We cannot understand the current period of comprehensive decomposition of the working class and a capitalist push, spanning decades and still far from finished, to erase the historic conquests of the prior period, defined by the October Revolution, without a severe criticism of the insufficiencies of those who attempted to go beyond the limits of that period. It was their failure to accomplish a leap forward which condemned us to the ongoing night of perpetual humiliation we still endure. As such we should have no support for those who make their influence over such a debacle into a claim for authority.
Rather we should carry out the closest and the coldest possible reading of the texts we inherit from them in order to understand and avoid the mistakes which constitute their legacy. Operaismo, the “area of autonomy”, the Little Red Book, the “Panthers” and the “armed struggle”, the NCM and the K groups, feminism and the “ultra left” these are not so much treasured heirlooms to be defended against reaction as the sad relics of the shipwreck of a generation. A shipwreck in whose wake we are still drowning.
Operaismo is one piece of flotsam from this wreck to which some continue to cling.
I
Tronti begins his text by asserting that almost everything which “has in itself” the “force of growth and development” is a phenomena which he identifies as “worker thought”. However this insight is almost immediately qualified by a reference to the “practical wisdom” which continues to characterize the capitalists. This is because what is important is not “science” per se but rather the “development of science” and this, it seems, the “workers” are quite bad at. In fact the superior wit of the capitalists has left them with nothing to do but contemplate the “dogmas” of their “own tradition”.
Therefore “worker thought” which began as practically the only “force of growth and development” is already in quite a wretched condition before our author’s first page is completed. That is because historically it has, in fact, hardly existed. We are informed that such thought “almost disappeared” after Marx’s investigations and from that point on it seems to find its sole concrete reference point in the “Leninist initiative of practical rupture” which Tronti emphasizes to us was only a “moment” because after that moment it was only capital which knew how to grasp the lessons of October.
It seems that “worker thought” in fact has no continuity as a “process” because the term process is too dignified in its fluidity to denote the contemplation of “traditional dogmas” which is its only concrete appearance outside of Marx in the British Library and Lenin in Smolny. In this way a century of revolutionary workers struggle becomes a blank slate upon which Tronti can write a work which embodies the “new spirit of adventurist discovery” which was lacking in the Second and Third Internationals committed as they were to the traditional dogmas which Tronti as the privileged interlocutor of a “fertile season” of “forceful youth” has now come to overthrow not with “science” but the “development of science”. And great things can be accomplished only in “abrupt jumps” because the discoveries which count always “break the thread of continuity”. Tronti is clear-he will not only “rescue” Marx and Lenin from the interpretative framework assigned them by the hegemonic workers parties but from the course of the continuities within which their ruptures were embedded. Like exotic animals removed from their habitats to serve the zoo visitor’s thirst for novelty Marx and Lenin are to be extracted from their place in the pantheon of what Alquanti later called the “religion” of “social communism” to provide a prestigious pedigree for a “new synthesis” which was as critically attentive to the latest developments of bourgeois sociology as it was happily indifferent to the “third internationalist” heritage.
But if this synthesis is to accomplish “great things” it must, like Marx’s research project, be a “rupture”. A rupture for which Tronti gives an original definition. According to him it was no mere elementary combination of Feuerbach’s “materialism” and Hegel’s “history” but closer in content to the discoveries of non-Euclidian geometry and field theory. Just as field theory by disrupting mechanistic physics set the stage for the theory of relativity, so Marx’s theory set the stage for the “Leninist October”. Here we observe a certain confusion of concepts; if the “Leninist October” stands in the same relation to Marxism that Einstein’s theory does to those of Maxwell and others it is no longer simply an “initiative of practical rupture” but another theoretical rupture, which by building on Marxism, is not reducible to it. This is the viewpoint of Stalinism with its “Leninist stage” and Gramsci with his “revolution against Capital”. This puts Tronti in the same position as everyone who asserts a “Leninist stage”: in what way did Lenin go beyond Marx’s methodology? More importantly how does historical materialism as the scientific revolution on the historical terrain equate to Maxwell’s field theory? He is in no hurry to answer this and happy to casually make Lenin into Einstein by an analogy more literary than logical. This blurry procedure is more than anything else a warning to the reader of what is to come.
