Leggiamo Tronti

Nate:
Notes on ch3. Original title, “Social Capital”, published in issue 3 of Quaderni Rossi in 1963. Title in the book is Capital’s Plan, which reminds me of the title of a Panzieri piece, “surplus value and planning”. Don’t know when and where that Panzieri thing first appeared. Anyone know? It appeared in English translation in 1976. Anyway, I like the basic point about planning - it’s anti- the state capitalist (ie, socialist) view that planning is antithetical to capital. Lots of long-ish quotes pulled out here. Need to review these eventually and make more of a synthesis/summary, put this in my own words. Later, later…

Tronti reads Marx, distinguishes A) the direct process of production of capital and B) total process of reproduction of capital. This is in sec3 of book 2 of Capital. I’ll try and look that over when I get home from the holidays. I need to think this through.

B) includes consumption as well the reproduction of capital. Individual capitals and their movements are moments of total social capital and its movements. This latter “includes both the social reproduction of capital as well as (…) the reproduction of the capitalist class and the working class, and thus the reproduction of the capitalist character of the entire process of production.”

Lots of transition talk here - “turns out”, “no longer”, etc. I’m not sure if this is textual/epistemological - “on first sight one might think … but then it turns out” - or a real/historical change - “it was once the case but now the situation is like this …”.

“Capital’s process of socialization is the specific material base upon which is founded, on a certain level, the process of development of capitalism.” Does this mean capital becomes social capital at certain stage, or does this mean that capitalist development is always a process of socialization?

“Capital’s ‘plan’ comes about primarily from the necessity of making the working class function as such within social capital. The growing socialization of the capitalist relation of production does not bring with it the socialist society, but only growing power for the workers within the capitalist system.” That answers my prior questions. Social capital is a stage. I like the point about planning being the planning of the imposition of work. And I like the point about the difference between the relative power (presumably negative disruptive power) of workers and the production of new social relations, though socialism is not a name for anything I’m excited about.

Individual capitals presuppose social capital. (In a sense, capitalism presupposes the capital relation, I think this is the importance of primitive accumulation, don’t know if that ever comes up in Tronti.)

“The value reproduced in the means of production must be at least equal to the constant part of the value of social capital. Thus, e.g., the part of the social work-day that produces means of production produces nothing more than new constant capital, i.e., it produces only a product meant to enter in productive consumption. While the part of the work-day that produces means of consumption produces only new variable capital and new surplus value. (…) Each one of these two parts of the social work-day produces and reproduces (and therefore accumulates) constant capital, variable capital and surplus-value of both main sections together, that of the means of production and that of the means of consumption. The work-day (…) now appears, in the production of social capital, actually divided between a constant part and a variable part of capital: between production-reproduction of the one and production-reproduction of the other, in each of which is included both production and consumption, means of production and means of consumption, productive consumption and individual consumption. Now the social work-day functions directly within the process of production and social capital. Within this process of production it produces, reproduces, and accumulates new capital; it produces-reproduces and accumulates new labor-power.”

Surplus value and surplus labor are extracted/imposed at the social level, the level of total aggregate capital and its movements. Is this important because of intra-class hierarchies? (Certain sectors may not be directly productive but help impose work on others, thus adding to aggregate surplus?) Otherwise what’s at stake here? I like the basic organizational point - one big union, after all we all work for/in/against social capital - but is that all?

“To a given rate of exploitation of labor there corresponds a given level of capitalist development. Not vice-versa. It is not the intensity of capital that measures the exploitation of workers. On the contrary: it is the determinate historical form of surplus-value that uncovers the ultimate social determination of surplus-value.” I like this - exploitation is primary. Development is indexed to exploitation, not the other way around. So talk of development is talk of re-arranging the forms of exploitation.

