Like Capital one hundred years before it, Mario Tronti’s Operai e capitale has served as a bible for generations of militants. From Silvia Federici and Toni Negri’s iterations on the theme of operaismo to John Holloway making the primordial ‘scream of negation’ his own, and Harry Cleaver’s authorship of the extraordinarily useful, Reading Capital Politically, the line continues into the present. “Within and Against” is everywhere if one knows how to look.
Just as Tronti wanted to engage with Marx in his own time, I have approached Operai e capitale on the basis of capitalism today. This is no easy task for an academic. As old autonomista Sergio Bologna says, Tronti does not ‘belong to the hoity toity’; in the academy one is continually wondering whether they are for or against the hoity-toity. Meanwhile the 2019 Verso translation by David Broder is eager for you to know that you have in your hands, “THE CLASSIC TEXT OF ITALIAN WORKERISM”. You are encouraged by the cast of names that adorn the cover: ‘a fascinating, foundational text’ (Michael Hardt), ‘a fundamental work’ (Mike Davis), ‘one of the most original and influential theoreticians’ (Fredric Jameson). You are assured that this is not merely ‘an artefact of the intense political conflicts of the 1960s’.
The difficulty is that as Steve Wright’s foreword makes clear, grasping one’s time in thought was precisely Tronti’s objective. He did not seek to write a perennial work. ‘Ongoing research’, is how he describes the text, ‘though caught at a decisive moment of transition’. That transition was the ‘war of the twentieth-century’ in its totality, the working-class ‘since Marx’ (276). Before that, it was the empirical landscape first charted by the red sociologists of Quaderni Rossi, the immense Fiat plants coming online in Northern Italy where shopfloor struggles advanced through sabotage and disruption without finding any political expression in the ‘reformist political sludge’ of Togliatti’s PCI. Rapid industrial take-off had become the order of the day. All organised parties were committed to participating in the permanent banquet of surging economic growth.
It was this transition that shaped operaismo, the Copernican revolution in theory: first, working-class struggle, then capitalist development. Whether this last phrase represents an advance of immense proportions or an artefact of a lost conjuncture has been the subject of debate within the Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Past & Present Reading Group. Following our collective discussion, the task of this blog is to see what can be salvaged from Operai e capitale, a book condemned to the failures of the last century.
Tronti is especially fond of Marx’s chapter on the working day. One might say that it contains Operaismo in germ form. From the concentration of vogelfreie Proletarier in the factory, the civil war over hours and the state’s imposition of social peace, Tronti fastens onto the moment where these struggles are transformed into the process whereby industrial capital begins to produce relative-surplus value. Rather than reading Capital as ‘a book about unemployment’ or the universality of the ‘amputated proletarian body’, capitalist development is grasped as the production of an autonomous class subject proper to specifically capitalist society and immanent to the class-relation: the mass worker of industrial capital.
The mass worker finds their home in the mass society, or what Tronti will call the social factory. Arguably, this is simply a redescription of what Raniero Panzieri called “neocapitalism” (borrowed in turn from Friedrich Pollock). It named an unprecedented internalisation of capitalist reproduction by the integrating powers of the Fordist state, apprehended in the purported shift from anarchy to planning: “the plan of capital” presided over by the complex of state managers, science, monopolies, finance, unions, and working-class parties. Together, they also articulated the newly democratic regime that had been welded to the social form. In so far as political enfranchisement quickly gave way to Keynesianism, Tronti sought to comprehend the basis of the post-war settlement in terms of class composition, the subjective demands of the workers, the development of their needs, all spurring the reproduction of capitalism as a whole on a higher footing.
Operai e capitale’s most striking claim about the social factory is its organic emergence from the antagonism of the class-relation. ‘The working-class struggle’, he writes, ‘had thus imposed capital’s own interest upon it; that is, capital had imposed its own interest on itself via the mediation of the working-class struggle’ (208). In fighting for their own reproduction, their own purposive existence, the dominated had compelled the mediation of the capitalist as social capital. Going against the Gramscian ‘national-popular’, society itself is assumed to be the form of appearance assumed by capital as a ‘general social power’ in its unmediated immediacy, the particularity of the social factory dissolving into mystified generality (329, 48).