From here we learn that; “large scale industry and its science are not the prize for who wins the class struggle. They are the terrain of this struggle itself”
Which is seemingly a precondition for “easily understanding” that “synthesis today can only be unilateral”. The “new synthesis” is exclusively in “worker hands” because “knowledge is linked to struggle” and only he who “truly hates” can “know truly”. Without the acceptance of these principles there will be no new “great season of theoretical discoveries”. The statement that industry and its science are not the prize for the victor but only the terrain of the struggle is indeed unilateral, but it is not a unilateralism which acts to clarify the terms of the discussion. Rather the reverse. In fact they are both prize and terrain. Control over the productive forces is the prize that goes to the winner of the class struggle which occurs on the terrain of their development. Why deny this? Here we begin to detect a certain unilateralism but not the class unilateralism from the worker’s standpoint as opposed to the bourgeois' standpoint expressed as the “general interest” which appears on the surface of the discourse. Rather, it is a unilateralism in understanding the process of constitution and refinement of the worker’s standpoint itself. The worker’s standpoint is not determinately the scientific truth of large scale industry as a historical process illuminated through investigation. It is linked only to “struggle” and depends on “hate”. That is to say experience and its intensity, not reflection upon experience and its systematic synthesis, becomes for Tronti the dominant term in the process of the constitution of the class standpoint.
This becomes clearer when he asks himself the question what are Marx, Lenin, and the “worker experiences of the past” for “us” “Others” have found in these things a “new science of life” or a “new consciousness of history”. However, the “only useful way to travel” is to seek “certain things and not others”. And this is also how to travel in the “world of the classics”. If you adapt this itinerary you find “stones on the street more precious than the gold of the mines”, namely “practical criteria for political action”. Here we begin to understand “hate” and “struggle” to be victorious, and do not need to clarify themselves systematically through the assimilation and application of a scientific world outlook, far from it. They need only extract this or that pointer or tip to assist them on the terrain of immediate practice.
Indeed, systematic analysis and reflection had best occur in small doses because: “A book today can contain something true on a single condition: if it is written with the awareness of having committed an evil action. If in order to act it is necessary to write, our level of struggle is lagging far behind. Words, however they are chosen, always seem bourgeois things. But so it is. In an enemy society, there is no free choice of means to combat it. And the weapons of proletarian revolt are always taken from the arsenal of the bosses.”
As Lenin said “Vulgar revolutionism fails to see that the word is also a deed”. But Tronti’s intoxication here goes beyond the norm of the vulgar revolutionary who demands the passage from words to deeds always and everywhere regardless of the concrete circumstances. Not only are words insufficient, they are “evil” and “bourgeois”. Here we are witness to the eruption of an anti-intellectual demagoguery as hypocritical in its self loathing pretension as it is irresponsible in its anti-scientific implications. What is indeed an “evil act” and a “bourgeois thing” is not intellectual practice in general, but its debasement into the fashionable barbarism of that “radical” hatred for culture and concept, which is a self evidently insincere affectation of the professional ideologue.
We are not long in awaiting the next “insight” from Tronti. Setting aside for a moment his, perhaps excessive, previously expressed enthusiasm for Lenin as a proletarian Einstein, Tronti goes on to observe that “After Marx, nobody has known anything about the working class”. Between the prophet Marx and his belated apostle Tronti who will lead us on the path to a “Marxist research of a new type” there was nothing but a “long night, a long dogmatic slumber of worker thought”.
What are the characteristics of this “new type” of research? Tronti does not hesitate to inform us of its object which we must “rigorously” and “without concessions” fix our gaze upon for a “long period”:
the present society, the society of capital, its two classes, the struggle between these two classes, the history of it, the predictions on its development
A fine summary but one in no way departing from the research program followed by countless Marxists over the period Tronti has summarily dismissed as a “long night”. Fortunately for our understanding of his argument but unfortunately for the conformity of its structure with the most basic rationality Tronti immediately clarifies what differentiates his “new type” of research:
To who asks what is it that will come after, it is necessary to respond: we don’t know yet. We must arrive at this problem. We must not depart from this problem. We have not arrived. And this is one of the reasons why in this whole discourse the future seems not to exist. Of all that which exists today nothing for us is the future.
