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.

*

The English translation ends “(…) destruction of the present society.” The line continues. “(…) the present society, which includes within it all the revolutionary needs of the working class.”

There are a few more lines that follow. “This is the moment of the strategic inversion where the worker articulation of capital is reinvigorated by the capitalists and refused by the workers: the most concrete moment that it is possible to foresee for the worker revolution. It is not by accident that it remains linked to the Leninist initiative of the Bolshvik October. The party takes charge here, in relation with the class, of the moment of tactics: in this way the class overcomes. The worker State, born on this basis, should not go beyond the functions of the party in a society of capital. But Lenin’s tactics became a Stalinist strategy, thus the Soviet experiment, from the worker point of view, failed. For us the lesson remains of holding organically united in our mind, but rigorously separated in pratice, those two moments of revolutionary activity: class strategy and party tactics.”

Translated (rough draft) March 2006 by Alex Diceanu, from the French translation by Yann Moulier (with the assistance of G. Bezza) published in 1977. The original Italian article was written in 1964. It was included in Workers and Capital (1st ed. 1966) under the title “A new kind of political experiment.”

The search for a new strategy for the class struggle in advanced capitalism is the order of the day. The urgency to arrive at a general perspective on this terrain prevails in the movement with the power of great historic necessities. This immense work will be collective or it will not be; it will either arrive immediately to know how to move near the social mass of workers, or it will remain blocked, it will stagnate and regress. There is no autonomous development of theoretical discoveries that is separate of their organizational practices. It is impossible to foresee the struggle when one is not in it. A command that does not understand the weapons to impose it is not a command. Such are the laws that govern the history of workers’ experiences. Of course there have already been moments where the relation between the class and its political organization brutally hid the character of the problem to resolve before all others; but this problem never imposed itself as abruptly as today under the imminent pressure, complex and clear at once, of a historic node as will be necessary to undo politically in the short period fixed by the situation of the social relations including by the subjective forces that are present. The discourse to be made today on the party will be thrown in a crucible of problems again revealed, melted in the new form that worker’s thought is able to give to the new class realities, modeled, sealed in the mold of their brutal nature, while examining with a critical eye all past models, and with a skilled tactical interest with regard to certain solutions offered by the current situation. Each of these moments must appear explicitly in the analysis if one wants to be able to confront the theme of the class party on the political field. To do this, it is necessary to introduce immediately, in place of the old, a new concept of the workers’ political struggle.

One knows the Leninist distinction between economic struggle (against the individual capitalists or groups of individual capitalists with the intention to improve the situation of workers) and political struggle (against the government to expand the rights of the people, that is to say, in favor of democracy). Lenin’s Marxism united subsequently in an indissoluble whole these two moments of the working class struggle. Without Marxism and without Lenin, these two moments became separated. Once divided, they entered in a double crisis that forms the current crisis of the class struggle in the Leninist sense of the term, that is in the sense of its organization and of its direction. Understood literally, this distinction boils down to a class union and a people’s party. A very “ Italian ” reality that we all have before our eyes, and forms the opportunism that has not even had to cut its bridges with Leninism. From this follow two consequences: 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. For extreme confusion, extreme remedy. To abolish the consequences, it is necessary to destroy the premises. It is necessary to explode the old distinction between economic struggle and political struggle; this will explode in one blow one of the cardinal points of reformism under its most modern form: post-Leninist and Communist.

This should not constitute a difficult task. If we examine well advanced capitalism, we will see that this distinction has already disappeared. 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. In order to avoid finding ourselves on the precipice [“en porte-a-faux,” delicate/dangerous situation?] on these two fields artificially proposed by the capitalists to the worker movement in order to confine the class struggle in a cage, it is necessary again to give on every occasion its character of a unique and global clash, probably the only one that is feasible today. 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. The elements of this definition blankets all in equal importance. The research of the strategic point around which to tip in a positive manner the relation that exists between the political movement, on the workers’ side and the economic crisis of capitalism, was already the object of theoretical analyses that we will resume soon in order to deepen them and to engage with them in a longer debate. The interpretation of the situation that Italian capitalism is currently undergoing, already taken up in these columns [1], can serve as an illustration of the possibility to apply tactically this strategic reconstruction; it is rich, in nothing but its exposition, in practical consequences of which it would only be a matter henceforth of putting into practice. On the other hand, what interests us today, is to place in the foreground an element that we have only slightly taken into account so far: that of the subjective conscience, internal and essential part of the very concept of political struggle, and constitutive of all active intervention by the revolutionary subjectivity, in so far as it has as its result organization. And in fact, it is within this definition of the political content of the class struggle that one will discover the irreplaceable function of the party, that the party will be reaffirmed and that it will impose itself again.

If it is accurate to say that the different moments of labour struggle condition by preceding the various moments of the capitalist cycle, it is necessary to add that, to give a revolutionary content to these struggles, it is at the mass social level and in a conscious manner that it is necessary to condition by preceding the movements of capital, brief in an organized manner from the standpoint of political intervention. If this holds true, then it raises the condition of a workers’ domination that exercises itself on the capitalist production process and that should constitute the immediate premise of its overthrow. 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. It is only by a subjective, conscious intervention, from the summit, thanks to a material force that grants you the functioning mechanism of the system to be destroyed and that makes you the employer, it is only by using socially this power that it will not only be possible to foresee the mutations that intervene in the development cycle of capital, but also to measure, to control, to manage and thus to organize the political growth of the working class by forcing it to pass through a chain of clashes at different levels and on various occasions, until the one where it is necessary to take the decision to break the chain, to reverse the relations between the classes and to break the state apparatus.

