Class and Subalternity

(The following is a guest post by George Ciccariello-Maher, occasional contributor to the illustrious Wrong Side of Capitalism.)

In thinking about Tronti's essay as well as other work I'm presently doing on hegemony, I found myself puzzling over a statement by Jon Beasley-Murray on the Marxist notion of class. Since Jon is joining us here, and since Tronti’s essay deals directly the questions involved, this is the ideal forum in which to raise the question. In his essay “On Posthegemony” (2003), Jon writes: “Here Marx was wrong: the history of all hitherto existing societies is less the history of class struggle than, at a still more primordial level, it is the history of the struggle to produce class.” This statement is part of a defense of the concept of the multitude as the operative concept in a posthegemonic period, and I would like to discuss briefly how Tronti responds to the same critique but does so within an understanding of class.

The radical character of Tronti’s position on class (and its fundamental proximity, I argue elsewhere, to that of Sorel) emerges most clearly in his markedly non-orthodox discussion of the class-in-itself (Klasse an Sich) versus the class-for-itself (Klasse für Sich). It is perhaps worthwhile to begin by noting that, even for Marx, the so-called “class-in-itself” cannot be reduced to pure objectivity, and we see this even in its alternative formulation as a “class against capital,” a class determined differentially vis-à-vis its enemy:

This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends becomes class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle (The Poverty of Philosophy). [This sentiment is echoed in The 18^th Brumaire as well as The German Ideology.]

Here, we see that the organic link between an oppositionally-defined class and its homogenization through struggle is already clearly present in Marx’s formulation. My point is less to defend Marx than to emphasize an ambiguity in the Marxist formulation, in which, in Jon’s words, we could see “the struggle to produce class” as intimately linked with class itself. In a passage that is so crucial as to be worth quoting at length, Tronti seizes upon this differential character of Marx’s definition to catapult himself beyond it:

Could we then say that we are still in the long historical period in which Marx saw the workers as a “class against capital,” but not yet as a class “for itself”?  Or shouldn’t we perhaps say the opposite, even if it means confounding a bit the terms of Hegel’s dialectic? That is, that the workers become, immediately, when confronted by the boss, “a class for itself”; and that they are recognized as such by the first capitalists; and it is only afterwards, after a long and difficult historical process, which is perhaps not yet completed, and which involves terrible practical experiences that are still repeated today, that the workers arrive at the point of being actively, subjectively, “a class against capital.” And there exists in this transition the need for political organization … The working class does what it is.  (Operai/Obreros, 235/245)

Put another way, “we cannot understand what the working class is if we do not see how it struggles” (Operai/Obreros, 200/209).  Contrary to many interpretations—which, no doubt, owe much to the misleading phrase “class-in-itself”—Marx’s understanding was not essentialist. A class can be said to exist in opposition, but only to constitute itself through political struggle. This existence is teleological in that it points toward the struggle, but Marx resists the temptation to define the present in terms of that teleology (by granting the “class-in-itself” political content), and he thereby neglects the strategic utility of that teleological content.

Tronti’s intervention is to tug on the ambiguity of this preliminary existence, one which—as formulated in The German Ideology—delineates class as the material effect of a “common battle” that has yet to begin. For Tronti, “from the very beginning the proletariat is nothing more than an immediate political interest in the abolition of everything existing,” and it is this political character which, from a Marxist perspective, constitutes the class-for-itself (Operai/Obreros, 241/250).  In accordance with the basic autonomist reversal which grants the working class the offensive, it is then this preliminary struggle against the individual capitalist which “produces capital…it is the organization of industrial workers into a class that provokes the capitalists in general to constitute themselves as a class” (Operai/Obreros , 236/245-246).

From here, I would like to move toward another issue raised in “The Strategy of the Refusal,” namely, the subaltern. Tronti writes, in the context of his critique of totality:

...just as the working class frees itself politically from the people at the moment when it is no longer posed as a subaltern class, so too working class science breaks with the heritage of bourgeois culture at the moment that it no longer takes the viewpoint of society as a whole, but of that part which wishes to overthrow society.  (Operai/Obreros, 245/254)

This gets at something that Jon mentions elsewhere (in the intro to Angelaki 6.1): the fact that within the framework of hegemony, the subaltern is a category of inclusion (albeit through co-optation). When the term will be taken up later, by Subaltern Studies, this becomes a situation of exclusion. But this takes place precisely through the subtractive character of the subaltern, that is, through a similar extension of Marx’s relational/oppositional understanding of class (most explicit in Spivak).

This leaves me with two questions:  firstly, is Tronti’s problem that he remains—despite his best efforts—within the framework of hegemony when he discusses the subaltern? And is this slightly surprising, given his radicalization of the Marxist notion of class? Secondly, however, can we not see a path forward—given the insights of both Tronti and Subaltern Studies—in which we need not dispense with class?  Does a rejection of objective social class lead automatically to the multitude?  Might we benefit from an analytic which brings these together, insofar as is possible, through a critique of Tronti’s (always-too-cavalier) dismissal of “Third Worldism”?