“Lenin wrote that “…the idea of seeking salvation for the working class in anything save the further development of capitalism is reactionary.” The working class suffers more for the shortcomings of capitalist development than capitalism itself. In fact, the bourgeois revolution offers the greatest advantages to the proletariat: in a way, it is “in the highest degree advantageous to the proletariat.” ” Why? Sounds very progressivist.
I like this:
“There is a point in which it is still the development of capitalist production in itself which can precipitate the capitalist system into a crisis. Labor’s answer can come so immediate as to provoke a high degree of class-struggle, and the coming into being of a revolutionary process that goes behind the system. Thus, the take-off of capitalist society can offer the historical occasion for a revolution with socialist content: if the labor movement finds itself politically better organized than the bourgeoisie. But it would be an error to generalize this movement. We are using it here only to reiterate that a revolutionary rupture of the capitalist system can occur at different levels of capitalist development. We cannot expect that the history of capitalism be concluded, in order to begin to organize the process of its dissolution.” I like the anticipating and out-organizing moment. I don’t know about the whole ‘capital development produces capitalist crisis’. The organization of the working class produces crisis. If that’s bound up with capital, fine, but why call it “capital” when it’s just a portion of capital acting (against capital and against itself as capital)?

“the collective capitalist (…) is the supreme mediation and composition of all particular bourgeois interests, while on the other it is the direct representative of the general social interest for capital. The collective capitalist is the form assumed by power in the hands of social capital-the power of capitalist society upon itself, capital’s self-government, and therefore government of the capitalist class, capitalism’s maximum result and probably the final form of its existence. We must not take seriously the bourgeois arguments concerning State intervention in the economy: at a certain level of development this apparent external intervention is nothing more than a very advanced form of self-regulation of the economic mechanism or, in certain cases, it serves to put back in motion that type of mechanism at a higher level. Capitalist planning itself can be a particular moment within the development of capital. The specific general trait remains the objective historical existence of social capital.” Must review that Panzieri piece. I like the whole point here that planning is not antithetical to capital. One question - is there a corresponding collective worker to the collective capitalist, and some body that gets delegated its authority? (Probably yes for Tronti - the Party.)

