this discussion has been interesting. I agree with Dave’s most recent post, and the critique of Tronti he makes, and that others have made – the retaining of the Leninist framework, and that the class has lost its power in the contemporary situation.

I would like to continue on the relationship to the present situation in a fairly confused manner (hope this is ok because I won’t be discussing Tronti directly), particularly the question of inter-capitalist conflict and crisis as a result of global proletarian power, and its use as a strategy to harness and subdue proletarian power. I think this is of course partly true, but not necessarily completely.

To see this crisis and competition as a result of an expansion of proletarian power and desire I think is somewhat problematic, because I don’t think this is all it has been that has contributed to this crisis. I think there are a number of contributing, causal forces – not all of which emerge from the proletariat. The way in which Bifo refers to the vectorial basis of class, and compositionism is useful, if not necessarily new or unique. But it is important, I think, to retain the concept of class decomposition, as well as re-composition, as a moment and process within the class struggle. This is important not so we can just record the banal, brutal, movements of capital as a class force, but so we can look more concretely at strategies within the class struggle, to “try and understand the specific, present, political situation of the class” – as they arise both from the struggle as immanent communism, and as capital organises. To acknowledge decomposition is not necessarily pessimistic, and it certainly doesn’t require one to follow Tronti’s line of argument concerning class organisation in his more recent article.

So, to the extent that we can see the imposition of credit, or debt, as a response to proletarian power, then it seems to have been somewhat effective as a means of decomposition. As a strategy of capital to undermine the collective class strength of the proletariat, to individualise consumption, and bind each worker to an intensification of work to meet debt – this has had some success. So there is a relationship there, I guess between where we are now and proletarian power – but it seems primarily as decomposition. But, things like securitisation, commodifying risk, trading debt etc. – is this directly related to an expansion of proletarian power? Or is it an upshot of contradictions within capital, and how it has sort to organise itself globally? Perhaps I am simplifying too much…

Of course, this doesn’t mean that struggle has stopped, or that the proletariat is without power and that it hasn’t expanded in some respects, or that capital completely holds the reigns. But I do think that the process of reconstituting the struggle, of re-composition, has suffered a number of set-backs in recent years, and hasn’t quite known how to deal with the conditions we find ourselves in. I guess it is for this reason that I don’t clearly see how this crisis, and inter-capitalist competition is directly, or at least solely, related to an expansion of proletarian power in the immediate situation we are in. Without doubt the crisis will try to be used to attack the proletariat. Any reforms that come of this will also definitely be used to subdue the upsurge in class hatred recently, whilst also being a result in some ways of this class hatred. But I think this is different to saying that an expansion of proletarian power in recent years is the cause of the crisis.
Love,
mark

this discussion has been interesting. I agree with Dave’s most recent post, and the critique of Tronti he makes, and that others have made – the retaining of the Leninist framework, and that the class has lost its power in the contemporary situation.

I would like to continue on the relationship to the present situation in a fairly confused manner (hope this is ok because I won’t be discussing Tronti directly), particularly the question of inter-capitalist conflict and crisis as a result of global proletarian power, and its use as a strategy to harness and subdue proletarian power. I think this is of course partly true, but not necessarily completely.

To see this crisis and competition as a result of an expansion of proletarian power and desire I think is somewhat problematic, because I don’t think this is all it has been that has contributed to this crisis. I think there are a number of contributing, causal forces – not all of which emerge from the proletariat. The way in which Bifo refers to the vectorial basis of class, and compositionism is useful, if not necessarily new or unique. But it is important, I think, to retain the concept of class decomposition, as well as re-composition, as a moment and process within the class struggle. This is important not so we can just record the banal, brutal, movements of capital as a class force, but so we can look more concretely at strategies within the class struggle, to “try and understand the specific, present, political situation of the class” – as they arise both from the struggle as immanent communism, and as capital organises. To acknowledge decomposition is not necessarily pessimistic, and it certainly doesn’t require one to follow Tronti’s line of argument concerning class organisation in his more recent article posted above.