All through the long “dogmatic night”, despite heavy gusts of revisionist fog, conscious workers knew quite well what would come after. The “expropriation of the expropriators” and the implementation of the communist program by the proletarian state. It was not a mystery but a blueprint already written in Capital itself, clear as an instruction manual for every attentive reader. For Tronti however, the “future seems not to exist”. Of course such a carefree attitude towards the future is not unknown to the “worker experiences of the past”. Most famously it recalls Bernstein’s dictum that the “movement is everything, the final goal is nothing”. Bernstein in his time of course also proposed a “new type” of Marxist research which was scrupulously hostile to totalizing dogmas. But when Tronti declares that nothing which exists today is the “future” he clarifies his own trajectory is slightly different if no less corrosive.
For Marxists it is precisely the science and industry which make up today’s productive forces which are the future. Indeed of all that which exists today, everything for us is the future. We know exactly what will come after. Because what will come after is simply the emancipation of socialized labor from its mystifying market mediation. Not only can we read the future from the structure of the present, it already exists in latent form. Tronti promotes petty bourgeois disorientation which, being unable to read either Capital or comprehend the empirical tendencies Capital elucidates, is compelled to glorify the dubious virtues of struggle for its own sake. But he does more, he foists his own disorientation on the labor movement:
No worker who struggles against the boss asks: and after? The struggle against the boss is all. The organization of this struggle is all. But already all this is a world.
What is missing here and in the lines immediately to follow is one rupture about which Tronti at the time of writing Workers and Capital remained discretely silent. That between economic and political struggle. The economic struggle at the level of the enterprise over the terms of the wage. The political struggle at the level of the state over the preservation or destructuration of the wage relation. The one does not simply flow into the other and one does not approach one step further to its solution by correctly observing that the disappearance of all remaining feudal residue makes the schema of hegemony over the revolutionary people obsolete. The disappearance of the class alliance as a strategic problem only makes the question of the leap from struggle over the terms of the sale of labor power to the struggle to conquer state power in order to organize the abolition of this economic category stand out in its singularity.
To impute that both the political dictatorship of the workers over the “whole of society” can flow out of the wage struggle within the enterprise in a simple continuity without a qualitative leap and that this dictatorship can be anticipated and aspired to without a clear program of final objectives grounded in the present is simply an evasion. In practice this means the question of the organization of the Party and its program is displaced in favor of the codification of a practice of “rank and file” pressure on the trade union bureaucracies which organize the wage struggle within the limits of bourgeois workers’ politics. Because without knowing what will replace the “old world” it is impossible to take a single step towards “abolishing” it. The contrary view implemented with sincerity led to nihilistic outbursts, culminating in marginality, heroism, and the victory of the class enemy. An outcome which our author set the stage for in theory before prudently washing his hands of it in practice.
All that aside, it is refreshing to learn that Tronti understands that even if he can dispense with a vision of the future in the struggle with the old world he still needs a “party”. And he needs such a party to combat “modern social democracy”. Not only that, a “deep and sharp” critique of “all the positions of the historical left” must be developed insofar as this left failed to obstruct the victory of social democracy. This all seems quite fair and the reference to the “struggle for the party” as the “red thread” which traverses the life and work of Lenin is perfectly reasonable if hardly original until we discover what is the “model of Leninist initiative” from which we must learn according to Tronti. It is how to “read directly in things without the filthy mediation of books” it is becoming capable of “changing the facts with violence without the cowardice of the contemplative intellectual”. Of course avoiding the “filthy” mediation of books and “changing the facts with violence” come as second nature to every criminal and soldier and have no more in common with Lenin’s strategic calculations then Sorel’s “violence” or Schmitt’s “decision” do with the transition from one mode of production to the next in the schema of historical materialism. Lenin’s lesson is reduced to a banal “who dares wins” which anyone with a healthy dose of virtue has no need of rhetorical excess to understand. One can only recall Plekhanov’s observation with regards to the Nietzsche enthusiasts of his own day - people idealize what they lack.
