2 Max Horkheimer and The Sociology of Class Relations

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NONSITE
Max Horkheimer and
The Sociology of Class
Relations
ISSUE #18 THE TANK /
BY MAX HORKHEIMER, JAMES SCHMIDT, JOHN
LYSAKER & DAVID JENEMANN /
JANUARY 11, 2016
In the fall of 1943 Max Horkheimer composed multiple drafts of an essay

entitled “On the Sociology of Class Relations.” The essay was intended for
inclusion in the collaborative project with Theodor W. Adorno which
came to be called The Dialectic of Enlightenment. One
indication that the essay was crucial to their project was that Horkheimer
solicited several responses to the working drafts including comments
from Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse (on the East coast) and
Friedrich Pollock and Adorno (in Los Angeles with Horkheimer).
Undoubtedly the handwritten notes that annotate several of the type-
script pages reflects some of the comments he received from his
respondents. More mysterious is the fact that the essay was never
published in the form presented here. Paragraphs from it appear
in Eclipse of Reason (1947), and long passages comprise a
German edition of the text in the Nachlass (volume 12) but that
version is a contemporary product of the editors. What appears here for
the first time is Horkheimer’s original essay in full and in its original
English-language format. To say that Horkheimer’s command of English
was far from fluent in 1943 will be clear to readers at once. I have done
my best to reconstruct the text from the type-script original which was
overlain, probably over many months, if not years, with hand-written
notes, alterations and additions.
The value of this text requires some comment. There is of course the
intrinsic worth of Horkheimer’s essay, and its relevance to one of the
monuments of Western Marxism. What draws this text into the space of
nonsite.org’s concerns is the intersection of union organization—
what Horkheimer critically elaborates here under a general theory of
“rackets”—and Marxism. To say unions and Marxism share a tense history
is an understatement. Even a passing glance at Lenin’s What is To
https://nonsite.org/max-horkheimer-and-the-sociology-of-class-relations/ 1/19
26/3/24, 02:17 Max Horkheimer and The Sociology of Class Relations – Nonsite.org
Be Done? indicates how centrally trade unions figured as an internal

enemy to the Marxist cause. Horkheimer follows in this tradition in some
large part. By the time Lenin came to write “Left-wing”
Communism: An Infantile Disorder in 1920, an essay
devoted to the strategic art of compromise, he had altered, or
substantially inflected, his view of the trade union movement as well as
parliamentary politics. At this moment the Supreme Court is poised to
offer yet another in a long series of blows against unionization in the
United States. To what extent did and do Leftist thinkers contribute to the
current assault on unions? To what extent can and should Marxism resist
this tendency?
The invited respondents to Horkheimer’s text—James Schmidt, John

Lysaker, Chris Cutrone, Nicholas Brown and David Jenemann, whose task
is respondent to the above—take up various positions in regards to the
ongoing debate around unions and Marxism. We hope that the
publication of Horkheimer’s key text, and the responses by
contemporaries will encourage further discussion around this problem.
—Todd Cronan, nonsite.org
Horkheimer Schmidt Lysaker Cutrone

Brown Jenemann
Max Horkheimer
On the Sociology of Class Relations (September-November 1943)
According to Marxian theory the power of the ruling class has been
based upon its 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 by uncontrolled social
forces, has decided which kinds of goods are desirable and by which
methods they have to be secured: either by hard labor alone or by the
use of arms.
The privileges thus held by the ruling minorities throughout the ages
were not altogether irrational. It is true that, in the last instance, 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 form of society capable of living

was an expression of economic superiority. 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 grew, though more convulsive and terroristic, but at the
same time became imbecile. They were transformed into a purely
repressive factor, the social and cultural forms, wearily maintained by
their administrative apparatus against new possibilities of human
association, exercise a mutilating effect upon the minds and faculties of
mankind.
The notion of class as it underlies this theory of history needs further

