What are the conditions that make class society possible?Thanks to James Crane for translating most texts cited in the essay. Human beings sustain themselves through their interaction with the natural world around them. Unlike most animals, humans do not have immediate access to their own conditions of reproduction. The tools and knowledge necessary for their metabolic interchange with nature is mediated through social formations, even what constitutes human needs at any given historical period is socially mediated, unlike what modern psychology might want us to believe.See Adorno’s critique of the false division of basic and non-basic needs in Theodor W Adorno, “Theses on Need,” trs. Martin Shuster and Iain Macdonald in *Adorno Studies*, Volume 1, Issue 1, January 2017, 103-105. Horkheimer notes that the invention of tools marked the division between domination purely based on physical force and that based on social control.Max Horkheimer, “Die Rackets und der Geist” [1942] in Max Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 12, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (S. Fischer Verlag, 1985), 287 Human production (and reproduction) is mediated through tools that arise in specific social relations, the same tools in turn start to mediate the social relations, human organizations and ways of living come to be “prescribed by the nature of such tools.”Ibid. Marx conceptualizes tools as organs of production, as a corporeal part of the human body required for human metabolism:
The first thing of which the labourer possesses himself is not the subject of labour but its instrument. Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible.Karl Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1*, in *Marx/Engels Collected Works* (hereafter MECW), vol. 35 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), 189
As Søren Mau has recently pointed out, as instruments of production (qua organs) can become the private property of individuals and groups, it “has the consequence that power can weave itself into the very fabric of the human metabolism.”Søren Mau, *Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital* (Verso, 2023), 115 The theoretical core of the concepts of the relations and forces of production consists in this fact, namely that human metabolism and reproduction is organized in definite social relations with the use of tools. Following Engels, Horkheimer argues that the primacy of tools in production is mirrored by the development of patriarchy apropos transition from mother-right to father-right with the concrete development of sedentary agriculture. The bygone age of matriarchy is associated with that of pre-history, an era without class conflict that did not objectify humans as tools for social reproduction;Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family” in *Critical theory: Selected Essays*, tr. Matthew J. O’Connell et al (Continuum, 1982), 118 Durkheim, meanwhile, associates pre-history without the division between public and private life as mechanical solidarity, contrasted with the organic solidarity of modernity with its highly specialized division of labour that grants its members some semblance of individuality.Émile Durkheim, *The Division of Labour in Society*, trans. W. D. Halls, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). In actuality, this division between private and public signified the development of class society with domination within and outside the family by different groups of people organized in a hierarchy. The development of patriarchy and class are deeply intertwined.
Early critical theory explicitly uses the dialectic between forces and relations of production as a starting point to develop a theory of class. The ownership of the means and objects of production by different members of the species was primarily maintained by repression of direct producers. The repression was rationalized as being in the long-term interests of the whole of society because it purportedly incentivized social and economic development; this development in turn made the forces of repression obsolete and irrational.Theodor W. Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory” in *Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader*, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford University Press, 2003), 110 The subordination of individuals in a hierarchy appears as rational until the conditions of social reproduction change through the development of society (apropos the forces of production.) As emblematically articulated by Max Weber, the concept of rationality in traditional theory meant the use of reason by a transcendental calculating subject to navigate the world of values.See Weber’s discussion on formal rationality in Max Weber, Economy and Society: A New Translation, trans. Keith Tribe (Harvard University Press, 2019,) 172-177; Gillian Rose on Weber’s neo-kantian inheritance in Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, (Verso, 2009,) 22-23; Horkheimer on the Marburg school and the status of the individual in Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” 198-200. Horkheimer appropriates the concept of rationality as itself arising from historically developing social relations that organizes the conditions of social reproduction. It is not “false” consciousness to accept the conditions of subordination but rather it is in “the [immediate] interests of those who were ruled… It was a condition for the development of mankind’s capabilities.”Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family,” 70 At stake is how humans navigate and internalize the limits of social formations as activity rather than as mere automatons fully path-dependent on a structure.