So, to the extent that we can see the imposition of credit, or debt, as a response to proletarian power, then it seems to have been somewhat effective as a means of decomposition. As a strategy of capital to undermine the collective class strength of the proletariat, to individualise consumption, and bind each worker to an intensification of work to meet debt – this has had some success. So there is a relationship there, I guess between where we are now and proletarian power – but it seems primarily as decomposition. But, things like securitisation, commodifying risk, trading debt etc. – is this directly related to an expansion of proletarian power? Or is it an upshot of contradictions within capital, and how it has sort to organise itself globally? Perhaps I am simplifying too much?

Of course, this doesn’t mean that struggle has stopped, or that the proletariat is without power and that it hasn’t expanded in some respects, or that capital completely holds the reigns. But I do think that the process of reconstituting the struggle, of re-composition, has suffered a number of set-backs in recent years, and hasn’t quite known how to deal with the conditions we find ourselves in. I guess it is for this reason that I don’t clearly see how this crisis, and inter-capitalist competition is directly, or at least solely, related to an expansion of proletarian power in the immediate situation we are in. Without doubt the crisis will try to be used to attack the proletariat. Any reforms that come of this will also definitely be used by functionaries of capital to subdue the upsurge in class hatred recently, whilst also being a result in some ways of this class hatred. But I think this is different to saying that an expansion of proletarian power in recent years is the cause of the crisis.

Love,
mark

Isn’t this “inter-capitalist conflict” also a result of global proletarian power and about how best to subdue and harness it?

Personally I think yes. We can ( for example) see both major world wars as capital’s reaction to proletarian struggle, and even imperialism as capital’s attempt to escape the heat of the class war at home. But I don’t think Tronti does. At some level Tronti only sees the working class as driving capital due to the political power it won in 1848; and there is the implication, in what I have seen in his more recent work, that it has lost this power and thus its role as the motor force of capitalism.

This I think is totally wrong. It relies on the existence of this separate realm called ‘politics’, rather than seeing politics ( or proletarian politics, or communist politics, or communist anti-politics) growing out of struggles and rebellions that are already happening.

rebel love
Dave

Re: the Leninism, I think Alexander Brown’s comments are dead on. Tronti produces innovative stuff within a problematic framework. I don’t have much else to add on that.

By the way, around roughly the same time, and publishing in the same milieu, Raniero Panzieri published material gently criticizing Lenin and Leninist categories, but also without taking on organizational questions. It’s here – http://www.geocities.com/Cordobakaf/surplus_value.html Panzieri and Tronti wrote a document together that sometimes gets called Theses On The Party. I worked on a draft translation of it but for the life of me I can’t find, which is annoying.

take care,
Nate

As Tronti and Alexander point out, what is important is to try and understand the specific, present, political situation of the class. This situation is something that Tronti tends to view both pessimistically and therefore not suprisingly, conservatively. In the recent piece by Tronti that Dave provided the link to he claims that workers are “mute” arguing that “we need to make workers speak”. Here he proposes a new left party “rooted in the real country, with mass confidence – social before it is electoral – a mass party of working men and women.”

Obviously Tronti is still “unable to escape the Leninist conception of working class organisation”. Trust me, there are still many Trontis in Wollongong, yearning for ‘the Party’, hoping for a ‘new left party’, writing “the history of the working class” and trying to “make the workers speak”. But those who have gone beyond Lenin need to stop believing in “miracles”. Recognising immanent communism and the current level of global proletarian power we can see how the class has the ability to force capital into reformism, and potentially to make use of that reformism for revolution.

Like Sam I also like “the idea that our class no sooner creates new organisations, struggles, ways of being, than it discards them as flawed, colonised by capital, not advancing its own interests”. But maybe, rather than “discards them”, the class continues to struggle within and against them, pushing, subverting, avoiding and negating them.

Tronti, or his translator, needs a good kick, and a reminder that translations may require adequate footnoting. I feel like I know what he’s talking about half the time, and the other half of the time assuming his incomprehensibility is connected to specifically Italian situations.

I’m pretty happy with the idea of the working class driving the motion of capital, but I’m fairly workerist, and see capital embedded primarily in the relations of production. I’m happy with the idea of the contingency of particular ways of doing things.

What I love is the idea that our class no sooner creates new organisations, struggles, ways of being, than it discards them as flawed, colonised by capital, not advancing its own interests.