Although Tronti feels no need to justify his hymns to the purity of violence and tirades against the written word he is compelled to note that there are some who “already consider this word [party] too corrupt to continue to use it. And perhaps they are right.” But he is not yet ready to dispose of this relic as compromised as it might be. Why? Because he is constrained to “anticipate the future with the means of the past” and it is anyway only a “Leninist tactic within a strategic research of a new type”. We have already learned what the “Leninist tactic” amounts to for him.
II
We are informed that “an ideology is always bourgeois because it is always a mystified reflection of the class struggle on the terrain of capitalism”. Taking the term ideology in the sense with which it is used in Marx this is correct. As is the rejection of the concept of Marxism as an “ideology” of the worker’s movement in the same sense. The ideology/science distinction explicitly clarifies the qualitative distinction between what in other terms would be phrased as proletarian and exploiting class ideologies.
But this definition of ideology hides dangers. Leaving aside the questionable claim that a process of “ideological mystification is in fact only possible on the base of modern bourgeois society”-is not ideology the common heritage of class society in general?-we proceed to the following:
...anyone who has opened even a single time the first pages of Capital can see that this [ideology] is not a process of pure thought which the bourgeoisie consciously chooses in order to conceal the fact of exploitation, but that this is the real, objective process of exploitation itself, namely the mechanism of the development of capitalism itself, in all its stages.
Ideology is indeed not at its base a consciously chosen deception. However, it is just as much not reducible to the “real objective process of exploitation”. First of all it cannot be both this objective process “itself” and the “mystified reflection” of the same. The mystified reflection is not the real object it mirrors in consciousness in a distorted form. The first is constituted on the basis of the second. It is dependent upon and determined by the latter and by the same token inherently irreducible to it.
Here Tronti slips into an ambiguity that echoes with less explicit extremism Korsch’s wholesale collapse of the base and superstructure distinction as exemplified in the following passage from Marxism and Philosophy:
Economic ideas themselves only appear to be related to the material relations of production of bourgeois society in the way an image is related to the object it reflects. In fact they are related to them in the way that a specific, particularly defined part of a whole is related to the other parts of this whole.
This collapse of the ideological and political superstructure into the economic base, serves for Korsch the same purpose that ambiguity around the non reducibility of the ideological representation to the economic relation does for Tronti. It constitutes a covert operation against the Leninist separation of the political and economic. A separation quite distinct from the revisionist formulations on the alleged “autonomy” of the former. The Leninist separation which can be best summarized in the famous dictum “politics is the concentrated expression of economics”. Tronti completes this operation in the next paragraph:
Therefore the working class has no need of its own “ideology”, because its existence as class, namely its presence as an antagonistic reality within the entire system of capitalism, its organization into a revolutionary class, does not link it to the mechanism of this development, it makes it independent from it and counterposed to it. Rather, the more advanced capitalist development, the more the working class can render itself independent from capitalism; the more the system is perfected, the more the working class must become the maximum contradiction within the system up to the point of making its survival impossible and thus making possible and therefore necessary the revolutionary rupture which liquidates and overcomes it.
At the beginning of this paragraph a subtle shift has occurred. If previously in the text ideological mystification was counterpoised to theoretical science, now “ideology” has become the cipher for the process of reflection leading beyond immediacy which is the precondition of every science. A shift indicated by the fact that it is the mere “presence” of the working class as a “reality” which makes it “independent” of the “entire system”. On the contrary, it is only the science of the proletariat which makes its organization, or more precisely, its existence as a revolutionary class possible. Without this science the working class is simply a mechanism of capitalist development. Without the party the class is simply raw material for exploitation and without the proletarian science of society, no party.