elucidation. At least during the most typical periods property of the
means of production was not identical with their well-planned use, or
with the existence of a unified will and determination. The various
groups which formed the ruling class understood each other fairly well
whenever the necessity occurred to crush the resistance of the
exploited masses or of any forces threatening to set up a new social
rule. When it came to punitive measures against the progressive
burghers in Southern France or even against 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 in no way a picture of
solidarity among the rulers of the Christian world. On the contrary, there
is a never ending fight going on over the booty among the different
hierarchical groups. Each one wants to assume authority over large
areas in order to be nourished and housed and served by as large a
population as possible. 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 effort of one of its parts to
secure the spoils that others might have appropriated. And since the
most efficient way to be sure of the continuous flow of goods and
services has always been the command over those who render them,
the struggle for security among the elites has been a run for as far-
reaching a command as possible, in other words, for the control of
production.
For several reasons this nature of the ruling class was obscured during
the 19th century. The emancipation of the bourgeois from the
restrictions of the guilds and the release of the laborer from serfdom
seemed to have abolished the unsurmountable differences between
the various sectors of humanity. Economic competition embracing all
parts of the population was more peaceful although more involved
than the quarrels and discords of the great in times past. It was one of
the achievements of Marx’s writings that he, while stressing the
changes and progressive features brought about by the new form of
exploitation, unveiled the oppressive character of modern economic
relations, the old issue of power behind the apparently rational set-up
of liberalism. In Fascism this identity of bourgeois society in its different
periods has become so obvious that economists who, in opposition to
materialistic interpretation of liberalism clung to a narrow concept of
market economy, purged from all political and historical implications,
are now throwing the ideas of economy overboard altogether replacing
it 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 between the workers and the capitalists was essentially
different from the nature of competition among the capitalists
themselves. Competition among workers, at least during the heydays
of liberalism, meant nothing else but that there were so many of them
that the wages could hardly rise above the cost of bare living and, as in
many cases, often even dropped below it. Fascism has only revealed
what was already inherent in liberalism: the delusive nature of the labor
contract as a deal between equally free partners. It would be a grave
theoretical mistake to denounce that contract in modern totalitarianism
as 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, competition among the entrepreneurs themselves was never

quite as free as it seemed to be. Here we are not thinking of the
interference with industry by the liberalistic state, which economists are
used to brand with reproach as long as big business does not take it
under its own exclusive management; we rather have in mind the
inequality resulting from the different degrees of social power which
various industries are able to exercise. Such differences depend largely
upon the more or less advanced stage of economic concentration and
centralization of the respective industry, upon the mass of machinery
which its particular branch of production requires, upon its importance
for the regular functioning of the economic life of the nation. Therefore,
the groups which by birth or deceit, brutality or smartness, expertness
in engineering, management of human relations, marriage or adulation,
have come to control a part of the total capital invested in industry,
from a hierarchy of economic power by which the free play of
competition has been limited at each of its stages. The discovery that
national economy in various capitalistic countries depended on 200, 60,
or even smaller numbers 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 elements of competition to
disappear: it secured the link between the needs of consumers and the
profit-interest of the individual entrepreneur, it diminished the
possibility, slight as it was, that an independent mind gained 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 its impartial
administration. Such elements vanish in the later stages and allow
society to revert to more direct forms of domination which in fact never

had been quite suspended. This process, however, is not only a
reactionary one. While the inequalities among the entrepreneurs are
spilling over into monopolistic and eventually totalitarian control of
material life the relation between capital and labor undergoes a most
typical change. In recent history of capitalism the working class has
entered competition {the struggle for power} by adapting itself to the
monopolistic structure of society.
Up to the early 20th century the fight of that class had a more or less
spontaneous and radically democratic character. Their memberships,
composed of workers who in the factory experienced every day their
antagonism to the individual entrepreneur, were more or less active.
Their executives, whose offices had not yet become quite stabilized
expressed at least partially the ideas and hopes of the oppressed
individual concerning a better society rather than to impress their own
ideology as administrators, struggling for a big share in social
domination upon the minds of their followers. (This, by the way, does
not mean that the revolutionary functionaries of the past did not try to
influence the workers. On the contrary, their efforts to open the eyes of
the workers were much more intensive and outspoken. The difference
of their psychological structures with those of their followers was
perhaps much greater than that between the workers of today and their
prominent representatives, yet the latter, once established, rest much
heavier upon the souls, their sway over the life of the association much
more powerful than the appeal to theoretical reason made by the older
type of functionary.) The figure of the individual, trying to defend its
qualities as a human being against becoming, in and outside of the
factory, a mere accessory to the apparatus of production, had not yet
been replaced by the figure of the member defined exclusively by its
standardized material interests. Today, the transformation is complete. It
[labor] has assumed a form which fits into the monopolistic set-up and,
consequently its relations to the different capitalistic groups are no
longer so radically different from those prevailing among the latter.
The new situation is expressed in the concept of labor as it is a guiding