“To expropriate the single individuals of their means of production is the point of departure of the mode of capitalist production. But it also becomes its end when the private means of production present themselves, and can only present themselves as means of production in the hands of associated producers.” I like this, capital is expropriation, it’s the imposition of work via enclosure - the closing off of avenues of access to means of subsistence that do not submit to the imposition of capitalist command. But what’s he on about with the means of production being in the hands of associated producers? Is this ‘in the hands of’ a legal situation of ownership, a shopfloor power situation of control, or something else? Is there a specific historical referent he’s got in mind?
“labor struggle has always objectively functioned as a dynamic moment of capitalist development. Yet, it can be said that only on this level it can be rationally foreseen and utilized in the total process of production of social capital. Thus, the tension between capital and labor becomes a “legal institution of society,” and all the institutions which guarantee an orderly bourgeois development of particular labor claims can be legally recognized in their full autonomy. The very organizations of workers acquire a decisive importance for the social interests of capital. There is a time in which modern capital cannot do without a modern union, in the factory, in society, and directly in the state. The political integration of the labor party within the absurd antedeluvian forms of bourgeois parliament, becomes itself a secondary moment of mediation, in order to arrive at the true organic integration of labor unions within the programmed development of capitalist society.” Again, seems to be a stage that is social capital. I don’t get that. I like the rest though. Reminds me of Glaberman and Weir, who I’ve just started reading, criticisms of union contracts and that organizational model for shopfloor activity.
“there is no longer capitalist development without a capitalist plan. But there cannot be a plan of capital without social capital. It is the capitalist society which, by itself, programs its own development. And this is precisely democratic planning.” I like the anti- “hurray for planning!” position, and what I take to be an anti-development position. What’s with the democratic planning stuff, is that an attack on self-management?
“Today, it is not a matter of rediscovering, after decades of absolute faith in the process of deterioration of capitalism, a similarly absolute faith in the objective rationality of this system. That all is well is certainly not what the modern capitalist believes, even with his science. It is believed, however, by our neo-reformist ideologists, always with their soul in crisis: pure economists, applied sociologists, technicians of the labor movement and Marxist philosophers-all these who are against the system, but who do not know what to do in order to fight it. In fact, in all of their recollections of capitalism, they regularly forget the working class.” I like that, the point that capital is not functioning smoothly and does not do so.
“even when the process of social production no longer takes on a natural and spontaneous garb, but rather, takes the opposite, a rational and planned form, even then the articulate system of production, from the single factory to the height of the State, poses itself as the tendentially systematic organization of frightening irrationalities. The anarchy of capitalist production is not cancelled: it is simply socially organized. When the emphasis is posed always and only on the moment of development, and here even on a planned development of capital, it is an attempt to consciously react to that long religious contemplation of the general crisis of capitalism which now has totally reversed itself in a profane imitation of its prodigious technical model of social development.” More anti-socialism.
“The only way to re-undertake a correct discourse concerning capitalist society is to rediscover the actual concrete possibilities of the workers’ revolution. On the other hand, these possibilities can only materially arise from the necessary development of capitalist production. Without doubt, the active side within the economic relation must be again revaluated: the conscious revolutionary activity of the organized proletariat must be re-examined in the same way that Lenin did before 1917. In addition, this organization of the revolution must be located within an historically determined moment of capitalist development as its external consequence and, at the same time, its internal contradiction: as Marx did in Capital. It is not an accident that our sectarianism dogmatically departs only from these texts.” I don’t know what to make of this. If it’s “revolution has to start from somewhere, somewhere materially located in production” then great. It’s a point about where tactical and strategic thinking can begin to apply itself. If it’s more than that, though, and I suspect it is, then I don’t like it. Necessity talk, bah.What’s the ‘our sectarianism’ in reference to - is this “we sectarians” or a derisive “those sectarians”?

“The internal nexus of total production is now directly given by social class-relations which contrapose the capitalist society on the one hand to the working-class on the other’. The national contract now engages the individual worker-or the workers of a particular sphere of production-no longer against the respective individual capitalists, but against a certain type of general development of social capital. The articulated contracting is, in this sense, nothing more than a normal pluralistic structure-a guarantee of that orderly pull toward the efficiency of the individual enterprises and of the entire system, which always comes from the trade-union activity of the workers. Unions are typical democratic institutions of capitalist planning.” More criticisms of the union form. This contract stuff, does this refer to specific written contracts, general labor law, or the (for the bourgeoisie) implied contract that exists in any employer-employee relationship? And is this a general point about capitalist development or about Italy in particular/the specific moment Tronti’s writing in?
immediately afterward - “Yet, these very movements of capital, camouflaged and hidden in labor demands reveal, as a fundamental material fact, the growing process of socialization no longer only of capital on the one hand and labor on the other, but of the very general social relation which immediately contraposes them within the process of production. It is the growing generalization and socialization of the class-struggle which arises from immediate needs of production and reproduction of social capital.” Is this expressing a tendency toward something like the social factory?
“if it is true that the quantity of additional living labor decreases, it is also true that the non-paid part of the social working day increases with respect to the paid part: surplus-value increases with respect to necessary labor along with relative surplus-value and, therefore, the absolute exploitation of labor. The progress of capitalist exploitation always serves as the material base of capital’s development. Then, it is only the process of socialization of exploitation that allows capital to organize itself on the social level. This is why the very broadened reproduction of social capital must reproduce on a broadened scale capitalist social relations. Reproduction and accumulation of social capital must reproduce and accumulate labor-power itself as a social class.” I assume this is meant with regard to productivity of labor - more productive labor produces its own cost of (re)production more quickly, so a higher proportion of the labor time is surplus. Does this also apply to nonwaged labor (as opposed to uncompensated, ie surplus, labor masked by the wage form?) as well? IE, increased productivity is used to eliminate positions leading to less waged workers and more people whose lives are unremunerated (or, in cases of welfare state etc, less remunerated)? Also, the reproduction and accumulation of labor power as a class, I assume this means class-in-itself, not for-itself.

