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.

This is what it hurts to see today: that the class adversary is not in good shape, that it is unable to provide for the majority of its subalterns, and that nevertheless its problems are entirely relative to the relationships between its internal parts. At base, labour-power too was an internal part of capital, but when it took off the uniform of the producer of surplus-value and donned the outfit of the realiser of political value, it threatened, as we used to say, the constituted order, hinting at something other and beyond. Now instead capitalist contradictions are only ever settlings of accounts between sections of the dominant forces: financialisation against real economy, liberalisation versus regulation and vice versa, market and/or state, world distribution of energy resources and therefore pieces of the world against other pieces of the world, but still within a single thought of social relations: the bosses – whether private or public – rule, and the workers comply.

Bringing the theme of work back on the political agenda. How? With whom? The answer to the last question seems obvious: with the workers themselves. Getting to know them again, these unknowns. Getting them to speak again, these mutes. Bringing the place of work back into the non-places of today’s politics. Empirical inquiries are not lacking. We are not starting from zero. Thankfully, the social sciences exist, data and numbers are not lacking, investigations have been carried out with regularity, the latest one by the metalworkers’ union, FIOM. What’s missing? A political interpretation: serious, lucid, realistic, non-ideological, non-conventional, non-electoralist.

The famous transformations of work are like the equally famous transformations of capitalism: when everything has been said, nothing has changed. The storytellers of the social come and describe the state of affairs: the liquid instead of the solid, what melts into air rather than what sediments on the ground, the whole that must become flexible, the production that becomes molecular, the power that is everywhere and nowhere like the holy spirit, because it is micro and no longer macro, and then the immaterial, the cognitive, the politics that is bios, made to measure for the asocial individual – forget about women and men of flesh and bone who organise themselves for the struggle. With limitless patience we read and listen, careful not to let what we don’t know slip through our fingers.

What is to be done about the exploitation of work? Do we put up with it, hiding it like dust under the carpet of good manners, or do we start once again to condemn it, showing that it is what objectively and materially unifies the current form of fragmented labour? Is it not true that today the social figure of the exploited brings together the worker in the great factory, the employee of the small service company, the precarious call-centre worker, the college graduate baby-sitter, the teacher or professor commuting while she awaits a permanent post, the labourer risking his life in one of the many thousands of subcontracted firms, the immigrant construction worker, the part-time researcher technician and the scandalously underpaid, or even not paid, contract lecturer, all the way to the self-employed worker filing his tax returns who, compared to rest, has the privilege of exploiting himself? We could go on and on. Asking what worker means after the working class is the same thing as wondering what the Left is after the workers’ movement. This is well and truly an epochal problem.

If it is true that the political centrality of the mass-worker has been replaced by the political centrality of the mass-bourgeois, then a great anthropological question poses itself on the terrain of human labour. The ideological hegemony of the Right – your boss’s interest is your interest, and you should do things on your own and not with others – does not stop before the factory gates, just like it doesn’t wait in front of the entrance to the home, where the holy family dwells. It enters, penetrates, invades, conquers, seizing hold of the soul – if there is no body of collective forces that pushes it back, countering it with the reasons of an organised solidarity. The material condition of subaltern labour – whether dependent or autonomous, stable or precarious – must now face up to this politically unprecedented situation, that the middle classes no longer need to be a separate social stratum, because they have become a diffuse democratic mentality. This is an illusory veil which the presence of an alternative horizon, both credible and practicable, has the duty to rend asunder.

But who today denounces the evils of society? A few precious experiences among social movements, some isolated scholarly gadflies, the odd papal homily, some praiseworthy grassroots philanthropy. What is lacking is the powerful voice of a subject that counts, and that makes its authoritativeness count, armed with consensus and thought. Work and politics is the point from which to begin once again to weave the interrupted thread of a new fabric of organisation. Around this point everything can be born, in terms of discourse and multiple experiences, but without it nothing will be born. It is first and foremost a political-cultural battle.

