Leggiamo Tronti

Nate:
I’ve been sick lately which has slowed me down. As a result, behind schedule. Anyway, notes now on the rest of the introduction, just quotes culled, nothing systematic. Also, page references are only to the Spanish edition, I’ll go over this section again with the Italian when I get time.

The intro was written in 1966, the rest of the book was written between 1962-65.

“Discoveries that count always break from continuity.” (p17spanish ed) Shades of Kuhn.

“The brain of the bourgeoisie thanks to workers’ pressure (…) has found within itself more than once the power to unify under the same concept multiple given experiences.” (p18) The underlying force there, then, is still the working class.

“Bourgeois science carries ideology within itself” and founds “general social science.” (18)

“large industry and its science do not constitute a prize for whoever wins the class struggle. They constitute the terrain of this struggle.”(19)

“a new season of discoveries is possible today only from the worker point of view.” (19)

Knowledge is linked to struggle. “The who truly knows is the one who truly hates. One has here the reason why the working class can know and possess all of capital”. (19) By contrast “the capitalists (…) can know all about the workers, but on occasions it is impressive how little they know of themselves.” (19)

“we are against the present society, but not for the world of the past. (…) We are against the present organization of struggle and of research, but we do not take as a model the theoretical and practical solutions of the past. To say no to the socialism of today it is not necessary to say yes to the capitalism of yesterday. “(20)

“it is possible to discover (…) the germ of new laws for action” (21)

The goal? “to radically transform the subaltern nature of the worker research into an act of domination threatening to the entire society” (22). Perhaps this is just me projecting from other stuff I’ve been reading, but this reminds me of Benjamin on divine violence and/or on the proletarian general strike as law-destroying.

One encounters “moments of leap in development in practical experiences decisively directly of the workers (…) with this attitude we should know how to go beyond: half foreseeing the future, half control over the present - part anticipating, part following. To anticipate means to think, to see different things in one, to see the development, to observe everything with theoretical eyes from the perspective of the class. To follow means to act, to move in the reality of social relations, to measure the material state of the forces present, to capture the moment here and now, to take the initiative in the struggle. In this sense, grand strategic anticipations of capitalist development are certainly necessary, but necessary as limit-concepts inside which the tendencies of the worker movement are fixed. Never exchange them with the real situation”. The point is “to block its [capitalist] development and, precisely by this, to make it enter into crisis.” (22)

Not sure what to make of this: “the arms for proletarian revolt have always been taken from the arsenals of the bosses.” (23)
Or this: “After Marx, no one has known anything about the working class. It continues to be unknown.” (23) Doesn’t it know itself, at least in fragementary fashion?

“How is the working class made, from the inside, how does it function inside capital, how does it work, how does it struggle, in what sense does it accept the system, in what way does it strategically refuse it: those are the facts and the questions.” (23)

No Future? “Of all that exists today, nothing is for the future. To place the model of a future society before the analysis of present society constitutes a vicious bourgeois ideology (…) No worker that struggles against the boss asks: ‘and later?’ The struggle against the boss is all. The organization of the struggle is all. All of that, however, is already a world.” (24)

The working class is the “only living, active element productive of society” and thus has the “possibility of exercising political domination over the present.” (24)

Yep. No future. “Prophecies over the new world, over the new man, over the new human community seem to us today dirty things, like the apology for the past (…) the problem today is not rooted in what to substitute for the old world. The problem today is how to abate it. It is still essential to know in what it consists” (24-5)

Lots of talk about maturation, advancedness, levels reached, and this sad comment knowing what happens later on in Italy — “the miraculously favorable class situation in Italy”. (25) Political work, then, “a matter still of opening a revolutionary process, preparing the conditions, accumulating forces, organizing the party.” Did I hear that right? “Yes, organizing the party. There are moments in which all problems can and should be reduced to this single problem. They are very advanced moments in the class struggle.” (25-6). I agree, just not about the party as the particularly organizational form.

“to foresee the development of capital does not mean to submit to its iron laws: it means to oblige it to take a certain route, to wait for it at some point with the most powerful of weapons, there to assault it and to destroy it.” (26)

We also need a critique of the historic left and of social democracy. (Wonder if he had to write an autocritique when he rejoined the PCI?) Hurray for Lenin etc. (26-7)

Unlike received Leninism, “the chain has to be broken today not where capital is weakest but where the working class is strongest” (28)

Rather than a three world analysis, we need “to begin to distinguish the distinct degrees, the different levels, the successive determinations of the capitalist contradictions, without exchanging them for an alternative system.” Capitalism has some contradictions that it lives with, indeed “without which it can’t live.” (29) Is this a reference to ‘real-socialism’ (capitalism with red arm bands)?

From the worker point of view, “the contradictions of capital are not refused, nor resolved, only used. And to use them, it is necessary to exasperate them in every way: also when they present themselves as ideas like socialism and advance bearing the flags of labor.” I guess it is. Delightful. (29)

I like this bit, he mentions “a transitory generation constrained to anticipate the future with the means of the past”. (30)

The project? “party struggle for the conquest of organization; leninist tactics inside a strategic research of a new type” (30)

“each political moment possesses its own historical specificity that must be captured with all the force that a concrete thought is capable of.” (30)

In this project “there is nothing universally human (…) Have you seen a worker struggle with a platform of generically human demands? Nothing is more limited and partial, nothing less universal in the bourgeois sense, than a factory struggle” (31) Contra Ranciere, then, I think.