“if it is true that variable capital, considered according to value, is equal to the value of labor-power, it is also true that, considered according to its matter, it becomes identified with labor-power itself-with living labor put in motion. On the level of social capital, the material element of variable capital cannot be represented other than in its immediate natural form, as social labor-power. The individual reproduction of the single worker is no longer sufficient. A social reproduction of the collective workers becomes necessary, i.e., the brute survival of labor-power as such is no longer sufficient: what is needed is a process of accumulation of labor-power for social capital. Now, labor-power must reappear in that real natural form which is its social nature: variable capital must directly re-enter the process of capitalist production as working class.” Hmm. Maybe it’s not class-in-itself after all, but a sort of class(-for-itself)-for-capital, in the sense of Tronti’s remarks on the union as the democratic planning of capital, the working class as engine of capitalist development. If so, does this mean capital produces the class-for-itself, or that capital needs the class-for-itself in order to exist? (The difference being, at an abstract level, that with the former it’d be a matter of wresting the product of capital - the class subject - away from capital, vs the latter being a matter of retaining control over the self-produced class subject, preventing capital’s seizure of control.)
Class decomposition is composition of the class as productive for capital.
Very left communist sounding: “neo-capitalist ideologies do not immediately derive from the only center of power of big capital. As practical mediation, they need to pass through the research institutes of labor unions. In a capitalist society which develops on the basis of a socially organized capital, neo-capitalist ideologies correspond to a capitalist organization of the labor movement. It is not true that at this point there is no longer a working class: there is a working class organized by capital.” Reminds me of the recent arguments about NEFAC’s position paper on workplace organizing.
Just to note the Hegelian idiom: “how can a mediation contradict what it mediates?”
“When the relation of production has become generalized to the level of a general social relation, when all of bourgeois society is reduced to the level of a moment of capitalist production (…)”. Does bourgeois society = capitalist society? Or does it mean something analogous to the phrase “polite society”, ie, a specific social sector? If the former, presumably there’s still conflict and antagonism within this being a moment of capitalist production. And, how is this not the case almost immediately with the advent of capitalism in the places where capitalism exists? Very simply, it seems to me that the unwaged labor of women is labor for capital, mediated by male waged laborers, anywhere that capitalism exists. That is, I want to hypothesize that exploitation of unwaged labor is as much a part of what capitalism is from its beginning as the exploitation of waged labor. I read this quote, though, to say that society outside the factory becomes functional to capitalism at a given stage. Am I reading this right?
I like this a lot: “the specific concept of labor’s power is immediately absorbed in the generic concept of popular sovereignty: the political mediation here serves to allow the explosive content of labor’s productive force to function peacefully within the beautiful forms of the modern relation of capitalist production. Because of this, at this level, when the working class politically refuses to become people, it does not close, but opens the most direct way to the socialist revolution.” I wonder what Tronti made of it when he re-joined the PCI.
“Labor-power not only can, but must be thrown as fast as possible from one sphere of production to another, from a productive locality to another. There is no capitalist development without a high degree of social mobility of workers’ labor-power (…) the decisive trait is the subordination of workers to the capitalist mode of production.” And it must be remembered that capitalist development is the development of exploitation. This quote speaks to immigration policies as well - to apply Foucault’s remark on law and crime to immigration, it’s clear that migration policy doesn’t stop migration but produces a specific distribution or modality of it. One that is functional to capitalist development. (Just saw an article in the Chicago Tribune recently about conversation in Mexico about how the Mexican gov’t can make use of money sent home from Mexicans working abroad in order to foster development - the remittances make people lazy is the fear among the Mexican elites, according to the article.) That subordination to capital is only ever imperfectly accomplished, of course, as the circulation of labor power can’t eliminate the circulation of anti-work sentiments and knowledges (like in The Many Headed Hydra).
