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March 24, 2006
This text, The Strategy of Refusal' by Mario Tronto is courtesy of Long Sunday. They are having a symposium on the strategy of refusal--on concept of the working class refusal : the refusal of work, the refusal of capitalist development, the refusal to act as bargaining partner within the terms of the capital relation.
The 1960's text about class struggle interests me, given the Howard Government's recent industrial relations reforms--- Workchoices---and the subsequent resistance by the unions and the ACTU to a de-regulated labour market ; a resistance grounded in a refusal to accept the demolition of both the tradition and institutions of centralized bargaining and the shift to individual contracts between employer and employee.
This kind of refusal is a going back to basics of class struggle; one in which, on the classic Hegelian-Marxist account, a class can be said to exist in opposition, but only to constitute itself through political struggle. The working mass or mulitude becomes united, constitutes itself as a class for itself, and the interests it defends becomes class interests. On this classic account the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.
This struggle is currently mediated in federal Australia by the resistance of all the ALP state governments to the reforms of commonwealth Government; a challenge about the use of the corporations powers of the coomonwealth that will be resolved in the High Court. The resistance to the reforms is widespread in the national community with refusal actions of the ACTU being widely supported.
So what light can Mario Tronti throw on this kind of resistance as refusal?
He reverses this classic Marxist account:
So, can we say that we are still living through the long historical period in which Marx saw the workers as a "class against capital", but not yet as a "class for itself"? Or shouldn't we perhaps say the opposite, even if it means confounding a bit the terms of Hegel's dialectic? Namely, that the workers become, from the first, "a class for itself" - that is, - from the first moments of direct confrontation with the individual employer - and that they are recognised as such by the first capitalists. And only afterwards, after a long-terrible, historical travail which is, perhaps, not yet completed, do the workers arrive at the point of being actively, subjectively, "a class against capital".
I'm not that fussed by the reversa---see here for a theoretical discussion .The reversal kinda makes sense of our history in Australia. I guess the reversal grants the working class the offensive in the class warfare. Yet it would need to be an offensive within capitalist domination over society, that is based on the command over the forces and relations of production.
The working class in Australia---the shearers--were recognized as a class by the pastoralists who reckon the shearers had to be kept in their place, and their strikes for better working conditions had to be broken. The response by the shearers in the 1890s was political---to form their political party to improve their conditions. It is a strategy of refusal to accept the political realities of pastoral capitalism as well as a strategic way to struggle against the domination of pastoral and merchant capital. Politics is the key to the class struggle from Federation onwards.
Tronti address the party. He says:
A prerequisite of this process of transition is political organisation, the party, with its demand for total power. In the intervening period there is the refusal - collective, mass, expressed in passive forms - of the workers to expose themselves as "a class against capital" without that organisation of their own, without that total demand for power. The working class does what it is. But it is, at one and the same time, the articulation of capital, and its dissolution. Capitalist power seeks to use the workers' antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor of its own development. The workerist party must take this same real mediation by the workers of capital's interests and organise it in an antagonistic form, as the tactical terrain of struggle and as a strategic potential for destruction.
Presumably by the workerist party Tronto means the Communist Party. Such a party no longer exists in Australia. All we have now is a social democrat party ---the ALP. This was explicitly formed as an organization to further the interests of the unionised working class. However, the ALP was never a party for the destruction of capital--it was a party primarily concerned to stabilise and modernize the development of the capitalist system. The ALP is not simply a workerist party.
Tronti says that:
The working class cannot constitute itself as a party within capitalist society without preventing capitalist society from functioning. As long as capitalist does continue to function the working class party cannot be said to exist.
Hmm. What we have in Australia is a working class organized in terms of the ACTU and the ALP, with all the strands of the movement seeking to further the interests of workers within the social relations of capital as they seek to accommodate themselves to the impacts of globalization on their working lives. This 'furthering' had involved reforms as tradeoffs----ie., the Accord-- during the 1980s-1990s when the ALP had formed government.
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thanks for the nod Gary. you're certainly more than welcome to take part..