It is necessary to establish a new relation in these conditions between spontaneity and organization. Because the old relation no longer functions. It rested on the illusion that it is enough to know capital in order to know the working class. From this, the approximate knowledge that is currently found among some in the higher levels of the party. From this also the current attempts to adapt the organisational instrument of the party to the necessities dictated by the development of capitalist society, rather than to the needs of the revolutionary workers’ revolt. It is necessary to repeat once again that the establishment of a correct relationship between class and party supposes initially on behalf of the party a scientific knowledge of the material, objective, spontaneous movements of the working class; and that it is only this that makes it possible to know scientifically the movements of the capitalist class and its social organization. It is in this sense that the party presents itself as the theoretical organ of the class, as the collective brain which has in itself the material reality of the class, of its movements, its development and its objectives. The leader of the party must necessarily have as a quality a political judgment capable of synthesis which can come only from vast experience [experimentation], carried out with refined instruments, modern, complex and possessed deeply. The leaders of the party [groupe dirigeant] as a whole, must know how to express in itself the synthetic unity of the working class science. [science ouvriere] He cannot ask for it from someone else, he must hold it within himself. The function of the party intellectual is definitively finished: as “a cultivated man” he does not have a place in the working class party. A science of the social relations separated from the practical capacity to overthrow them is no longer really possible if it ever was. And consequently a correct relationship between class and party, supposes in the second place precisely this practical capacity to plan [prevoir], to guide [diriger] the class movements in the historically given situations: not only to know the laws of action, but to be able to act concretely because one possesses intimately what can be called the theory and the practice of the law of tactics. In this sense the party is not only the scientific vehicle of strategy, it is equally the practical organization of its tactical application. 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 with at that of spontaneity or at that 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.

But it is not necessary to create illusions: never during these historic occasions will the relationship between class and party, between the working class and workers’ movement, express itself in a perfect form. If this was the case, we should declare finished the history of the class: in fact it has seemed finished every time where it was claimed that the perfect from had been attained. No party will ever succeed to express, in its entirety, the incomparable wealth of the experiences of struggle that are lived at the level of the class as a class in itself. [la classes en tant que telle] The party must continually aim to understand within itself the global reality of the working class while planning and guiding its movements, all the while knowing from the start, that between its own margins of subjective action and the pressure that is exercised on it by its base as a whole, constraining its ability to act, there will always be a gap in the end. This tension towards the working class must be lived in the party as its reason to be. And the party leader, the professional revolutionary must be the living mirror of this revolutionary tension at once towards his own class and against the opposing class. All action of the working class leader [dirigeant ouvriere] finds itself trapped between these two contradictory extremes. It is from this constraint that are born all the true theoretical discoveries, that is all the unforeseen intuitions, the inspired syntheses of social reality, of which alone the workers’ viewpoint is capable. Thus is born simultaneously the tactical capacity to move among the facts, to move then according to one’s will, to destroy them and to rebuild them, with the subjective violence organized by these forces themselves. The revolutionary leader represents this living contradiction that does not have a solution. But when we depart from there to then find ourself opposite the party bureaucrat, we feel all the urgency to dig deeply the mine of historic research that will explain what has happened during these decades in the workers’ movement.

Nevertheless it would be mistaken and morally abstract [faire du moralisme abstrait] to stop here. It would be easy at this point to deviate from the essential points. We want deliberately to undervalue the internal institutional problems to the party, as well as its organisational structures: These are the easiest problems to resolve and they will resolve themselves in time. It is the new course that imposes a new organization and not the opposite. And we have learned to attach little importance to the moments of internal democracy that do not put into question the general course. It is evident that it is in the factory that must be born the political relationship between class and party, that it is from there that it must leave to invest the whole of society, including its State. And it is towards the factory, on this decisive terrain, that the political mechanisms of the revolutionary process must return in order to progress. Such is the correct way, on the only condition that we hold to the scientific concept of the factory, which will prevent us from remaining on the side of the relations of production, confined in a network of empirical relationships with the individual employer, and at the same time that we go immediately beyond to confront the social employer in a general uprising, and to the formal political level. The party’s command in the factory requires, to fulfill its role, that the factory is already inside the party. In order that the party organization can have a material life in every factory, it is necessary first that the relations of production succeed in possessing a political life within the party program [ligne]. And if one looks closer, one will discover that none of these two moments precedes truly the other, that they have an interrelated existence and than it is only as such that they can exist, in an organic whole, in a historic relation of movement to organization, of spontaneity to direction, of strategic course to tactical moves. This is a matter of the decisive problem towards which must converge the solution of all others problems: the problem of joining [point de suture] party and class, brief of the terrain of common struggle of the social class and of the political party, the only one upon which a class party can exist from the workers’ viewpoint.