Hence, the intersection of the process of production and the form of exploitation is central to understanding the class structure of any given social formation.See “Introduction: Themes in Historical Materialism” in Jairus Banaji, *Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation*, (Haymarket, 2010). The processes through which the surplus labour of direct producers is appropriated by the owners of the means of production influences the forms of thinking (and social control) in society that become embodied in relatively autonomous institutions such as the family, education, and religion—the Institut für Sozialforschung prefigures what is later conceptualized as the ideological state apparatus that stabilizes the structure of capitalism by Louis Althusser.See Louis Althusser, *On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses*, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London New York: Verso, 2014). As Horkheimer himself puts it:
“To regard the economic process as a determining ground of events means that one considers all other spheres of social life in their changing relationships to it and that one conceives this process itself not in its isolated mechanical form but in connection with the specific capabilities and dispositions of men, which have, of course, been developed by the economic process itself.”Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family,” 52
On the flipside, Horkheimer interrogates the processes of internalization and rationalization of authority by direct producers (and the excluded), which is characteristically reflected in the culture of a society. The “so-called social nature” of humanity that appears natural to positivist psychologists as the “self-integration into a given order of things”Horkheimer, op. cit., 56 through institutions such as religion is reducible to “the memory of the acts of force by which men were made ‘sociable’ and civilized and which threaten them still if they become too forgetful.”Horkheimer, op. cit., 52 The history of direct domination and its social memory is reflected in the tendency to accept conditions of indirect domination—the history of the caste system and its continuing prevalence today in both direct and indirect forms serves as the paradigmatic example. The liberal hope that the caste system would be eventually supplanted by the development of capitalism was never realized, caste domination was instead integrated with capitalist social relations.Horkheimer, op. cit., 62-65.
Class, Contract and Monopoly
Marx extensively wrote about class and class struggle throughout his life but never developed a systematic theory of class per se. Infamously, the manuscript for the third volume of Capital ends just as Marx begins a section on class. Furthermore, Michael Heinrich argues that the concept of class in the three volumes of Capital appears as the (unwritten) result of the unfolding categories of political economy rather than a precondition/assumption for a systematic theory of capitalism.Michael Heinrich, *An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital*, tr. Alexander Locasio (Monthly Review Press, 2012), 192 Marx describes his method as “rising from the abstract to the concrete,”Karl Marx, “Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58” in Karl Marx: 1857-61, Collected Works 28 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), 38 See section 3 of the Introduction in the volume for more on Marx’s method, 37–45.. developing the most abstract concepts of classical political economy that are layered on top of each other to describe complex tendencies that exist within capitalism as a historically emergent system. Marx starts with describing the dynamics of commodities as products of labour, from which he derives most other mutually interlocking concepts and categories of “exchange value and use value, exchange value and value, concrete and abstract labour, as well as the necessity of money and its functions, the concept of capital, the theory of surplus value and exploitation, the class relation underlying all of this, and so on.”Mau, *Mute Compulsion*, 13 Thus, the concept of class in the capitalist mode of production is dependent on all these other interlocking concepts. This is quite different from modern sociological theories that abstractly conceptualize class in terms of social stratification based on occupation and their income brackets (i.e. lower, middle, and upper classes). Following Marx, Horkheimer conceptualizes class as a concrete historical category that cannot be understood in isolation/abstraction from the actual processes of social reproduction in a given social formation. Class is simultaneously understood at a structural level as the social position of a group within a specific social formation and as a group cognizant of itself as a class apropos its social location. Class as a political agent, or an interest group only exists if individuals that share common interests are conscious of their own social position.Horkheimer, “On The Sociology of Class Relations.” In “Reflections on Class Theory,” Adorno points out that “the concept of class is bound up with the emergence of the proletariat.”Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” 93 Class only becomes intelligible with the universal domination over the proletariat through necessitating conditions that require an individual to sell her labour-power for wages, a situation which is the result of the ongoing process of primitive accumulation.Most readings of Marx on primitive accumulation understand it as something restricted to the past. For Marx, however, primitive accumulation is a necessary component of capitalism as a system. Capitalism functions through the continual appropriation of resources that create conditions of wage labour. See William Clare Roberts, “What Was Primitive Accumulation? Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept,” *European Journal of Political Theory* 19, no. 4 (October 2020): 532–52, [https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885117735961](https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885117735961) The declaration that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in MECW*,* Vol. 6 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1976) 484 in the Communist Manifesto implied that what was previously thought of as natural hierarchies of the primitive tribe or the divine right of kings were nothing but stronger groups dominating the weaker ones to control production and thereby exist outside the immediate process of production qua labour, i.e. to be served by majority of the population.As Horkheimer puts it, “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.” Horkheimer, “On The Sociology of Class Relations.” The past is understood retroactively through the present—or inversely, as Adorno puts it, the history of domination and oppression culminates in the universal domination of capitalism.“If all the oppression that man has ever inflicted on man culminates in the modern age in the cold inhumanity of free wage labor, then the past is revealed in conditions and things – the romantic contrast to industrial reason – as the trace of former suffering. The archaic silence of pyramids and ruins becomes conscious of itself in materialist thought: it is the echo of factory noise in the landscape of the immutable.” Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” 94 Hence, for Marx (and the critical theorists), class struggle implied the fight against the system of capitalism and the very concept of classes as such.
The capitalist process of production is based on the “so-called labour contract,”Horkheimer, Authority and the Family, 86 where the worker could sell her labour-power for a wage through which she could access the conditions of her continual reproduction. The contract guaranteed by the state and law, which were (purportedly) and to varying degrees held up by democratic institutions that represented the will of the people within the nation-state. However, this free contract concealed the actual inequality between people, where an individual worker was more “dependent on the settlement of a contract” than the owners of Capital, who could choose between workers.Ibid. This meant that the working class had to adapt to existing unequal conditions by competition (contra struggle) amongst themselves as each individual worker had to compete against others to sell her labour, which meant that wages rarely rose above subsistence levels, and even below subsistence observed throughout the history of capitalism. Hence, “The distinction between employer and worker lay in the fact that this impersonal necessity […] represented for the employer the condition for his control and for the worker a pitiless fate.”Ibid. The subordination of the individual to irrational economic circumstances through the contract is also personal submission to the will of an employer.Ibid.
The Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis locates the birth of legality and the institution of law with the development and universalization of capitalist social relations. In capitalism, the relationship of exploitation is legally mediated through the form of the contract as the worker disposes of her labour power as a commodity on the market, in contrast with direct forms of subjugation seen in societies based on slavery and serfdom. Social regulation, sanctions, and disciplinary mechanisms are rendered through the legal form rather than direct unalienated punishment.Michel Foucault shows the transition between direct punishment to indirect punishment through the legal apparatus. Michel Foucault, *Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,* tr. Alan Sheridan (Vintage Books, 1995) Hence Pashukanis argues that it is only in capitalism that “the legal form attains universal significance, legal ideology becomes the ideology par excellence, and defending the class interest of the exploiters appears with ever increasing success as the defense of the abstract principle of legal subjectivity.”Evgeny Bronislavovich Pashukanis, *The General Theory of Law and Marxism*, tr. Barbara Einhorn, ed. Chris Arthur (Transaction, 2002), 45 The primary function of the legal form is the concealment of the actuality of exploitation in the process of production, which is accompanied by the reduction of individuals (who embody differences) to a formal equality as subjects of the law. The legal form becomes the essential “precondition for the non-coercive extraction of surplus value, on which the reproduction of the capitalist relations of production rest.”Ibid. For Horkheimer, the ban on collective bargaining and the state control over contracts in fascism “revealed what was already inherent in liberalism.” Hence, “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.”Horkheimer, “On The Sociology of Class Relations.” The very impersonal nature of the labour contract incentivizes reactionary responses by hiding the actual relations of exploitation between people, which in conditions of social crisis leads to minority groups being held as a scapegoat.See Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to "Holocaust",” *New German Critique*, no. 19 (1980): 97–115, [https://doi.org/10.2307/487974](https://doi.org/10.2307/487974).