“Only in its generically human figure can labor-power voluntarily submit itself to capital. Only as human needs do workers’ demands become freely accepted by the capitalist. It is the point in which the worker definitely discovers the “cult of man” as a bourgeois sham.” As in Tronti’s remarks (FIND) prior that the workers’ revolt is always only partial, not universally human.
“There are no rights outside of capital. The workers no longer have to defend even the “rights of labor” for, at this level, the rights of labor are the same as those of capital.” Sounds like my friend Angela. I like the point, though, that workers’ struggle can only get so far on the terrain of rights. That said, I think fights against the erosion of labor rights in the US today are worth something and not only defensively - those fights can lay the groundwork for more than just a holding action, if they function toward an accumulation of class hatred, organizational ability, and relationships.
“The trade-union and the union struggle cannot by themselves get outside of the system and are destined to be inevitably part of its development. (…) A trade union which, as such, i.e., without party and without the political organization of the class, pretends to be autonomous from the plan of capital, succeeds only in attaining the most perfect form of integration of the working class within capitalism. Modern unionism, i.e., the party as the transmission belt of the trade-union, is the highest form of capitalist reformism. It is the way in which the objective need of capitalist production of regaining the real political terrain of the class struggle is overrun and at the same time utilized within the subjective initiative of capital.(…) within the terrain of economic competition with the capitalist, the workers are systematically defeated: on this ground they have no other choice than to improve the conditions of their own exploitation.” Nonsense. The political terrain is no more pure than the economic, even if one accepts the division. Tronti’s got an agenda here - factory organization feeds into party, not vice versa. It all depends what means by union, though. If one means contracts and mediation by the state, then sure (but the same is true of the party at least in its parliamentary mode). But if one means workplace organizing then this is not so. Improving conditions of exploitation can be a source from which bases for breaking out of exploitation can later occur, via the processes required in order to win those improvements.
“a true workers’ planning of the revolutionary process must and can be an answer to the programming that social capital makes of its own development. True, it is not enough to ideally contrapose the plan of capital: it is necessary to know how to utilize it materially. And this is impossible other than by contraposing to the economic program of capitalist development a political plan of labors’ answers.” Material use doesn’t involve a fight over conditions in and against work? Politics can’t occur in and against the factory?
This is great: “only thing that the general interest cannot mediate within itself is the irreducible partiality of the workers’ interest. Hence, we have the bourgeois call to social reason against the sectorial demands of the workers. The same relation that exists, at a certain level, between social capital and the single capitalists is sought between capital and labor: as functionaries put it, an always “dialectical” relationship. In fact, when collective labor agrees to reasonably participate in the general development, it ends up by functioning as just another part of collective social capital. On this road the only thing attainable is the most balanced and rational development of all of capital. It is at this point that the working class must instead consciously organize itself as an irrational element within the specific rationality of capitalist production.” So the point about unions, perhaps, then is one to say ‘workers should not enter into the processes of capitalist development deliberately’? If so, I agree.