Of course, the road to be traveled is still long. Beyond all the chatter on the concept of autonomy, one cannot deny that there are some completely current occasions where tying the union to the party as its transmission belt seems again the most feasible method of class struggle. But it is clear that with the exception of these occasions, the belt tends to break and the relationship to reverses itself. This is why it can be foreseen that in the long run there will inevitably come to be an identification on the class terrain between the party and the union. And the reduction of the union to a party, or rather of the class union to a class party, will constitute maybe the first scientific formulation of the workers’ party in advanced capitalism. At this stage, the union will be reduced more and more to a defensive function of the conservation and of the development of the material and economical value of social labour power, while the growth of the party will have to be made more and more in the direction of an offensive weapon of the political interest of the workers against the system of capital, and that serves to attack it. If one has a workers’ party, and let us be clear, only given this condition, the union will be able to resume fully its natural role as defender of the workers’ human rights [des droits du people des travailleurs]. The new definition of the political struggle requires in fact, at the least a class party and a popular union. There will be a moment – and that necessarily – where the union will only shelter the workers’ mediation of the capitalist interest, while the direct interest of the workers will live, in the party and only in the party. To such an extent that the working class will seem to have totally disappeared outside of the party, except to reappear in the phases of acute social tension and when there is a general clash. When the revolutionary organization will have found a first successful application in developed capitalism, it will aim completely at a revolutionary process, foreseen, prepared, practiced, the end [cloture] of which will have been only provisional and it will be constantly reopened. This will be nothing more than the organization of a continuity always stronger, and of a more and more accelerated succession of underground growth phases of the class and of revolutionary attacks by the party. At a certain stage of the struggle, it will be necessary in reality to make capital dance a long time to this music before we are be able to deliver the decisive blow.

Our goal today is to discover and to clear the road that will bring us to this stage. The goal still remains consequently to lay the foundation of a revolutionary process by advancing the objective conditions and by beginning to organize the subjective forces. We will not reach it without joining immediately a grand strategic insight and a strong dose of political realism. Already Marx, due to his maturity, [parvenu a sa maturite] had understood that “it is from within the current society that it is necessary to take all the weapons to fight it.” It is from this maturity that it is necessary for us to set off again today if we want to avoid rediscovering the childhood sensations of the workers movement. It is evident for example that different levels of political development exist, that will always exist, at the heart very of the working class, and that the most advanced sectors will always have to confront the problem of the direction of the most backward sectors, just as the whole of the class will have to confront the problem of a real political unity that cannot be achieved except through the party and its center [en son sein]. It is also as evident that the problem of the workers’ hegemony exists not over the other classes, but over the other parts of what we will call approximately and in a general manner the working [laborieuses] masses. This, on the theoretical level, constitutes the difference between the direct forms of productive work and its indirect forms, a difference that will deepen, express itself, on the directly political level, exactly by the hegemony of the working class over the nation [le peuple]. To ensure that it is inside the working class that the nation plays its role, this is always a current problem for the revolution in Italy. Not of course to win a democratic majority in the bourgeois parliament, but to construct a political bloc of social forces and to use it as a material lever that will derail one by one, then together, the internal connections of the political power of the opponent: a fearsome popular power, maneuvered, controlled and directed by the working class thanks to its tool, the party. It is what had always characterized the goals of the party, that is now precisely excluded: to play the role of mediator in the relations that exist between related classes, that is between the different stratums and all their ideologies, all in an system of alliance. To have reduced the party to be the wax that seals the historic bloc, this was, if not the most, one of the most determinant factors, of the blocking of all revolutionary perspective in Italy. The Gramscian concept of the historic bloc limited itself to identifying a specific state, a national moment of capitalist development. Its immediate generalization, that one finds in the works written in prison, was already a first error. The second error, a lot more grave, was in the Togliattian vulgarisation under the form of the new party that had to aim to identify itself more and more with this historic bloc going as far as to dissolve itself in it until the history of the nation comes to merge completely with the national politics of the people’s party. It is too easy to say today: the design failed. The truth is that it could not have succeed. Capitalism does not allow those that speak in the name of the class enemy to do these kinds of things. This would be in a purely formal manner. This program, capitalism keeps for itself, adapts it to its level and uses it for its own development. Everyone said that Togliatti was realistic. He was maybe the man most removed from the social reality of his country that the Italian workers’ movement ever knew. One wonders if his realism was really calculating opportunism, or very well, a poorly argued utopia.

It is not by chance if it is necessary to resume, at this point, the analysis of the current phase of this social reality. It still remains entirely to sort out the account of Italian capitalism. It is undoubted that Italy finds itself currently in the phase that precedes immediately a stabilization of capitalism at its level of full maturity. The internal situation as well as the international links forge ahead this process with an irresistible force. It is also as evident that the Italian workers’ movement finds itself in the phase that precedes immediately a social democratic compromise at the traditional political level. And there again the internal context just as the international situation pushes in the direction of a strong acceleration of this development. We propose the hypothesis that these two processes do not present the same mechanical and irresistible objectivity. And that on the contrary the class struggle, in its current phase in Italy, must seek to separate these two processes, to put them in contradiction in such a way as to make them progress in opposite directions. The objective being to reach for the first time and therefore during an original revolutionary experience an economic maturity of capital in the presence of a politically strong working class. To do this it is necessary first of all to block in Italy what has constituted the historic path that all the advanced capitalist societies have followed; this is only feasible by preventing a stabilization of the system to another level, that would gain it, at that very moment, all that the political terrain counts as new available margins [compte de nouvelles marges disponible]; this is also the only way to preserve for workers this political threat towards the system which everyone knows well risks disappearing during the following decades if it does not endow itself in its decisive moments and in its crucial points, with functioning forms and with explicit organization. Maturity without stabilization, economic development without political stability: it is on this stiff rope that it is necessary to make capital walk, in order to mobilize again at the same time the working class forces that will cause it to fall. Without the general defeat of the working class there will not be political stabilization: in this moment this is what the capitalist initiative wants to bring about. The workers’ defeats on the general level, are also the ones (maybe the only ones) that mow down the base and decapitate all possibilities to form organizations immediately by removing all the concrete potentials of offensive struggles, by redirecting the mass of workers towards henceforth traditional behaviors of political passivity and of purely economic refusal. When the official workers movement of a capitalist country displays in its entirety openly social democratic positions, it is necessary to possess an alternative organization ready to take over its role: that is to be able to pull behind it right away the political majority of the working class. The experience that we have of international capitalism showed that if this condition is not met revolutionary perspectives are closed off for a long period. Consequently this is the condition that it is necessary to bring about. It is necessary to work starting today to prepare this alternative organization at the moment, by mustering the maximum amount of forces, by maintaining as much control as possible of the situation, and by displaying the largest measure of long term insight, and of practical skillfulness.

