From Racket Theory to Real Domination

A Comparison of the Frankfurt School and Jacques Camatte

Introduction

In the early 1940s, the Frankfurt School developed a body of work—most of it only published posthumously decades later—that has been given the name ‘racket theory.’ That body of work is the topic of Section 2 of this essay.

The other subject of this essay is the French (post-) Marxist theorist Jacques Camatte. In what follows I will be mostly concerned with works dating to before Camatte’s turn towards holocaust denial,1 homophobia,2 transphobia,3 anti-abortion politics, and the nouvelle droite. With regard to the thematic material, I will be focused on drawing out the aspects of Camatte’s work that resonate with the Frankfurt School’s racket theory.

While my verdict on Camatte is fundamentally unfavorable, I have tried my best to keep the text from degenerating into an ultra-left version of the classic “my dad can beat up your dad” argument. Also, I started writing this before Camatte died; it is not a theoretical obituary. Special thanks to James Crane for translating most of the quotations from Horkheimer.

The Frankfurt School’s Racket Theory

Let’s begin our crash course in racketology with a long quotation from Otto Kirchheimer:

The term racket is a polemical one. It reflects on a society in which social position has increasingly come to depend on a relation of participation, on the primordial effect of whether an individual succeeded or failed to “arrive”. Racket connotes a society in which individuals have lost the belief that compensation for their individual efforts will result from the mere functioning of impersonal market agencies. But it keeps in equal distance from, and does not incorporate, the idea of a society wherein the antagonism between men and inanimate elements of production has been dissolved in the image of a free association for the common use of productive forces. It is the experience of an associational practice which implies that neither the individual’s choice of an association nor the aims that the latter pursues are the result of conscious acts belonging to the realm of human freedom.4

This gives us much of what is fundamental in the Frankfurt School’s critical appropriation of the concept of the racket, but it is too matter-of-fact, too much of a finished product. To get at the origin of their racket theory, we have to turn to an essay by Adorno entitled “Reflections on Class Theory.”5 Relevant for my purposes are the following three sentences, which form a dialectical series:

  1. “All history is the history of class struggles because it was always the same thing, namely, prehistory.”6
  2. “In the image of the latest economic phase, history is the history of monopolies.”7
  3. “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.”8

I do not have the space for an extended reading of Adorno’s “Reflections,” so I am just going to translate the essential theses above into the problematic we discover in the broader racket theory corpus:

A. The equation history = class struggles = prehistory poses a challenge on the terrain of theory: to find unity in history with reference to future freedom (communism-as-society) by and while positing class struggle as its motor (communism-as-the-real-movement).
B. The ascendance of monopolies that abrogate the principle of economic competition requires a rethinking of the concept of class because “the concept of class […] is modeled on the bourgeoisie itself. As the anonymous unity of the owners of the means of production and their various appendages, the bourgeoisie is the class par excellence.”9 Now “the ruling class disappears behind the concentration of capital;”10 it consists of monopolists and monolith social capital. Problem (A) is further complicated. History is the history of monopolies. (Thus, pseudo-marxisms: Veblen, progressivism, social democracy, theoretical Popular Frontism, etc.)
C. Finally, the homological hierarchies of domination present in organized labor and monopoly capital throw the destiny of the proletariat into question. The return of direct domination is complemented by a tendency towards ‘voluntary’ conformism. Freedom becomes a dirty word.11

The theory of rackets, imagined in this way as a fragmentary response to Adorno’s inaugural essay, is an answer to the question of how theory can maintain the core of historical materialism (A) while undergoing a fundamental rethinking of the concept of class (B) and class struggle (C).12 I lack the space to explain it below, but Camatte’s problematic is similar. Now for racket theory proper.

* * *

In the fragment “Die Rackets und der Geist,” Horkheimer writes that the racket is the “basic form of domination.”13 This is because class society is itself a racket: “‘Ruling class’ always means the structure of rackets on the basis of a determinate mode of production, so far as they simultaneously protect and suppress the lowest strata.”14 Or again: “The structure [of every ruling class in history] has been that of competing rackets.”15

The use of the term racket was inspired by what the members of the Frankfurt School (and many others) saw as the increasing monopolization of the capitalist economy, a process that entailed corresponding changes in politics and culture. The tendency within capitalism towards concentration and centralization “allows society to revert to more direct forms of domination, which in fact never had been quite suspended.”16

