What in the hell …

Class and Party is another essay by Tronti, that Alex translated for the reading Tronti blog (which sadly stalled out, and which sadly a large group of people said they were interested in but only three of us ever participated in; I should copy all my Tronti notes from there to here and start reading the Tronti book in Spanish again).

Tronti’s essay begins with an urgent assertion: “The search for a new strategy for the class struggle in advanced capitalism is the order of the day. The urgency to arrive at a general perspective on this terrain prevails in the movement with the power of great historic necessities. This immense work will be collective or it will not be; it will either arrive immediately to know how to move near the social mass of workers, or it will remain blocked, it will stagnate and regress. There is no autonomous development of theoretical discoveries that is separate of their organizational practices.”

The last sentence is an important reminder for those of us who work in universities against the idea that simple theoretical innovation – achieved alone and for a living – is a politically important activity.

Tronti then lays out a distinction between economic struggle and political struggle, a distinction which Tronti claims Lenin thought to bridge practically and which after Lenin became a division causing failure on both sides, organizationally speaking: “a union that finds itself having to manage the concrete forms of the class struggle without even being able even to evoke their political potential, and a party that exhausts itself talking about this political opening without the least reference, or the least link with the concrete forms of the class struggle.”

Tronti’s solution is to abolish the distinction altogether. It’s not clear what this means, however, given that for Tronti or Tronti’s Lenin the political struggle was for the expansion of freedoms against the state. Tronti appeals to a periodization of “advanced” “social capital’ in which we see “of integration processes on the grandest scale between the state and society, between the political stratum of the bourgeois and the social class of the capitalists, between the institutional cogs of power and the cogs of production regarding profit,” a claim I simply don’t understand. Does this refer to sort of Keynsian policy? Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s important, but… how is this different from earlier eras? Maybe I have the years involved in the stage wrong – in Lenin In England the epoch Tronti referred to began in 1848 or earlier, so maybe he has something similar in mind here. At any case, for Tronti at this stage “all labour struggle that limits itself voluntarily to the economic terrain ends up coinciding with the most reformist politics.” If this means “pure and simple” unionism of the early AFL type, then sure, definitely, though the AFL also pursued some political agenda in the sense of legislation. In any case, the criticism of labor struggles which limit themselves to the economic seems to preserve the economic/political distinction that Tronti wants to abolish. (On this distinction, see Serigo Bologna’s essay on workers councils, section 2.)

Tronti writes that “In modern capitalism, the political struggle from the workers’ viewpoint is the one that aims consciously to put in crisis capitalist development in its economic mechanisms.” Sounds great, but what does it mean? It’s hard not to read “political” here as an honorific. And how does this work where the conscious aim is the test? Surely the aim alone is insufficient – it can’t be enough just to want it, surely there has to be some element of practical efficacy, yeah? And why isn’t practical efficacy sufficient? Why does it have to be a conscious aim to destroy capitalism? (I actually agree with Tronti but he hasn’t given an argument here and I wish he would because I don’t really have one either, so much as a gut feeling.)

