°Tronti: autonomy
An excerpt as I draft, on autonomy, recognition and movement.
[…] In 1964, Mario Tronti began putting forward an analysis of working class autonomy that would come to be identified—and not always accurately—with an entire period and milieux of radical politics in Italy. According to Tronti, “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.” As an instance of this, Tronti argued that the unification of “the world market” was imposed on capital by “the unity of movement of the working class at the world level”.
Tronti would later characterise this “unity” as the “strategy of refusal”. In the rejection of work, widespread non-cooperation and the exodus from traditional forms of working class representation that marked the 1960s, Tronti (and others) discerned not the end of class struggle—as the optic of socialist orthodoxy would have it—but a different strategy. In retrospect, Franco Berardi described these insights as “the emancipation from the Hegelian concept of subject”: “the concept of social class is not to be seen as an ontological concept, but rather as a vectoral concept.” In other words, there was no pre-given or essential form of organisation or struggle but, rather, movements and compositions.
Yet the particular innovation of this argument, as it specifically concerns autonomy, was not merely to insist on the political-strategic priority of working class struggles, since such a proposition is—notwithstanding numerous renditions otherwise—already apparent in some of Marx’s writings, albeit in a political-economic register. Nor was it simply, to paraphrase Sergio Bologna’s contribution, that forms of class organisation and their adequacy could only be derived from given forms of class composition. In no way lessening the importance of either of these insights, none of these explain why it was that the concept of ‘autonomy’ was such a pivotal notion. That is to say: autonomy in the very specific and radicalised sense of ‘to give oneself one’s own law’, without the furtive heteronomy of an autonomy granted by recognition in an other, or a higher and specifically capitalist, law.
The points about class composition and refusal were, I would argue, allied to a more provocative argument about the redundancy—and in many respects, entrapment—of political-legal representation. Put schematically: whereas capital required the state to enter the field of class struggle, labour did not. If one sets aside all the attempts to expound the thesis of autonomy through the then-priveliged ground of the dialectic, the discussion of the party as the ‘class for itself’ and so on—the conceptual framework that, as it happens, Tronti says he will “confound”—, then the argument as it is presented in “The Strategy of the Refusal” contains the extraordinary proposition that “the person who provides labour is the capitalist. The worker is the provider of capital”.
In other words, it is the capitalist who furnishes the conditions for the appearance of labour; whereas “the only thing in the hands of the worker are the conditions of capital.” Labour, from the outset, is the property of the capitalist—it cannot exist as labour in the absence of this appropriation. Moreover, the re-organisation of exploitation proceeds as an attempt by capital to escape its de facto dependance upon the working class. In order to accomplish this, capitalists must of necessity resort to force so as to “make the working class abandon its proper social role as the dominant class”. Here, Tronti overturns the standard claims regarding the “inexorable necessity of working class mediation” to argue that, on the contrary, the state amounts to capitalist subjectivity as such. “The capitalist class does not exist independently of the formal political institutions”; yet the working class “exists independently of the institutionalised levels of its organisation”.
Angela, can you expand on the last paragraph? I don’t know if I understand. It seems to me that there’s a tension between saying the worker having only the conditions of capital and saying the working class existing independently of its representations. It seems to me wrong to say that the working class has only the conditions of capital (unless I misunderstand). I think I’d want to say that the working class has the use values of its own life-time, the fight being over who they’re use values for (for bosses in the use of producing value, or for ourselves for any of the myriad things we want to do). Or is it that labor power, with its various possible uses, is precisely the presupposition of capital? I think I’ve missed the point, and I think it’s Tronti’s point and not yours that I’m failing to grasp. I’ve been meaning to look back over the Tronti stuff for a long time, maybe I’ll see if I can find my printouts. Anyway, I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this stuff and I look forward to reading more of the piece.
Nate [September 26, 2005 @ 3:06 pm]
I’m not sure that I see the tension. I think by “conditions” Tronti would also understand “presuppositions”.
