Long Sunday

Five theses on Tronti

(The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, author of the weblog Life during wartime.)

What is important about ‘The Strategy of Refusal’ is the strategy of refusal. This is its Copernican revolution, its exception. The rest is noise.

[O]nly afterwards, after a long-terrible, historical travail which is, perhaps, not yet completed, do the workers arrive at the point of being actively, subjectively, ‘a class against capital’.  A prerequisite of this process of transition is political organisation, the party, with its demand for total power.  In the intervening period there is the refusal - collective, mass, expressed in passive forms - of the workers to expose themselves as ‘a class against capital’ without that organisation of their own, without that total demand for power.

Refusal is the strategy of ‘the intervening period’, the hinc et nunc, the long Sunday.  Is it any accident that Tronti reminds us in La politica al tramonto that Kafka was born in Prague the same year Marx died in London?

Strategy of Refusal of Strategy

(The following is a guest post by Stephen Squibb, author of the weblog fugitive ethical.)

What is being refused in Tronti’s “The Strategy of The Refusal”?

"What is generally known as class consciousness is, for us, nothing other that the moment of organization, the function of the party, the problem of tactics – the channels which must carry the strategic plane through to a point of practical breakthrough. And at the level of pure strategy there is no doubt that this point is provided by the very advanced moment in which this hypothesis of struggle becomes reality: the working class refusal to present demands to capital… in the final event, this means depriving capital of its content, of the class relationship which is its basis."

Putting aside the specifics of Tronti’s account of class consciousness for a moment, it is certainly evident that this is a departure from the traditional understanding of the term. But this should not surprise us; Tronti warns at the outset that it might be worthwhile "to confound Hegel's dialectic a bit," by asserting that the working class is a class for itself before it is a class against capital. He is clear that this is a departure not simply from Hegel, but from Marx as well.

Notes on “The Strategy of the Refusal”

(The following is a guest post by Nate Hawthorne, author of the weblog What in the hell...)

Thanks very much to Angela for being the impetus behind getting this Tronti symposium going.  I'm enjoying it a great deal.  In what follows I deal with a few issues that I am concerned over in relation to a few different thinkers and within Marxism generally.  Some of this may well repeat things I have said elsewhere.  (One of the prices of friendship is that one sometimes runs out of interesting things to say, or simply forgets what one has said to whom, and so one repeats oneself to one's friends.  If this is so here, I apologize, and apologize as well for the length of this post.  I hope that at least in this instance affection beats boredom in the interpersonal emotional game of rock-paper-scissors.)  There are also many other things I wish I could address, and which are I think related to the concerns I deal with here.  I can't do so here due to limits of time, length and ability, and so relegate these matters to future conversation, reading, and discussion.  There's also a great deal in Tronti that I like very much.  I don't spend much time on it here because I'm trying to work out other problems with what I like less.

Tronti begins “The Strategy of the Refusal” with a gesture common in Marxism, that of positing the uniqueness of capitalism:  “the effective development of the productive power of labour begins when labour is transformed into wage labour, that is, when the conditions of labour confront it in the form of capital.”  I take 'effective development' to mean something like 'increase of.'  I'm not entirely sure what Tronti means by 'productive' when he says that labor becomes more productive under capitalism.  Since I didn't understand it, and since I don't like not understsanding things and tend to dismiss that which I don't like, I at first thought this was something I could just leave out in my selective read of the piece.  I no longer think that's the case.

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:

2 Questions on Tronti

This symposium has been my first exposure to Tronti. I've benefitted from the posts and comments that have appeared thus far.

Most interesting to me is Tronti's insistence on the party, on a form for political action that corresponds to mass passivity at the level of production. On the one hand, refusal (passivity) is necessary to deprive capital of what it needs to control. On the other, the constitution of the party as a political actor is necessary in order to break the hold of the capitalist state. The party then is another space, a political alternative, a new site which does not issue demands but which receives or responds to those of capitalists. So, it seems as if his strategy involves an economic and a political logic, one that separates productivity from struggles and claims, and that establishes a specific task fitting for each.

All I can add at this point are two questions.

Minor refusals

(The following is a guest post by Eric Beck, author of the weblog Recording Surface.)

Deleuze says somewhere that the beginning and the end are merely points, that it's the middle that is truly interesting. So it is for Tronti, who almost despite himself affirms that in the struggle against capital the action takes place in the center. For Tronti, the middle is the place of the refusal, nestled between the beginning, the workers as a "class for itself," and the end, the workers as a party demanding "total power." Near the end of "The Strategy of the Refusal," even as he insists that we must move beyond passivity and noncollaboration and as he avows his teleological commitment to the party form, Tronti reiterates that the struggle should be based on "the working class refusal to present demands to capital, the total rejection of the whole trade union terrain, the refusal to limit the class relationship within a formal, legal, contractual form."

