Saturday, November 27, 2004
Rackets
I've stumbled across an interesting description of political groups known as "rackets." I have to admit, I'm not so familiar with this term, at least not in a political context, but maybe that's because I spent so much time in anarchist groups, where people dwell on defining and redefining other words, such as "collective" and "affinity group." This article, which deals mainly with Marxists, comes from a left-communist site. It was written in 2001 by someone named F. Palinorc. That's somebody I've never heard of, though it might a pseudonym for someone else. But I have found his/her descriptions to be very interesting. For example, there are these sort-of defining paragraphs:
Political rackets are informal specialist bodies, usually legal and aspiring to state domination. However, their reduced size forces them to an unstable and precarious existence. At most, they become pressure groups for parties that have gone beyond the racket stage. The larger the racket, the more it approximates a party, which contains a few rackets called tendencies or factions. Only extraordinary world and national events propel rackets to become mass parties and even attain state power. But these moments are few and far between. Most rackets have a relatively short existence. A few last for years, as torture chambers for their members....
Though political rackets seldom attain their goal of state power, their internal organisation mimics statist functions. The membership of the racket is its proletariat, and the leaders constitute a sort of portable mini-state. Rackets are essentially conservative, even if some of them, the Marxist and anarchist ones, spout radical or emancipatory messages.
...And I really like the paragraph that follows, which starts to make all of this look very familiar:
But joining a racket is usually exhilarating at the beginning, when the new recruit is convinced that his participation will shape history and that he’s joining a collective venture to help humanity. He also feels that he’s found a heroic community of like-minded comrades. Joining a racket has this hidden libidinal dimension, which explains the enormous attachment and zealotry of the members. At the beginning, a recruit is unaware that he’ll be persuaded to lose most of his individuality and free time, and that the false community of the racket will only accentuate his alienation.
Later on, the article treats us to a list of "characteristics." As people read this, they will almost certainly find resemblances to some groups that they know or others that they've heard about...
- They gyrate around a guru, a charismatic leader (Weber) or ‘egocrat’ (Perlman). The guru is usually male, though rackets run by female gurus have been known to exist;
- The guru fosters and controls a centralised and despotic hierarchy. He relies on an inner faction of conspirators, who plot permanently against the racket’s membership. No racket is ruled by consensus or by transparent participatory methods;
[Actually, I probably should say something here, since I worked/collaborated on a project that dealt with this particular point... I think that in some circles that we know, especially very recently, there are many groups that can adopt an official/superficial consensus "process" (especially at meetings) while managing to be run or ruled behind the scenes in an exclusive or hierarchical way. I wouldn't say that all groups that perform this trick are rackets - far from it - but it is possible that some might be, as might many other groups.]
- Rackets have a political platform or programme, usually of a messianic kind. One of the tasks of the guru is to inherit or draft and uphold this platform. Rackets attempt to influence the world around them by publishing regularly (or maintaining a web site). To them influencing others means recruitment, not contributing to an ongoing clarification of consciousness;
- Rackets recruit individuals who voluntarily join and are systematically persuaded by the guru’s infallibility. Once recruited, the racket’s goals is to alienate individuals further by making them sever many of their links with society. This is not a conscious conspiracy, but a process in which recruiter and recruited delude themselves and each other. The first by his denial of what takes place in the racket, and the latter by his suspension of critical thought;
- Rackets strive to become permanent but are constantly disrupted by internal dissension, splits and competition from rival rackets. Political divergences are rarely addressed – they are replaced by personal factionalism and competition for positions in the hierarchy. Thus the pervasive use of scapegoating and ad hominem attacks;
- Paradoxically, the survival of rackets depends on internal factionalism and external enemies. The climate of paranoia and search for scapegoats strengthens the guru’s control. He is reinforced by recurrent purges. New rivals, often formed by the expelled members, focus the survival instincts of the racket, creating paroxysms of hate and fostering a state of siege mentality. These centripetal and centrifugal ‘crises’, both carefully stage managed, aid the rackets’ survival;
- The more virulent rackets attempt to organise themselves in military fashion. The move illegalises them and places them in direct confrontation with Leviathan. This tends to deplete them of female members and increases the dysfunction of militants enormously. These rackets tend to exist more in the peripheries of the system, where Leviathans are weak and depend mostly on naked terror to survive. This method of rule unleashes an indiscriminate war between Leviathans and opposing rackets, where terror and extermination are the sole methods of asserting domination;
The article also has a lot of interesting words about why rackets are formed and who might join them. A lot of it has to do with the atomization and fragmentation of society, especially under capitalism. I particularly like this discussion of a quote from Karl Kautsky:
In The Socialist Revolution, Kautsky observed that: "The smaller the number of individuals who take part in a given social movement, the less this movement appears as a mass movement – then the less the general and necessary are evident among them, and the more the chance and the personal predominate." Kautsky was referring to socialist sects, without suspecting that this phenomenon, where ‘chance and the personal predominate’, would become common in society once atomisation was generalised. Disaffected individuals are more attracted to rackets, not to large Leviathanic corporations like parties, official churches and unions.
