Leggiamo Tronti

Alex:

Back at it….I read this article mainly with a focus on Tronti’s views on organization.

In this chapter Tronti calls for a “class party,” the “workers’ party” that is characterized as having its base in the factory among industrial wage workers and not based upon electoral support among what Tronti calls the “masses” (by which he means the unemployed, peasantry, pretty much the the unwaged along traditional marxist lines; not sure if he includes the middle classes here) Thus he calls for a political party of industrial workers in contrast to the contemporary left political parties. One whose purpose is to organize the working class and express its desires, a sectarian party that is unconcered with the popular vote. Thus not an electoral vehicle but a vehicle of political struggle.

According to Tronti, the integration of the economic and political terrains “at the stage” of social capital requires a struggle that is similarly integrated, breaks down the division between the economic and political struggles of the working class that he sees as defining the class struggle contemporarily. Tronti describes as reformist any struggle that operates on only one of these two terrains at the stage of social capital and inevitably such struggles will be made function to capitalism’s development. I think here Tronti has in mind what he calls “a very Italian reality…an union that finds itself having to manage the concrete forms of the class struggle without even being able even to evoke their political potential, and a party that exhausts itself talking about this political opening without the least reference, or the least link with the concrete forms of the class struggle.”

He writes further: “At the stage of social capital, when we are witnessing the putting in place of integration processes on the grandest scale between the state and society, between the political stratum of the bourgeois and the social class of the capitalists, between the institutional cogs of power and the cogs of production regarding profit, at this stage, all labour struggle that limits itself voluntarily to the economic terrain ends up coinciding with the most reformist politics. When the historic democracy / capitalism complex finds for the first time its final, definitive authority in the only form that is possible: that is, under authoritarian planning that requires, through the more and more direct exercise of popular sovereignty, an “active” consensus of the productive social forces, from that moment, all labour struggle that limits itself voluntarily to the “political ” field (no longer for democracy, but for democratic planning!) finishes by confusing itself with the most opportunist economism”

Tronti thus proposes a “new” concept of political struggle that combines the economic and political terrains: The workers’ political struggle is one that seeks to put in crisis capitalist development at production, in the factory. “In modern capitalism, the political struggle from the workers’ viewpoint is the one that aims consciously to put in crisis capitalist development in its economic mechanisms.”

Here it seems that a political party is unncessary, only unified workers’ struggle with a radical aim (for example, anarcho-syndicalism) However, Tronti does not believe that the necessary organization for a mass struggle “with a revolutionary content” capable of blocking capitalism’s development is possible without the party, the workers’ party, as leader of the struggle. “But, one does not do this without passing through the organization of this domination, without the political expression of organization, without the mediation of the party.”

The reason, according to Tronti, is the following: “The working class spontaneously possesses the strategy of its own movements and its development; the party has but to collect it, express it and organize it. But the true tactical moment, the class does not possess it on any level, neither at that of spontaneity or of organization. All the lost historical occasions, all the offensives against the class enemy that failed, all the employers’ attacks that were not punished by the response of the working class that they deserved are due and are due only to one factor: the ignorance that only the party had and has the ability to isolate in order to seize the given moment where the confrontation of the classes becomes and can be made into social revolution. The great Leninist moment of the party marks, on the workers’ side, the historical conquest of the world of the tactic; it is not by chance that his name is tied for the first time to a historically concrete revolutionary experiment.”

So strategy belongs to the class but only the party is capable when it comes to tactics. I’m reminded here of Steven Wright’s book (which I no longer have) where he writes something along the lines that Tronti saw working class movements as great tidal waves moving forcefully towards shore (the spontaneously possessing strategy part) but that ran out of energy and quicky dispersed once on shore in the absence of the party and its monopoly on tactics, its unchallenged tactical wisdom.

It follows from the above that Tronti’s problematic then becomes how to ensure a party leadership with a monopoly on tactics that knows intimately and is guided by the strategy possessed spontaneously by the working class. I think Tronti’s answer is pretty clear in this article: a hierarchical organization/the workers’ party led by a group of leaders with the ability to know the working class’ strategy by virtue of the “scientific” reorentation towards the study of the working class and not capitalism only a la orthodox marxism. To Tronti’s credit by “study” he does not mean the party intellectual which he explicitly rejects but what he calls “moving within the workers’ movements.”

Nevertheless, Tronti seems to be saying “lead by following” in the sense of the party leading the working class tactically while following its strategic directives. Further Tronti proposes no general structures to ensure the “leaders” will actually follow workers’ strategy. A recipe, in my view, for ending up exactly right back to what Tronti is arguing against-a party disconnected from workers’ struggles and seeking to manipulate its movements. And one that is going to be reformist, become part of the management of social capital’s motor of development.

Again, I am reminded of Steve’s book where he states that part of Tronti’s thinking is a tendency to quickly dismiss the complexities and difficulties of democratic organization.
As Tronti puts it “We want deliberately to undervalue the internal institutional problems of the party. They are the easiest to resolve and they will resolve themselves in time. It is the new course that imposes a new organization and not the opposite.” Sort of puzzled by this last line.

Now that I’ve looked over the article I feel like I need to re-read it again. I think Tronti makes some interesting points I’ve overlooked. I don’t think they change his argument regarding the need for a workers’ party and its nature but they are interesting.