibition of private possession of gold. The various laws resulting in the abolition of this right ratified the verdict against the existence of the independent economic subject. They put the dot on the ‘i’ of all trends and which abolished the liberal world. Gold in private possession for the owner provided a certain protection against the vacillations of the economy. Even modest property, guaranteed within certain limits, a life which was not entirely absorbed by participation in the economic process. The relative stability of the value of that particular merchandise endowed its owner with a force of resistance against his complete integration into the social mechanism, this resistance expressed itself in a certain degree of autonomy by which bourgeois culture was characterized. The more or less independent position of money for gold showed in his own mentality as well as in his literature and art. Culture obeyed its own laws to a certain extent and contained a criticism not only with regard to specific and concrete points of reality but also of its basic structure. Gold within the reach of any economic subject made the bourgeois individual somehow the successor of the aristocrat. The bourgeois could provide security for himself and make reasonably sure that even after his death his dependents would not have to submit totally to society. This freedom on the one hand excluded the masses, but, on the other hand, created cultural forms opposing this same exclusiveness. Today, no one can expect to find a place to lead a life of his own. He has to surrender completely: not to human solidarity but to the social process of monopoly. There are no safety-zones on the thoroughfare of society. Everyone must keep moving. Monopolism does not tolerate the beggar. But the beggar, whom the Rentier had always wanted to see removed from the streets, takes him along to the realm of the anguished. [*] Exemption from work, “privacy” voluntary or involuntary, bore witness to the existence of a non-totalitarian order. Gold in private possession was the sign of bourgeois rule. Its transfer to the state is the sign of monopoly. [**] ↩

  22. (Editor’s note:) Alternate formulation crossed out in (1a): “… pragmatism, which expresses the resignation of unsubject thought.” ↩

  23. (Horkheimer’s handwritten correction:) Note to insert section of writing from opposite side of page, but no corresponding insertion appears in the digitized scan. ↩

  24. (Editor’s note:) Alternate formulation crossed out in (1a): “cell” ↩

  25. (Editor’s note:) Cf. Horkheimer’s letter to Felix Weil, 1/13/1943: “It is a fact that most of the people who have been held in a concentration camp bear the traces of hell in their souls. We might say that some of the character traits, which now have developed into symptoms of madness, may have been recognizable even before the person had that terrible experience, but at that time they did not have that sinister aspect. Once a certain psychological quality has become clearly visible, we always can trace its roots back to the past, but we easily forget that it would not have struck us as something unusual if it were not for the new form which it has taken in the meantime. You will remember the observation that human anatomy is the key to that of the monkey? The meaning of that truth is that once we know man, we can discover his beginnings in earlier forms of life. Once Fascism had developed in European society, we now are able to find its hallmarks in earlier stages of human history, but it would be an error to say that, because of those traces, the development was a necessary one.” In: MHGS Bd. 17 (1996), 397. ↩