Despite its title, this article is not about England
as such. It marks, in 1964, one of the early points in the continuity of
political theory that reaches through our book to the most recent works of
Toni Negri (Domination
& Sabotage); it also marks an early point of the continuity of the
political pratice of the working class, in the sense that Tronti's
affirmation that "a new era in the class struggle is beginning" must
be closely related to the renewed experience of class autonomy expressed in the
events of Piazza Statuto in 1962 (see the final section of this book).
Tronti goes on to explore the
nature of this new era. His concern is to start the building of the new
revolutionary working class organisation a new area of theoretical research,
a new project for a working class newspaper.
The article was originally written
for Issue No.1 of the revolutionary newspaper Classe Operaia
("Working Class") in January 1964, and was republished in Operai e
Capitale ("Workers and Capital"), Einaudi, Turin, 1966, p.89-95,
under the heading "A New Style of Political Experiment".
A new era in the class struggle is
beginning. The workers have imposed it on the capitalists, through the violent
reality of their organised strength in the factories. Capital's power appears
to be stable and solid.... the balance of forces appears to be weighted against
the workers... and yet precisely at the points where capital's power appears
most dominant, we see how deeply it is penetrated by this menace, this threat
of the working class.
It is easy not to see it.
We shall need to study, to look long and hard at the class situation of the
working class. Capitalist society has its laws of development: economists have
invented them, governments have imposed them, and workers have suffered them.
But who will uncover the laws of development of the working class? Capital has
its history, and its historians write it but who is going to write the
history of the working class? Capitalist exploitation can impose its political
domination through a hundred and one different forms but how are we going to
sort out the form that will be taken by the future dictatorship of the workers
organised as the ruling class? This is explosive material; it is intensely
social; we must live it, work from within it, and work patiently.
We too have worked with a concept
that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake.
And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start
again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the
working class. At' the level of socially developed capital, capitalist
development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind
them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital's own
reproduction must be tuned.
This is not a rhetorical
proposition. Nor is it intended just to restore our confidence. Of course, we
urgently need to shake off that sense of working class defeat which has for
decades dragged down this movement which, in its origins, was the only
revolutionary movement of this era. But an urgent practical need is never
sufficient basis for a scientific thesis: such a thesis must stand on its own
feet, on a solid and complex grounding of material, historical fact. At that
point, our case will be proven: in June 1848 (that fateful month, a thousand
times cursed by the bourgeoisie), and possibly even earlier, the working class
took over the stage, and they have never left it since. In different periods
they have voluntarily taken on different roles as actors, as prompters, as
technicians or stage-hands whilst all the time waiting to wade into the
theatre and attack the audience. So how does the working class present itself
today, on the contemporary stage?
Our new approach starts from the
proposition that, at both national and international level, it is the specific,
present, political situation of the working class that both necessitates and
directs the given forms of capital's development. From this beginning we must
now move forward to a new understanding of the entire world network of social
relations.
For instance take the basic
material feature of this network the fact that the world market has been
undergoing reconstruction a process which we can trace back to the ending of
Stalinism' s Stranglehold over development, It would be easy to explain this in
terms that are economistic, addressing ourselves to "the problem of
markets in capitalist production". But the working class viewpoint
seeks to find a political explanation. The meaning of a unified world market today
is that it brings an international level of control of social labour
power. It is possible -albeit difficult to organise commodity production
within a limited free-trade zone. But not so the movements of the working
class. Historically, right at its origins, workers' labour power was already
homogeneous at the international level, and in the course of a long
historical period it has forced capital to become equally homogeneous. And
today it is precisely the unity of movement of the working class at the
world level which forces capital rapidly to salvage a unified response.
But when we say that there is a
unity in the movements of the international working class how are we to grasp
it? The various institutional levels of the official labour movement only
create divisions in everything; the structures of capitalism unify
everything -but only in capital's interests. An act of political struggle can't
be simply tested and measured by empirical ans. The only way to prove this
unity is to start organising it. Then we shall discover that the new forms of
class unity is wholly implicit in the new forms of working class struggle, and
that the field of this struggle is social capital at an international level.
At this level, the political
situation of the working class has never been so clear: wherever in history we
find concentrated the social mass of an industrial labour force, we can see at
a glance the same collective attitudes, the same basic practices, and the same
unified political growth. Planned non-cooperation, organised passivity,
polemical expectations, a political refusal, and a permanent continuity of
struggles these are the specific historical forms in which working class
struggle today is generalising and developing itself. They are transitory forms
of a transitory situation, in which, in social terms, the workers have already
gone beyond the old Organisations, but have not yet reached a new organisation
a vacuum of political organisation, be it reformist or revolutionary. We have
reached a period of in-between in working class history: we must examine it
deeply and grasp its implications, for its political consequences will be
decisive.