intellectual principle not only in the minds of workers but also with the
general public. Labor like Agriculture or Industry, or even sections of
Industry, such as Steel, Rubber, Oil, are collective terms which are not
ordinary abstracta or generalia. Their logical structure
resembles more a totality like a State, Nation, Church with regard to
their components rather than a generality like color or animal with
regard to their specimens. They emphasize the concreteness of
themselves as universal concepts, not as much one of the elements
they comprise. The logical structure indeed mirrors exactly the mold of
their objects. The elements of labor, primarily the mass of ordinary
members, are not the forces which, by their own ideas and spontaneity,
determine the course of the whole; they are not so much, to use a
mathematical term, the constant value with regard to the whole as the
fluctuating one. On the contrary, the whole, i.e., the organization in
which the leaders, with their specific materialistic and power interests,
with their philosophy and character structure, have an infinitely greater
weight than the ideas of any plain member, determines and even
overawes the individual.
There is, however, a most typical difference between the social

totalities of our monopolistic society and those of earlier periods. 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 patterns which had assumed their shape in long historical
developments. They had become fixed images and models. True, such
patterns—magical, religious or philosophical—were intellectual
sediments of their present forms of domination, they reflected the
hierarchical stratification of society as it were, 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 had
become objectivized spiritual structures: any system of ideas as far as it
is wrought in meaningful language, be it religious, artistic, or logical, has
a general connotation and pretends to be true in a universal sense.
Therefore, the older forms of totalities which tried to comply with a
spiritual, idealized model, contained an element which is completely
lacking in the purely pragmatic totalities of monopolism. The latter also
show a hierarchical structure, the wholly integrated and despotic
totalities, but the ascent of their functionaries to the upper grades has
nothing to do with any quality of theirs regarding an objective spiritual
content but almost exclusively with their ability to impose on people, to
handle people, to be smart with people. Purely administrative and
technical qualities define the human forces toward which the modern
totality gravitates. Such traits were in no way lacking in leaders of the
different sectors of ancient classes, but by their radical separation from
any autonomous idea today they give to the modern totality its
particular character.
The concept of labor as a pragmatic totality becomes quite clear when

confronted 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 in their fate, each of them, on the
whole, had the same outlook on life: the periods of employment would
become shorter, the pressure of the unemployed on the wages grow
stronger, the misery, in the midst of an ever wealthier society, become
unbearable. More and more the capitalist would be unable to grant
even the 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 its 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 to the
formation of a party which would finally change the world. This party
would spring from the similarity of the situation of the workers all over
the world, its principles and structure would abstract from the
temporary differences in the financial situation in different branches of
production as well as in different geographical and national settings. It
would not express so much the actual conscience of the individual
worker which may be affected by all the mutilating influences of
exploitation, but the resistance against the frustrations imposed upon
man by social forms which have become purely oppressive. The effort
of this party would be inspired by the fulfillment of just those human
aspirations, material and spiritual ones, which were suppressed or
distorted by making the individual a kind of accessory to machinery as
it is achieved in the modern industrial process, the parties aims were
connected with the situation of the individual and the masses and did
not have a special affinity to a particular category of workers at the
expense of other ones. It represented the oppressed masses as such.
Since the reason for the laborers frustrations was not considered to be
found in any specific defect of capitalism but in the very principle of
class-rule the workers parties efforts were to be guided in each stage
by the subjective idea of the abolition of that rule and the
establishment of a true community.
It was decidedly not concerned with the increase of its members’

income, 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. Members, by the very reason that such principles could
be understood and assimilated only by relatively advanced elements of
the working class, were an avant-garde of the working class. They were
supposed to control the leaders very closely and the criterion of that
control was not supposed to be 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. Since the working class, the
proletariat, in its tremendous majority was composed of individuals
who, in their own psychology, expressed rather the mutilating effect of
exploitation than the idea of a free humanity, the party, in spite and
even because of its antagonism to the majority of masses for whom it
stood, thought of itself as the genuine conscience of that same
majority. The true interest of the masses, which they were unable to
formulate themselves, guided the party’s decisions as the theory of
capitalist society.
Theory, therefore, played an essential role in the proletarian party. It