But the ruling class is not the only racket. Racket-style organization, according to Horkheimer, now also predominates in the labor movement. This is part of a wider historical tendency: “Under the pressure of the ruling class, people within the ruled class are forced to become rulers against those who are even more powerless. The oppressed themselves still become, through this mediation, the direct executioner of those further down.”17 Part of a wider historical tendency, but not identical with it! Horkheimer is clear, albeit pessimistically so, about the specific historical potential of the proletariat in the fragment “Geschichte der amerikanischen Arbeiterschaft” :

The historical course of the proletariat led to a crossroads: it could become a class or a racket. Becoming a ‘racket’ would have meant privileges within national borders, becoming a ‘class’ would have meant world revolution. Leaders have robbed the proletariat of this decision.18

The resignation of the proletariat’s historic task by the official labor movement, which for Horkheimer was emblemized by the American Federation of Labor and the German Social Democrats, meant that a strong distinction had to be made between radical and reformist (actually conformist) forms of class struggle.

In the foregoing passages, Horkheimer is referring to a particular meaning of racket, namely the protection racket. This interpretation agrees with Horkheimer’s earlier claim in “The End of Reason” that “Protection is the archetype of domination.”19 The unity of protection and domination is one of two essential unifying characteristics of the various social forms to which Horkheimer gives the name racket. Thus: “The most general category of functions practiced by groups is protection. Groups maintain the conditions for the continuation of the division of labor in which they have favored standing; they uphold and violently ward off changes that could endanger their monopoly. They are rackets.”20

The other essential characteristic of the racket is its particularism: “Every racket conspires against spirit, and all conspire against, among one another. The reconciliation of universal and particular is immanent to spirit; the racket is their irreconcilable opposition, disguised by ideas of unity and community.”21 Competitiveness and hostility grow out of this fundamental particularism.

This leaves us with the question of what exactly the purpose of the racket is as a form of social organization. Kirchheimer provides a rather direct answer: for him, the aim of all so-called racketeers is the “establishment of domination over a segment of the process of production or distribution.”22 Horkheimer sometimes provides similarly broad qualifications (“to get as large a share of power over men, goods and services as possible”), but in other places he places a distinct emphasis on the sphere of distribution or circulation. For instance:

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. […] 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.23

The emphasis on distribution in passages like the one above suggests a close connection to Friedrich Pollock’s theory of state capitalism,24 and indeed most commentators have interpreted Horkheimer in this way. Such interpretations ignore Horkheimer’s strong criticism of Pollock’s theory in the fragment “Die Ideologie der Politik Heute.”25 Adorno was perhaps even more repulsed by Pollock’s theory of state capitalism, writing to Horkheimer that “a critique [of Pollock’s essay “State Capitalism”] that would express my view of the matter would have been psychologically beyond my control” and going on to request that Horkheimer completely rewrite it.26 In my opinion, the analyses of Franz Neumann’s Behemoth bear greater resemblance to (Adorno and) Horkheimer’s theory than do those of Pollock’s essays on state capitalism.27

In any case, the racket theory had a broader scope than the theory of state capitalism. Older forms of social organization were also castigated: the family is a racket, gender is a racket, and so are the initiatory communities of so-called “primitive tribes.” Thus, Horkheimer applied the concept in a transhistorical manner, but he had his reasons for doing so. As far as he was concerned, the concept was only thinkable in the first place with reference to modern rackets: “The modern concept [of the racket] serves to describe past social relations. ‘The anatomy of the man is the key to the anatomy of the monkey.’”28 The racket-style organization is only boiled down to its essence in the modern racket.

Horkheimer’s condemnation of rackets is wide-ranging, but it is not an attack on organization as such or even all organizations contemporaneous to his work. A handful of fragments and texts from the 1940s provide us with indications of what Horkheimer thought a revolutionary organization would look like. For starters, a non-racket organization in class society can only be a fighting organization “with its point directed upwards,” but such organizations “have no place in the established hierarchy, are without regular economic function, and, after periods of illegality, live on in revolutionary actions.”29 Horkheimer had previously condemned the tendency of reformist opposition to become integrated into capitalism in “Authoritarian State,” writing that “Whatever seeks to extend itself under domination runs the danger of reproducing it.”30

More concretely, Horkheimer was a proponent of workers’ council democracy.31 In the racket theory corpus, he and Adorno repeatedly assert that workers are capable of taking over and competently managing the present system of production.32 He closely read the articles on the Spanish Civil War that Karl Korsch sent him, and scattered positive references to the anarchists of Spain may indicate sympathy for Korsch’s argument that they were the successors of the revolutionary spirit of 1917.33

