#RacketTheory

2026-01-26

"Bunnings sells timber sourced from NSW Forestry Corporation via a number of local suppliers."

"The state-owned forestry corporation has been convicted of more than a dozen environmental offences and is facing charges on dozens more. A judgment in the land and environment court last year found the agency was likely to reoffend and had poor prospects of rehabilitation."

"But The Wilderness Society (TWS) complaint raises concerns that the agency has retained this certification, despite its convictions for environmental offences."

"Prof David Heilpern, a former magistrate and the dean of law at Southern Cross University who has likened the NSW forestry agency to a “criminal organisation”, said he hoped the TWS complaint would be taken seriously."

“It arises from the unprecedented situation where a government supplier of a product has been convicted of a series of offences relating to illegal activities on public land."
>>
theguardian.com/australia-news
#FCNSW #NSWLogging #timber #greenwashing #certification #SupplyChain #crime #regulation #RacketTheory #governance #PublicLand #BellingenLogging

Miguel Afonso Caetanoremixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2025-10-14

"Bourgeois economists are incapable of confronting the falsity of their understanding of competition: For the bourgeoisie, the fall of serfdom and mercantilism seemed to have abolished class distinctions, producing what they understand as the natural order of competition among free individuals. This order is supposed to be the correct way for human society to be organized, the realization of our innate propensity to truck and barter. In this vision of bourgeois society, every subject is both producer and consumer; there is no class. Anything that disrupts this picture is an intrusion of the non-economic into the sphere of the economic. To the extent that they are willing to acknowledge it, monopolization compels the bourgeoisie to admit that the unequal distribution of power continues to exist under their rule. Rather than accepting the falsity of their understanding of competition, however, the bourgeoisie understands monopolization solely as a regression to a prior mode of direct class rule. They admit that competition, as they understand it, no longer exists, but they believe that it once did, and that what exists today is no longer genuine competition.

Against this, Horkheimer understands pre-monopoly capitalism as characterized both by competition that reached all members of the population and by the unresolved problem of power. Whether by “birth or deceit, brutality or shrewdness, expertness in engineering machinery or human relations, by marriage or adulation,” there have always been groups that have managed the competitive processes within capitalism. Racketization is a reversion to more direct forms of domination, but these forms were always present, hidden behind the apparently rational market system, and this “was already clear to everyone except for the professors in the times of so-called liberalism.”"

ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/202

#FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #CriticalTheory #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Competition #Horkheimer #Capitalism

Miguel Afonso Caetanoremixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2025-08-22

"The texts collected here belong to the materials on ‘racket theory’ composed by members of the Institute for Social Research between 1941 and 1944. More specifically, they were mostly (probably) written by Max Horkheimer, albeit with considerable input from Theodor W. Adorno and occasional feedback from others.
(...)
The history of the ‘racket theory’ corpus is difficult to reconstruct. We have found it helpful to divide our subsequent analysis of the racket theory project into three major sections, which are not exclusive in terms of content. Our narrative starts with the earliest use of the term in Max Horkheimer’s essay “The End of Reason” (1942). After this, we turn to analyzing the stream of texts which were explicitly composed for or about publication(s), mostly written between spring 1942 and fall 1943. Then we treat the topic of reflexivity and the specific character of the racket theory project that flows from its particular form of reflexivity. Finally, we briefly discuss some particularities of the core racket theory texts before concluding. Translations from additional German sources are our own."

ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/202

#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #StateCapitalism

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