Tronti’s naive cult of force and contempt for thought leads him inevitably to a reversal into a purely mechanical determinism. If the working class is independent of the system simply by virtue of its “presence” as an “antagonistic reality” then the working class will inevitably make its “survival impossible”. In reality the existence of the working class as a factor of rupture within capitalist development is dependent upon the encounter of the movement of the working class as the sellers of labor power within capital and the historical materialist critique of capital itself. Only this encounter, which is inherently a conscious and strategically guided process, opens up the possibility of the movement of the working class beyond the limits of the oscillations of capitalist development. He succeeds in combining syndicalist intoxication by violence with the naive determinism of the worst of the Second International.
As Plekhanov observed “the need for progress is one thing and the presence in society of a force capable of satisfying this need is quite another”. Tronti confuses these two concepts completely with his “antagonistic reality”. The “intellectual, moral and political development of the class” is not a simple attribute of its “economic anatomy” but rather stands on the level of the historical dynamic of struggle between the classes which reflects and restructures this “anatomy” through the mediation of conscious reflection, the assimilation of the proletarian science of society by the advanced elements of the working class movement.
This syndicalist reduction of worker antagonism to an unmediated objective-economic factor, though it may converge with the most naive strains of thought in the Second International, negates Lenin’s entire contribution to political thought. Consider Martynov’s complaint at the Second Congress of the RSDLP regarding the Iskra program: “...nothing is said anywhere in the draft about the development of the class-consciousness of the proletariat being an inevitable consequence of the development of capitalist society.” Tronti is simply another Martynov.
However, like any theorist who reduces worker antagonism into immediacy he must confront the gap between this allegedly immutable revolutionary essence and the continuation of the prevailing capitalist reality. Although the very “existence” of the working class somehow makes it “independent” this has not saved “Marxism” from becoming a “populist ideology”. This is because the workers movement despite being an “antagonistic reality” has “experienced a process of integration within the system”. This process has culminated, according to Tronti, in a situation where “reformist practice” seems to be “implicit in the concept of the working class itself”.
This narrative amounts to a reversal of the terms of the real process in accordance with an idealization of primitive, non reflective spontaneity. It is not the workers movement, which beginning as an inherently “antagonistic reality” experienced a “process of integration”. Rather the workers movement, beginning as an interest group within bourgeois society with cooperative and trade unionist dreams of integration, became the site where an intellectual elite assimilated the science of history and on that base plotted a trajectory beyond the fluctuations of capitalist development.
Historical materialism was the necessary premise not of the struggle to maintain a non-existent original “independence” but to organize an unprecedented secession. The authentic essence of the working class is reformism. The development of the revolutionary tendency is a constant struggle of the working class against its own bourgeois nature. An excavation of the future within the present which imposes upon its practitioners the same demands that a sculptor imposes upon a block of material. This process of clarification, this purgation of ideological impurities, which allows objective reality to find full reflection in the mirror of science is what distinguishes the action of communists as bearers of the project of state power for a class from the primitive rebellion whose inner essence is always revealed as the “populist ideology” which Tronti decried without realizing he was indicting his own future.
For Tronti though it be may well be true that the “Leninist thesis” that there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory “has never before stood out in such relief as today” it is equally true that “revolutionary theory is not possible without revolutionary movement” that is to say that:
...the process of demystification of Marxism is not possible without worker power. Rather, worker power-the autonomous organization of the working class-is the real process of demystification, because it is the material base of revolution.
Here Tronti’s “process of mystification” again kicks into high gear. To talk of autonomous worker organization means nothing absent revolutionary theory. If we can learn anything from Lenin it is that it is criminal to forget that every working class organization no matter how “autonomous” that is not guided by the theory of the proletariat and the program derived from it is a bourgeois workers organization. This found its world historic confirmation in the councils which ratified the integration Tronti decries. “Worker power” without dialectical materialism is the “material base” for the restructuring of the bourgeois state and nothing more. This is because revolution is not the eruption of the contradictions of the unconscious economic process, but the conscious mastery of this process by an elite who grasp the logic of history in its totality as the growth of productive forces and plan and impose the new order not only from below but also from above. There is a reason why Lenin did not repeat his formulation in reverse.