Camatte’s Theory of the Real Domination of Capital

Now I turn to summary and analysis of the relevant parts of Jacques Camatte’s oeuvre. I am concerned in particular with Series II of Invariance (i.e., the years 1971-1975), which is dominated in content by Camatte’s ambiguous rejection of most of Marxism (or “the theory of the proletariat” as he calls it).34

Theory of the material community of capital and real domination. Camatte’s eccentric reading of texts such as the Grundrisse and “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” lead him to create two new and interrelated concepts to describe the present form of capitalism.35 The first is the real domination of capital, a ‘creative’ gloss on Marx’s abortive theory of the real subsumption of labor under capital. The real domination of capital refers to the domination of the whole of society by capital and the relegation of human existence to a mere moment in the valorization process. According to Camatte, this real domination grows out of the predominance of fixed capital and relative surplus value in the production process of capital—factors which increasingly render the proletariat secondary (if not irrelevant) to the production process.36 37 Domination of the proletariat in the production process by means of fixed capital is then extended to mastery of the entire valorization process including circulation and eventually the real domination of society as a whole. The second concept—the material community of capital—is closely related, but distinct. The material community of capital is what supplanted the human communities (Gemeinwesen) of pre-capitalist modes of production. Camatte once wrote a letter to his comrade Gianni Collu explaining the concept of Gemeinwesen or community; he wrote that it is “the substance of the social reality of humans” and “a superior unity above all the state-unities, above the unending mob of organizations;” individuals are mere accidents of this substance.38 The establishment of capital’s real domination went hand-in-hand with its constitution as the material community of humanity. The alienated human community (capitalism) is mediated and reproduced by the socio-material processes of capital, i.e. the production and exchange of commodities within the valorization process of capital. With the advent of capital’s real domination of humanity, the material community becomes autonomous and self-reproducing, as capital is now the ground for all social institutions (e.g., the state, etc.). Capital posits its own presuppositions and becomes the presupposition of humanity. What was previously mystification now becomes real and effective. Capital dispenses with gold and value and becomes its own tautologous representation.39

Capital has thus succeeded in “[absorbing] the movement that negates it, the proletariat,” and, consequently, “all forms of working-class political organization have disappeared.”40 At the same time, capitalists are absorbed into the automatic functioning of capital. Class conflict therefore goes the way of the dodo and is replaced by inconsequential squabbles between the gangs/rackets/organizations/groups “which are the varied modes of being of capital.”41 Camatte explains further: “This mode of being [the gang-racket] arises from the fact that capital can only valorize itself, and hence only exist and develop its being, if a particle of itself, now autonomized, confronts the whole of society, positing itself in relation to the total-socialized equivalent, capital. [Capital] needs this confrontation (competition, emulation) because it only exists through differentiation.”42 It is unclear if Camatte came to the word ‘racket’ by himself or if he learned it from the Frankfurt School. The former case is very plausible, as most of the texts from the Frankfurt School that presaged Camatte’s new theoretical path vis-a-vis “rackets” would not be published for several years.

The eclipse of the proletariat by capital had consequences for practice and organization. Camatte and Collu give two points of departure for future practice: “refuse to reconstitute a group, even an informal one” and “maintain a network of personal contacts with people having realized (or in the process of doing so) the highest degree of theoretical knowledge: antifollowerism, antipedagogy; the party in its historical sense is not a school.”43 Camatte further spelled out the practical implications of “On Organization” in a 1970 letter to his comrades:

…we could be a certain number of revolutionaries without forming a group, even informally (that is to say, non-structured), but evidently this is only possible tendentially, in the sense that it is only through theoretical activity that we can avoid the traps laid for us by capitalist society. In other words, we cannot be a group and still play a part in the unification of the class that must develop presently; this can only happen if we consider ourselves as the heart of the movement [!?]; if we do not become autonomous [s’autonomise]; if, therefore, we see ourselves as an element of the becoming-unification, not as an instrument, a means to bring it about. This is why there is no interior and exterior.44

This effectively put Camatte on a level with (or even below) the attentistes of the French councilist group Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières (ICO),45 although the emphasis on theoretical activity—and the belief that this groupuscular theoretical activity is of world-historical importance—gives his take a distinctively Bordigist flair.

