Class and party
Nate:
Ch7. “Class and party”
This chapter was originally published as an article in Classe Operaia vol1, December 1964. What was Tronti doing, what was he involved in during the time he was writing and publishing these articles?
“The investigation of a new strategy of class struggle in advanced capitalism is the order of the day.” There is a need to recompose the general perspective that pressures “the movement with the force of grand historic necessities. This enormous labor will be collective or it will not be (…) There does not exist an autonomous development of theoretical discoveries independent of practical organization. There do not exist possibilities for foreseeing the struggle from the margin of the struggle. Nor do their exist [CONSIGNAS] that can be truly such without the weapons to impose them. These are the laws that govern the history of the workers experiences.” (114) I’m not clear: does margin mean here “at the sideline” a la ‘armchair’ revolutionary theorists (*ahem*), or does this mean theorists involved in ‘marginal’ struggle? If the latter, what are the criteria for determining marginal from central struggles?
Tronti speaks of overcoming the old distinction between economic and political struggle (115), what’s the new terrain and the organization in/on it going to be like?
He maintains that this overcoming is one of a lack of efficacy, a material overcoming connected to capitalist development (not a critique of the history of the workers movement).
Subjective consciousness is “internal and essential to the very concept of political struggle, and constitutive of every act of intervention of revolutionary will [en cuanto de] organization. Within this definition of the political contents of the class struggle there should be rediscovered, reaffirmed, and re-imposed the irreplaceable function of the worker party.” (116)
The old relationship between spontaneity and organization doesn’t work anymore, the old one “was based on the illusion that to know capital was enough in order to understand the working class.” (116) That’s a criticism of the history of the worker movement, and of many people today, and an important one.
Tronti calls for a “scientific knowledge” of the working class, which I’m suspicious of in part (the science part, very old fashionedly marxist), and says that this is the only basis for scientific knowledge of “the movements of the capitalist class and its social organization.” (117) I like the last point there, though. Politicizing the economic, and seeking to understand the enemy in/via its responses to the friend, the working class.
The old form of the cultural party intellectual has “definitively concluded”.
“A science of social relations separated from the practical capacity to radically transform them is not really possible, if it ever was. And a correct relation between class and party presupposes (…) precisely this pratical capacity for foreseeing and directing the movements of the class in historically determined situations: not only knowledge of the laws of action, but the concrete possibility of acting. The party in this sense is not only the scientific bearer of strategy but the practical organ of its tactical application. The working class possess a spontaneous strategy of its own movements and developments, the party has no more than to reveal, express, and organize them.” (117)
Need to review this chapter later as well, particularly re: the party and party/class relationship, but toward the end there’s this: “the levels of development of capital and of the working class do not mechanically coincide (…) the practice of the struggle demonstrates (this?) more richly than all the accumulated wealth of worker thought.” (124) Presumably worker thought means marxism, and not the knowledges in the working class itself, moments of the class’s own consciousness? (That’s not a division I’d accept unproblematically, but Tronti might a bit more.) I like the point about the relative independence of capitalist and proletarian development. Not sure how the latter is judged, as per my question re: the last chapter, is this a retroactive/descriptive or proactive/prescriptive evaluation?