The development of capitalism is highlighted by intra-class struggle within the ruling class as the logic of monopolization/expansion comes in conflict with each other, alongside the primary struggle between producers and owners of the means of production. The ruling class, “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.”Horkheimer, “On The Sociology of Class Relations.” The development of nation-states lead to the struggle over industries central to social reproduction of economic life, which in turn lead to the dominance of a small number of elite families over these industries. The tendency towards monopolization closely knit with the intra-class conflict within the bourgeoisie is mutually determined by the inner tendencies of capital accumulation and pre-capitalist social forms such as caste. What the economists understood as externalities that hampered intended functioning of the market were rather immanent to the very functioning of the logic of capitalist accumulation; it is in the direct interests of the ruling class to reduce and hamper competition amongst themselves through subordinating one another while incentivizing competition in the working class to reduce wages.Ibid.
The discrepancy between the legal discourseAs Pashukanis argues, “The constitutional state is a mirage, but one which suits the bourgeoisie very well \[…\] Power as the 'collective will', as the 'rule of law'. is realised in bourgeois society to the extent that this society represents a market.” [Pashukanis, *The General Theory of Law and Marxism*, 147](https://www.zotero.org/google-docs/?uVZXCo). of the abstract individual who can freely interact with the market and the actuality of unfreedom is highlighted by this tendency of monopolization immanent to class society. The assertion that real utopian ideals of liberalism qua capitalism is corrupted by what are purportedly external forces of the state and bureaucracy becomes the ideological rationalization of the struggle within the ruling class. Labels such as cronyism are attributed to those who gain an advantageous monopoly position through political and ideological connections with the existing state. The utopian ideal of liberalism naturalizes capitalist social relations as a fundamental part of human existence while simultaneously denying the immanent tendencies of capitalism. This highlights the actual non-identity of the concept of class; it designates the real unity of (bourgeois) interests of a class that is accompanied by its actual dis-unity.Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” 98 These discrepancies are accentuated during monopolization as the entirety of society is pitted against itself to gain control over resources necessary for social reproduction, members of a social strata attempt to better their social position while suppressing the members of strata below them—social mobility is intimately interwoven with the subordination of others within the constraints of class society.
The development of organizational forms with a rigid hierarchy, which Horkheimer calls totalities, is not merely a result of the optimization mechanisms of the capitalist market that maximizes allocative efficiency of resources,See R. H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” *Economica* 4, no. 16 (November 1937): 386–405, [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x) but rather contains within itself the history of struggle for the control over resources. The power relations that have developed over time and the optimization mechanisms of the market mutually determine each other. The concept of allocative efficiency is reframed as the most effective method of monopolizing resources that are not fully integrated into capitalist relations of production through what Marx called the original/primitive accumulation. While monopolies have always existed throughout the development of capitalism, the monopoly stage of capitalism only arises with the near-full integration of capital in social life and state vis-a-vis control over production by a small minority.
For Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy, monopolies are big corporations that are highly efficient rational calculators for extracting social surplus. They are “profit maximizers and capital accumulators,” and “they are managed by company men whose fortunes are identified with the corporations’ success or failure.”Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, *Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order*, (Monthly Review Press, 1968). These monopolies start organizing normal economic life with aid from the state as they control the price system, tax and labour policy to maximize production and profitability of the corporation. Production is centralized in a small number of production units that are hierarchically organized for the efficient transfer of information and social control over the workers.Otto Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” in *The Journal of Politics*, May, 1944, Vol. 6, No. 2, 139-176 [https://doi.org/10.2307/2125270](https://doi.org/10.2307/2125270); 148 This is accompanied by change in the production process (what Marx called real subsumptionIn the economic manuscripts of 1861-63, Marx writes about the real subsumption of capitalism as changing the very nature of work to suit the needs of capital accumulation as opposed to formal subsumption, where surplus is extracted from pre-capitalist ways of production. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW, Vol. 34 (Lawrence and Wishart, 1994\) 104–17.): the scientific management of Taylor and the moving conveyor belts that fed the highly specialized division of labour of Ford.Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” 145 Otto Kirchheimer in “Quest for Sovereignty” demonstrates that highly organized hierarchical monopolies efficiently “[respond] quite often to the needs of government” as self interested bourgeoise nation-states under specific conditions such as war, “leads to a wholesome transfer of public authority to the principal agencies of private self-administration.”Kirchheimer, op. cit., 150 With hindsight, we can observe that the process of privatization has taken place regardless of any extraneous conditions. Hence, Adorno points out that with monopolization
The ruling class disappears behind the concentration of capital. This latter has reached a magnitude and acquired a weight of its own that enables capital to present itself as an institution, as the expression of society as a whole. By virtue of its omnipotence, the particular is able to usurp the totality: this overall social aspect of capital is the endpoint of the old fetish character of the commodity according to which relations between men are reflected back to them as relations between things.Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” 99
In the mid-20th century, monopoly capitalism could absorb the majority of the population into the production process—at least in the first world. This fundamentally changed with the further development of capitalism into neo-liberal capitalism with the regulation and creation of new markets in spheres that were previously managed by the state such as education.David Harvey, *A Brief History of Neoliberalism* (Oxford University Press, 2005), 65 The result was a massive tide of exclusion from the production process, and therefore the expansion of what Marx called the relative surplus population.“The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent.” Marx, *Capital*, 623 The expansion of the surplus population was simultaneously accompanied by the total integration of all aspects of life into the market.
What, then, is the nature of class and class struggle with this furthering integration of capitalism into every facet of life? Horkheimer points out that during the revolutionary movements of the 19th and early 20th century, capitalism did not fully hold sway over every aspect of life—there were spaces with relative autonomy for individual entrepreneurs, subsistence producers, etc. As the impersonal market forces of capitalism began to dominate almost everyone with extending monopolization (and later on the advent of neoliberalism), class struggle fundamentally changes its form while the antagonisms of capitalism are heightened through, for example, the rapid expansion of the informal sector and imperialist super exploitation of the global south. As Horkheimer puts it,
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.Horkheimer, “On The Sociology of Class Relations.”
For the early critical theorists, the rapid immiseration of the working class during moments of crisis undermined the institutions that rationalized conditions of subordination. Which rises the possibility of revolutionary aspirations in the working class to change the very conditions of social reproduction, hence the “resolute will of progressive groups to win the victory over the naked force of arms”Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family,” 60 of the ruling classes. However, Horkheimer points out that it is equally possible for reactionary forces to co-opt the anxieties caused by crisis to reinstate “outmoded cultural apparatuses” with intensified disciplinary power.Horkheimer, op. cit., 60 With the universalization of the impersonal mechanisms of capitalism (the interlocking forms of market, law and the state), capitalism provides movements for radical progress and regression into explicit forms of social domination. For Horkheimer (and the rest of the institution), the monopoly stage of Capitalism was already a regress into barbarism. Class struggle had largely been replaced by class adaptation as a result of the development of highly integrated monopoly society, the working class’s relationship to “the different capitalistic groups [is] no longer radically different from those prevailing among the capitalistic groups themselves.”Horkheimer, “On The Sociology of Class Relations.” This does not imply that the possibility of radical change disappears, but rather shows the forms of consciousness that develop in monopoly capitalism.