For Mario Tronti, who died this last August 7th, we share a short text by Diego Sztulwark and Mario Tronti’s Thesis on Benjamin.
Today Mario Tronti passed away. His 92 years were many, but he will surely remain the author of Workers and Capital (Italy, 1966). In January 2001, Tronti wrote a reflection on those years in which an anti-bourgeois current, embedded in a revolution to modernise capital, seemed to be the “yes, this time” in history: a rupture and not the restructuring of capital. The spirit of innovation of those years came to break the air of “decline” of the time. And it was not surprising that this happened, if one takes into account that this “divided social form” that is capitalism is inevitably traversed by conflict and the will to integration (this phrase, applied to the Argentine labor movement, resonates with Resistance and integration, title of a great book by historian Daniel James on Peronism).
Antagonism and assemblage are operations that weave with a single thread, from within the opposition of classes. As Gilles Deleuze read it, the novelty of Workers and Capital resided in the – ontological – precedence of potentiality (Workers) over power (capital). Class antagonism changed its face when the perspective of labor struggles was adopted. Tronti seems to believe, in his last reflection, that the wheel of fortune turns under the weight of innovation in production – against the tradition of the political institution -, or that it stops catastrophically under the weight of repression, fetishism of the merchandise and the handling of technique. The methodological core of workerism consisted, for Workers and Capital, in displacing the point of view of the whole (that of capital) towards that of workers autonomy, registering in theory and in practice the centrality of the worker both in counter-culture and in production. The error of the workerism would have been its “orthodox Marxism” – in the sense of Lukács -, although recomposed from the experience of the factories of advanced capitalism.
From a distance, Tronti believes that he made a mistake in reducing the class struggle to direct antagonism. Fascinated by the best Marx, that of the critique of political economy, the workerists of the 1960s had overlooked the role of a decisive third term, without which capital would not have defeated the uprising of labor: the political. More than the defeat of a political collective, however, Tronti registers the demolition of the workers’ centrality itself, which was followed by the great project of capital to erase a proletarian memory. To the question of whether there is a legacy of the workerist tradition in a world that believes itself to be non-workerist, Tronti answers yes. A Benjaminian yes, with which we would like to remember him today. If workers autonomy was the current of Marxism that turned the partial view of the whole into a source of subversive subjectivation – producing a series of events that form the heritage of labor struggles – workers autonomy constitutes a world that cannot be canceled (and something of that we have managed to experience in our 2001 [in Argentina]), belonging only (in his words) “to all those subjected, to all those excluded, to all those dominated
Diego Sztulwark 07/08/2023 (Lobo Suelto)
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Mario Tronti: “In art as in politics there is nothing other than struggle”
For Mario Tronti (from Blackout) …
Can you really be outside? This is the question I asked Mario the last time we talked (Francesco Matarrese | Greenberg and Tronti: Being Really Outside?). Today, the eighth of January, his important, extraordinary answer arrived. Now it is here, naturally, in the written struggle, in this paper.
In art as in politics there is nothing other than struggle
Can you really be outside? This is the question. I answer: yes. I am. I feel I am. For sensibility, even before for reason. This world, as it is, as it is historically organized and dominated, does not belong to me, it is not part of me, and therefore it is extraneous to me. I do not stop here. The fact is: I find, before me, a form of being in the world, which is also not metaphysical but historically determined, which demands and obtains a hostile relationship. This way of being, or this world of being, fights me, and I fight it. I am not subjected to the forms of struggle, I choose them: naturally as far as possible. And all my intellectual and practical efforts consist in increasing and possessing the sphere of possibilities. There is a change in the contingencies. And all depends on the power relationships. The “inside and against,” the labor that, from inside capital, had enough power to block the mechanism of its reproduction, describing a high level of struggle, and proposing the concrete utopia of putting the systemic organism into subjective crisis. All this is a past. It no longer affects the present. Is a utopian reading of the past possible? Benjamin showed that it is not only possible but necessary. I shall follow in this direction. With an addition. The past, which I feel has a name: the Twentieth Century—I always write my century in capitals, to mark its majesty—it is not the Edenic age that invokes nostalgia, but rather the epoch of maximum danger for the centuries-old order of dominion and exploitation. And I know, along with Hölderlin, that where danger is greatest, there is salvation. It is only from the disorder of the world of life that new skies and new earths, or rather new forms of life, can be born. The avant-gardes of the Twentieth Century are not neo-Romanticism, they are neue Revolution.
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