Political rackets are informal specialist bodies, usually legal and aspiring to state domination. However, their reduced size forces them to an unstable and precarious existence. At most, they become pressure groups for parties that have gone beyond the racket stage. The larger the racket, the more it approximates a party, which contains a few rackets called tendencies or factions. Only extraordinary world and national events propel rackets to become mass parties and even attain state power. But these moments are few and far between. Most rackets have a relatively short existence. A few last for years, as torture chambers for their members....
Though political rackets seldom attain their goal of state power, their internal organisation mimics statist functions. The membership of the racket is its proletariat, and the leaders constitute a sort of portable mini-state. Rackets are essentially conservative, even if some of them, the Marxist and anarchist ones, spout radical or emancipatory messages.
...And I really like the paragraph that follows, which starts to make all of this look very familiar:
But joining a racket is usually exhilarating at the beginning, when the new recruit is convinced that his participation will shape history and that he’s joining a collective venture to help humanity. He also feels that he’s found a heroic community of like-minded comrades. Joining a racket has this hidden libidinal dimension, which explains the enormous attachment and zealotry of the members. At the beginning, a recruit is unaware that he’ll be persuaded to lose most of his individuality and free time, and that the false community of the racket will only accentuate his alienation.
Later on, the article treats us to a list of "characteristics." As people read this, they will almost certainly find resemblances to some groups that they know or others that they've heard about...
- They gyrate around a guru, a charismatic leader (Weber) or ‘egocrat’ (Perlman). The guru is usually male, though rackets run by female gurus have been known to exist;
- The guru fosters and controls a centralised and despotic hierarchy. He relies on an inner faction of conspirators, who plot permanently against the racket’s membership. No racket is ruled by consensus or by transparent participatory methods;
[Actually, I probably should say something here, since I worked/collaborated on a project that dealt with this particular point... I think that in some circles that we know, especially very recently, there are many groups that can adopt an official/superficial consensus "process" (especially at meetings) while managing to be run or ruled behind the scenes in an exclusive or hierarchical way. I wouldn't say that all groups that perform this trick are rackets - far from it - but it is possible that some might be, as might many other groups.]
- Rackets have a political platform or programme, usually of a messianic kind. One of the tasks of the guru is to inherit or draft and uphold this platform. Rackets attempt to influence the world around them by publishing regularly (or maintaining a web site). To them influencing others means recruitment, not contributing to an ongoing clarification of consciousness;
- Rackets recruit individuals who voluntarily join and are systematically persuaded by the guru’s infallibility. Once recruited, the racket’s goals is to alienate individuals further by making them sever many of their links with society. This is not a conscious conspiracy, but a process in which recruiter and recruited delude themselves and each other. The first by his denial of what takes place in the racket, and the latter by his suspension of critical thought;
- Rackets strive to become permanent but are constantly disrupted by internal dissension, splits and competition from rival rackets. Political divergences are rarely addressed – they are replaced by personal factionalism and competition for positions in the hierarchy. Thus the pervasive use of scapegoating and ad hominem attacks;
- Paradoxically, the survival of rackets depends on internal factionalism and external enemies. The climate of paranoia and search for scapegoats strengthens the guru’s control. He is reinforced by recurrent purges. New rivals, often formed by the expelled members, focus the survival instincts of the racket, creating paroxysms of hate and fostering a state of siege mentality. These centripetal and centrifugal ‘crises’, both carefully stage managed, aid the rackets’ survival;
- The more virulent rackets attempt to organise themselves in military fashion. The move illegalises them and places them in direct confrontation with Leviathan. This tends to deplete them of female members and increases the dysfunction of militants enormously. These rackets tend to exist more in the peripheries of the system, where Leviathans are weak and depend mostly on naked terror to survive. This method of rule unleashes an indiscriminate war between Leviathans and opposing rackets, where terror and extermination are the sole methods of asserting domination;
The article also has a lot of interesting words about why rackets are formed and who might join them. A lot of it has to do with the atomization and fragmentation of society, especially under capitalism. I particularly like this discussion of a quote from Karl Kautsky:
In The Socialist Revolution, Kautsky observed that: "The smaller the number of individuals who take part in a given social movement, the less this movement appears as a mass movement – then the less the general and necessary are evident among them, and the more the chance and the personal predominate." Kautsky was referring to socialist sects, without suspecting that this phenomenon, where ‘chance and the personal predominate’, would become common in society once atomisation was generalised. Disaffected individuals are more attracted to rackets, not to large Leviathanic corporations like parties, official churches and unions.