Texts following “On Organization” have a somewhat softer position; Camatte even had some backhanded compliments for the French Maoist movement!46 The change in tone was connected to his latest prophetic vision: “Since [May ‘68] there has begun inside the universal class […] a struggle which will lead to the revolutionization of this class and its constitution as a party-community, the first moment of its negation.”47 The party (-community) of which Camatte speaks is the historical party, i.e. communism qua ‘the real movement.’ The editor-in-chief of Invariance saw the new organizations of the 1960s as momentary, fragmented expressions of the movement—already underway!—that would negate ‘the proletariat’ and unify the new ‘universal class’ (which includes the “middle classes”) en route to the “immediate triumph of communism.”48

Once we get into Invariance’s third series, it becomes clear that after about 1973 Camatte broke with any and all remotely conventional ideas of revolution. “Resistance,” he writes, “is a disguised [form of] waiting, an unspoken hope that the world’s course may still change.”49 Instead of resisting, we must “leave the world,” create “communist forms” and “new modes of action,” embrace non-violence, etc. “Men and women will come to realize that they themselves are the determining elements, and that they do not have to abdicate their power to the machine…”50 Camatte’s thinking has reached complete tautology. There is no longer anything in it worth discussing.

Remarks (In Place of a Conclusion)

The similarities between Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory and that of Camatte are striking. Furthermore, direct inspiration from the Frankfurt School is (probably) not the decisive factor in Camatte’s intellectual development—although surely there was some degree of it, especially in the 1970s. I consider both the Frankfurt School’s racket theory and Camatte’s work to be failed theoretical programs, albeit ones with rational kernels. However, I also think that the Frankfurt School’s failure is more compelling, interesting, and important.

A key difference between the Frankfurt School and Camatte lies in their conceptions of reconciliation, utopia, and revolution. Camatte is harmonistic, whereas the Frankfurt School is therapeutic.

Camatte’s elliptical descriptions of communism betray this harmonistic tendency. His basic stance is defined by the thesis that communism “is not a question of having or of doing, but of being.”51 It “is not a new mode of production; it is the affirmation of a new community.”52 These abstract-metaphysical theses contrast with the Frankfurt School’s indications of what communism would look like, which are generally negative.

The harmonism is also present in his descriptions of revolution and transition. In the texts of Invariance Series I, the transition simply appears as a series of policies (all taken from Bordiga) easily enacted by the omnipotent class-party-state-community: abolition of the separation between economic enterprises, shortening of the working day, cessation of all commodity exchange, disalienation of labor, etc. To that extent, and only to that extent, the early Camatte is guilty of “[degrading] the revolution to mere progress.”53 Subsequent treatments of the topic in Series II of Invariance degenerate into the fairytale prophecies summarized above. In Camatte’s mature work, the mechanical predictions of vulgar historical materialism—predictions which at least had the pretension of being scientific—are replaced by a willfully abstract belief in humanity. Despite the continuous and drastic changes in his theory, one never finds any trace of genuine autocritique in Camatte, only the mind-numbingly repetitious discourse of a pseudosagelike know-it-all. The puppet called “Gemeinwesen” is always supposed to win.

The works of the Frankfurt School, by contrast, are suffused with the awareness that what has been lost can never be regained, not really.54 Even the dead are not safe from the enemy, and we have scarcely any idea what victory would look like. Thus Benjamin:

Whoever wishes to know what the situation of a ‘redeemed humanity’ might actually be, what conditions are required for the development of such a situation, and when this development can be expected to occur, poses questions to which there are no answers. He might just as well seek to know the color of ultraviolet rays.55

Benjamin’s polemical denial that we can have any idea of what redemption looks like is complemented by Adorno’s negative utopianism. The utopian can and does appear to us, but only fleetingly through reflection. Adorno’s descriptions of the good life are gnomically simple: it is “life without fear” or “a world in which no one goes hungry.” In Horkheimer’s early work, on the other hand, we find a certain cynicism and an awareness of the tragic element in everything. Revolution is nothing metaphysical; it is simply a matter of pain, hunger, and misery, of sufferings that can never be repaid. Socialism is not the perfection of humanity.56 Nor is either revolution or socialism a sure thing: “the experience of our generation,” Benjamin wrote, was that “capitalism will not die a natural death.”57

Adorno and Horkheimer’s reflective meditations have a greater edificatory—and indeed truly mystical—effect than Camatte’s attempts at intuitive illumination, to say nothing of Benjamin’s Marxist mysticism.58 Camatte’s trajectory as a thinker is something like Benjamin’s intellectual life being played backwards. Instead of moving from mysticism to Marxism, it is his later works which are characterized by sophomoric metaphysics and infatuation with reactionary mystics (Klages, Bachofen, etc.).