“the working class becomes the only anarchy that capitalism fails to socially organise. The task of the labor movement is to scientifically organize and politically manage this labor anarchy within capitalist production. On the model of the society organized by capital, the labor party itself can only be the organization of anarchy no longer within, but outside of capital, i.e., outside of its development.” I don’t know why it has be (called) a party, given that there’s a corresponding left communist attack on the traditional/received party form to be made just as much of the traditional/received union form.
“we must be more specific it is not a matter of creating chaos within the productive process. It is a matter of “organizing the systematic disorganization of production” and this is what is meant by neo- anarcho-syndicalism. And it is altogether unnecessary to hide behind this absurd left-over, the totally new perspectives which only today are opening up for, the class-struggle. Nor must we on the other hand, contrapose a workers management to a capitalist management of the modern industrial enterprise”. I don’t follow. Whose the neo-anarchosyndicalists he’s referring to? Are these maybe some of the people who ended up around Collegamenti Wobbly? (Must remember to ask Steve.) Also more left commie sounding stuff - down with self-management! Interesting.
“all that is a function of capital acquires the possibility of becoming directly functional to the revolution against capital From labor’s viewpoint, the integral control of the social process becomes all the more possible as capital becomes social capital. Labor’s articulation of the entire capitalist mechanism now unveils itself at the center of the system as the arbiter of its further development or of its definitive crisis.” What does this mean? That workers are now more than ever able to gum up the works? Power in capitalism is not synonymous with socialism/capitalism as Tronti remarks earlier. I took that to mean that the important part of increased worker power in capitalism is that it offers a negative power, a power to stop and to disrupt. Control here, is that the same, a negative power? Or is it some self-management capacity? I think the former, see the next quote.
“all that is a function of capital acquires the possibility of becoming directly functional to the revolution against capital From labor’s viewpoint, the integral control of the social process becomes all the more possible as capital becomes social capital. Labor’s articulation of the entire capitalist mechanism now unveils itself at the center of the system as the arbiter of its further development or of its definitive crisis.”
I don’t know what to do with this:
“The objective anarchy of the working class within capitalism must now express itself at the highest level of consciousness. None of its elements can any longer be abandoned to spontaneity: everything points back to a scientific prediction of the revolution and to its consequent rigorous organization. Spontaneism belongs always and only to the “masses” in a general sense: never to the workers of large factories. Working people often love to explode in unforeseen acts of disorderly protest. Not so with the working class: the people have only their own rights to defend while the working-class must demand power. Thus it demands, first of all, that the struggle for power be organized. No one is more inclined than us today to wholly accept the Leninist thesis: “In its struggle for power the working class has only one weapon: organization.” Workers do not move unless they feel themselves to be organized, i.e., if they do not know that they are armed in the struggle. They are serious people: they never seek self-destruction. They are a social class of producers and not a group of miserable oppressed. Today they will not move unless they have a revolutionary plan which is explicitly organized.” Spontaneity is just rapid and informal organization, which appears to not be intentially organized by one actor. As Bologna says, spontaneity is micro-struggles, micro-organization.
What does the following quote mean? “Party programs are useless: revolutionary strategy must not be confused with certain areas of demands. It is not a matter of contracting today the individual points in order to subsequently challenge tomorrow the whole of power. It is exactly the opposite: the demand for power must precede everything. Only in this fashion is everything organized for the conquest of power. The dominating class must be immediately challenged concerning political domination” What I’m not clear on is this: does Tronti mean ‘organizing’, ’some formal organization’, ‘X specific organizational form’, or what?
This is pure genius and beauty, however:
“The first step always remains the regaining of an irreducible workers’ partiality against the entire social system of capital. Nothing will take place without class hatred: neither the elaboration of the theory, nor the practical organization. Only from a rigorously working-class viewpoint will the total movement of capitalist production be comprehended and utilized as a particular moment of the workers’ revolution. Only one-sidedness, in science and in struggle, opens the way both to the understanding of everything and to its destruction. Any attempt to assume the general interest, every temptation to stop at the level of social science, will only serve to better inscribe the working class within the development of capital.” This doesn’t strike me as fixable to specifically contemporary capitalism, though, but as the trans-historical (transcendental?) condition for revolutionaries against capital as such. On that note, I don’t know what to do with any of the ‘advanced capitalism’ etc stuff. Just sounds like Marxian fossils - capital was progressive and isn’t anymore etc. Progressive or not, for those of us who have to sell our labor power, we want out full stop. The progressivist stuff sounds to me like a reading of prior history from the position of the general interest, coupled with a reading of the present from a partial/specific sectorial interest. Why not simply read everything from the latter perspective, class hatred as intellectual organizing principle just as much as political?