The Weapon of Organization

Mario Tronti's Political Revolution in Marxism

Mario Tronti, Andrew Anastasi

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781942173373
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Mario Tronti was the principal theorist of the radical political movement of the 1960s known in Italy as operaismo and in the Anglophone world as Italian workerism, a current which went on to inform the development of autonomist Marxism. His “Copernican revolution”—the proposal that working class struggles against exploitation propel capitalist development, which can only be understood as a reaction that seeks to harness this antagonism—has inspired dissident leftists around the world.

Tronti’s influence as a theorist thus already reaches far beyond Italy to activists and writers working in different sectors on different problems historically and geographically. While his imposing and acclaimed Workers and Capital has only recently appeared in English translation, Tronti has influenced many of the most creative social and political theorists of our time.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have long acknowledged the influence of Tronti on their thinking, drawing especially on his inversion of strategy and tactics in their influential collaborations. Tronti’s work in the 1960s also furnished important building blocks for a Marxist feminist critique of unwaged labor—as developed by Mariarosa dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, and many others working on social reproduction theory—as Tronti showed how capitalist control extends beyond the factory to all of society. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have echoed Tronti’s calls for a radical antagonism “within and against” institutions and the state.

The Weapon of Organization is a crucial introduction to Tronti, presenting a variety of never-before-translated texts—personal letters, public talks, published articles. With an incisive and provocative introduction that situates Tronti and highlights his relevance to contemporary political struggle, Anastasi translates and restores key writing from the birth of Italian operaismo —days of street fighting and theorizing for a renewed age of revolution.Tronti’s goal, Anastasi writes, was not to become a revered thinker but to participate in the destruction of capitalist society.

Part One

From Investigation to Intervention

01

On Marxism and Sociology

(April 1959)

This talk was delivered as a short rejoinder to a longer presentation given by Lucio Colletti during a conference at the Istituto Gramsci in Rome. The conference, held April 13–19, 1959, explored the relationship between Marxism and sociology. Colletti was a Marxist philosopher who, in collaboration with Galvano Della Volpe, helped to break the stranglehold of Italian idealist philosophy over Marxist thought in the postwar PCI. Colletti condemned the split between dialectical materialism and historical materialism, instead emphasizing the unity of Marx’s method and his critical study of capitalist society. Tronti’s own contribution brought an additional component to the fore: the necessity of political practice.¹

I will make a very short and very schematic intervention. I do this not so much to contribute to the discussion, but because I consider it appropriate to take a position on these questions, especially when they elicit different answers—in fact, I would say conflicting answers—within our movement.

In this sense, I believe that the worst thing would be to wish to settle these divergences in every way, not because I believe that the possibility of this agreement would be invalid if we were at the end of the discussion, but because I believe it is invalid to assume the possibility of this agreement in advance. The framework of this conference, at certain moments, has risked playing out in this way, as a traditional procedure: Seppilli presented the theses, Colletti laid out the antitheses, and Spinella wanted to produce the synthesis immediately.² In this way, Spinella has somewhat reproduced a general framework while also preserving a general law, which is that of the Hegelian dialectical trinity. At the same time, he has delivered an element of interruption into the proceedings of this conference.

I believe that the problem of this conference must be clarified in its own original terms, that is, the relationship between Marxism and sociology. In other words, to me this seems not to be a conference on sociology, but on the way in which Marxists understand sociology. This is the specific theme we must emphasize. Along these lines, I believe that, at the beginning of the discussion, we did not have two different interpretations of sociology so much as we had, I would say, two different interpretations of Marxism. And the two interpretations of sociology were a natural consequence, somewhat, of these two different interpretations of Marxism. I would say that if this conference were to clarify this theme, it would contribute to the conference’s original problem, that is, the relationship between Marxism and sociology.

In Spinella’s talk there was just a moment, a short passage, in which he said—as if it were perhaps an element of secondary importance, or even a presupposition—that he uses the term “historical materialism” because he understands Marxism to be more broad than historical materialism itself. Indeed, he understands Marxism to be dialectical materialism, of which historical materialism is an example or a particular application.³ And so, according to this, certain general laws exist, and they exist prior to the practical application or research, which is to say that a general systematization already exists, one that is not implicit in historical materialism but which precedes historical materialism. This means that, in the moment in which one employs materialism, one presupposes the existence of this framework of general laws.