The most compelling part of Camatte’s work—the concept of the material community of capital—predates his turn away from Marxism. Again there is a striking resemblance to the Frankfurt School—here I refer to Adorno’s analysis of (capitalist) society as a reified totality.59 One of the key differences relates to analysis in its original sense: breaking things down. Camatte explicitly refused the possibility of this, claiming that capital has overridden its logical elements and presupposed categories (the commodity, value, money, labor, etc.). Conversely, Adorno tended to center the basic exchange relation, and hence the aforementioned elementary categories. (I think many people who take influence from Camatte actually interpret the material community concept with reference to the elementary concepts, hence in a Lukácsian-Adornian manner.) Camatte began with the real subsumption of labor within the immediate process of production and then extrapolated this into the real domination of humanity by capital, whereas Adorno, being more sociologically cautious, focused on the expansion of commodity fetishism to cover greater and greater parts of social life. In my opinion, the Lukács-Adorno approach has infinitely more analytical potency than Camatte’s deliberately flattened social ontology.

As I said before, I believe that both theories are ultimately failures. The difference lies in what they offer as salvage for thinking, in the potential for a critical re-appropriation of their analysis. The Frankfurt School’s incomplete conversations about rackets offer more for this purpose than Camatte’s impenetrable monologue on real domination.60

  1. Jacques Camatte, “Évanescence du mythe antifasciste” (1982) ↩

  2. Jacques Camatte, “Amour ou combinatoire sexuelle” (1978) ↩

  3. Jacques Camatte, “Interview with Cercle Marx” (2019) ↩

  4. Otto Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty” in The Journal of Politics, May, 1944, Vol. 6, No. 2, 139-176; 161. ↩

  5. Theodor Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory” (1942) in Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford University Press, 2003), 93ff. ↩

  6. Adorno, op. cit., 94. ↩

  7. Adorno, op. cit., 100. ↩

  8. Ibid ↩

  9. Adorno, op. cit., 97. ↩

  10. Adorno, op. cit., 99. ↩

  11. Adorno, op. cit., Section VIII ↩

  12. Cf. the typescript “Memorandum über Teile des Los Angeles Arbeitsprogramms…” Max Horkheimer Nachlass VI.33 / Na 1 578, 1r-4r https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-1118910 ↩

  13. Max Horkheimer, “Die Rackets und der Geist” [1942] in Max Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (S. Fischer Verlag, 1985), 287. ↩

  14. Horkheimer, “Die Rackets und der Geist,” in Max Horkheimer gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12, 288. ↩

  15. Max Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations” (1943). For the purposes of this essay I am consulting a critical edition of the text that we at the Critical Theory Working Group have compiled on the basis of the variants found in the Horkheimer archive. It will be published on our blog shortly. See Max Horkheimer Nachlass XI.16-17 / Na 1 639 https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-1110761 ↩

  16. Max Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations” ↩

  17. Typescript “Notizen zum Programm des Buches, 3.8.1942,” Max Horkheimer Max Horkheimer Nachlass XI.10.1 / Na 1 805, 180-181 https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-1112682 ↩

  18. Max Horkheimer, “Geschichte der amerikanischen Arbeiterschaft” (1942) in Max Horkheimer gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12, 260 ↩

  19. Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason” in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, 1941, 366-389; 374 ↩

  20. Horkheimer, “Die Rackets und der Geist,” in Max Horkheimer gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12, 286. ↩

  21. Horkheimer, op. cit., 290. ↩

  22. Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” 160. ↩

  23. Horkheimer, “On The Sociology of Class Relations” ↩

  24. See Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism” in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX 1941, 200-226. ↩

  25. Max Horkheimer, “Die Ideologie der Politik Heute” [1942] in Max Horkheimer gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12, 316ff. ↩

  26. Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer, 8 June 1941 in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Briefwechsel 1927-1969, Bd. II 1938-1944, eds. Christoph Gödde and Henri Loritz (Suhrkamp 2004), 139. ↩

  27. For more about the influence or non-influence of Pollock, see James Schmidt, “‘Racket,’ ‘Monopoly,’ and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” (nonsite.org, 2016) ↩