But, actually, your remarks about use- and exchange-value are to the point, in another sense. Because if the 1960s-70s in Italy is marked by the emergence of the concept of ‘autonomy’, the same period elsewhere (France, Germany maybe) was marked by a dissatisfaction with the work that the distinction between use- and exchange-value does, specifically: where use-value is regarded as the ground of something external to - autonomous from? - capital. (I’m thinking the SI, early Baudrillard, maybe Marcuse, maybe even Vance Packard, heh - the whole discussion of the social, capitalist creation of needs.)
So, going the long way around, what interests me about Tronti’s argument is the way the concept of autonomy emerged to displace the work that the distinction between use and exchange-value once did, to displace this onto a question of representation.
That said, this is an excerpt of a longer piece which I’ll be finishing soon, hopefully. And I’m interested in Tronti’s argument not because I would stay with it, but because I think it offers an interesting - maybe the most interesting - point of departure for re-considering the concepts of autonomy, recognition and movement.
My sense, right at the moment, is that both use-value and autonomy - as they emerge in the marxian imaginary - are fictive concepts; but entirely necessary for understanding something important, not least about how and when they appear and disappear.
s0metim3s [September 26, 2005 @ 6:55 pm]
hi Angela,
This stuff on dissatisfactions with the categories use value and exchange value is really interesting, something that’s been on my mind lately. If you get time, eventually, can you recommend some works by the folks you reference? I’m keen to read more on that and follow that line of thought. I like your phrasing of fictive but necessary concepts, it touches on the conversation with Franz about the ‘concepts are tools’ metaphor as well. I have a vague recollection of something called a ‘regulative idea’ from Kant, is that anything like what you mean?
best,
Nate
Nate [October 2, 2005 @ 4:51 am]
On ‘use-value’ discussions, other than the ones I’ve already mentioned, I’m not sure.
And, yes, ‘necessary fictions’ are like Kant’s ‘regulative ideas’. I think he talks about it in those exact terms. Anyway, doesn’t pretty much everyone - except maybe Heraclitus - have a version of the ‘necessary fiction’ discussion at some point? Though the question is how they approach it. eg: Wittgenstein, Foucault talks about it in the context of epistemes, Nietzsche talks about the “will to illusion” …
I tend to get more excited about it in the context of a discussion about grammar - which is where it gets more provocative.
s0metim3s [October 3, 2005 @ 2:24 pm]
heya,
I was being in lazy in my sources question - you mention people’s names, not book titles. :) I’m not sure I follow you on the grammar part - a grammatical necessary fiction? as in ‘the fiction of a linguistic community’ vs an infinity of idiolects , or as in ‘a fiction of grammar being rules other than convention and relative shared agreement? or maybe I’m completely missing the boat here. I will say that nearly any mention of Wittgenstein does set my pulse to pound. I’m still on a big Ranciere kick, in The Names Of History at the moment, which is largely about discourses on the past, fascinating stuff, and at least tangentially relevant to the fictions stuff. He seems to be lauding what he calls an ‘anti-mimetic narrative’ of history. I’m not sure I understand
(it’s very French), or maybe it’s that I disagree - for all my anti-realist impulses I’m still sometimes hung up on a certain attachment to something like ‘the truth’, which boils down to wanting to use deflationary maneuvers on others’ arguments and goals but not wanting them used on on mine.
One more thing I just thought of - when you say ‘necessary fiction’, is the important part the first (as in something like, maybe, ’something which seems presumed by X vocabulary/mode of thought to which we are attached’) or the second (as in, ‘in distinction from something which is not fictional)? I just want to be sure, because I assume you don’t mean the second - because I think that goes out the window if one holds to an ungroundedness (thinking of your response to Franz elsewhere around here), though of course the sweeping of most everything into the category ‘fiction’ doesn’t mean all fictions as equal.
good night,
Nate
Nate [October 3, 2005 @ 4:02 pm]
Nate
Going back a bit further in time, I’d also cite Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and Adorno’s critique of Veblen: though not really as explicit reconceptions of the use/exchange value concepts, they certain deal with closely related questions. Even Galbraith’s The Affluent Society I suppose.
Baudrillard’s first four works are more-or-less the process of his grappling with these themes: The Consumer Society; The System of Objects; For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign; The Mirror of Production.
Also Goux, Symbolic Exchange, and in some ways Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy.
Benjamin
Benjamin Rosenzweig [October 10, 2005 @ 9:01 am]