At the highest level of capitalist development, this social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society becomes an articulation of production, the whole society lives in function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over the whole society (26).
Social capital wears society like a glove. The later Tronti will come to critique the sovereigntist metaphysics of democracy, but chapters like “Factory and Society” already evince a powerful hostility to the abstractly universal. To this, he counterposes refusal. The general interest, the generality of science, the cult of man, pluralism, and democratic planning; all are rejected in the name of the class as ‘antisocial revolutionary force’ (60-1).
Even if it takes its phenomenological shape in the sheer facticity of class hatred, this is a philosophical postulate: the particularity that abolishes itself in realisation. Bourgeois science, by contrast, must subsume the whole without remainder, confusing ideology for reality, social capital for society, and so forth. Class hatred is also practical. The preceding genealogy of the mass-worker leads up to the explanation of how class composition can become the most potent of weapons within the heart of capital:
The workers as a class find themselves within capital and must fight it from within, whereas the class of capitalists is only counterposed to the workers and can strike it en bloc from without. This, which has been the working class’s greatest point of weakness, should instead become the greatest sign of its power (138).
These efforts could not attain a unitary basis on the side of society. Think back to the wildcat strikes at Fiat. Political power within production gives it the necessary partiality needed to obtain ‘power of decision over the movements of capital’, and Tronti is above all, a theorist of working-class political power (xxxiii). Because social capital had developed to cohere the capitalist class within a formal state apparatus as a political subject—an apparatus reproduced and articulated by the workers themselves—he believed it was especially vulnerable at the moment of valorisation. The capitalist factory can become the workers’ fortress. When work has become absolutely objective, so sensuously denuded, the workplace is nothing more than the agora in which rebellious subjectivities can test themselves. The class power can be assured of the fact it will always be reproduced as a latent political subject, as a class ‘even in the absence of the party’ (249).
Tronti is optimistic but he is always clear that revolution is never automatic. Organisation is his mantra. ‘Class consciousness’, he writes, ‘is, for us, nothing other than the moment of organisation, the function of the party, the problem of tactics’ (260). This is quite distinct from the old Przeworski line I was brought up on, that ‘struggle about class precedes eventual struggle between classes’. While Tronti was certainly aware of recomposition and the restructuring of the labour process—consider his 1962 report on the strike at Fiat—it is always presumed that antisociality is plastic and productive of further movement. Indeed, the factory is always figured as the home from which militants would sally out to conquer the PCI, arguably the principal objective of Tronti’s politics in the 1960s.
Working class power is always understood in Operai e capitale through the name of Lenin; that is to say, through the working-class party. The idea of the “party in the factory” is the fulcrum on which the restructured relationship between tactics and strategy turns. The immediate task of the movement would be to prevent the PCI’s assent to ‘the political stabilisation of capitalism in Italy’ but subsequently with its base in production, the party could ‘head off to take hold of the whole society’ if not all of Europe (98, 94). Their potential strength, the working-class No! has a dual aspect: refusal in the mass strike and in the prospect of political non-collaboration, ‘political refusal of capital and production of capital as an economic power’ (256). In Tronti’s hands, dual power becomes a practical and theoretical movement, a flexible way of thinking working-class organisation precisely because of its non-identity.
Tronti is at his most exciting and inventive when he sticks to a concrete situation. Bringing to bear his Lukácsian inheritance upon the historical transition, radicalizing the aporia of reification and antagonism in order to grasp the determinate opening of struggles. One aporia reflects another: ‘the passion of belonging’ and ‘the calculus of possibilities’ (330). Tronti is never disinterested. The analysis of the historical process, the assessment of objective elements—what Andrew Anastasi calls ‘his most precious contribution to Marxism’ in thinking the ‘relationship between strategy and tactics’—all of this begins from fidelity to the working-class standpoint.