Today as during other historic periods, the struggle inside the worker movement represents an essential part and a basic moment of the class struggle in general. To ignore it, we lose the complexity, the knowledge, the control of the class struggle against capital and, thus, the possibility to act. It is not a matter today of using the PCI in a revolutionary direction. It is far too late for this; the goal is again completely negative. It is a matter of preventing the process of the explicit social democratization of the Communist party. For to prevent this, is already to block the political stabilization of capitalism in Italy. This means not allowing the whole of the Italian worker movement to accept here and now the new margins [marges] proposed by capital’s reformism, at a moment where, outside of the official worker movement, on the class level, no truly organized power and consequently no seriously feasible offer of an alternative political organization exists. This returns finally to avoiding a terrible defeat of the workers that would set the struggle back years, that would put an end to the prospect of a rupture of the system in the short run, and that would therefore reintegrate within [rentre dans le rang] western capitalism, the Italian class situation that could not be kept there, that must not return there, where it is necessary to not let it return regardless of personal sacrifices, of theoretical delays and finally of practical compromises. The first political objective regarding organizational practice, is to not abandon the PCI to the reformist transaction of capital even if it came to such a degree of solicitation; on this objective it is only within a struggle that it will be possible to reformulate quickly in terms of revolutionary action the political relationship that exists between class and party. The revolution “in the short run ” in Italy finds itself linked to this prospect. And it is a difficult prospect that will not be available if we do not have the courage to take certain positions, the patience to initiate political initiatives of long duration and the power to wage a violent struggle when the day comes. Everyone sees clearly that the last act of the comedy, that should result in the complete liquidation of the class party, has already practically began. The liquidators of the party will have to be liquidated in their turn and right away. Lenin explained: “The liquidators are not only opportunists. The opportunists push the party in a bourgeois and erroneous direction on the path of worker political liberalism, but they do not renounce the party itself, they do not liquidate it. The liquidators represent the form of opportunism that goes as far as to renounce the party.” It is against this extreme form of opportunism, that renounces all, that we will have to carry out the next battle. Not to stop there, but to go beyond, towards the workers’ party.

But all these facts that will come about in time, what might be their spatial limits? In which historic horizon will they inscribe themselves? Does one not run here again the risks of overestimating a national moment, a specific stage of capitalist development? All this analysis does it not cheapen the huge complexity of the problems of the worker revolution that are present today at the international level? The complexity of this problem is huge, it is true. We could not escape it even if we wanted. All that has been said so far represents only a tenth of what it would be necessary to say now. We do not even know if this is what is most important. But definitely, this is what is most urgent, most harmful, brief the starting premise. A form of opportunism exists today internationally [dans l’internationalisme] that is strange and strangely current; this is the reason it will also be necessary to be right on the idea according to which all will only be able to be resolved on a world-wide and generic scale and in terms of revolution or integration. It is an intellectual bias among so many others to rid themselves of concrete moments of the true class struggle. Nevertheless no powerful idea today [idée-force] seems to us to have the ongoing importance of the Leninist thesis according to which the chain of capitalism will break at a point and that tries to focus and to resolve the various problems of organization and of direction on this essential objective. This thesis saw and sees again its importance grow as a supranational integration of contemporary capitalism is taking place. The channels of communication established by capital according to its interests constitute henceforth an objective fact including for the working class. It is only today that a revolutionary rupture at the national level begins to really have the possibility to become generalized in chain at the international level. Better, this proves to be itself more and more the only possibility. For it appears clearly henceforth that only a true revolutionary experience will be able set in motion the overall mechanism of the international revolution. No theoretical discourse, no political alternative that remains at the stage of a program will be able to have this impact, this value as a model [valuer de modele], this role of brutal practical proposition that currently constitutes the necessary minimum in the most advanced capitalism needed to break the de-facto truce [treve de fait] that exists between the workers’ revolution and the development of capital. Of course it is necessary to correct the Leninist thesis on a point. We will put less emphasis today on the inequalities of capitalist economic development than on the inequalities of the political development of the working class: this in order to accept the neo-Leninist principle according to which the chain will not break where capital is weakest but where the working class is strongest. It is very necessary get this in our minds– and this is not easy to do – that there is no mechanical coincidence between the level of capitalist development and of the development of the working class. Once more the practice of struggle reveals itself richer than all the wealth that the worker thought [pensee ouvriere] has accumulated thus far. We will choose therefore the chain link where we find simultaneously ourselves in the presence of a capitalist economic development sufficiently elevated and of a very high political development of the working class. Is Italy therefore in the process of becoming the epicenter of the revolution in West? It is too early to say. All depends on the limits that we will seek to overcome, on the path to be opened. [Tout depend des delais que nous mettrons a faire passer la ligne, a ouvrir la voie]

(December 1964)

[1] This refers to the columns of the newspaper Classe Operaia, that appeared from 1964 to 1966, and from which the present chapter is taken as well as the three preceding ones. (NDT.)

I really enjoyed this article particularly Tronti’s critique of representation. Very busy so some of these notes are sloppy and I mostly paraphrase rather than quote. This admittedly is not ideal so please, without fear for hurt feelings, do not hesitate to point out if something I’ve written is out of wack or needs clarification. I will try to go back an add some direct quotes if I get a chance.