We are working in the furrows of a great tradition. But this is only a temporary surrogate, while we await the return of the initiative into the hands of practical politics. Of course, we need to make workers speak, even through new forms of co-research. But we must also start speaking about workers again, with programmes and projects that concern them directly, existentially. And here the forms in which practical politics is currently organised on the Left do not work, they do not respond to the command that the theme of work and politics should trigger in the operational machine. The latest disheartening events tell us as much. The Partito Democratico spoke of something else, the Arcobaleno didn’t speak to anyone, and it will not suffice to cloister oneself in a generous heretical sect of the refounders of communism in order to resolve this problem.

An alternative Left that for the time being closes ranks around the field of work is necessary, and we must therefore make it possible. But this too must be thought and practiced as a passage rather than a point of arrival. Once upon a time we used the formula ‘the world of labour’. Now we sometimes say ‘the world of labours’: not that much has changed when it comes to the fact that whatever world we’re dealing with, we need representatives and forms of representation adequate to it. To put it bluntly, so that everyone will understand, we need a great political force, a popular Left, rooted in the real country, with mass confidence – social before it is electoral – a mass party of working men and women, with the political pride to name the matter at hand in this way. Then, we might even lose some battles, but at least we’ll know that we’re there fighting a just war.

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”.

Lenin In England

A new era in the class struggle is beginning. The workers have imposed it on the capitalists, through the violent reality of their organised strength in the factories. Capital’s power appears to be stable and solid…. the balance of forces appears to be weighted against the workers… and yet precisely at the points where capital’s power appears most dominant, we see how deeply it is penetrated by this menace this threat of the working class.

It is easy not to see it. We shall need to study, to look long and hard at the class situation of the working class. Capitalist society has its laws of development: economists have invented them, governments have imposed them, and workers have suffered them. But who will uncover the laws of development of the working class? Capital has its history, and its historians write it – but who is going to write the history of the working class?

Capitalist exploitation can impose its political domination through a hundred and one different forms – but how are we going to sort out the form that will be taken by the future dictatorship of the workers organised as the ruling class? This is explosive material; it is intensely social; we must live it, work from within it, and work patiently.

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.

This is not a rhetorical proposition. Nor is it intended just to restore our confidence. 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. At that point, our case will be proven: 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. So how does the working class present itself today, on the contemporary stage?

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.

For instance take the basic material feature of this network – the fact that the world market has been undergoing reconstruction – a process which we can trace back to the ending of Stalinism’ s Stranglehold over development, It would be easy to explain this in terms that are economistic, addressing ourselves to “the problem of markets in capitalist production”. But the working class viewpoint seeks to find a political explanation. The meaning of a unified world market today is that it brings an international level of control of social labour power. It is possible -albeit difficult – to organise commodity production within a limited free-trade zone. But not so the movements of the working class. 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. And today it is precisely the unity of movement of the working class at the world level which forces capital rapidly to salvage a unified response.
But when we say that there is a unity in the movements of the international working class – how are we to grasp it? The various institutional levels of the official labour movement only create divisions in everything; the structures of capitalism unify everything -but only in capital’s interests. An act of political struggle can’t be simply tested and measured by empirical ans. The only way to prove this unity is to start organising it. Then we shall discover that the new forms of class unity is wholly implicit in the new forms of working class struggle, and that the field of this struggle is social capital at an international level.

At this level, the political situation of the working class has never been so clear: wherever in history we find concentrated the social mass of an industrial labour force, we can see at a glance the same collective attitudes, the same basic practices, and the same unified political growth. Planned non-cooperation, organised passivity, polemical expectations, a political refusal, and a permanent continuity of struggles – these are the specific historical forms in which working class struggle today is generalising and developing itself. They are transitory forms of a transitory situation, in which, in social terms, the workers have already gone beyond the old Organisations, but have not yet reached a new organisation a vacuum of political organisation, be it reformist or revolutionary. We have reached a period of in-between in working class history: we must examine it deeply and grasp its implications, for its political consequences will be decisive.