So even in his invocation of an end, Tronti returns to the middle, the site where the working class rejects not only the commands of capital but also the institutional imperatives of official labor movements, the cultural authority of working-class intellectuals, and the state, which seeks to reduce the working class to juridical and democratic, i.e., nonpolitical, citizen-subjects. Tronti hints at, but doesn't detail, the ways in which the middle offers the working class fecund ground for creating a politics that gives voice to its refusals. The working class shares the cramped spaces of the middle with other political minorities, women, ethnic and racial minorities, migrants, the disabled. These minorities establish revolutionary connections and create revolutionary becomings in the autonomous space they share, and these minoritarian connections and becomings are responsible for demands that capital cannot tolerate:

The first demands made by proletarians in their own right, the moment that they cannot be absorbed by the capitalist, function objectively as forms of refusal which put the system in jeopardy. Whenever the positive demands of workers go beyond the margins that the capitalist is able to grant, once again they repeat this function--the objective, negative function of pure and simple political blockage in the mechanism of the economic laws. [...] In such circumstances, the demand as a refusal sets off a chain of crises in capitalist production, each of which requires the tactical capacity to make a leap forward in the level of working class organisation.

Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet

(The following is a guest post by Roger Gathman, author of the weblog Limited, Inc.)

What would one have said, in 1976, about Tronti’s essay and the future it forecast? Here is my tendentious and unfair opinion: one of the things one could have forecast is that, as the privileged site of production became less and less like a nineteenth century factory, the term 'factory' would experience a metaphorical creep. And that this creep would disguise the increasing blurring of the analytic distinction between production and consumption, and thus miss what distinguishes the Keynesian period from its predecessors.

Let’s illustrate this with a little story. When Tonti writes: “… capital reach[ing] a high level of development it no longer limits itself to guaranteeing collaboration of the workers - i.e. the active extraction of living labour within the dead mechanism of its stabilisation - some-thing which it so badly needs. At significant points it now makes a transition, to the point of expressing its objective needs through the subjective demands of the workers, ” I imagine he was not thinking of the embodiment of that demand in union pensions. But, indeed, in the forties, fifties, sixties and the seventies, a lot of money flowed into union pensions (I am talking about the U.S.), and that money did a lot of things. I’m not talking about the most colorful things, like the way Teamster pension funds built Las Vegas. I’m talking about your standard pension investments in equities in general. In the eighties, those funds – to the disappointment of the new breed of body snatching Randians, eager to take down the traditional enterprise structures and replace them with a new structure dedicated to the proposition that an enterprise is an aphid, and the upper management is a super-ant – were mobilized by the traditional managers of capitalist enterprises against the LBO merchants. Schwab and Thomas, in a review of Union pension investment patterns published in Michigan Law Review, Feb 98, were much more prescient about labor and its place in influencing the internal composition of the capitalist enterprise than Tronti was in 1976:

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). 

Refusal

[via]

And, of course, a reminder of the upcoming symposium on Mario Tronti's "The Strategy of the Refusal". The schedule of contributions is as follows: Monday 20th: Jon Beasley-Murray | Tuesday 21st: Eric Beck, Roger Gathman | Wednesday 22nd: Jodi Dean, Steven Squibb | Thursday 23rd: Nate Hawthorne, Geo | Friday 24th:  Brett Neilson, Doug Johnson | Saturday 25th: Craig McFarlane, Brian Lamb | Sunday 26th: Keith Tilford, Angela Mitropoulos.

The Strategy of the Refusal

Mario Tronti's work formed something of a pivot in the development of communist politics in Italy, and informed many of the premises, or at least touchstones, that would become more familiar to English-language readers through the work of Toni Negri, Paolo Virno, Silvia Federici and others (such as Midnight Notes in the US), and as it inspired a subsequent lexicon of exodus, desertion, lines of flight and autonomy. Tronti's signature text is Operai e Capitale, a compilation of essays written in the mid-1960s, some of which have been translated into English (see below). [The entire book has been translated into Spanish and French, and parts in German, as far as I know.]

The concept most closely associated with Tronti is that of 'refusal'. In his analyses of the character of class struggles in the 1960s, there was, he argued, a global pattern of struggle which took the form of a refusal, of the struggle against work, of absenteeism, widespread non-co-operation and the desertion of traditional forms of working class representation.  He argued, among other things, that it is the refusal which induces the composition and strategies of capital and, more controversially perhaps, in order "to struggle against capital the working class must struggle against itself insofar as it is capital".

There is much more that could be said here, much that might complicate such a perspective, elaborate on it, contend with it. But this is only a brief introduction for the purposes of announcing a reading of Tronti's "The Strategy of the Refusal", symposium-style.