I would say that this point, which his talk only addressed in passing, is instead the fundamental point; in other words, his entire argument, his examination of problems related especially to sociology, flows from this premise. I believe that his particular conception of sociology is implicitly tied to this conception of Marxism.

I would say that this interpretation of Marxism—this division, this fracture produced within Marxism itself—could be the basis of two possible stances: either a stance of absolute powerlessness in the field of knowledge and thus practical research, precisely because at a certain point this general framework becomes an empty one that gives no practical grasp on reality; or the other stance that can follow from this formulation, of direct concessions to positions that are foreign to Marxism, for the reason that this general framework, precisely in its generality and abstractness, fails to sink its teeth, concretely, into a particular type of reality, and so it has an immediate need for something that can achieve this practical grasp on reality on its behalf. Thus, it needs to take an element from outside and not from within Marxism; and this is fatal, because whenever a general theoretical framework and thus general laws are assumed in advance, these cannot exist by themselves, independently from their practical application. When general laws are applied, they are immediately filled with a given content, which is clearly not controlled by these general laws but taken immediately from a determinate type of reality which is subsisting in that moment. To me it seems completely natural that, once the question has been formulated in this way—namely, the question of a general dialectical materialism that in itself contains the possibility of sociological research—it is inevitable that this sociological research would turn out not to be sociological research for Marxism, but something external to Marxism itself, in other words, a sociology that corresponds, at times, to bourgeois sociology.

Not only this, but I would say that, in doing this, we lose the scientific originality of Marxism. In other words, precisely due to this implicit need to appeal to something that is outside of Marxism, one retreats from that fundamental presupposition of Marx and of Gramsci, of the necessity, possibility, and reality of Marxism’s autonomy, self-sufficiency, and originality, which therefore has no need in the course of research to appeal to elements external to Marxism itself. This is the question’s fundamental point: that it is impossible to realize a precise, scientific grasp on reality when departing from this premise, and that when doing so one is likely to pick up a determinate element that has not been rationally tied to other elements, that has not been interpreted and seen within a general context, and thus one that has been isolated, transformed, and truly distorted, as if it had its own specific reality.

This gives some hint of what we can illustrate further: an element grasped in this immediate way very often exists in opposition to Marxism itself. In other words, insofar as the dominant ideas are always the ideas of the dominant class, we can see that, for a certain long period, we all had been historicists, and that, looking ahead, we are tending to become sociologists.⁴ I mean this in the sense that—precisely because we fail to consider Marxism to be something autonomous and self-sufficient and think that it needs external support—previously we were forced to take this support at a moment in which a determinate tendency was dominant, namely, a moment in which idealist historicism was dominating the culture. This inevitably inserted itself right inside of Marxism. When a theory’s dominance shifts, its dominance also shifts within Marxism; it is precisely this that manages to safeguard the autonomy and originality of Marxism itself.

Now, as historicism must not be rejected as a whole, given that it is not a matter of taking that type of historicism and filling it with Marxist content, the same can be said for sociology. In other words, it is not a matter of taking the dominant, bourgeois sociology and using it for Marxist ends, but of considering that just as Marxism presents itself as the only real historicism, in the same way, from this other point of view, Marxism presents itself as the only true sociology, that is, as the only science of society.

I agree with Pescarini when he said that the only sociology for us is Marxism, that is, the only scientific analysis of society that we have, the only science of society, is Marxism.⁵ I would say something further: that this Marxist sociology is not something definitively fixed in established canons; rather, it is continual elaboration and development. Clearly, we must consider various problems that prevent this research from becoming overly specialized. For example, the problem is not to discover a national interpretive line for Marxism; in other words, it is not so much about finding a national Marxism. Rather, it is a matter of a concrete application, which Colletti explained very well: a model of a determinate situation that is concrete and therefore also national.

It is clear that no one rejects the necessity, or rather the indispensability, of the study and scientific analysis of the exact structure of Italian capitalism, but this analysis is impossible if we have not already understood the basic structure of a capitalist socioeconomic formation in general. On the other hand, our understanding of this overall capitalist-economic formation is itself the result of a concrete research project that, indeed, is within capital. It is not, then, something that is alive before the research, but rather something born as a function of the research itself.