was the heir to these older systems of thought which had been the
models for past totalities. These older systems had vanished because
the then prevailing forms of solidarity proclaimed by them had proved
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 object. It looked at capitalism under the
aspect of its being the last form of domination. In no ways it justified the
established ideas and superstitions of those whom it guided. In contrast
to the tendencies of mass culture, none of those doctrines undertook
to “sell” the people the way of life in which they are fixed and which
they unconsciously abhor but overtly acclaim. Social theory offered a
critical analysis of reality, including the workers’ own distorted thoughts.
Even when the actual masses were hostile to the party it felt itself
related to their decisive interests by its theory. The party was not above
the masses as the labor-leader of today find themselves above the
laborers and the proletariat itself remained somehow amorphous and
chaotic composed of individual subjects, deprived as they were of their
human qualities by their transformation into mere elements. That
amorphism, by which it 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 whose
role was not to be underestimated had (illegible) to subordinate
their actions to the parties strategy. Labor in monopolistic society is
itself a kind of monopoly. The amorphism of the masses and its
complement, theoretical thinking, both expressed in the parties fight
against exploitation as such, formed the contrast to the pragmatistic
totalities of today which pay for the rise from the passive role of workers
in the capitalistic process with their complete integration. The
proletariat as conceived by Marx was no totality.1
Labor in monopolistic society is itself a kind of monopoly. Its leaders

control labor supplies as the Presidents of Big Corporations control raw
materials, machines, or other elements of production. Labor leaders
trade at this kind of merchandise, manipulate it, praise it, try to fix its
price as high as possible. Labor, becoming a trade among others,
completes the process of the reification of the human mind. With

religious and moral ideologies fading and the proletarian theory, which
once had expressed the ideals and hopes of the individual for a better
society, being abolished by the march of economic and political events,
the conscience of the workers becomes identical with the categories of
their lenders’ trade. The idea of antagonism between the international
proletariat and any system of domination is completely superseded by
the concepts tied to 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 hallmark 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 under monopolism into their eyes and ears and muscles not
only during the leisure time but during the working hours from which
the so-called amusement can anyway hardly be differentiated. As it
was true that many of them had to lead periodically a vagabond life,
their minds were inclined to roam and therefore were susceptible to
theory. Workers today like the public in general are intellectually much
better trained, they know the details of national affairs, the tricks and
crooked means, typical of the most opposite political movements,
particularly those which live from propaganda against corruption.
Despite of their knowledge of the conditions of wealth and success, the
workers will join in any persecution, any attack on a capitalist or
politician who has been singled out because he violated the rules, but
they don’t question the rules themselves. Since they have learned to
take the basic injustice of class society as a powerful fact and powerful
facts as the only thing which ought to be respected, their minds are
closed to any dreams of a basically different world and to all concepts
which instead of being mere classifications of facts are formed under
the aspect of real fulfillment. 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 their systems when they once tried to open their eyes:
there is only one way of living and that is the actual one, the one of
hardboiled smartness, all that seems to be opposed to it are idle
slogans, lies, metaphysics, he who is unable to adapt himself to this
state of affairs, whether it is myself or any other man, the badly
adjusted, stupid one, is rightly doomed. 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.
Not that exploitation has decreased. Despite of its accuracy, statistics

cannot veil the fact that the gap between the social power of a single
worker and of a single Corporation president has deepened and this
difference is the real measure as far as social justice is concerned.
And although the unions, dealing in certain categories of labor, have