My general impression upon reading “Lenin in England” is that it contains kernels of great wisdom enmeshed in a mire of confusion. If we situate the piece historically, it was written in 1964, this is no great surprise. Today we can talk about ‘autonomist’ Marxism and employ a wide variety of sophisticated theories and terms which have been developed over many years. Tronti in 1964 however, is obviously grappling with a new kind of revolutionary theory within the still dominant traditions of Leninism and Italian Communism.

The greatest theoretical insight in the piece, which Tronti repeats and rephrases several times throughout, is the statement that “the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.” This so called “Copernican” inversion of accepted Marxist wisdom opened the door to a whole new praxis of revolution and theory. Tronti’s conviction of the primacy of working class struggle as the active agent of history is strong. He even gives us a date, June 1848, when the class “took over the stage” and he claims that they have remained the prime mover of history ever since. Capital does not direct the development of the capitalist system but rather “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 fundamental, ‘paradigm’ shift Tronti derives the radical consequence that “we are compelled to analyse the working class independently of the working class movement.”

He states that despite the overwhelming power of the working class struggle to determine the development of society “it is not easy to see it.” Thus for Tronti, the project is not one only of uncovering a previously hidden, subjective truth, but in recognising the fact that our very perception and perspective, our theoretical work itself are a part of the class struggle. He reminds us that Capital has its share of economists, governments and historians who work hard to cast society in capital’s mold. What is lacking is an historian to write “the history of the working class”. Again, Tronti recognises a fundamental problem of this radical, one-sided theory: when confidence and rhetoric substitute themselves for reality. He argues, though, that this revelation is not only desirable but necessary and true. It’s truth is to be found in the material reality of the struggles themselves and in “the violent reality of their organised strength in the factories”. At the same time working class power is not something which relies on “empirical evidence” to prove its existence. It is based in a “rigourously one-sided class logic” and demands of its proponents both courage and determination. It is our responsibility to make theory and practice focus not on”the development of capitalism, but the development of the revolution.”

Yet at the very moment of recognition and amid the passionate cries to dedicate ourselves to this perspective Tronti is unable to escape the Leninist conception of working class organisation. He correctly identifies the fundamental weakness of Leninism while still searching everywhere for a Leninist solution to the problem. It is a testament to his conviction and honesty that he does not solve the problem but merely grapples with it. For it is a problem whose solution he did not have the tools to describe but merely to point out some of the trail markers.

We can see in Lenin in England the outlines of a theory of constituent and constituted power. Tronti refers again and again to the tendency of working class power, when constituted, to act as an impediment to revolution. “The various institutional levels of the official labour movement,” he states “only create divisions in everything.” In terms of political organisations Tronti recognises, even in 1964, that “the workers have already gone beyond the old Organisations”. Yet he shies away from embracing the radical possibility of this by pointing to the lack, the “vacuum of political organisation” he perceives in place of the old organisations. We are at, he states “a period of in-between in working class history”, but what on earth is that supposed to mean? If indeed we are “to analyse the working class independently of the working class movement” can we not conceive of organisation at the level of the class itself? Indeed, I propose that we can and must, but it is clear that Tronti is not quite ready to make that leap. He moves from these radical insights into speculation about a new working class party “committed to direct opposition to the capitalist system”.

Despite Tronti’s recognition of the class’s power to resist he describes it “as a class without class organisation”. Yet within his own argument there are frequent references to the activity of the class which appears quite organised. He states that the class has “discovered (or rediscovered) … the political ability to force capital into reformism, and then to blatantly make use of that reformism for the working class revolution”. Cleary, a strategic perspective such as this is demonstrative of a level of internal organisation. Tronti makes reference to the complex relationship between the class itself and the working class organisations. On the one hand “it is easy to see the job of mystification that the old organisations are doing on the new working class struggles” but Tronti argues that at the same time “the workers are continously, consciously making use of the institution which capital still ‘believes to be the movement of the organised workers’”. In other words the organisation of the class includes a complex dynamic between constituted and constituent power. It is my conviction that Tronti was able to perceive the weakness of constituted bodies of working class power and their tendency to shore up capitalism but he was incapable of fully realising the degree to which constituent power is actually organised power but in a radically different way. We can see the outlines of this idea in the statement that “‘organisational miracles’ are always happening and have always been happening, within those miraculous struggles of the working class”.