On page five of Colletti’s report, which has been mentioned several times, he speaks of nothing but the concept of determinate abstraction, which is a characteristically Marxian concept, one that Marx not only repeats explicitly but applies concretely, typified in the concept of socioeconomic formation. This really is the specific example of a determinate abstraction, in other words, a concept in which the singularity of the particular object is not lost, but in which its specificity is actually preserved. In fact, it is the determinate abstraction that allows for the preservation of this specificity and this precision.⁶

I believe, returning to the initial problem, that the distinction between dialectical materialism and historical materialism is precisely what then causes and is at the origin of the distinction between economics and sociology—and not only this, but it is also at the origin of the distinction between theory and practice, as well as the distinction between culture and politics.

Comrade Barro yesterday took this thesis to its ultimate consequences, when he said that the economist studies society in general, and the sociologist studies things in particular, as if this tidy and physical dissociation could be made between two persons, one handling pure theory and the other only empirical research; as if this distinction were really legitimate within Marxism.⁷ Well, this distinction—I find it again right at the origin of the fracture, the open breach in Marxism, which is, basically, the breach between dialectical materialism and historical materialism. Among other things, I believe that a historical study would show precisely this: that this is the breach through which all revisionist interpretations of Marxism have always passed.

To reject the legitimacy of that distinction means to accept the correctness of the opposite thesis, that is, of unity—which here is not an identity. Colletti should have been more precise and spoken at greater length on this: it seemed at a certain point that these two things were made to identify with one another immediately, and that therefore, the specificity and the determinacy of each moment was lost. But, on the contrary, it is precisely upon that unity of the heterogeneous that this question must be established. Indeed, just thinking of the figure of Marx makes it difficult to accept the conception of the distinction. How is it possible in the figure of Marx to distinguish the philosopher from the politician, the historian from the economist? It is absolutely impossible; one cannot say that first he was the philosopher and then he was the historian, then the economist, in parentheses he was the political person—no! He did each of these things; his first work, Critique of the Philosophy of Right, is the critique of the bourgeois state, the 1844 manuscripts are the economic-philosophic manuscripts—already we have the entire orientation for a whole work. How can one say that Capital is not at the same time a work of theory and a work of practical action? How can one maintain that “Critique of the Gotha Program” is not, at the same time, a political program and a formidable theoretical work about the state and rights?

So, there is this continual unity of diverse moments that one finds in Marx, and perhaps in a more obvious manner in Lenin; if Capital is at the same time a scientific work and a moment of political action that shifts the objective reality of things, one could argue inversely that the October Revolution or the Paris Commune is at the same time a great practical movement and a powerful theoretical discovery. I would say that the worst thing that one can do within Marxism is precisely to make this split and smuggle it into one’s work, to not talk about it explicitly but to expect and take for granted this split between theorists and researchers.

Basically, here the question has been reintroduced: on the one hand the theorists, on the other the researchers. It is the first and last problem that must be eliminated, immediately. We absolutely cannot accept the existence of a researcher who offers material to the theorist, who then reworks it and produces theory. We cannot have a Seppilli who conducts social inquiries and then brings them to a Colletti, and a Colletti who organizes them into a general theory, just as we cannot have the purely theoretical type of intellectual whose only task is to offer materials to the politician, who applies them concretely. Instead there is a continual unity, precisely because this unity is already realized within Marxism, and thus it already is alive in the person of the Marxist.

And so, I would conclude with this figure of the Marxist scientist, who poses the necessity of unifying heterogeneous moments in theory, who is precisely the living unity of these heterogeneous moments. In other words, the person who achieves an equilibrium, which is precisely a scientific equilibrium—practical, not conquered once and for all, but daily, in research and in practical contact. An equilibrium of the concrete bond between theory, on one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Experiments and Explosions: Tronti’s Work of the 1960s
• Part One: From Investigation to Intervention
• Part Two: The Strategic Overturning
• Part Three: The Problem of Organization
• Appendix: A Mario Tronti Bibliography, 1958–1970
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author
• About the Editor and Translator
• About Common Notions
• Become a Monthly Sustainer