been able to raise their prices, at least during certain more or less
exceptional periods, other categories, organized or unorganized,
experience the whole weight of class society. There is, furthermore, the
cleavage between the ones who are in the unions and those who
cannot afford to enter or to remain 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 through the
medium of these, by the ruling groups of the industrially more
developed countries. The principle of exploitation has not changed at
all, but on the one hand, the pressure of the masses who, as Marx
predicted, cannot be employed any longer as wage earners in private,
competitive industry, producing consumer goods for the purpose of
profit, on the other hand the association of the masses against universal
exploitation has been made even more difficult through the
appearance of new antagonisms in the ranks of the oppressed masses
themselves, through a number of social and psychological processes
which make for the destruction of any memory concerning humanity as
a whole and are inseparable from the growth of labor as a well-
organized competition in the struggle for a share in domination.
Since it is the trend of capitalistic society that ever greater parts of the
middle class lose their economic independence, those processes
concern almost the total population. They form the counterpart 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 seems to vanish, and, wherever it becomes manifest,
is wiped out pitilessly. The conscious measures of expression *that are
executed by the agencies of mass culture are only the visible
supplement of the subconscious trends necessitated by the economic
and social development. The persecution of anything which is
suspected to stand for independent social thought, for a philosophy
which has no strong ties to any of the groups struggling for a greater
share of power, and therefore no direct usefulness for the prevailing
interests of any of them, but sticks to truth as it regards a single
concrete individual and hence humanity in general, such (illegible) is

not only a social but also an anthropological fact; it takes place within
each member of society today.
From the day in which the infant opens his eyes to the daylight, he is
made to feel that there is only one way to get along in this world: by
resigning the unlimited hope which was born with him. This he can only
achieve by mimesis, he continuously repeats not only consciously—
he acquires judgment and notions much later—but with his whole
being, what he perceives around him. Long before he can even speak
he echoes the gestures of the persons and things around him and later
on he echoes the traits and attitudes of all the collectivities at whose
mercy he is: his family, his classmates, his sport’s team and all the other
teams which enforces a deeper conformity, a more radical surrender by
complete assimilation than any farther or teacher in the 19th century. By
echoing, repeating, imitating the surroundings, by adapting himself to
all the powerful groups to which one belongs, by transforming oneself
from a human being into a pure member of specific organized bodies,
by reducing one’s potentialities to the readiness and skill to conform
with and gain influence in such bodies, one finally manages to survive.
It is survival by forgetting, by practicing the oldest biological means of
survival: mimicry. That is the reason why like a child repeats the words
of his mother and the youngster the brutal manners of his elders, by
whom he has suffered so much, today’s mass culture, the giant
loudspeaker voice of *monopolism itself, the (illegible) of the times
as (illegible) would call it, in contrast to genuine art , which once
confronted reality with truth, copies and doubles reality endlessly end
boringly, that is why all ingenious devices of the amusement industry
serve nothing else but to reproduce over and over and without
betraying the slightest revolt the scenes of life which are dull and
automatized already when they happen in reality, that is why the
pictures, radio, popular biographies and novels shout incessantly the
same rhythm: this is our life, this is the only possible life, this is the life 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 another hope than the one
which can be realized by success have become integrated: on the one
hand, beatitude and everything which refers to the absolute has been
assimilated by confining it to thoroughly religious connotations; it has
become part of Sunday School vernacular, happiness on the other
hand, means exactly the normal life of which though and even religious
thought, at certain times, contained a radical criticism. Language has
been thoroughly reduced to the function as which it is described in
positivistic theory, i.e. to just another tool in the giant apparatus of
production in monopolistic society. Each sentence, which is not

equivalent to an operation in that apparatus appears to the layman as
meaningless as it is described to be by contemporary epistemology
according to which only the purely symbolic, the operational, that is to
say the purely senseless sentences makes sense. Under the pressure
of the pragmatistic totalities of today, the self-expression of men has
become identical with their functions in the prevailing system. Within
themselves as well as in others men desperately repress any other
impulses. Wherever they perceive it they feel an overwhelming wrath
and fury, an utter rage which crashes down on everybody and
everything which by stirring up the old and undying longing forces
them anew to curb and repress it.
In the earlier periods of bourgeois society as well as in the history of

other forms of society the existence of greater multitudes of
independent economic subjects who had to care for their own
individual property and to maintain it against competitive social forces,
necessitated in the culture of relatively independent thought which by
its very nature is related to the interests of humanity. Against its own
wishes, the society of middle sized proprietors and particularly the
professions related to the now vanishing economic sphere of
circulation and 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 has to
take care of his rights. [See Kirchheimer on compromise]. Therefore the
category itself of the individual with its good and bad implications is in
the state of liquidation and thought unrelated to the interests of any
established groups, unrelated to the business of any industry has lost
its significance. The selfsame society which, in normal times, leaves a
considerable part of its machinery idle, which suppresses or files
important inventions and which, in the rare periods of full employment,
devotes a tremendous part of its working hours to idiotic
advertisements even what is left of culture boils down to
advertisements and propaganda, or to the production of instruments of
destruction, the selfsame society, which has made usefulness its
device and the most sinister destructive kind of luxury its real business,
has stamped thinking as related to truth, i.e. the only ultimate use for
which civilization really could be useful, a hateful luxury.
The difference of the situation from other chapters of class society