  28. Horkheimer, “On the Sociology of Class Relations” ↩

  29. Horkheimer, “Die Rackets und der Geist,” in Max Horkheimer gesammelte Schriften, Band 12, 288 ↩

  30. Max Horkheimer, “Authoritarian State” Telos 15:2 (Spring), 1973, 3-20; 5. ↩

  31. Horkheimer, “Authoritarian State,” 6 et passim. ↩

  32. Horkheimer, op. cit., 10; Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory” in Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 108. ↩

  33. See Karl Korsch, “Economics and Politics in Revolutionary Spain” in Living Marxism, Volume 4, Number 3, May 1938 ↩

  34. I recommend those interested in Camatte’s background and development to read Michele Garau’s two-part essay “The Community of Capital: On Jacques Camatte” in Ill Will. ↩

  35. For more on these concepts and the relevant parts of Camatte’s theory more generally see Ray Brassier, “Wandering Abstraction” (Metamute, 2014) and Endnotes, “The History of Subsumption” (Endnotes, 2010). ↩

  36. Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community: The Results of the Immediate Production Process and the Economic Work of Marx (Radical Reprints, 2020), 47, 67; Jacques Camatte, “The Wandering of Humanity” (1973) in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays, ed. Alex Trotter (Autonomedia 1995), 39. ↩

  37. Compare Camatte’s theses with a characteristic quip from Horkheimer: “In the system of the free market economy, which pushed men to labor-saving discoveries and finally subsumed them in a global mathematical formula, its specific offspring, machines, have become means of destruction not merely in the literal sense: they have made not work but the workers superfluous.” Max Horkheimer, “Authoritarian State,” 3. ↩

  38. Jacques Camatte to Gianni Collu, May 23, 1970. Invariance Series III, No. 1 (1976), 43. My translation ↩

  39. See Jacques Camatte, “A Propos Capital” (1971) in Capital and Community (Radical Reprints 2020), 271ff. ↩

  40. Jacques Camatte, “On Organization” (1969/1972) in This World We Must Leave (Autonomedia 1995), 26. ↩

  41. Camatte, “The Wandering of Humanity,” 42. ↩

  42. Jacques Camatte, “Capitalisme et développement de bande-racket” (1969). My translation ↩

  43. Camatte, “On Organization,” 33. ↩

  44. Camatte to comrades, January 5, 1970. Invariance Series III, No. 1, 1976, 20. My translation. ↩

  45. Here I am making a very similar argument to the one made in Section I of the essay “We Unhappy Few” from Endnotes vol. 5. Camatte himself bizarrely claimed that the ICO were “Leninists;” see “Remarques” in Invariance Series I, no. 7, 172. ↩

  46. Jacques Camatte, “About the Revolution” (1972) in Capital and Community, 280. ↩

  47. Camatte, op. cit., 285. ↩

  48. Camatte to comrades, January 5, 1970. Invariance Series III, No. 1, 1976, 22; Cf. 36. ↩

  49. Jacques Camatte, “Contre toute attente” (1978). My translation. ↩

  50. Jacques Camatte, “Against Domestication” (1973) in This World We Must Leave, 125-6. ↩

  51. Jacques Camatte, “The Democratic Mystification” (1969) ↩

  52. Camatte, “The Wandering of Humanity,” 64 ↩

  53. Horkheimer, “Authoritarian State,” 12. ↩

  54. See Gillian Rose, “Walter Benjamin - Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism” in Judaism and Modernity (Verso, 2017). ↩

  55. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’” (1940) in Selected Writings, vol. 4, eds. Michael W. Jennings et al (Harvard University Press, 2003), 402. ↩

  56. Max Horkheimer, “Metaphysische Verklärung der Revolution” in Max Horkheimer gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 11, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (S. Fischer Verlag, 1987), 264-66. ↩

  57. Walter Benjamin, “Konvolut X: Marx” in Walter Benjamin gesammelte Schriften, Bd. V.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Suhrkamp, 1991), 819. My translation. ↩

  58. In the “Thèses provisoires” (1973) he explains his “intuitive” approach with reference to Feuerbach, claiming that it is now necessary to transpose Feuerbach’s humanist (idealist) hermeneutic from religion to science. This tellingly positive attitude towards Feuerbach is repeated in his letter of January 10, 1973 published in Invariance Series III, no. 3. ↩

  59. The line of thought has its origins in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, specifically the essay on reification. ↩

  60. Subsequent texts in this dossier will go into more depth on the flaws and limits of racket theory. ↩