The new barbarians

Re-reading "The Strategy of Refusal," the verve, confidence, and daring of Tronti's formulations are striking.  What's established, then, in this and other early examples of Italian operaismo, is a style of intellectual engagement: brash, iconoclastic, sweeping, taking no prisoners. 

This is a style of writing that aspires to separate itself radically from all intellectual production hitherto, indeed from intellectuality as it has been traditionally conceived tout court.  No more "organic intellectuals" of the Gramscian inheritance; these are but parasites of the Communist party and the labour movement (16). 

So what Tronti proposes is no less than a revolution within theory, in which culture and mediation are brusquely rejected:

Antihumanism, irrationalism, anti-historicism, instead of being practical weapons in the hands of the working class struggle, become cultural products in the hands of capitalist ideologies.  In this way, culture--not because of the particular contents that it takes on in a particular period, but precisely through its ongoing form, as culture--becomes a mediation of the social relation of capitalism, a function of its continued conservation.

[. . .]

A critique of culture means to refuse to be intellectuals.  Theory of revolution means direct practice of the class struggle.  It is the same relationship as that between ideology and working class science; and as that between these two combined and the moment of subversive praxis.  (16)

This style will be maintained throughout the following decade, and can still be seen in Negri's work today.  Empire, for instance, is a book with an unusually high quotient of exclamation marks.  The first lesson of operaismo, then: write as if you had no doubts.

At the same time, the echoes or foreshadowings of Althusser visible in the quotation above--theory as both class struggle and science, for instance--demonstrate that style alone cannot insulate a writer from the fate of party parasitism.  It is then no great surprise that Tronti should later himself join the Communist party, to become again one of its organic intellectuals, if perhaps one with a somewhat more strident tone.

But the critique being absolute--a plague on all of culture!--then the terrain is cleared, second, for theory to become affirmation.  And what is affirmed is the power and autonomy of the working class, in and for itself, beyond and in the teeth of all attempts, political or intellectual, at its representation.

For the break constituted through the strategy of refusal

presupposes the existence of a political force of the working class, organized per se, and able to constitute an autonomous power of decision in relation to the whole of society, a No Man's Land where capitalist order cannot reach, and from which the new barbarians of the proletariat can embark at any moment.  Thus the final act of the revolution requires that there should already be the workers' state within capitalist society--the workers having power in their own right and deciding the end of capital.  (20)

This radical affirmation of autonomy, an autonomy available hic et nunc and proclaimed with ardent enthusiasm, becomes the core of what will later be known as the theory of autonomia, enables the productive encounter with schizoanalysis in Paris, and can also be traced in the contemporary post-autonomista work of Negri and others.

[Apologies for my delay.  The above is at least a placeholder to kick the Tronti fest off.  I hope to write another, more developed, post later this week.]