Beginning with the end: Tronti is calling for an Italian 1905, meaning like the Russian 1905 when workers’ struggles at production prevented a political stabilization and led to innovation of organization (the soviets) thus, according to Tronti, paving the way for October 1917, which as Nate wrote, is Tronti’s symbol for revolution.

“the Soviets emerge in 1905. Without 1905 there is no October 1917. At the stage where we are , a general repetition is needed for each one of us and for all; we must withdraw from it profitable results in regards to a new organization; a point net will be fixed beyond which there can be indeed only the process of the workers revolution.”

Back to the beginning of the article: Tronti outlines his analysis of the crisis of contemporary Italian capitalism. This again centres on workers’ wage demands that have risen beyond what the post-war economic arrangement can tolerate throwing it into crisis.

Paragraph 1: Capitalists face a choice: either force a political readjustment, defeat workers on the political terrain by blocking wage demands through a reformist arrangement with the workers’ official representatives or allow the wage-productivity deal to continue breaking down and undergoe the inevitable economic adjustments that this entails.

The first choice terrifies the capitalist class since they fear the response of the working class (not its representatives); the second choice is feared by the individual capitalist because economic readjustment threatens his profits and ownership of his property. (bankruptcy, take-overs etc.)

Par. 2: At an advanced stage of capitalism, the possibility to control its development are considerable but the institutional forms that this control takes, the representatives of the working and capitalist classes (the state, party, unions) are uncertain, unstable, always “behind” the latest capitalist developments. “It is rare that capitalist dictatorship [on the economic terrain] knows political stabilization.”

Tronti here begins a critique of representation. My notes are a little sloppy but I wrote at the time that according to Tronti, the political terrain is the terrain of representation where the working class and capitalist class and the relations of power between are represented by the state, party and the union. The official representatives are often behind, have to play catch up to the actual developments in the relations of power on the economic terrain. As a result, political solutions often fail to deal with the real issues. It is in this sense that Tronti argues that the official representatives have yet to deal with the real reasons for the Italian crisis while this (workers’ wage demands) have long been obvious to workers and capitalists alike on the economic terrain. However, Tronti fears an eventual political solution and hopes workers can block it within production.

Par. 3: Tronti characterizes the relationship between workers and their official movements as “ambiguous” by which I believe he means that workers’ contemporary militancy is not matched by its representatives, that the official movements are “out of touch” for lack of a better term, with workers desires and experiences. In order to change this, mass struggle against the class enemy is needed. No factions within the party, no outside pressure from “minority” groups will succeed. Only the experience of class struggle will lead to innovations of organization ending the “ambiguity” that exists between the working class and its official movements.

Par. 5: Tronti writes that up to this point in the article he hasn’t said anything on organization because this is a practical matter, to be resolved through struggle. On the terrain of practice, the objective conditions present will always prove determinant on questions of organization. This part seems to put a damper on his previous statements on organization that seem much more proscriptive.

Same paragraph: The objective contemporary conditions are that (1) the capitalist class is not “wise” enough to include the Communist Party in its reformist political solution because (2) the CP retains its ties, even if weak, to the working class. I think Tronti means by this that the CP continues to authentically represent some aspects of workers’ desires and experiences.

Tronti goes on to say that however these ties are weak because the autonomous development of the working class has gone beyond or class composition has changed and the organizational forms of the CP are now outdated. A search for a political alternative, new forms of organization are needed and this practical search must be carried out by workers in the course of their struggles.

I read this as class composition is always changing, always going beyond old organizational forms so alternatives must always be developed and this begins and ends with workers and their struggles.

Par. 6: Tronti issues a warning. When searching for alternative organizations we must be careful not to fetishize the new, for danger of hanging on to them and becoming blind to ongoing changes. “This is the fate of minorities. The Bolshevik taste for majorities must be recovered in the simple sense of the term. Mass action or there is no action, as far as the workers are concerned.” An “avant-garde” that is not in tune with the mass movement is no different from an “arriere-garde.”

Tronti then advocates the restructuring of the official movement by the mass struggle of workers in the factory, both unionized and not (”organized and unorganized” maybe I’m wrong to translate it as unionized) who thus create the material power to restructure (renew?) the official movement from the outside. This is not a “boring from within” strategy but one of mass struggle outside the official movement that eventually, according to Tronti, drags the official movements along changing them to once again reflect accurately the workers positions.

As I read the above part I wondered why even bother to renew the official movements if mass struggle leads to new forms of organization or is this exactly what Tronti saying but retaining the old party/union names?

Par. 7: In order to bring about this renewal through mass struggle, Tronti advocates the blocking of a political solution to the contemporary Italian crisis within production, struggle that will lead to innovations of organization, raising the specter of a true political struggle, not one over government but of power, of the modification of the relations of power between classes. An Italian 1905.

A brief summary of the argument:

The new strategy: a total refusal of capitalist society

The old tactics - the union struggle: in the factory, against the boss, blocking of production, the general strike. Block any attempts at stabilizing the contemporary crisis of Italian capitalism (itself brought about by the wage demands of workers, breaking the wages-productivity deal, one of the foundations of Fordism) since currently the working class is too weak at the political level.

Working class strength begins in the factory. In the absence of a strong union struggle, the working class and its organizations are weak on the political terrain and the capitalist class is able to contain and use the working class to shape capitalist development in its favour.

Only after a struggle in the factories, after the working class has built/asserted its strenght within production, can the working class be strong enough on the political terrain to shape the development of capitalism in its favour, towards revolution.