III
The same stubborn refusal to assimilate elementary Leninist lessons appears in Tronti’s retelling of Marx’s review of the struggle over the working day where he insists that this struggle amounted to a “class confrontation on the political terrain” when it is a question of a struggle in which the proletariat did not yet exist as a political class. To use Lenin’s expression, at that time “...the workers, were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system.” Indeed this was a consciousness which came slowly and marginally to the English working class in general. This is as always a matter of no concern to Tronti who at the time of writing took Lenin as the decorative form and syndicalism as the functional content.
And this same perspective is carried forward into a fatally confused review of contemporary trends. We are informed that the more the production of relative surplus value penetrates and extends the more the “factory extends its exclusive domination over the whole of society” and that it is on this basis that the “political state tends to be always more identified with the figure of the collective capitalist” and therefore a “function of the capitalist”.
In short, allegedly all of society becomes a “factory” immediately resulting in a situation where “the social relation of the factory acquires an ever more directly political content”. Just as Tronti previously collapsed ideology into the economy, he now subjects politics to the same treatment. In both cases the intention is the same. To deny the necessity of a qualitative break with spontaneity. If the “social relation of the factory” has an “ever more directly political content” which is given objectively by the linear progression of capital’s own laws and if ideology likewise is only the “real, objective process of exploitation itself”, then the imperatives of ideological and political struggle melt into the economic struggle. A long detour has been taken to arrive at the same vulgar economism with which Lenin broke. And indeed if bourgeois revisionism first of all found fault with operaismo in it having set the stage for “terrorism”, the proletariat must begin its charge sheet with the crime of economism.
In the sober light of the October Revolution “political content” only appears when parties representing antagonistic class programs for the transformation or preservation of the relations of production contend for state power at the head of masses in their millions (Lenin rightly insisted on this as the only scale at which real politics occurs). The workers march through the factory where they throw out the scabs and beat up the foreman, all very nice, but without the proletarian world outlook and the party it was just another day in bourgeois society. The fascination of many operaists with the classical period of the workers movement in the United States, the country in which more than any other in the West combined violent disruption with political nullity is all too indicative.
The coronation of spontaneity reaches its climax with Tronti’s characterization of the “final stage of the class struggle at the most high level of capitalist development” as follows :
To the capitalist who seeks to counter-pose labor and labor power within the collective worker, it responds counter-posing labor power and capital within capital itself. At this point, capital seeks to decompose the collective worker, the worker seeks to decompose capital: no more right against right, decided by force, but directly force against force.
Far from a description of the “final stage of the class struggle at the most high level of capitalist development” the above passage describes the most basic level of class struggle at every level of capitalist development.
This passage describes perfectly the elemental, unconscious resistance of the worker to the tendentially total degradation of the waged condition, her drive towards association in order to limit the exploitation of labor power - the extraction of absolute surplus value. The obstruction of this drive by capital organized in its state and the violent collisions which result far from describing the high point of political class struggle, it describes the elementary preconditions of trade union struggle. Because within the logic of this text there is no qualitative difference between gunfire at a 19th century American strike and the methodical preparations of the Bolsheviks for power. Everything collapses into the inherent animal vitality of the working class. This is London and Sorel, not Marx and Lenin. Tronti notes the tendency of capital to reduce the working class to a “natural force of society”, he leaves unmentioned that his system does the same.
If it is indeed true and well said that “when capital has conquered all the territories really and truly external to capitalist production, the process of internal colonization begins; rather, when the circuit of bourgeois society is finally closed-production, distribution, exchange, consumption-one can say that the real process of capitalist development begins.” and that on this basis “worker refusal” impedes the “functioning of the system” it is equally true that the only worker refusal which impedes the functioning of the system is the leap from spontaneity to consciousness, from economic to political struggle. All the rest is no more than the “dynamic stabilization of the system”.
