I’ll get back to you on the tactics/strategy bit - we had a discussion of this in the reading group meeting today, I need to find my notes and type something up that.

On unions and reformism, I agree with you that this is an area where periodization is very useful, though I want to offer two qualifiers. (This reminds me, if I haven’t told this joke here before - “How many historians does it take to change a light bulb? Five. One to identify a turning point, a second to change it, a third to complicate the narrative, a fourth to sum up the state of the field, and a fifth to go back to the original lightbulb.” Something like that.) One is that this varies by country. Tronti occasionally marks that he’s talking about Italy, but only occasionally. I don’t know much about Italian industrial relations (at all, but I mean legally) but my assumption is they’re more like the UK and Canada than the US. A good friend and comrade from Canada puts it this way - the level of mediation involved in Canadian labor law makes US labor law look like a boxing match. (I’d like to write on this in a serious way some day, see if there’s some ties between a legacy of social democracy, a recuperative legal regime of industrial relations, and the role - or not - of working class autonomy in the law.) The second qualifier is that while I agree on the periodization here, this seems to me largely a matter of the disposition of the ruling class rather than much else and it’s certainly not a change at the level of technology or the labor process understood outside of power relations between workers and bosses (a la the immaterialization of labor theses).

Okay, third qualifier: I agree with you about the threat posed by workplace struggles (I could be remembering this wrong, but I have some recollection of Negri commenting on workplace struggles in Revolution Retrieved, about the political nature of socially necessary labor time and how workplace struggles are struggles to raise what counts as SNLT), but I don’t think this is a new thing either. Sergio Bologna says someplace something along the lines that workers councils in Germany had in some ways very simple and non-revolutionary demands, but they would have been fatal to capitalism at the time. Tronti at the time of this writing might respond that specifically unionist content of the struggles (I don’t know if this is an influence but I kept thinking of the little Gramsci I’ve read, where the union is the legally recognized body that compromises and defends while the council is the unmediated class war body - I find that helpful but I really want to retain ‘union’ as a term which can mean what Gramsci calls ‘councils’ - I’d say those are good unions!) insofar as union means law and contracts and so on, are precisely not or not solely workplace struggles but mechanisms for channeling unrest and preventing workplace struggles (defined as unpredictable interruptions in value production for capitalists and as radicalizing/recompositional experiences for the working class). Know what I mean? I think the key here is Tronti’s remark in the Lenin In England essay (I think that’s the one) about starting from the working class. Either Lenin or Trotsky makes some remark like this too, about strikes being schools or training grounds for revolution, changing the workers who participate in them.

On this, specifically with regard to unions, I don’t know if you’ve read this stuff but I find Staughton Lynd pretty compelling (I’ve heard him comment on the CIO in the US including labor peace as a goal in its contracts, and on the Wagner Act being explicitly geared toward maintaining labor peace and identifying labor peace as predictability of accumulation), also Stan Weir and Martin Glaberman’s criticisms of union structures and industrial relations. That’s definitely an area where periodization makes a great deal of sense - the growth and decline of business unionism in the US, and other economic trends alongside it (I would say facilitated by it - there’s a good essay or two by Stan Weir on this in Singlejack Solidarity, about how the Longshore union officials helped prepare the way for containerization, which I think could be called an important part of creating just in time production). I think it’s important to emphasize that this is a periodization in terms of political composition as primary.

Sorry if this doesn’t make sense, it’s late here. In any case, thanks for the thought provoking comment.

take care,
Nate

I will say, though, that his claims about the inherent reformism of union struggles don’t really seem to apply today (perhaps they never did). And this is where I would make a case for something like periodization being meaningful, since the struggles of workers did, effectively, amount to an impulsion to revolutionize the means of production during the Keynesian compromise. Today, I don’t see that happening. I find Robert Brenner’s (and others’) claims about stagnation in the world-economy since ‘73 compelling, and it seems like one of the upshots of this has been a sense on the part of capital that unions have got to go, ditto social services, that they had served their purpose as a way of disciplining workers and increasing productive forces. It might be arguable that workplace struggles today are, in fact, a much greater threat to capital, since it’s unclear that there’s now enough room to grow that capital can afford to spread the wealth. . .That could change, I suppose.