The first consequence is, not
surprisingly, a difficulty: how are we to grasp the material movements of the
class, in the absence of levels of institutions corresponding to those
movements i.e. the lack of those channels through which class consciousness
usually expresses itself? This clearly demands a greater theoretical effort
(and one more capable of making abstractions), but it also has a clearer
practical function: for we are compelled to analyse the working class
independently of the working class movement.
The second consequence is that we
find contradictions and seeming uncertainties in the movements of the class. It
is clear that if the working class had a revolutionary political organisation,
it would aim, everywhere, at making use of the highest developed point of
capitalist reformism. The process of building a unification of capital at the
international level can only become the material base for a political
recomposition of the working class (and in this sense a positive strategic
moment for the revolution) if it is accompanied by a revolutionary growth not
only of the class, but also of class organisation. If this element is absent,
the whole process works to the advantage of capital, as a tactical moment of a
one-sided stabilisation of the system, seemingly integrating the working class
within the system.
The historical workings of Italian
capitalism ie the organic political accord between Catholics and Socialists
could perhaps reopen a revolutionary process along classical lines, if it again
managed to provide Italian workers with a working class party which would be
committed to direct opposition to the capitalist system in the democratic phase
of capital's class dictatorship. Without this, the dominance of capitalist
exploitation will, for the time being, become more stable, and the workers will
be forced to seek other paths towards their revolution. Whilst it is true that
the working class objectively forces capital into clear, precise choices, it is
also true that capital then makes these choices work against the working class.
Capital, at this moment, is better organised than the working class: the
choices that the working class imposes on capital run the risk of giving
strength to capital. This gives the working class an immediate interest in
opposing these choices.
Today the strategic viewpoint of
the working class is so clear that we wonder whether it is only now coming to
the full richness of its maturity. It has discovered (or rediscovered) the true
secret, which will be the death sentence on its class enemy: the political
ability to force capital into reformism, and then to blatantly makeuse of that
reformism for the working class revolution. But the present tactical position
of the working class as a class without class organisation is, and must
necessarily be, less clear and more subtly ambiguous. The working class is
still forced to make use of contradictions which create crisis within
capitalist reformism; it has to play up the elements which hinder and retard
capitalist development, since it knows and senses that to allow a free hand for
capital's reformist operations in the absence of a political organisation of
the working class, would amount to freezing for a long period the entire
revolutionary process (and, by the same token, if such an organisation did
exist, it would open this process immediately). Thus the two reformisms that
of capital and that of the labour movement should certainly meet, but only
through a direct initiative by the working class. When as at the present
moment all the initiative is in capital's hands, the workers' immediate
interest is to keep them apart. From a tactical point of view, too, it is
correct that this meeting should take place once the working class has
experienced not only struggle, but also revolutionary struggle, and within
revolutionary struggle has also experienced alternative models of organisation.
At that point, the historic encounter of capitalist reformism with the
reformism of the labour movement will really mark the beginning of the
revolutionary process. But our present situation is different: it precedes and
paves the way for that later stage. From this follows both the workers
strategic support for capital's development in general and their
tactical opposition to the particular forms of that development. So, in the
working class today there is a contradiction between tactics and strategy.
In other words, the political
moment of tactics and the theoretical moment of strategy are in
contradiction, in a complex and very much mediated relationship between
revolutionary organisation and working class science. Today, at the theoretical
level, the workers viewpoint must be unrestricted, it must not limit itself, it
must leap (forward by transcending and negating all the empirical evidence
which the intellectual cowardice of the petty-bourgeois is forever demanding.
For working class thouht, the moment of discovery has returned. The days of
systems building, of repetition, and vulgarity elevated to the status of
systematic discourse are definitely over. What is needed now is to start again,
with rigorously one-sided class logic courage and determination for
ourselves, and detached irony towards the rest.
This is not to be confused with
the creation of a political programme; we must resist the temptation to carry
this theoretical out-look immediately into the arena of the political struggle
a struggle which is articulated on the basis of a precise content, which, in
some cases, may even contradict (quite correctly) our theoretical statements.
As regards the practical resolution of practical problems of direct struggles,
of direct organisation, of direct intervention in a given class situation where
workers are involved all these should be gauged first of all by what the
movement needs for its own development. Only secondarily should they be judged
from the viewpoint of a general perspective which subjectively imposes these
things on the class enemy.
But the separation of theory and
politics is only the consequence of the contradiction between tactics and
strategy. Both have their material base in the process (still slowly
developing) by which the class and the historical organisations of the class the
working class" and the "labour movement" first become
divided, and then come to counterpose each other. What does this mean
concretely, and where will it lead us? The first thing to say is that the goal,
the aim of this approach is the solid recomposition of a politically correct relationship
between the two moments. No separation between them can be theoretically
justified, and no counterposition can be effected at any point, not even
provisionally. If a part of the labour movement finds again the path to
revolution as signalled by the working class, then the process of unification
of these moments will be easier, quicker, more direct and more secure.
Otherwise, the revolutionary process, although nonetheless assured, will be
less clear, less decisive, longer and more full of drama. It is easy to see the
job of mystification that the old organisations are doing on the new working
class struggles. But it is harder to grasp the way that workers are
continuously, consciously making use of that institution which capital still
'believes to be the movement of the organised workers.
