archive : s0metim3s

The reading of Tronti’s “The Strategy of the Refusal” opens tomorrow over at Long Sunday. You can find the rundown of contributions here, a little introduction to the symposium here, and the relevant essay is here.

CultureMachine’s annual edition is up, this one on Jean-Luc Nancy, including Brett’s and my piece, “Cutting Democracy’s Knot”.

Mario Tronti’s work formed something of a pivot in the development of communist politics in Italy, and informed many of the premises, or at least touchstones, that would become more familiar to English-language readers through the work of Toni Negri, Paolo Virno and others.

The first paragraph of - provisionally titled and still in draft form - “Cutting Democracy’s Knot: Nancy and Tronti between the Present and the Not-Now”, co-written with Brett.

Autonomy, Recognition, Movement, the first couple of paragraphs, as I send it off to the editor:

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.

John Maynard Keynes, First Baron of Tilton, born June 5 1883.

Keynes was certainly not the first, but he is most associated with, an economics which sets forth the importance of managing subjectivity - in economic parlance: subjective probability, liquidity preference, demand management and so on. He is also prehaps the most well-known exponent of ‘full employment’ and critic of laissez faire capitalism. Like Marx (and Ricardo), Keynes located the points of ‘economic disequillibrium’ in the actions of labour. Unlike Marx, he did so in order to proffer solutions for the smoother running of capitalism, namely: state management.

Paul Mattick’s Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy influenced a number of readings of Keynes, particularly those around Potere Operaio, such as Mario Tronti: “only Keynes has provided the capitalist point of view with a formidable subjective leap forward.” (Tronti, The Strategy of the Refusal, 1965) Specifically, Tronti argued that capitalists, unlike workers, require an institutionalised form of power (the state) - hence the necessary connection for the Operaistas between dismantling the state and dismantling capitalism. Here is where the thesis of working class autonomy emerges: Keynes’ insight into labour as the independant variable, requiring no institutional form through which to assert its presence in the class struggle is hailed as the strategy of refusal. Antonio Negri elaborated on this argument two years later, in “Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State“, but has since reversed that approach by appealing to European capitalists to constitute themselves as a ‘progressive’ bloc viz US capital and arguing for ‘full (global) employment’.

But if Negri has replaced the strategy of refusal with the strategy of a joyful Spinozian embrace, the question remains as to what ‘refusal’ might mean, without recourse to dialectical schema or the comfort of foundations, including those of the Subject. For if Keynes was astute enough to recognise the lack of foundation in the workings of the capitalist economy, it is not I think quite accurate to read this as a recognition of labour in immediate subjectivist terms, as a kind of voluntarism (contra Tronti). Indeed, what’s interesting about Keynes’ non-foundationalism is that it is both thorough - predating the insight if not the language of Baudrillard’s Political Economy of the Sign - but that he reinstates a very particular and pragmatic foundationalism in so doing:

… there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know. Nevertheless, the necessity for action and for decision compels us as practical men to do our best to overlook this awkward fact and to behave exactly as we should if we had behind us a good Benthamite calculation of a series of prospective advantages and disadvantages, each multiplied by its appropriate probability waiting to be summed.

We are compelled to behave “as if we had behind us a good Benthamite calculation” because we are compelled to act as “practical men”. What does it mean to act as “practical men”? On this, Agamben’s notion of ‘passive politics’ is worth exploring further, which Stefano Franchi discusses here. Exploring a passional and ‘passive’ politics seems to me a more interesting way to talk about the strategy of refusal, since it also evokes a refusal, not least, of the intersections between ‘activism’ and the political (Benthamite) calculus, of the practical man.

But what is it that defines (compels) the Benthamite calculus as the horizon of action, of what it means to act? The ‘general measure’ - ie., money - to be sure, but what compels this (whether by force or the residual force of a monopoly of self-evidence) is the state, law as the definition of value (and non-value). And it’s here that Agamben’s discussion seems lacking of an engagement with Keynes.