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
highest developed countries. The revolutionary thinkers had to come to

the proletariat from the middle- or upper classes. Since that time, the
working class as a whole has made a tremendous progress. Its
rationality, at least as far as it is able to express itself, is purely
pragmatistic 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 and even those who don’t
express it, but by their mere existence are suspected to harbor it, are
hated and eventually persecuted, the strengthening of all reactionary
organizations and movements betray the rising fear of the abolishment
of fear and repression. With feverish haste one tries to channel the ever
greater fury which develops in the masses under the necessity to
repress their own original longings, and to prevent that furor from being
overcome by the *eventual insight in the ever increasing stupidity of
that repression, and on the identity of human interests. Such channeling
which has always been the business of the ruling class, of its cultural
and terroristic apparatuses, which, has also become the business of the
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
and it is perhaps better veiled there than it ever was in society as a
whole. Docilely and without a hint of any opposing interests the workers
surrender port of their money to the mammoth trusts which trade in
their own labor. It is not so much the level of the contributions but the
social situation of the labor leaders enabled by it which makes the latter
ones a kind of group of the ruling class itself. Certainly a great part of
their material interests is opposed to the interests of other competing
groups but this holds true for all the groups which (illegible) have
formed the ruling class: for the worldly and spiritual powers in the
Middle Ages, feudal lords, church and court under absolutism, for the
different groups in modern production and commerce. What they have
in common is the general source of their income. They all live on what
they can grasp from the surplus value originating in the process of
production. True, they draw their share not as profit from an advanced
amount of capital, but this is not of ultimate importance. Even the
profits of the capitalist don’t correspond to what the factory, in which his
capital is invested, produces in values and surplus values. His role as an
exploiter is, though connected with, but different from his role as a
businessman. In the latter quality he has to compete with others in
order to get a possibly large amount out of the sum total which
expresses the results 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 communication– or
amusement industries and even all the professions and activities which
are exercised by the so-called “third persons.” 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
leadership of the big capitalist trusts to keep their doings from public
discussion by a public opinion which is controlled by their competition.
Each the capitalist professional and labor groups exercise a specific
function in the social process on the one hand and on the other uses
that function to get as large a share of power over men, goods and
services as possible. The methods of this struggle in history have
varied. They have been partly competition but partly cheating, robbery,
and war. This struggling which, as pointed out in the beginning,
characterizes the set-up of each ruling class as definitively as its role in
production, has become a trait of the labor groups. Although the
leaders cannot achieve any results without obtaining, at least
temporarily, any results for the workers, their own social and economic
power, their own position and income (all of these factors
overwhelmingly superior to power position and income of an individual
worker) depend on the maintenance of the class system as such. Their
economic fact holds true despite of the great services they may render
to their respective memberships. The entrepreneur’s activities too had
had very often a positive effect on the income 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. Accordingly social history during
the last decades has brought closer cooperation between them. The
attitude of the labor unions to the state in the last decades has been
similar to that of the great capitalistic organizations. They were mostly
concerned with preventing the government from mingling in their
affairs. No interference with our private business was the doctrine (cf.
[illegible] instances Gompers testimony before the Lockwood
Committee). It was the “Master of the House” standpoint. In the
meantime the increasing economic power of capitalist monopoly has
made an understanding between their leaders, their participation in
administrative tasks of the central government more imperative. The
development toward the integration of corporative elements into the
administration has made even greater progress during the war. Society
becomes a *reformed and regulated process not so far much with
regard for the 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 as much
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 will have

