Thanks for raising some good points here.

Re. your question. I’ll try to elaborate, but it’ll be a lot of guesswork. The quote you quoted me as quoting (“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.”) reminds me of a couple of passages in the Grundrisse about how capitalism seeks to dominate the whole globe, strives to universality. If, as Tronti says, the working class is the socially dominant entity, then it must be the universal class, ie, consitute itself at the international level. In other words, since universality is immanent to capitalism and the working class is the dominant class, it must embody the universal….At least I think that’s where he’s coming from.

I of course don’t believe that one should look at this as the end of the story, as the eternal arrangement. There is no teleology here. This homogeneity at the international level is a continual process, one of response/reaction, decoding/recoding, etc. But Tronti does seem to be saying that the working class has dominated…from the beginning. It’s when the “working class movement” gets in the way that the efficacy of that domination is in jeopardy.

Is it more accurate to say the working class primarily shapes capitalist development, the working class as the main instigator of change but with some exceptions of the capitalist class and the state playing this role?

Good question. I’m not sure, but what I notice about this is something I talked about in my post and that I stole from Angela: capital has to drag the state around with it; that is, the “capitalist class does not exist independently of the formal political institutions.” So both capital’s perceptions and ability to act are mediated/enforced by the state, whereas the working class does not necessarily have a mediating agent. Which is why capital is so interested in saddling it with one, usually in the form of a union but also, today, with NGOs and the like.

I guess Tronti’s antidote to these attempts at mediation, his way of ridding the working class of the albatross of the labor movement, is “organization.” Whatever that means exactly. Unlike you, Alex and Nate, I think that Tronti is very clearly rejecting the (Leninist) party, but I’ll have to get into that later, as I need to run. What he is getting at I don’t know.

Like you, I’m not certain on the “anti-imperialism” thing, though I have a few ideas. Again, those will have to wait.