Leggiamo Tronti

Nate:
From the intro - “What interests us is everything that has in itself the force of growth and development. It interests us to know that this force is today possessed almost exclusively by workers though. ” (p16/p11 S/I eds.)

Many Lenin references, and they start early - ‘the leninist initiative of the practical rupture’ was necessary to ‘return to revolutionary hands the theoretical bracn of the contemporary world’.

I take this workers thought or worker thought as in working class or workers’ movement thought, proletarian thought, thought by/for the working class interest, not the empirical thoughts of workers. The ‘today’ is interesting - Tronti writes on the next page of the ‘point of maturity’ reached by the working class (and yet, it’s in a stage of ‘robust youth’), and of a contrasting old age and drowsiness/infirmness/weakness of the bourgeoisie. Is is safe to assume this is an account of decadence (a former progressivist force has become just a blockage)?

“The theoretical rennaisance of the worker point of view imposes itself today by/through the necessities of the struggle.” What sorts of necessities? “To start walking (again?) means to immobilize the adversary in order to strike a stronger blow”. (p17/p12) Also speaks approvingly of “the immediate needs of the struggle starting to direct the very production of ideas”. This makes it sound pragmatic, not necessities in any grand philosophic sense, which is fine by me, just needs in the everyday sense. Have to watch that though, as the reading progresses, to see if there’s a slip to a stronger form of necessity, and if the ‘directing’ slips into becoming any kind of subordinating (to my mind the these two slips accompany each other in some version of Marxism, and one works for the other).