Tronti sought a ‘living unity’ in research, theory, and practice: the ‘cold logic of reason’, ‘moved by class hatred’ (240). Such a stance can be alarming. Tronti, it was said, nurses a politics of despair. His optimism inverts into the nightmare of general subsumption. And they would be correct. Life after the catastrophe was a time of testing and theology for the later Tronti, a divine comedy. Not for nothing was Operai e capitale condemned ‘with horror and fear’ by the cultural magazine of the PCI.
Even so. As someone who had the misfortune to pass through Kierkegaard, Schmitt, Weber, Heidegger, and Musil before ever encountering Marx—all names that Tronti was partial to, “Ratzingerian Marxist” that he was—I find it difficult to criticise the author of lines like, ‘the insurrection as a work of art only now turns into a science of revolution’ (60). One might say: come for the strategy, stay for the ‘chiselled’ writing:
Strong thought requires strong writing. A sense of the grandeur of the conflict awoke in us a passion for the Nietzschean style: to speak in a noble register, in the name of those beneath (328)
To speak in a noble register, in the name of those beneath. Tronti was a politician. He was also from the very beginning, a cultural revolutionary taking up arms for ‘the revolution in forms’, ‘a matter of restoring, or perhaps implanting, a postproletarian aristocracy of the people’ (333, 340). The grandeur of the conflict. The decisive moment of transition. I find this combination to be interesting. Matteo Mandarini has argued that in Operai e capitale ‘Marx is supplemented with Nietzsche’. That is certainly correct. You see it in the high style and the disdain for the moral, even the great reversal, ‘the will organised as a ruling class’ (xxv). I would instead suggest that what unites the politician and the cultural militant is the name of Max Weber. It bursts forth in the profound ambivalence towards bourgeois modernity. Tronti tells us himself that Operaismo was ‘Weberian methodology mixed with the politics of Marxist analysis’ though he would hardly be the first to attempt that synthesis (332).
Tronti’s entire conception of politics is Weberian: ‘will, decision, organisation, conflict’ (333). ‘Politics as Vocation’ is its red thread. It shapes his sense of Lenin as the politician of both conviction and responsibility, the genius who grasped the art of politics unconsciously as Machtinstinkt, in its ‘objective functioning’ (293). Already present in Lukács, the Bolshevik’s here I stand, I can do no other collapses into the ongoing struggle of the subject-object to become the answer to the riddle of history, thereby avoiding the schism of value agnosticism and the necessity of defending bourgeois totality.
The difficulty is that Tronti, at least in his later years, seems to conceive of Operaismo as a disavowed voluntarism, a conviction that could never quite be reconciled with political responsibility. Being an operaisti ‘of a communist kind’ among the intellectuals of Quaderni Rossi, he writes, was ‘perhaps my personal issue’, ‘my truth’ (327, 329). An impossible profession, and yet, no complete Lutheran. Tronti’s agony was to commit himself to reformation without ever renouncing the Church. As he mused in retrospect, ‘the idea of ‘inside and against’, ‘was unable to take root in flesh-and blood individuals’; ‘the relish for intellectual adventure and the exercise of political responsibility’ could not be made compatible (346, 340). The thorn would impel him from Operaismo to the later experiment with parliamentarianism, the dabbling with Schmitt and Tocqueville. “Political mysticism”.
Gillian Rose writes that the gap between theory and practice ‘strain towards each other’. How Tronti inhabited this aporia in all its evident anxiety is simultaneously his strength and his weakness. ‘To be at peace with oneself’, he wrote in later life, ‘is to go to war against the world’. Tronti presents himself in Operai e capitale at all times as a militant, as a man animated with the passion of communism. That was his lot. Does the search for foundations redound in the theory itself? I would argue that if Weber has been criticized for constructing a dualism between the unmeaning of History and charismatic politics while not so secretly finding a mediating third in the eternal nation, Tronti arguably follows a similar logic of the fetish.
