The end of real socialism in 1989/90 did not lead to a global spread of bourgeois democracy and the rule of law. Instead, in the ruins of the modernizing regimes of Eastern Europe and the Global South, gangs emerged to fight for power and resources with violence. The boundaries between legal and illegal economies dissolved. The terms "warlord," "oligarch," and "failed state" entered common parlance.
In this situation, the concept of "racket" was rediscovered to describe the decaying tendencies of bourgeois society. The term originates from English, where it stands for racket, profiteering or crookedness, among other things. The racket concept was coined in the 1940s by the Institute for Social Research, which had been exiled to the United States, especially by Max Horkheimer. In 1997, the ideology critic Wolfgang Pohrt, drawing on Horkheimer, attempted in his book Brothers in Crime to determine the conditions under which society is replaced by a system of cliques and gangs. In 1998, iz3w also discussed the extent to which racket theory can be used to understand these processes, for example in the thematic focus "Politics in Gangs" (iz3w 227).
The Racket theory gained particular power in the efforts of the anti-German left to explain the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, the term increasingly degenerated into a buzzword that was rarely filled analytically. For some time now, in light of the failure of the "Arab Spring," among other things, there has been a renewed interest in the Racket theory. In line with this, the ça ira publishing house presents Thorsten Fuchshuber's dissertation on the "Critical Theory of Gang Rule", an attempt to reconstruct the reflections on the problem of racket rule that have remained fragmentary.