"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Tronti's 'Strategy of Refusal' #2
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March 30, 2006
Back to reading Mario Tronti's Strategy of Refusal, which I'm reading in the context of a political campaign in Australia against the deregulation of they need to sack their workforce, and street marches in Paris as part of a continuing protest over a new jobs law. Tronti say:
This is the historical paradox which marks the birth of capitalist Society, and the abiding condition which will always be attendant upon the "eternal rebirth" of capitalist development. The worker cannot be labour other than in relation to the capitalist. The capitalist cannot be capital other than in relation to the worker. The question is often asked: "What is a social class?" The answer is: "There are these two classes". The fact that one is dominant does not imply that the other should be subordinate. Rather, it implies struggle, conducted on equal terms, to smash that domination, and to take that domination and turn it, in new forms, against the one that has dominated up till now. As a matter of urgency we must get hold of, and start circulating, a photograph of the worker-proletariat that shows him as he really is - "proud and menacing". It1s tine to set in motion the contestation - the battle, to be fought out in a new period of history -directly between the working class and capital, the confrontation between what Marx referred to in an analogy as "the huge children's shoes of the proletariat and the dwarfish size of the worn-out political shoes of the bourgeoisie".
Well, we are currently living in a moment of contestation and battle around the hegemony or domination of capital in Australia.
Tronti adds that:
It is the directly political thrust of the working class that necessitates economic development on the part of capital which, starting from the point of production, reaches out to the whole of social relations. But this political vitality on the part of its adversary which is, on the one hand, indispensable to capital, is, at the same time, the most fearful threat to capital's power. We have already seen the political history of capital as a sequence of attempts by capital to withdraw from the class relationship; at a higher level we can now see it as the history of the successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class, through the medium of the various forms of capital's political domination over the working class.
That is what we are seeing being played out in Parliament---the political domination of capital--what Tronti calls the political dictatorship within democracy as the modern political form of class dictatorship. The working class is certainly on the defensive, as the labour conditions it has struggled for over the last 50 years are being rolled back. We have 'the State of capitalist society.'
So what are the differences between the two forms of political power?
The difference between the two classes at the level of political power is precisely this. The capitalist class does not exist independently of the formal political institutions, through which, at different times but in permanent ways, they exercise their political domination: for this very reason, smashing the bourgeois State does mean destroying the power of the capitalists, and by the same token, one could only hope to destroy that power by smashing the State machine. On the other hand, quite the opposite is true of the working class: it exists independently of the institutionalised levels of its organisation This is why destroying the workers: political party does not mean - and has not meant - dissolving, dismembering, or destroying the class organism of the workers. I'm not convinced that the working class exists independently of the institutionalised levels of its organisation.
The working class's organizations in the form of the peak union body --the ACTU-- was a part of the bourgeois state under the Hawke/Keating Labor government during the 1980s and 1990s, and it helped to shape economic policy under the Accord as the Australian economy was opened up to the international one. In the old Marxist language it had been incorporated and it delivered lower wages for an increased social wage --that was the tradeoff.
What is the working class outside the union and the ALP? Non unionised labour? Casual workers? Part-time workers?
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hi Gary,
What is it that your not convinced about? The working class having an extra-institutional existence/politics?
Best,
Nate