Immediately following, Tronti attempts to evade the consequences of his own logic, to blur the lines between himself and Lenin declaring that:
...the working class within capital is the only insoluble contradiction of capital itself: or better put it becomes such, from the moment in which it is self organized as a revolutionary class. Not the organization of the oppressed class, defense of the interests of the workers; nor organization as a class of government, management of capitalist interests. But organization as antagonist class. Political self management of the working class within the economic system of capitalism. If the formula of “dual power” has a meaning this must be it.
As we can see it is impossible to evade the conclusions generated by the structure of his argument without exploding the entire economistic structure. Organization as an antagonistic class can only be organization as a party with a program for power not “self management … within the economic system of capitalism” which is no more than the rallying cry of a “rank and file” unionism more tactically aggressive than the “tops”. Organization of the working class as a subject structured for the seizure and exercise of state power and constituted by a materialist consciousness of the historical process can only be brought forth by an antagonistic class organized as a party.. As Tronti himself notes his formula is for “dual power” not the party. And dual power without the party is nothing.
He immediately compounds his error with the vulgar sociological-identitarian reading of the merger formula which is beloved among anti-Leninists insisting that:
It is no longer a problem today if political consciousness must be brought to the worker from outside and if the party must bring it from outside. The solution has already come directly from the development of capitalism, from capitalist production which ends by breaching the bounds of bourgeois society, from the factory which has now imposed its exclusive domination over all of society: political consciousness must be brought by the party, but from within the process of production.
The “outside” from which political consciousness is “brought” never in Leninist terms denoted a merely “sociological” outside (the bourgeois intellectuals). The space from which political consciousness comes is the space of reflection outside the immediacy of the economic struggle dominated by the default reproduction of bourgeois ideology. It is the total view which subordinates the struggle within the enterprise to the struggle for state power articulated throughout the social totality whether that totality be partially or fully capitalist. To negate the “outside” and simply situate political consciousness “within” production is to collapse reflection into immediacy.
Tronti’s attempt to deploy the collapse of the political into the economic against a collaborationist policy of parliamentary manoeuvre is simply a rerun of the syndicalist “left” revisionism of the fin de sicle. A project he shared with operaismo as a whole-it is sufficient to recall Panzieri’s affinity for French syndicalism. The transformation-conceptual or real-of the whole of society into a “factory” cannot negate the need for a qualitative and consciously organized leap beyond the “walls” of the individual “factory” towards a strategic project for state power. The “social factory” does not make What is to be Done obsolete.
IV
Previously Tronti extracted a fatally flawed conclusion (the substantial obsolescence of What is to be Done?) from a correctly and even brilliantly drawn picture of the fuller and deeper development of capitalism since Lenin’s moment (one even more topical for our time then Tronti’s). Now he employs a correct criticism of the revisionist transformation of the policy of the class alliance into an ideological mystification through its application to fully developed capitalism as the basis for a negation of the function of programmatic synthesis fulfilled by political leadership.
If it is indeed true that narrow “workerism” is no danger “within a process which tends to reduce every laborer to a worker” and that the revisionist attempt to maintain the minoritarian status of the working class in fully developed capitalism with a mystification of the status of the “new middle strata” it in no way follows that:
In the social relations of production, the spokesperson of society is no longer the working class but capital directly. The general social interest rests completely in the hands of capital. To the workers nothing remains other than their partial class interests. Therefore on the one hand the social self governance of capital, on the other the self management of the class of organized workers.
On the contrary with the full development of capitalist relations of production the general social interests can only be expressed by the representatives of the totality of labor subordinated to the wage relation. This labor, insofar as it remains at the immediately given level of its cacophony of partial and temporary interests, is incapable of offering an alternative perspective to capital’s for the management of the social whole. The partial interests of the working class must be subordinated to the general interests of the proletariat for wage labor to present the prospect of its tendential abolition as a practical alternative.
If the party is compelled by the level of productive forces to lead the bourgeois revolution as the first stage of the socialist revolution its initial strategic task is the constitution of a class alliance with the peasantry. If the bourgeois revolution has been accomplished one way or another either by “American” or “Prussian” means then the task of the party becomes the synthesis of the partial interests of the various strata of the working class, decomposed and set against itself on every level, into a general program of power. Regardless, the mediating and representative function of the political party is the threshold which uncrossed condemns the working class to vegetate in its natural state of petty bourgeois idiocy.