The first consequence is, not surprisingly, a difficulty: how are we to grasp the material movements of the class, in the absence of levels of institutions corresponding to those movements – i.e. the lack of those channels through which class consciousness usually expresses itself? This clearly demands a greater theoretical effort (and one more capable of making abstractions), but it also has a clearer practical function: for we are compelled to analyse the working class independently of the working class movement.

The second consequence is that we find contradictions and seeming uncertainties in the movements of the class. It is clear that if the working class had a revolutionary political organisation, it would aim3 everywhere, at making use of the highest developed point of capitalist reformism. The process of building a unification of capital at the international level can only become the material base for a political recomposition of the working class (and in this sense a positive strategic moment for the revolution) if it is accompanied by a revolutionary growth not only of the class, but also of class organisation. If this element is absent, the whole process works to the advantage of capital, as a tactical moment of a one-sided stabilisation of the system, seemingly integrating the working class within the system.

The historical workings of Italian capitalism – ie the organic political accord between Catholics and Socialists – could perhaps reopen a revolutionary process along classical lines, if it again managed to provide Italian workers with a working class party which would be committed to direct opposition to the capitalist system in the democratic phase of capital’s class dictatorship. Without this, the dominance of capitalist exploitation will, for the time being, become more stable, and the workers will be forced to seek other paths towards their revolution. 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.

Today the strategic viewpoint of the working class is so clear that we wonder whether it is only now coming to the full richness of its maturity. It has discovered (or rediscovered) the true secret, which will be the death sentence on its class enemy: the political ability to force capital into reformism, and then to blatantly make use of that reformism for the working class revolution.

But the present tactical position of the working class – as a class without class organisation – is, and must necessarily be, less clear and more subtly ambiguous. The working class is still forced to make use of contradictions which create crisis within capitalist reformism; it has to play up the elements which hinder and retard capitalist development, since it knows and senses that to allow a free hand for capital’s reformist operations in the absence of a political organisation of the working class, would amount to freezing for a long period the entire revolutionary process (and, by the same token, if such an organisation did exist, it would open this process immediately).

Thus the two reformisms – that of capital and that of the labour movement – should certainly meet, but only through a direct initiative by the working class. When – as at the present moment – all the initiative is in capital’s hands, the workers’ immediate interest is to keep them apart. From a tactical point of view, too, it is correct that this meeting should take place once the working class has experienced not only struggle, but also revolutionary struggle, and within revolutionary struggle has also experienced alternative models of organisation. At that point, the historic encounter of capitalist reformism with the reformism of the labour movement will really mark the beginning of the revolutionary process. But our present situation is different: it precedes and paves the way for that later stage. From this follows both the workers strategic support for capital’s development in general and their tactical opposition to the particular forms of that development. So, in the working class today there is a contradiction between tactics and strategy.

In other words, the political moment of tactics and the theoretical moment of strategy are in contradiction, in a complex and very much mediated relationship between revolutionary organisation and working class science. Today, at the theoretical level, the workers viewpoint must be unrestricted, it must not limit itself, it must leap (forward by transcending and negating all the empirical evidence which the intellectual cowardice of the petty-bourgeois is forever demanding. For working class thouht, the moment of discovery has returned. The days of systems building, of repetition, and vulgarity elevated to the status of systematic discourse are definitely over. What is needed now is to start again, with rigorously one-sided class logic – courage and determination for ourselves, and detached irony towards the rest.

This is not to be confused with the creation of a political programme; we must resist the temptation to carry this theoretical out-look immediately into the arena of the political struggle – a struggle which is articulated on the basis of a precise content, which, in some cases, may even contradict (quite correctly) our theoretical statements. As regards the practical resolution of practical problems of direct struggles, of direct organisation3 of direct intervention in a given class situation where workers are involved – all these should be gauged first of all by what the movement needs for its own development. Only secondarily should they be judged from the viewpoint of a general perspective which subjectively imposes these things on the class enemy.

