written in 1962 and published in English in 2019 by Verso
notes written in 2017 for a grad school comprehensive paper on autonomy
Beginning from the premise of labor’s primacy over capital, Tronti analyzes the labor process, class struggle, and wider society through this lens. It culminates in the strategy of refusal, to be organized by the party. Tronti begins with his key inversion of Marx: we can’t start with understanding capital as a way to understand the working class. Instead, the working class is the party with all the power, causing capital to continuously transform its methods of exploitation and to organize all of society outside the factory so that it may control labor inside it.
After the struggle for an eight hour workday ended, dead labor has been used to dominate living labor, making living labor into abstract capital, into labor-power. This causes workers’ mystification, as they see surplus value to be the self-perpetuation of capital. They are organized by capital, seeing their social relations as an external thing, as a value of capital. And as the organic composition of capital rises and workers are made to cooperate in more complex ways, they’re left with even less understanding of the valorization process (more class struggle increases organic composition, which increases mystification). This all leads to valorization occurring on capital’s terms instead of the workers’, while at the same time cooperation increasingly creating a ‘collective worker.’ Capital even extends this push to organize workers on its terms outside the factory walls, and into the organization of society. The workers’ consciousness is further colonized on their own terrain, as all of society is integrated into an expanded production process, which the states supports through its planning.
The social factory
Another main point he extrapolates from is that the social factory shows us that class struggle is within the capital-labor relation. Therefore the strategic imperative of the working class is discovering itself as part of capital. So the refusal to work is the refusal to be variable capital/labor-power. Against this, capital wishes to totally objectify workers as labor-power, to completely align their motions and reproduction with value production. At the broadest levels of strategy, the working class must remain within this contradiction, build the party within it (and specifically within the factory), and destroy the state from within the factory. And because capital is also inside this contradiction, the possibility of working class revolution increases as capital develops. The working class struggle to overcome capital causes it to react, increase the organic composition of capital, thereby increasing worker cooperation, heightening the level of the contradiction, and causing it to become socialized throughout society. Class struggle is ever-more generalized and workers have a greater capacity to emerge from the contradiction.
The strategy of refusal
Refusal means that workers must totally, hatefully, and irrationally oppose capitalist production. Only this level of opposition will counter rationalization through the integration of dead labor. They must refuse to be a bargaining partner within capitalism. They must refuse the entire class relation. And the fact that many workers already hate their jobs and don’t search for dignity there shows the working class is already a class-for-itself, but since it’s still within capital it’s not yet a class-against-capital. They’re in subjective opposition but not yet objective opposition, while Marx posited the opposite. To be against capital, workers must systematically dis-organize production. Beyond refusing to produce commodities, they must refuse to allow capital to even organize production. He describes all this against the lesser demands of trade unionism, chiefly the way unions demand better planning and therefore more perfectly integrate workers into capital. If they unite to seize the state, they end up merely managing capital. But more often they simply demand a greater share of profit, dignity in work, and that reproduction be more controlled and better planned. Or workers carry out individual, passive refusal and not collective, active refusal.
Finally, the party should no longer treat capital as primary to labor, as this orients them towards capital’s development. It must understand capital through the working class, through the factory. Only by starting here will it succeed in changing society and the state. It must create a crisis for capital by developing the class consciousness needed to do so (developing the class-against-capital). The party provides theory and its organization into tactics. Following Lenin, it must collect, express, and organize the spontaneous strategy of the working class. The revolution will only succeed when the class takes solid form through the party and the party organizes refusal to collaborate in capitalist development. The culmination of this refusal is the demand to emerge from the contradiction- the demand for all power to the workers.
Autonomy
Autonomy is a pretty limited concept for Tronti: it’s about refusing collaboration with capitalism, and eventually this refusal growing in power until it’s strong enough for labor to emerge from the labor-capital contradiction (by taking over all the factories? He doesn’t say.) So, as workers’ refusal grows, capital responds by heightening the contradiction until survival is impossible and rupture is necessary. Practically, his only indication is that this means strikes and organizing parties to organize strikes. There is nothing in terms of positive alternatives, projects, or ‘freedom to’ found here. Apart from his old-school Leninist conception of the party, this strategy also easily falls into a teleological process of ‘what’s bad for workers is actually good for them since a higher organic composition of capital means more worker cooperation and therefore more contradiction.’ He also has a very reductive understanding of society and the state: it’s all either a factory or at the service of the factory.
