Tronti on the Crisis.

taken from The Institute for Conjunctural Research (they have cool pictures there too)

It is time to engage in a new research project. Our theme is: work and politics. Yes, because it is a novelty to concern ourselves with this theme. It says a lot about the condition we find ourselves in. What until some time ago was an old conviction has today become an entirely new realisation: either the workers constitute a political force or they do not exist. And the political inexistence of the workers is of course the problem of the Left, but it is also the problem of society and the state, it is the real theme behind the crisis of civilization. If we don’t put it in these terms, we will not find the compass that we seek in order to orient ourselves in the open seas of world-capitalism, once again thrown into turmoil by affairs that are entirely its own.

Lenin In England

Taken from libcom

Lenin In England

Mario Tronti

Despite its title, this article is not about’ England as such. It marks, in 1964, one of the early points in the continuity of political theory that reaches through our book to the most recent works of Toni Negri (Domination & Sabotage); it also marks an early point of the continuity of the political practice of the working class, in the sense that Tronti’s affirmation that “a new era in the class struggle is beginning” must be closely related to the renewed experience of class autonomy expressed in the events of Piazza Statuto in 1962 (see the final section of this book).

Tronti goes on to explore the nature of this new era. His concern is to start the building of the new revolutionary working class organisation – a new area of theoretical research, a new project for a working class newspaper.

The article was originally written for Issue No.1 of the revolutionary newspaper Classe Operaia (“Working Class”) in January 1964, and was republished in Operai e Capitale (“Workers and Capital”), Einaudi, Turin, 1966, p.89-95, under the heading “A New Style of Political Experiment”.