gained direct control of the state the actual labor bureaucracy will be
abolished as well as the governmental one, and replaced by more
dependable commissioners of those groups. Although this could be
achieved without a formal change of constitutional principles it would
characterize a development similar to the German one. It is also
possible that labor in its actual structure conquers an even stronger
portion in the set-up to come. In both cases the material situation of
labor as a whole may improve, unemployment be reduced, 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, the differences in wages
according to sexes, age and industrial groups will increase. This two-
fold process will bring about a more thorough integration of the
working class into modern society, also a unification of psychology in
the sense of the triumph of particularistic rationality behind the thin veil
of collectivistic slogans. This means a disillusionment of the masses
and an increasing menace to the class system. On the other hand, the
concentrated power the ruling groups with their centralized defense
techniques will make any change more difficult.
The gradual abolishment of the market as a regulator of production is a

symptom of the vanishing influence of anything outside the decisive
groups. 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 satisfied or refused in accordance with the
policy of the ruling class. But if this new rationality is closer to the idea
of reason than the market system, it is also farther from it. Although the
dealings between the ruling and the ruled were never really decisively
determined by the market but by the unequal distribution of power as it
was expressed by the property of the means of production, 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 is of human needs is
no longer distorted by the dubious economic indicators of the market,
but by their conscious molding in a giant system of socio-psychological
surgery. The misery of undone competitors and backward groups in a
country can no longer be ascribed to anonymous processes which

permit a distinction between them as economic subjects and as human
beings; but the downfall of the vanquished opponents, competitors as
well as whole social strata, minorities and nations, is decided or
convened upon by the elites. Those who are to suffer are singled out
and called by their names. However, the small policies of economic
leaders today are as private and particularistic and therefore as blind or
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 put
forth by any individuals or groups at all. There are more people who
have real insight in the economic situation and the potentialities than in
any other period. But their chances, which seem to have improved by
the progress of the methods of production and planning, by the
perspicuity of all social matters and the decomposition of all kinds of
superstitious have deteriorated by the progress of the methods of
domination, by the extinction of theoretical thought and by the new and
strong taboos resulting from the pseudo-enlightened philosophy of
pragmatism which expresses the resignation of unsubject [?] thought.
All the trends mentioned in the foregoing pages have to be taken into
consideration when a theory of class relations, which is on the level of
our actual experience, should be drafted. The concept of the racket
serves only to differentiate and concretize the idea of the ruling class, it
is not meant at all to replace it. However, it can help to overcome the
abstract notion of class as it played a role in older theory. It may also
lead to recognize that the pattern of class relation is typical not only for
the relations of the big groups of society but from there penetrates all
human relations even those within the proletariat. In the present phase
of capitalism many earlier structures of class society which have up to
now been incompletely described and explained, have become
transparent. The similarity of the most respectable historical entities as
for instance the hierarchies or the Middle Ages with modern rackets is
only one of them. The concept of racket 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 extend its part in consumption, has been in class
society just a good strategic position for grasping as much goods and
services in the sphere of distribution. This is particularly the case in
periods in which the mode of production to which its leaders stick so
tenaciously has become obsolete. They use their productive
apparatuses as others hold to their guns. In the contemporary slang-

use of racket there might be no conscious thought of all these
connections, but objectively it expresses the idea that in present day
society each activity, whichever it may be, has as its content and goal
that it is (illegible) by no other inferred (illegible) the acquisition of
a possible large part of the circulating surplus value. Therefore, one
tries to monopolize an economic function not for the sake of
production or satisfaction of needs. The slogan used against all sorts of
activities and even against whole groups that they are unproductive,
furthermore the constant fear that anything oneself does may be
unproductive or useless seems to originate from the fact that one
realizes in his inner thought that despite of all the tremendous
achievements of society, its material and mental pattern is not that of
solidarity like for instance the group of mother and child in nature but
the racket and that the gulf between reality and all the ideologies
which civilization pretends to be its fundaments become wider every
day. Industry overcomes society and its own awareness of production
as being a mere stronghold in the fight for (illegible) by adopting
production as a kind of religious creed, by promoting technocratic
ideas and labeling upon other groups which don’t even have an access
to the (illegible) industrial bastions as unproductive. It is a similar
mechanism as the one which made the terroristic Rackets in the 16th
and 17th century Europe which tortured, murdered, robbed hundreds of
thousands of unfortunates and wiped out the female population of
whole provinces for their alleged intercourse with Satan proclaimed
their Christian love all the louder and (illegible) the tortured,
murdered, robbed God on the cross more fervently and adored the
Virgin for her conception from the holy spirit more devotedly. Today the
rackets (illegible) pursue [?] each person or group who refuse to join
them, and as destructive [to] each undertaking which tries to put an
end to destruction. The ones who accomplish repression by an ocean
of spoken and written words watch jealously that not a single
inappropriate [?] sentence be heard.
These remarks could serve only as a kind of introduction to a real