But now, Tronti proceeds to an all encompassing qualification, he attempts to execute what appears superficially as a complete abjuration of the implications of the prior course of his argument:
A union, which as such, namely without party, without class political organization, pretends to be independent from the plan of capital, is not capable of being anything other than the most perfect form of integration of the working class within capital. Modern unionism [sindicalismo], the party as the transmission belt of the union, is the high point of capitalist reformism...If there is anyone who pretends to interpret the previous discussion [discorso precedente] in economistic and objectivist terms, these people demonstrate that they have understood nothing of the previous discussion.
All that is required to demystify the above is to remember what Tronti has previously said regarding the “model of Leninist initiative”. The party is not a complex system of mediations which synthesizes the general program from the particularity of individual situations of struggle via a systematic and “professional” practice of reflection which ascends from the ideologically distorted immediacy of spontaneous experience to the level of proletarian class science. It is simply a violent will, a practice of attack and the permanence of the offensive. Here we see already prefigured in Tronti’s discourse the limitations of the practice of PO and everything which followed.
Indeed the working class according to Tronti has no need for the synthetic function embodied in the party as process because;
within the process of socialization of capital itself, in the course of the development which leads the social capital to become the representative of the general interest, the working class cannot do otherwise than begin to organize its own partial interest, to directly manage its own particular power. When capital is uncovered as a social force and on this base gives form to a capitalist society, no other alternative is left to the working class than that of opposition to this entire sociality of capital. The workers no longer have the ideal of a true society to counterpose to capital’s false one, they no longer have to dissolve and dilute themselves within the general social relation: they can now regain and rediscover their own class as a revolutionary antisocial force. Confronting the working class now without possibility of mediation, there stands the entire society of capital. The relation is finally reversed: the only thing which the general interest is not able to mediate, within itself, is the irreducible partiality of worker interests.
These lines ignore that just as the bourgeois in order to manage the social totality must constitute itself within the structures of the bourgeois state and oppose its general interest to the mass of its particular ones, so the working class in order to contest this management must constitute itself as a party. Which is something qualitatively more than simply the management of particular worker interests in opposition to capital as imagined by Tronti in the dramatic terms of the “organization of anarchy”. It is the construction of a structure of representation and mediation which constitutes the general interest of labor as an alternative program for the management of the social whole. The evasion of this is what makes Tronti’s party concept “neosyndicalism” despite all his protests.
This is confirmed by the shocking mendacity of his observation immediately following that:
spontaneism belongs always and only to the “masses” in generic terms, never to the workers of the large factories. The working people love to explode in improvised acts of disordered protest, the working class no: the people has only to defend its rights, the working class must demand power. Therefore it demands first of all that it organize the struggle for power.
Firstly, the term spontaneity was used by Lenin to characterize the default of the trade union movement, which is to say the movement of wage workers, whether employed in large factories or not. To insist that the “workers of the large factories” have an innate demand for power which only needs to be organized is to reiterate the same economist simple mindedness which forms the whole content of Tronti’s impoverished “political wisdom”. The demand for power is the end result of a conscious process of reflection which grasps the structure of the social whole and its dynamic of development over time. It never germinated in anyone’s brain as a result of any assembly line shift in any factory no matter how “large”.
Secondly, if this immediacy of the political within the economic is an attribute only of the workers specifically in the large factories what becomes of Tronti’s prior observations reducing the social whole into a homogeneous binary of labor and capital? If we are to take this most recent observation seriously and recall that in Italy of the Sixties not everyone had the “privilege” of working in a large factory and thereby effortlessly avoiding spontaneity, we can only assume that Tronti has contradicted himself and these workers can hardly afford to represent only their own particular interest if they intend to challenge the power of capital. Perhaps it is best to understand that Tronti enjoys nothing more than the sacrifice of substance to style and leave it at that. And with this we can write the obituary of the left of the Sixty Eighter generation and its sorry epigones.