As Nate notes as well, Tronti doesn’t see this strategy and tactics leading to a revolutionary break but towards a change in the relations between the classes, towards a stronger working class. And, in the absence of such a struggle, a stronger capitalist class.

Now from the top:

Tronti refers in this chapter as elsewhere to “the most advanced” and the “most backward” sectors of the working class. In prior chapters I thought Tronti was clear that he was referring to positions within production. However in this chapter it is less clear to me. For example, he writes (using Nate’s translations here where possible) “The most backward worker sectors tend today to take on, in an active manner, traditional types of struggles, general but defensive. The most advanced sectors, on the contrary, tend to respond anew by renouncing the open struggle, given the lack of offensive capacity of the organized worker movement. ” Backwards/advanced in terms of relation to the official worker organizations, their tactics/forms of struggle, position in production? I’m not even sure I like the whole “backwards/advanced” notion although I mind it slightly less if it is put in terms of relation to the official organizations and forms of struggle.

I liked his analysis of the crisis of Italian capitalism at the time arguing its roots lie in the wage demands of workers that have raised wages beyond the confines of the wages-productivity deal. Quite consistent with his argument that the working class is, as Eric put it, socially dominant.

“The capitalist response to the increase in the nominal wage, in general consisted in attacking the real wage by setting in motion an inflationary spiral of prices, the only way to avoid the immediate effects on production. Thus, one cannot even talk today about a development bottleneck; we have here only a mechanism of readjustment at the same level of the various compartments of the capitalist structure. The bottleneck, the blockage, the crisis of development, are things to be discovered, to build, to impose subjectively and by force.” I liked this. We can’t wait for capitalism to go into crisis but must bring the crisis about ourselves. Capitalism can survive “economic” crises but has a much harder time with political ones or with “economic crises” that are made political.

“The workers dicovered that the economic struggle, under the banner (manteau) of the union, alone is capable of attacking at the base of capitalist power, and constitutes thus, the only political struggle that is practical now.” We see here Tronti’s earlies argument given by the formula: factory =>society => state.

Tronti argues that the union struggle is necessary but not suffcient, organization/struggle on the political terrain is also needed, comes in after the workers have build their strenth in the factory. And continues thereafter to be the key source of strenght for the movement. I got this from his listing of the shortcomings of sydicalism according to him and from the last paragraph paragraph, respectively:

“During all these years we have been in the presence of an example of the political use on a grand scale of the union struggle (lutte syndicale). With all the prospects and also all the limits that this consists of: struggle in the productive structures, immediate confrontation with the boss, the possibility of rapid wage gains, but also sindicalist illusions, errors of spontaneism, under-valuing of organization. Starting from these elements there is reinforced, on one hand the concepts of the “mass party”, and there responds, on the other hand, the organization of minoritarian “groups” for intervention into struggles.” This does indeed seems to describe today well.

And: Tronti states that capitalism will break where the working class is strongest, ““the link in which the chain will break will not be that in which capital is weakest, but rather that in which the working class will be strongest.” And “From this stems the paramount need for the working class to give systematically an open form to its struggle which nourishes organically its political growth. From this stems finally, the need for a political organization of the class, the fundamental duty to make the subjective choice of the ground and moment of the general offensive to strike the system at its base and to several times shake the top, thus building by leaps a continuity of the revolutionary process as a whole.”

I like this. “A law of development: when the political level of the working class and the political unification of capital increase, the union tends to separate itself from the immediate interest of workers, and to integrate itself completely, as institutional mediation, within the capitalist interest…And as regards us today, it is not a question of stopping a development in process, but on the contrary, to use it. It is in the factory, where precisely this use of the union struggle occurs, that you will find workers contempt for the trade unionist that has almost reached the same level of class hatred for the little bosses (management “petits chefs”?), the guards, the technicians and the engineers. In the future it will be more and more thus. But, , how to succeed in organizing this situation today against the social boss?” I read this as let’s use the hatred of workers for this particular type of unions to organize a greater, more radical struggle. Also seems highly applicable today.

A nice quote: “In principle and in reality to be beaten while fighting is best for the working class.”

In the last paragraph Tronti seems to hint at a non-Lenist party form of organization although it still remains unclear to me exactly what he has in mind and whether he is indeed leading towards a rejection of the Party.

“Behind this effort of discovery and rediscovery of the most modern modes and methods by which the presence of the workers in capitalist society was expressed and is still expressed, we will have to hold to the firm conviction that at the decisive moment of the frontal clash, we will find the most elementary forms of struggle and fo organization, the mass strike, violence in the street, the workers’ permanent assembly.” Suggestive but still muddied when taking into account he earlier comments on organization.

Nate asks: “the link in which the chain will break will not be that in which capital is weakest, but rather that in which the working class will be strongest.” (105) Is this
descriptive/theoretical/retroactive — breaks happen due to worker power not capital weakness, this is assessed after the fact of a break — or prescriptive/political/forward looking — don’t focus on the perceived weak links of capitalist development but the perceived strong points of the working class for present and future action?

Good question. When I read this I felt it was prescriptive but there’s nothing in the chapter that I can see to definetly suggest one way or the other. Could it be both?

In the interests of getting back to the readings I have decided for now to put aside “Social Capital” which I have read several times but need to go over it again since I’m finding it a very tough read. I am paying for not having read more Marx. This chapter was a nice way to get back at it though.

“We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.” Nate wrote: “This is the whole impulse that draws many of us to sources like Tronti, operaismo, and the other moments in the autonomist tradition more broadly construed.” Exactly. I remember reading this quote (in Steven’s book I believe) and having a prolonged “that’s it!” moment.