sociological task {A real sociology of the racket as the cell of the ruling
class in history could serve both a political and a scientific purpose. It
could help clarify the goal of political practice. In a society whose
pattern is different from that of the rackets, a racketless society. It could
serve to define the idea of Democracy, as it still leads an underground
existence in the minds of the independents [?] {men} desperate
distortions by which the rackets have adapted it to their economic and
political practice, despite of their sly formulation of political concepts
which makes of express political cliques dominating whole groups and

states champions of Democracy and of humanist theoreticians trying to
promote and practice however inadequately democratic contents
(illegible) of (illegible). Despite all that, the meaning of
Democracy deeply connected with that of truth is not forgotten and it
needs to be expressed against a world which is more repressive and
diabolic than ever and against the channels [?] {most hardened} of
tactics of stupidity. Scientifically the sociology of the racket} which
could not only yield a more adequate philosophy of history but help to
throw more light on many issues in the realm of humanities up to such
remote and controversial problems as the initiation rites and rackets of
magicians in primitive tribes. It looks as though the breaking of young
men at the occasion of their entrance into such tribes was not so much
meant as an acceptance into the community as such but into a
particularistic social totality in the sense described above. Very similar
observations can be made with regard to the relation of adults and
children through the Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 19th
century. The adults with regard to the children behaved as a totality.
The “Racket” was also the pattern of the organization of the males with
regard to the females. The modern concept serves to describe the
patriarchal relations.{The modern concept serves to describe the past
social relations. “The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the
monkey.”}
Notes
1. The concept of the racket referring to the big and to the small units
struggling for as great a share as possible of the surplus value
designates all such groups from the highest capitalistic bodies down to
the little pressure groups working within or without the pale of the law
among the most miserable strata of the population. It has arisen as a
theoretical concept when, by the increasing absoluteness of the profit
system the disproportion between the functions of the ruling class in
production and the {advantages} which they draw from it became even
more manifest than at the time of (illegible) Capital.

2 Max Horkheimer and The Sociology of Class Relations

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26/3/24, 02:17 Max Horkheimer and The Sociology of Class Relations – Nonsite.

In the fall of 1943 Max Horkheimer composed multiple drafts of an essay

Be Done? indicates how centrally trade unions figured as an internal

The invited respondents to Horkheimer’s text—James Schmidt, John

—Todd Cronan, nonsite.org

Horkheimer Schmidt Lysaker Cutrone

organization and stabilization of some form of society capable of living

The notion of class as it underlies this theory of history needs further

In fact the idea of competition as it was conceived in liberalistic theory

important for the theory of class relations. First, the nature of

Second, competition among the entrepreneurs themselves was never

The development of capitalistic society according to its own inherent

society to revert to more direct forms of domination which in fact never

The new situation is expressed in the concept of labor as it is a guiding

There is, however, a most typical difference between the social

The concept of labor as a pragmatic totality becomes quite clear when

It was decidedly not concerned with the increase of its members’

Theory, therefore, played an essential role in the proletarian party. It

Labor in monopolistic society is itself a kind of monopoly. Its leaders

completes the process of the reification of the human mind. With

positivistic attitude, fostered by modern economic conditions, labor

Not that exploitation has decreased. Despite of its accuracy, statistics

And although the unions, dealing in certain categories of labor, have

concrete individual and hence humanity in general, such (illegible) is

production in monopolistic society. Each sentence, which is not

In the earlier periods of bourgeois society as well as in the history of

The difference of the situation from other chapters of class society

highest developed countries. The revolutionary thinkers had to come to

The antagonism between the classes is reproduced within the

It is possible that once the strongest capitalistic groups will have

The gradual abolishment of the market as a regulator of production is a

country can no longer be ascribed to anonymous processes which

apparatuses as others hold to their guns. In the contemporary slang-

These remarks could serve only as a kind of introduction to a real

which makes of express political cliques dominating whole groups and

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