But the separation of theory and politics is only the consequence of the contradiction between tactics and strategy. Both have their material base in the process (still slowly developing) by which the class and the historical organisations of the class – the 1′working class” and the “labour movement” – first become divided, and then come to counterpose each other. What does this mean concretely, and where will it lead us? The first thing to say is that the goal, the aim of this approach is the solid recomposition of a politically correct relationship between the two moments. No separation between them can be theoretically justified, and no counterposition can be effected at any point, not even provisionally. If a part of the labour movement finds again the path to revolution as signalled by the working class, then the process of unification of these moments will be easier, quicker, more direct and more secure. Otherwise, the revolutionary process, although nonetheless assured, will be less clear, less decisive, longer and more full of drama. It is easy to see the job of mystification that the old organisations are doing on the new working class struggles. But it is harder to grasp the way that workers are continuously, consciously making use of that institution which capital still ‘believes to be the movement of the organised workers.

In particular, the working class has left in the hands of the traditional organisations all the problems of tactics, while maintaining for itself an autonomous strategic perspective free from restriction and compromises. And again we have the temporary outcome, of a revolutionary strategy and reformist tactics. Even if, as often happens, the opposite appears to be the case. It appears that workers are now in accord with the system, and only occasionally come into friction with it: but this is the “bourgeois” appearance of capitalist social relations. The truth is that, politically speaking, even the Unions’ skirmishes represent for the workers an academic exercise in their struggle for power: it is as such that they take them on, make use of them, and once they have been made use of, hand them back to the bosses. As a matter of fact, the classical Marxist thesis – that the Union holds the tactical moment, and the Party holds the strategic moment -still holds true for the workers. This is why, if a link still exists between the working class and the unions, it does not exist between the working class and the Party. It is this fact which frees the strategic perspective from the immediate 0rganisationa~ tasks; it splits, temporarily, class struggle and class organisation; it splits the ongoing moment of struggle and temporary forms of organisation -all of which is the consequence of the historical failure of Socialist reformism, as well as being a premise of the political development of the working class revolution.

Theoretical research and practical political work have to be dragged – violently if need be – into focusing on this question: not the development of capitalism, but the development of the revolution. We have no models. The history of past experiences serves only to free us of those experiences. 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. Then we would consider how to articulate these experiences within the working class, choosing subjectively the nerve points at which it is possible to strike at capitalist production. And on this basis, testing and re-testing, we could approach the problem of how to create a relationship, a new and ongoing organisation which could match these struggles. Then perhaps we would discover that “organisational miracles” are always happening, and have always been happening, within those miraculous struggles of the working class that nobody wants to know about but which perhaps, all by themselves, make and have made more revolutionary history than all the revolutions the colonised people have ever made.

But this practical work, articulated on the basis of the factory, and then made to function throughout the terrain of the social relations of production, this work needs to be continually judged and mediated by a political level which can generalise it. This is a new kind of political level, which requires us to look into and organise a new form of working class newspaper. This would not be designed to immediately report and reflect on all particular experiences of struggle; rather, its task would be to concentrate these experiences into a general political approach. In this sense, the newspaper would provide a monitoring of the strategic validity of particular instances of struggle. The formal procedure for carrying out such a verification would have -to be turned on its head. It is the political ‘approach which must verify the correctness of the particular struggles, and not vice-versa.

Because, on this basis, the political approach would be the total viewpoint of the working class, and therefore the actual real situation. And it is easy to see how such an approach takes us, away from the Leninist conception of the working class newspaper: this was conceived as the collective organiser on the basis of, or in anticipation of, a Bolshevik organisation of the class and of the Party. These are impossible objectives for us at this stage of the class struggle: this is the stage where we must embark on a discovery, not of the political organisation of advanced vanguards, but of the political organisation of the whole, compact social mass which the working class has become, in the period of its high political maturity – a class which, precisely because of these character istics, is the only revolutionary force, a force which, proud and menacing, controls the present order of things.

We know it. And Lenin knew it before us. And before Lenin, Marx also discovered, in his own experience, how the hardest point is the transition to organisation. The continuity of the struggle is a simple matter: the workers only need themselves, and the bosses facing them. But continuity 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).

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.

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.

January 1964