Tronti writes that “what interests us today, is to place in the foreground an element that we have only slightly taken into account so far: that of the subjective conscience, internal and essential part of the very concept of political struggle, and constitutive of all active intervention by the revolutionary subjectivity, in so far as it has as its result organization. And in fact, it is within this definition of the political content of the class struggle that one will discover the irreplaceable function of the party, that the party will be reaffirmed and that it will impose itself again.”
A goal of this consciousness will be “preceding the movements of capital,” to anticipate what capitalists will do, presumably so as to already have a proletarian response planned. This can happen “only by a subjective, conscious intervention,” specifically by the party. The party’s practice is to “to measure, to control, to manage and thus to organize the political growth of the working class by forcing it to pass through a chain of clashes at different levels and on various occasions, until the one where it is necessary to take the decision to break the chain, to reverse the relations between the classes and to break the state apparatus.” I like some of this very much, but not the controlling part. This is part of the struggle-as-training-of-the-class sensibility I mentioned in my last post.
As Tronti writes, this is a matter of a new relationship “between spontaneity and organization.” (New how, though? Again my pet peeve about claims to epochs and novelty – I see this sensibility as present in the early IWW, for instance, so it’s not all that new by the time Tronti is writing, though perhaps it might become newly hegemonic [again?] in the working class movement.) Though maybe I misunderstand the point. Tronti writes that the old relationship between the two “rested on the illusion that it is enough to know capital in order to know the working class.” That is and clearly always has been a mistake, hence the “illusion.”
The project is still that of organization, and “a correct relationship between class and party supposes initially on behalf of the party a scientific knowledge of the material, objective, spontaneous movements of the working class.” I don’t like this one bit, “the party presents itself as the theoretical organ of the class, as the collective brain which has in itself the material reality of the class, of its movements, its development and its objectives,” though Tronti’s description of the activities of the party leadership sounds somewhat reasonable to me: engaging with workers about their experiences and struggles to help create more clarity and pose decisions, and to work on implementing these decisions effectively.
“The function of the party intellectual is definitively finished: as “a cultivated man” he does not have a place in the working class party. A science of the social relations separated from the practical capacity to overthrow them is no longer really possible if it ever was. And consequently a correct relationship between class and party, supposes in the second place precisely this practical capacity to plan [prevoir], to guide [diriger] the class movements in the historically given situations: not only to know the laws of action, but to be able to act concretely because one possesses intimately what can be called the theory and the practice of the law of tactics. In this sense the party is not only the scientific vehicle of strategy, it is equally the practical organization of its tactical application. The working class spontaneously possesses the strategy of its own movements and its development; the party has but to collect it, express it and organize it.”

I don’t understand what Tronti means by “the true tactical moment,” which he thinks the working class lacks utterly. This ties in to Tronti’s Leninism. “[A]ll the employers’ attacks that were not punished by the response of the working class that they deserved are due and are due only to one factor: the ignorance that only the party had and has the ability to isolate in order to seize the given moment where the confrontation of the classes becomes and can be made into social revolution.” ??

This bit sounds like humility on the part of the partisans of parties:

“No party will ever succeed to express, in its entirety, the incomparable wealth of the experiences of struggle that are lived at the level of the class as a class in itself. [la classes en tant que telle] The party must continually aim to understand within itself the global reality of the working class while planning and guiding its movements, all the while knowing from the start, that between its own margins of subjective action and the pressure that is exercised on it by its base as a whole, constraining its ability to act, there will always be a gap in the end.”

But it could just as easily be an excuse for the party being ignorant of and out of touch with the working class. Something like this, maybe: ‘Oh, a gap between party and class? Well you comrade, there is always a gap…’

Tronti refers to professional revolutionaries as party leadership. He also refers t o working class leaders and revolutionary leaders. In the context of the essay these sound like he means them synonymously, but presumably the professional revolutionary - if professional in the sense of employment - is not longer in the working class. This person may be a working class leader in that they lead the class, or be a working class leader in terms of cultural sensibility - coming from a working class background - but they are no longer of the working class in the sense of being a producer of surplus value.

I like this very much: “we feel all the urgency to dig deeply the mine of historic research that will explain what has happened during these decades in the workers’ movement.”

This I don’t like so much: “We want deliberately to undervalue the internal institutional problems to the party, as well as its organisational structures: These are the easiest problems to resolve and they will resolve themselves in time. It is the new course that imposes a new organization and not the opposite.”

That’s fine for the moment of the piece’s writing, but my feeling is that in the present there’s too much movement-ism and not enough organization, such that institutional and structural issues are really underdeveloped right now. I also think there may be a sense in which Tronti is invoking present objective changes (such as “advanced capitalism”) to justify a subjective and political change.

This makes sense: “it it is in the factory that must be born the political relationship between class and party (…) And it is towards the factory, on this decisive terrain, that the political mechanisms of the revolutionary process must return in order to progress.”