In particular, the working class
has left in the hands of the traditional organisations all the problems of
tactics, while maintaining for itself an autonomous strategic perspective free
from restriction and compromises. And again we have the temporary outcome, of a
revolutionary strategy and reformist tactics. Even if, as often happens, the
opposite appears to be the case. It appears that workers are now in
accord with the system, and only occasionally come into friction with it: but
this is the "bourgeois" appearance of capitalist social relations.
The truth is that, politically speaking, even the Unions' skirmishes represent
for the workers an academic exercise in their struggle for power: it is as such
that they take them on, make use of them, and once they have been made use of,
hand them back to the bosses. As a matter of fact, the classical Marxist thesis
that the Union holds the tactical moment, and the Party holds the strategic
moment still holds true for the workers. This is why, if a link still exists
between the working class and the unions, it does not exist between the working
class and the Party. It is this fact which frees the strategic perspective from
the immediate 0rganisational tasks; it splits, temporarily, class struggle and
class organisation; it splits the ongoing moment of struggle and temporary
forms of organisation all of which is the consequence of the historical
failure of Socialist reformism, as well as being a premise of the political
development of the working class revolution.
Theoretical research and practical
political work have to be dragged violently if need be into focusing on
this question: not the development of capitalism, but the development of the
revolution. We have no models. The history of past experiences serves only to
free us of those experiences. We must entrust ourselves to a new kind of
scientific interpretation. We know that the whole process of development is
materially embodied in the new level of working class struggles. Our starting
point might therefore be in uncovering certain forms of working class struggles
which set in motion a certain type of capitalist development which goes in the
direction of the revolution. Then we would consider how to articulate these
experiences within the working class, choosing subjectively the nerve points at
which it is possible to strike at capitalist production. And on this basis,
testing and re-testing, we could approach the problem of how to create a
relationship, a new and ongoing organisation which could match these struggles.
Then perhaps we would discover that "organisational miracles" are
always happening, and have always been happening, within those miraculous
struggles of the working class that nobody wants to know about but which
perhaps, all by themselves, make and have made more revolutionary history than
all the revolutions the colonised people have ever made.
But this practical work,
articulated on the basis of the factory, and then made to function throughout
the terrain of the social relations of production, this work needs to be
continually judged and mediated by a political level which can generalise it.
This is a new kind of political level, which requires us to look into and
organise a new form of working class newspaper. This would not be designed to
immediately report and reflect on all particular experiences of struggle;
rather, its task would be to concentrate these experiences into a general
political approach. In this sense, the newspaper would provide a monitoring of
the strategic validity of particular instances of struggle. The formal
procedure for carrying out such a verification would have to be turned on its
head. It is the political approach which must verify the correctness of the
particular struggles, and not vice-versa. Because, on this basis, the
political. Approach would be the total viewpoint of the working class, and
therefore the actual real situation. And it is easy to see how such an approach
takes us, away from the Leninist conception of the working class newspaper:
this was conceived as the collective organiser on the basis of, or in
anticipation of, a Bolshevik organisation of the class and of the Party. These
are impossible objectives for us at this stage of the class struggle: this is
the stage where we must embark on a discovery, not of the political
organisation of advanced vanguards, but of the political organisation of the
whole, compact social mass which the working class has become, in the period of
its high political maturity a class which, precisely because of these
character istics, is the only revolutionary force, a force which, proud and
menacing, controls the present order of things.
We know it. And Lenin knew it
before us. And before Lenin, Marx also discovered, in his own experience, how
the hardest point is the transition to organisation. The continuity of the
struggle is a simple matter: the workers only need themselves, and the bosses
facing them. But continuity of organisation is a rare and complex thing: no
sooner is organisation institutionalied into a form, than it is immediately
used by capitalism (or by the labour movement on behalf of capitalism). This
explains the fact that workers will very fast drop forms of organisation that
they have only just won. And in place of the bureaucratic void of the general
political organisation, they substitute the ongoing struggle at factory level
a struggle which takes ever-new forms which only the intellectual creativity of
productive work can discover. Unless a directly working class political
organisation can be generalised, the revolutionary process will not begin:
workers know it, and this is why you will not find them in the chapels of the
official parties singing hymns to the 'democratic' revolution. The reality of
the working class is tied firmly to the name of Karl Marx, while the need of
the working class for political Organisation is tied equally firmly to the name
of Lenin. With a masterly stroke, the Leninist 'strategy brought Marx to St
Petersburg: only the working class viewpoint could have carried out such a bold
revolutionary step. Now let us try to retrace the path, with the same
scientific spirit of adventure and political discovery. What we call
"Lenin in England" is a project to research a new Marxist practice of
the working class party: it is the theme of struggle and of organisation at the
highest level of political development of the working class.
[Please note: this text contains textual inaccuracies occurring during
transmission.]
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