Tronti Mario - The Weapon of Organization

In the early 1970s I read Tronti religiously.

Silvia Federici, author of Revolution at Point Zero

Mario Tronti is one of the great intellectual and political figures of our age. The recognition of the importance of his work, not only as a contribution to revolutionary activism, but as a leap forward into the unknowns of speculation and praxis, after the end of history, was long overdue. The beautiful anthology assembled and introduced by Andrew Anastasi will make this clearly visible for a generation of new English-speaking readers, and even others.

tienne Balibar, coauthor of Reading Capital

The Weapon of Organization is a breakthrough in English-language scholarship on Italian workerism, and the recovery of the history of revolutionary theory for the present. Andrew Anastasi has collected and translated pivotal texts, as well as situated them with his careful and illuminating commentary.

Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity

This illuminating collection provides not only an understanding of Trontis influential anticapitalist theses but also a window into the political dynamics out of which they grew: the scene of revolutionary theory and practice in 1960s Italy. As Andrew Anastasi argues in his excellent introduction, Trontis theses ought to beand, in some senses, already arecentral pillars of our own, contemporary political thought.

Michael Hardt, coauthor of Assembly and Commonwealth

Every generation of revolutionary anticapitalists has to come to terms with how to read afresh the classic formulations of Marx and Lenin in ways appropriate to the conditions of their times. How Tronti and some of his close colleagues did this in the 1960s is a spectacular and inspirational example of how to re-theorize class formation and the practices of class struggle from a ground-up and workerist perspective. While our contemporary world may be very different, there is much to be learned not only conceptually but also methodologically from Trontis brilliant and incisive interventions at all levels in the politics of his era.

David Harvey, author of The Limits to Capital and Reading Marxs Capital

Mario Trontis Political Revolution in Marxism

Mario Tronti

Edited and translated

by Andrew Anastasi

Brooklyn, NY

commonnotions.org

The Weapon of Organization: Mario Trontis Political Revolution in Marxism

Edited and translated, with an introduction, by Andrew Anastasi

by Andrew Anastasi (preface, introduction, translation, notes)

This edition 2020 Common Notions

were published in Italian in Loperaismo degli anni sessanta: da Quaderni rossi a classe operaia 2008 DeriveApprodi srl

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

ISBN: 978-1-942173-22-9 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-942173-37-3 (ebook)

LCCN: 2020930534

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

www.commonnotions.org

Cover design by Josh MacPhee / Antumbra Design

Layout design and typesetting by Morgan Buck / Antumbra Design

Antumbra Design www.antumbradesign.org

Printed on acid-free, recycled paper

by Andrew Anastasi

Andrew Anastasi

M ario Tronti worked in the 1960s not to become a revered thinker but to contribute to the destruction of capitalist society. In his earliest writings he criticized how Marx had been absorbed into academic disciplines; it has been somewhat fitting, then, for Tronti to have experienced the opposite fate, remaining at the margins of Anglo-American political thought. This may now be changing as new translations ferry Trontis work across time and space and provide entry points for a new generation of readers. As part of that larger endeavor, this book seeks to address a particular audience: those who are eager to explore Marxist theory in its rich diversity, who are rooted in the left organizations which have grown exponentially in recent years, and who have been nurtured by a thriving ecosystem of political debate online and in print.

This volume collects speeches and writings by Tronti that explore problems of Marxist theory insofar as they pertain to ongoing discussions about organization. They provide a window onto a living laboratory of thought, offering considerations and qualifications that complicate some of the claims found in Workers and Capital. That book contains his most important works, and it takes the reader on an exhilarating rollercoaster ride; it may also leave one with the sense that the political possibility glimpsed therein has been exhausted.The Weapon of Organization instead returns to Trontis work of the 1960s in pursuit of tools for struggle today. It does not approach his thought as a catechism; it seeks to learn from a process. The texts here, especially those originally spoken out loud and published without revision, provide not a snapshot of what to think but a framework of how to think for revolution.

Contributions to Marxist thought have often arrived by way of conjunctural interventions, as working-class movements provide the nourishment essential for theoretical discovery. The struggles of the 1960s inspired Tronti to invert canonical readings of Marx, subject dogma of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to withering criticism, and revisit his own output with a skeptical eye. Likewise, we should reject an uncritical Trontismo adhering to the letter of his writings without regard for the aims and needs of our movements.

One of his most precious contributions to revolutionary thinking was his conception of the working class as an autonomous political force that struggles against capital. Rather than a blank canvass onto which ideals are projected, the class is produced and reproduced over time through struggles.

That the working class can be composed means it can also be decomposed. Yet in the face of the capitalist attack, workers today continue to struggle in diverse ways to form a class.

After Trontis interventions of the 1960s, to write the history of the working class in the United States, for instance, means taking stock not only of deindustrialization, tertiarization, and changes to the labor processchanges in the technical composition of the working classbut also the proliferation of new forms of struggle against capitalist social relationsmoments of its political composition.

Rather than waiting for workers of the world to become properly conscious of their shared lot as a class, a Trontian viewpoint today sees that antiracist, feminist, Indigenous, migrant, and tenant movements drive anticapitalist subjectivation as much as struggles over waged work. Rather than answers, it suggests questions: What practices are already circulating among forces refusing to collaborate with the development of capital? How might these be supported, extended, and amplified in the interests of producing a global working class, understood in political terms? Can these myriad forces constitute a unified subject which refuses to grant the demands of capital?