This reminds me of the Sojourner Truth Organization and of the bits of Gramsci I’ve read on unions and councils:

“the reduction of the union to a party, or rather of the class union to a class party, will constitute maybe the first scientific formulation of the workers’ party in advanced capitalism. At this stage, the union will be reduced more and more to a defensive function of the conservation and of the development of the material and economical value of social labour power, while the growth of the party will have to be made more and more in the direction of an offensive weapon of the political interest of the workers against the system of capital, and that serves to attack it.”

“The goal still remains consequently to lay the foundation of a revolutionary process by advancing the objective conditions and by beginning to organize the subjective forces.”

Presumably the change in objective conditions (in a positive sense for the working class) requires precisely subjective organization.

Tronti polemicizes against the parliamentarian approach of the Italian Communist Party:
“It is too easy to say today: the design failed. The truth is that it could not have succeed. Capitalism does not allow those that speak in the name of the class enemy to do these kinds of things.

Interestingly, Tronti writes that “it is necessary to resume, at this point, the analysis of the current phase of this social reality,” which while I agree suggests that Tronti’s own work is simply a preliminary.

This also sounds to me like the STO:
“When the official workers movement of a capitalist country displays in its entirety openly social democratic positions, it is necessary to possess an alternative organization ready to take over its role: that is to be able to pull behind it right away the political majority of the working class (…) if this condition is not met revolutionary perspectives are closed off for a long period.”

Tronti writes:
“Today as during other historic periods, the struggle inside the worker movement represents an essential part and a basic moment of the class struggle in general. To ignore it, we lose the complexity, the knowledge, the control of the class struggle against capital and, thus, the possibility to act.”

I agree, I think, but it’s not clear: does this mean struggle inside the official labor movement or does this mean struggle independent of the official labor movement? Both? Tronti writes of “preventing the process of the explicit social democratization of the Communist party” so I assume he means struggle inside the official institutions.

Tronti writes that “the idea according to which all will only be able to be resolved on a world-wide and generic scale and in terms of revolution or integration (…) is an intellectual bias among so many others to rid themselves of concrete moments of the true class struggle.” That seems right toe me. He continues, that “no powerful idea today [idée-force] seems to us to have the ongoing importance of the Leninist thesis according to which the chain of capitalism will break at a point and that tries to focus and to resolve the various problems of organization and of direction on this essential objective.” The transition from the first - use of a correct point in an opportunistic way so as to not participate in class struggle - to the second - the need to focus on key (that is, potentially crisis-inducing) locations - is not actually argued or established. The second is not the only conclusion one might draw from the first.

This seems false to me in that (and is annoying in that) periodizing way that bugs me a lot in Negri et al - “It is only today that a revolutionary rupture at the national level begins to really have the possibility to become generalized in chain at the international level.” The spread of the Haitian uprising among slaves back in the day seems like only one argument against this view.

Yes: “No theoretical discourse, no political alternative that remains at the stage of a program will be able to have this impact, this value as a model [valuer de modele], this role of brutal practical proposition that currently constitutes the necessary minimum in the most advanced capitalism needed to break the de-facto truce [treve de fait] that exists between the workers’ revolution and the development of capital.”

And this also seems to me absolutely correct: “it is necessary to correct the Leninist thesis on a point. We will put less emphasis today on the inequalities of capitalist economic development than on the inequalities of the political development of the working class: this in order to accept the neo-Leninist principle according to which the chain will not break where capital is weakest but where the working class is strongest. It is very necessary get this in our minds– and this is not easy to do – that there is no mechanical coincidence between the level of capitalist development and of the development of the working class. Once more the practice of struggle reveals itself richer than all the wealth that the worker thought [pensee ouvriere] has accumulated thus far.”

Except that the term “workers’ thought” has the same ambiguity as revolutionary/working class leader in relation to professional revolutionaries that I discussed above. Is this the thought of the labor movement? Revolutionary thought? The thoughts of workers?