Worker organizations mimicking corporate structure neutralize rather than challenge capital

Evidence

In an age of the real subsumption of community by capital, says Jacques Camatte, “capital had to absorb the movement that negates it, the proletariat, and establish a unity in which the proletariat is merely an object of capital… . It follows that all forms of working-class political organizations have disappeared.” Camatte is lamenting forms of social organization that cannot be truly considered unities of workers—organizations that take the form of a “racket” or “gang,” which rely on hierarchies and financial investments, “firms” that follow a corporate structure and may appear to oppose “legitimate” forms of capitalist organization but nonetheless mirror capitalism rather than oppose it. If the proletariat is supposed to be that which negates capital, the racket and the gang absorb the proletariat, rendering class struggle impossible. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 393

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Frankfurt School’s racket theory (Horkheimer, from earlier reading) about survival as compulsory team membership. — connects to: Volunteer communities collapse when formalized into for-profit corporate structures — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 135; Worker cooperatives failed from capital scarcity and capitalist supplier discrimination — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 641
• QUESTION: Worth checking how Camatte’s ‘racket vs. proletariat-negating-organization’ distinction maps onto platform unions and creator co-ops today.