From Racket Theory to Real Domination | CTWG

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.
— Read on ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/Rackets_Camatte/