To much of the PPE group’s surprise, a considerable chunk of the classic text on Italian workerism is devoted to marxological exegesis. Purely at the level of the page, it is symptomatic of the entire project just how difficult Tronti seems to find transitioning from the ‘Marxian purification of Marxism’ and its oedipal struggle with orthodoxy to the political analysis of concrete situations, a disappointment compounded by his obvious talent for the latter (9). While he admits that he is a ‘clumsy historian of events’, it is fateful that for all of the impetus to go to the workers themselves, the analysis of forms and categories is frequently absent of the concrete or the motile (329). It is never clear, for instance, how a concept like social capital causally inheres in a given social formation. Presentation absorbs too much of ideology’s eternalising drift.
Despite its centrality, the same argument follows for the mass-worker. Because Tronti sees history at the level of the anthropological, working-class subjectivity is theorised as such. The mass worker has no Verstehen, following Lukács, being the culmination of a process whereby labour-power progressively sheds its subjective and qualitative form under the violence of abstraction, terminating as homogeneous and indifferent concrete labour. Class transforms into negative ontology only insofar as it has ceased to be understood as a dynamically historical process composing a unity of diverse aspects, which goes some ways to explaining the mystery of Tronti’s missed encounter with social reproduction—a lacuna left to be comprehensively developed by other theorists. The result is that in binding himself to the essentialism of the working-class standpoint, Tronti’s innovations in strategy and tactics are similarly bound to the historical specificities of the 1960s conjuncture: not totally, but it is enough to disorder his decision to work backwards from the anatomy of the mass-worker to the plan of capital. Moves like this leave Tronti alarmingly vulnerable.
Take the more conjunctural chapter, the later “Postscript of Problems” dated to 1970. Tronti confesses here to a fascination with that ‘hidden face of the international working-class’, the American (298). Why? Because ‘American class struggles are more serious than those in Italy precisely in that they obtain more but with less ideology’ (279). Without a revolutionary party, without extensive penetration of Marxism, working-class struggle within production had metastasised into a wage-earner’s welfare state. Here was an objective expression of Operaismo: the workers, following their particular cause, can produce the general crisis (326). Pushing for higher wages irrespective of inflation in the Vietnamised economy only accelerated this trajectory further. The same year that the “Postscript” was written saw General Motors panicking that ‘labour discipline has collapsed’; two years later, you get ‘industrial Woodstock’ at Lordstown.
Tronti did not hallucinate the potential of the “subversive seventies”. But he also misses the incipient counterrevolution, the burgeoning force of class re/decomposition, the new forms of separation and mediation underpinning the conservative counter-mass. There are hidden faces to the working-class that Tronti misses because he is not interested in capitalist strategy and the right. How do we think about the reassertion of ‘intraclass difference’? Where are the tools to destroy what Mike Davis called that ‘revolutionary element’ of the late 1970s, the political mobilisation of the middle-strata? What about the murderous swarms, the viral contagions feeding off the dreamwork that accompanies liberal civilisation’s downfall?
Nevertheless. It is hard to fault an old militant. As he writes in the marvellously summative “Our Operaismo” from 2008:
The fact is that the whole history of the first half of the twentieth-century converged on the figure of the mass-worker; only the worker-subject who emerged in that time, between 1914 and 1945, and grew up after it, could rise to the height of that history (336).
When the mass-worker goes, the aperture of practice is lost because history is lost. The proletariat is unrecognizable. ‘The attempt to change the world miscarried’. And yet, Operai e capitale itself insists: Rip it up, start again, change direction. Find the ‘flickering lamp’ of the class struggle. The party of history must traverse the morass of disorganisation, the inventiveness of barbarism, the sad passions of defeat. For some of us, these activities will transform into a living unity. For all of us, ‘Nothing is over, that is the only certainty. The other certainty is that everything ends, even this.’
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