“Of course, we urgently need to shake off that sense of working class defeat which has for decades dragged down this movement which, in its origins, was the only revolutionary movement of this era. But an urgent practical need is never sufficient basis for a scientific thesis: such a thesis must stand on its own feet, on a solid and complex grounding of material, historical fact.” I also like this a lot.

“Our new approach starts from the proposition that, at both national and international level, it is the specific, present, political situation of the working class that both necessitates and directs the given forms of capital’s development. From this beginning we must now move forward to a new understanding of the entire world network of social relations.” The workers’ struggle as motor/instigator of capitalist development thesis. I found this insight extremely illuminating when I first came across it. This is more than just a corrective to economistic accounts of capitalist development but also to so much political economy that I have studied where capitalist development is read politically but all the initiative is placed in the hands of the capitalist class, the state and more rarely the official labour movement with the power of working class independent of its “representatives” all but ignored.

But I wondered if Tronti takes away the autonomy of the other antagonist in this social relation, the capitalist class. Later he writes “Whilst it is true that the working class objectively forces capital into clear, precise choices, it is also true that capital then makes these choices work against the working class. Capital, at this moment, is better organised than the working class: the choices that the working class imposes on capital run the risk of giving strength to capital. This gives the working class an immediate interest in opposing these choices.” So is he saying that the capitalist class is purely reactionary, only capable of responding to the initiative of the working class? I really like the argument that it is working class struggle that shapes capitalist development but does the capitalist class not sometimes take the initiative? 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? I am trying to think of examples but none come to mind at the moment which doesn’t bode well for my argument!

Nate wrote: “And this compulsion to analyse the class independent of the working class movement, is this from the present onward (because of the state of things today) or does this involve a re-reading and criticism of the history of the working class and its organizations (and perhaps some impostors that posed as its organizations…)?” Good question. As I read I thought Tronti implicitly argues that this involves a re-reading of the history of the working class and its organizations but now I’m not sure. I may have been reading this into the reading.

Eric writes: “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.”

I’m not quite sure what Tronti means . Eric, would you mind elaborating on this? It would help clear up for me the previous question as posed by Nate.

Nate wrote: “I’ve avoided more of classical Marxism than I probably should have because the people who speak in its name generally strike me as fucks, particularly in their involvement in movements. I’m now trying to play catch up, because I want to know the tradition better.” I laughed out loud when I read this. I’m in the same boat for the same reasons though I suspect I’m even farther behind (hence my struggle to read “Social Capital”)

Tronti writes: “We must entrust ourselves to a new kind of scientific interpretation. We know that the whole process of development is materially embodied in the new level of working class struggles. Our starting point might therefore be in uncovering certain forms of working class struggles which set in motion a certain type of capitalist development which goes in the direction of the revolution.”

Nate asks “Who interprets, though? Generally, is Tronti posing a distinction between the audience (”we”) and “the working class”? What was Tronti doing at the time of this writing? Not working? Or, is the distinction between some of us in the working class and a lot of the rest of the working class? (I don’t think this distinction can be avoided.) I’d want to say that the forms of struggle and organization that are already happening involve some kind of interpretation that’s already happening, by definition. That can be improved of course, and circulated (along w/ the organization processes) - in this sense the ‘uncovering’ would mean ‘uncovering for us and for some other workers’, not any kind of leading of already-organizing workers to consciousness. Also, what’s the last line about, re: colonize people? Is this an anti- thirdworldist/anti-imperialist politics? Is there a contemporary debate Tronti is referencing here?”

I have similar questions here. Reading down a little, I wondered in the margins if Tronti sets up his “working class newspaper” as having some “truth” that allows it to pronounce which struggles are revolutionary and otherwise? I think here he does pose a distinction between the audience or theoretician and the working class. And I read the part on “colonized” people as Tronti definitely taking a shot at thirdworldist politics. I’d like to know too if Tronti is referencing a contemporary debate. Seems a little early but in this regard I don’t know much about the history of such debates.

I also agree that there seems to be a lot of tension on the question of organization. The last two paragraphs make it clear to me that Tronti calls for Organization, the Leninist party but often his thinking often suggests more horizontal forms of organizations. Its a tension that seems to run throughout his work right from the introduction

“This explains the fact that workers will very fast drop forms of organisation that they have only just won. And in place of the bureaucratic void of the general political organisation, they substitute the ongoing struggle at factory level - a struggle which takes ever-new forms which only the intellectual creativity of productive work can discover. Unless a directlyworking class political organisation can be generalised, the revolutionary process will not begin: workers know it, and this is why you will not find them in the chapels of the official parties singing hymns to the ‘democratic’ revolution.”

And the “directly working class political organisation” is the Leninist party.

“The reality of the working class is tied firmly to the name of Karl Marx, while the need of the working class for political Organisation is tied equally firmly to the name of Lenin. With a masterly stroke, the Leninist ’strategy brought Marx to St Petersburg: only the working class viewpoint could have carried out such a bold revolutionary step. Now let us try to retrace the path, with the same scientific spirit of adventure and political discovery. What we call “Lenin in England” is a project to research a new Marxist practice of the working class party: it is the theme of struggle and of organisation at the highest level of political development of the working class.”

I didn’t know who Joe Hill was but thanks Nate for inadvertently introducing him to me. US labour history, another area among many I need to catch up on. If only they taught this stuff during the 5 years I spent in university.

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.

I think Tronti’s main argument in this article is that the revolution begins in the factory given by the formula: factory => society => State.