Despite the breadth of Tronti’s insight he remains bound to the Leninist idea of the intellectual who stands outside of the class struggle. Although he does not state this in the article it is clear from his language, from his objectification of the working class as ‘other’ that a separation exists between the author and the class itself. Tronti acknowledges that the practical work of revolution is “articulated on the basis of the factory” but he claims that in order to “be made to function throughout the terrain of of the social relations of production, this work needs to be continually judged and mediated by a political level which can generalise it”. Even here at his most Leninist moment, Tronti struggles to see beyond it. He argues not for “the political organisation of advanced vanguards, but of the political organisation of the whole, compact social mass which the working class has become”. It is here at the intersection of profound insight into the limits of Leninist concepts of revolution and the pressing immediate question of how best to intervene in the class struggle that ‘Lenin in England’ stands. Unable to free itself of the legacy of the Bolsheviks, Tronti’s analysis falters. He articulates profound and important insights into the nature of class struggle and capitalist social relations and points at the problem of political organisation but he cannot make the leap which would see the abandonment of ‘the Party’ as a strategy and the situation of the radical intellectual not at the separate ‘political’ level of class organisation but as a living, breathing part of that compact social mass which struggles daily for revolution.

It seems to me this is actually two claims, first that the working class is the engine for capitalist development, and that the working class can shape or use capitalist development. The first claim is not true, if it means that behind all capitalist development we can find working class initiative. It is true if the claim means that the working class is *sometimes* the engine of development, or that capitalism always seeks to make working class intransigence functional to its own purposes (but failing that, capitalists and their states may simply start killing people).

Surely the claim that the working class ( or at least the struggle of the working class – and what is the relation between the two?) Is the core contention of the operaismo-then-autonomist position? After all it is in Lenin in England where Tronti presents his ‘Copernican Inversion’ which is often presented as the key stone of almost all later postoperaismo theorisation. Quote:

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. 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….

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.

In this essay it seems that Tronti understands this due to the victories gained through struggle.

in June 1848 (that fateful month, a thousand times cursed by the bourgeoisie), and possibly even earlier, the working class took over the stage, and they have never left it since. In different periods they have voluntarily taken on different roles – as actors, as prompters, as technicians or stage-hands – whilst all the time waiting to wade into the theatre and attack the audience.

Thus capital is driven by labour largely due to the political power of labour. As much as labour constitutes itself as a force we can say that capital is driven by the struggle of labour. Thus Tronti sees the current crisis as a product of inter-capitalist conflict.

This can be compared to the other variants of autonomism such as Holloway that sees labour as the engine of capitalist development due to the nature of the category of capital: i.e. since capital is the product of labour, a vampiric growth, it can only gain motion as much as it can grasp the activity of the force it vampirises. This is the cause of its ‘madness’ and our hope.

This difference leads to two different politic roads (at least)..

that I think proletarianization and management of the proletariat always involves the production and management of hierarchies inside the class.

I guess the Midnight Notes Collective are the best proponent of this view from an autonomist perspective.

Indeed I think this is possibly the major challenge that reconstituting communist politics faces: how to deal with the hierarchies of differences amongst us, particularly since they often open to the potential of collapsing into vortexes of identity based violence.

Thought I think Tronti is arguing that revolutionary unity is based on a material homogeneity and division is imposed from without (by capital and by the labour movement such as it is). If such a homogeneity does not exist does it mean that Tronti’s politics become inoperable?

rebel love
Dave

It seems to me this is actually two claims, first that the working class is the engine for capitalist development, and that the working class can shape or use capitalist development. The first claim is not true, if it means that behind all capitalist development we can find working class initiative. It is true if the claim means that the working class is *sometimes* the engine of development, or that capitalism always seeks to make working class intransigence functional to its own purposes (but failing that, capitalists and their states may simply start killing people). The second claim is I think true, but “can” or “has the ability” doesn’t say anything about what is and isn’t a good idea for the class at any particular moment.

On homogeneity, I think Tronti mostly means political homogeneity – unity in revolutionary struggle – but I think there is the element you talk about and rightly criticize him for, inattention to other areas of struggle. I also want to add that I think proletarianization and management of the proletariat always involves the production and management of hierarchies inside the class.

cheers,
Nate