One point on autonomy that may be helpful is that, as capital increasingly turns society into a factory, it sells the way it has ordered society as ‘spontaneous, autonomous self-organization’ or else its coopts self-organization into reinforcing the reproduction of labor-power-as-capital. With people celebrating social media as emancipatory, it’s not hard to find examples of this happening. This is a good reminder that we shouldn’t underestimate capitalism’s ability to turn alternative forms of self-organization into it’s new lifelines, and it shows that Tronti has a point in advocating for full and absolute refusal. He highlights that we must always bear in mind that relations of production dictate our social relations. We won’t magically create non-capitalist social relations while our relations of production are still capitalist. However, the upshot for Tronti is that change and autonomy must come from the factory, and I think this is a workerist underestimation of reproduction.
Nonetheless there are aspects of his analysis to salvage. I agree we shouldn’t emphasize capital over labor in our theory and strategy, to which I would add that we shouldn’t emphasize production over reproduction. It’s also important to bear in mind that, if we really want to live without class society, we must refuse to be socially organized by capital, and this means making demands that can’t be absorbed by capitalism, that relentlessly demand an end to class society. This is what an autonomous theory of social relations is all about. While we are still being organized by capital, it’s also true that society becomes a factory- all our relations and energy get directed towards value production. And he also has a good point that capitalism is quite adept at mystifying us about this by reifying the way wealth is produced. We’re lured into seeing ourselves as mere wage earners, participants in the self-valorization of capital who get to expand our consumption and production is further mechanized. And finally, he may be right in saying that the contradiction is constantly intensifying, making the potential for worker power all the greater. I’m just so scared of nuclear war, neo-barbarism, and ecological holocaust that it reminds me that a heightened contradiction could just as easily mean civilizational collapse. And that, my friends, is why reproduction is so important.
Schools of thought
Surplus value and valorization: The traditional process of value creation is about workers becoming capital (variable capital) and the cooperation of the worker-as-labor-power being organized by capital as constant capital is imposed upon it. So the unique part of Tronti’s argument is that, not only is surplus value robbed from the worker, but making the worker into capital (with a specific form of cooperation) ensures and perpetuates this theft of surplus value. He emphasizes the relations over the specific act of exploitation. ‘Work’ is a relation that necessarily creates value to be alienated, and no amount of contract negotiation, worker dignity, or social planning will change that fundamental fact. But then Tronti only says we should refuse to participate in this, and you could take it one step further and promote production and reproduction process where workers actually do control their organization, are able to control surplus value by controlling their organization, and cooperate to create non-commodities for use. This is what Zibechi and many people studying cooperativism are excited to find in contemporary society. In the same vein as Zibechi, decolonization moves way past simple refusal in positing different social relations, relations with the land, and non-capitalist production and reproduction.
Instead of being a precursor of Zibechi or Simpson, Tronti’s workerism makes him much more an heir to Lenin, with an added understanding of the welfare state. (Lenin didn’t have an analysis of the ‘social factory,’ which is a conclusion Taylorism and Fordism led Tronti to make, as well as his denouncement of trade unionism for complimenting this Fordism with calls for better planning.) So factory workers must refuse to collaborate with capital, while capital seeks to plan, organize, and force cooperation in all aspects of their lives. He writes in very Leninist terms about revolution depending on the class (which must come from factory workers) becoming solidified through a party. Moreover, Tronti goes so far as to say that, given labor is primary in the labor-capital relation, capitalist development brings the working class closer to victory. They’re ‘within and against’ capital, so a more developed capitalism means more opposition from workers. And, when I revisit Commonwealth, I need to see if Hardt and Negri share this opinion, pitched as ‘more developed capitalism depends on more collaboration, allowing the multitude more experience in self-organization.’
Zibechi has a very different opinion on political organization and the factory. He affirms that autonomy depends on its exercise, immediately and concretely, by social groups that can’t be represented, but instead must represent themselves through assemblies. Instead of society being a factory, for Zibechi those denied access to industrial employment have made production more social.
Relation to other concepts
Again, Tronti has a very reductionist analysis of the state, writing that as society increasingly becomes a factory, the state becomes a function of the collective capitalist. It plans how society will be oriented towards reproducing capital. This is very much in line with Foucault’s thinking, but Poulantzas would say both have an instrumental conception of the state. Remembering he’s supposed to make the working class primary in all its relations with capital, elsewhere Tronti says the state was formed defensively to protect capital from the working class. Nonetheless, Gramsci has a much more nuanced understanding of the state.
Apart from this, there’s nothing linking his thoughts to ecology or settler colonialism. This is the problem with workerism. There’s no attention to gender either, so let’s start with a gendered reading of Tronti and reproduction via Fortunati.
Stuart Schussler 