The article begins with a discussion of capitalist production a la Marx: production as work process and process of valorization; work for use-value vs. exchange value; dead and living labour; the wage form; absolute and relative surplus value; mystificatory processes at work within capitalist production

I am not too clear on this part of the article probably a result of a need to review some of the above concepts as used by Marx and of lazy reading. Heavily abstract writing tends to have this effect on me.

However, I think the main point being made here is that capitalist production is inherently antagonistic and the key site of capitalism (if I read this right, he seems to reduce consumption, distribution and exchange as different moments of production or at least as subordinate to production). Tronti is thus setting up here his argument that the site of production should be the privileged site of working class struggle.

Marx: “What is important here is to see that production and consumption…appear in any case as moments of a process where production is the veritable starting point…thus its predominant factor, the act where the process renews itself.”

Tronti then goes on to describe the emergence of capitalist society, crucially for his argument, a process that begins from within production.

My rough understanding of what Tronti writes here is as follows: As capital moves from absolute to relative surplus value, that is as capitalism begins to manage/define the social relations of production, it (or rather the social relations of production) creeps outside the immediate site of production to shape and eventually define society since production is an inherently social activity and thus changes therein pass through the walls of the workplace so to speak. In short capitalist production leads to the capitalist society or the social factory. The political regulation of the working day and the emergence of the collective capitalist/the modern state are manifestations of the emergence/emerging of capitalist society. Thus, capitalist society has its center of gravity in capitalist production.

“Thus, due to the immediately social nature of work, the ever more exclusive capitalist domination over the conditions of work expands and deepens; and, by means of this domination and the ever more rational use of all the conditions of production, capitalist exploitation of the workforce/labour power develops and specializes.”

“It is not by chance that Marx placed the chapter on the working day when discussing the passage from absolute surplus value to relative surplus value, from the capital that seizes the labour process as it finds it to the capital that disrupts this labour process in order to model it in its own image and in its own resemblance. The struggle for the 8-hour working day is historically at the heart of this passage.”

The emergence of capitalist society is not a process driven by capital alone or predominantly. It is shaped on the contrary predominantly by the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class with the working class as the most active agent, the instigator of struggle.

“The working class struggle forced the capitalist to change the form of his domination. This is to say that the pressure of the work force is capable of forcing capital to modify as far as its internal composition, that the workforce intervenes from within capital as an essential component of capitalist development, that it pushes forward from within, capitalist production and forces it to spill over into all the exterior relations of social life.”

“The collective capitalist, be it by the conclusions of various boards of inquiry, or by the brutal intervention of the State, first of all seeks to convince, and in the end to force the individual capitalist to model himself on the general and uniform needs of capitalist social production.”

“The more capitalist production penetrates deeply and invades expansively the sum of social relations, the more society appears as the whole vis-a-vis production and production like a particular part vis-a-vis at society. When the particular is generalized and becomes universal, it appears as represented by the general and the universal.”

From the above argument it follows that just as capitalism attacks the working class within production in order to change it and society according to its interests, similarly working class struggle can do likewise and overthrow capitalist society and the State through revolutionary struggle within production, which for Tronti means the factory – “Social production has become industrial production.”

“…at this stage, it is not only possible, but historically indispensable to thrust at the heart of the social relation of production the global struggle against the social system, and to put in crisis bourgeoisie society from within capitalist production.”

And to achieve this the working class must be opposed to its own constitution as the working class, to its own existence as a part of capital. “The collective worker is not only against the machine in the form of constant capital, but he is also against labour power itself in the form of/as variable capital.” And further down, “It is evident that the integration of the capitalist class into the system becomes, consequently, a vital necessity for capitalism: the fact that the workers refuse this integration prevents the system from functioning. The only possible alternative become: the dynamic stabilization of the system or the workers’ revolution.” Is this one of the roots of the “refusal of work” of Italian politics in the 1970s?

I am not too sure about the last part of the article.

First: “The development of the productive forces is the “historical mission” of capitalism. And, actually, it is the foundation at the same time of its major contradiction: because the ceaseless development, of the productive forces cannot but involve the continual development of greatest of productive forces: the working class as a revolutionary class.”

He then goes on to write: “Because the only insoluble contradiction of capitalism is the working class within capitalism: or rather it becomes it from the moment when it autonomously/self- organizes as revolutionary class.”

So one the one had he seems to tie the strength of the working class to stages of capitalist development (the more advanced the stage the stronger the working class) and on the other, working class strength is based upon autonomous or self-organization. So which is it for Tronti? Or does he mean that as capitalism develops the working class becomes potentially stronger but this potential is only realized if the class gets itself organized? I am more keen to agree with this although I am still wary of linking the strength of any collectivity to its position within production or the economic system more broadly. For me at this point, “strength” is tied to organization. In short, one can be marginal to the economy and, if organized, present a significant challenge to the system. I think we can see lots of examples of this, such as the Zapatistas. And finally what does Tronti mean by stronger as in a more “developed productive force”?

And he goes on to say that revolutionary class means organized into the worker’s party, that is the party based within the factory.

“The problem today is no longer to know if political conscience must be brought to the worker from the outside, and if this role falls to the party. It is the development of capitalism, of capitalist production which ends up shaping the borders of bourgeoisie society, in short of the factory that has imposed from now its exclusive domination of society as a whole, which has already dictated directly the solution to the problem: the role of bringing political conscience to the workers returns to the party, but it must do it from within production. There is no one today that can think of putting in place, little by little, a revolutionary process without the political organization of the working class, without the workers’ party.

As long as the party is “bringing political consciousness” to workers, this still seems to me an act from the outside, outside the working class, and all the consequences that follow.

“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?