Leggiamo Tronti

ERIC:

Before reading these Tronti chapters, I’d assumed that he was a curio, a once-important figure who had been left behind by history and his successors. I imagined his relationship to autonomism/poststructuralism as similar to Lukacs’s relationship to the Frankfurters: interesting for the directions he hinted at, but completely surpassed by his heirs. I was wrong.Though the immediate moment alluded to in Tronti’s “Lenin in England” has passed, the questions he poses and challenges he lays down are, or should be, still germane today. Tronti’s concerns in this chapter (which has the feel of an overture, though I don’t know if he continues with these themes in the rest of the book) are with situating working-class struggle as dominant over capitalist development and exploring the working class’ relationships with capital, with its own official movements, and with intellectuals. In short, Tronti is above all concerned with representation, or rather, working class resistance to it.

Before getting into this resistance, a bit on “reversing the polarity” of class antagonism. Tronti writes that “the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.” Nate wonders, as did I, if Tronti is describing here a stage reached, a recent historical development. I think, though, that what he’s doing is actually correct a long-held theoretical mistake: “Historically, right at its origins, workers’ labour power was already homogeneous at the international level, and–in the course of a long historical period–it has forced capital to become equally homogeneous.” He seems to contradict himself at times–variously seeming to invoke the end of Stalinism and June 1848 as points of bringing about the reversal–but those dissonances seem to be describing secondary features rather than questioning the reality of working-class domination.

Nate also wonders if Tronti is making claims about the need for Organization, even a party. I’m also a bit confused about that. There seems to be a lot of tension in this piece on the question; at times he hints at a normalizing claim about such an organization, but the movement of his thought always seems to take him away from such a declaration. The way I would state the relationship–and I don’t know how clear this will be–is that organization is necessarily a fleeting, moving thing, barely able to keep up with struggle, a process of becoming (which hopefully I’ll add to a bit below). Or, to use his words: “[C]ontinuity of organisation is a rare and complex thing: no sooner is organisation institutionalied into a form, than it is immediately used by capitalism (or by the labour movement on behalf of capitalism).”

A key insight of Tronti’s work is contained in this quote and elucidation of it that I stole from Angela: “Tronti overturns the standard claims regarding the ‘inexorable necessity of working class mediation’ to argue that, on the contrary, the state amounts to capitalist subjectivity as such. ‘The capitalist class does not exist independently of the formal political institutions’; yet the working class ‘exists independently of the institutionalised levels of its organisation’.” This, I guess, is the classic statement of autonomy, but what interests me more is the assertion of the working class as nonmediated entity. In its encounters with capital (and its agents, the state and civil society), the working class is equipped to confront the enemy without representatives, without parties, unions, NGOs, etc. Of course, capital attempts to foist these forms on the working class, but the working class can relocate the fight to its ground by “transcending and negating all the empirical evidence which the intellectual cowardice of the petty-bourgeois is forever demanding.”

The working class also resists attempts by what Tronti calls the “working class movement” to act as its representative. The dynamic here is that the working class is always for-itself, whereas the movement, which can roughly be reduced to unions, has mixed allegiances, is an instrument that can be grabbed by capital and used to its advantage. Tronti notes that, for this reason and others, “the workers have already gone beyond the old Organisations.” Again, this should be looked at as not a recent development but as inherent in workers’ social position: “workers will very fast drop forms of organisation that they have only just won.”

I think what Tronti is getting at here is that in the ebbs and flows of struggle, the working class is not coming into organization or a preordained form but is in a process of becoming. Because it is not encumbered by institutional imperatives, because its political existence is not mediated by organizational forms, its range of movement is nonlimited. It can become what its situation demands, and then become something else as circumstances change and it realizes its present state is inadequate. It can mine the possibilities and exploit them. Struggle, not its form, is primary. Capital, with the state in tow, can only follow along.

I said earlier that Tronti is as relevant today as he was 40 years ago. I think this is so because after 30 years of offensive measure–neoliberalism, an endless war on terror, the dismantling of welfare states, etc.–capitalism has, in the end, not destroyed working-class resistence. And considering the extreme crises in the institutions–social-democratic political parties, labor unions–and ideas–democracy, human rights, global justice and order–that have attempted to manage resistance in the last 50 years, the breach may be even wider.