The conviction that capitalist production requires laborers who are not only dispossessed of autonomous means of reproduction, but are also legally free to offer their capacity to labor on the market, has been central to Marxist analyses of capitalism.
The idea that one could reconstitute a viable left politics by straightforwardly reappropriating the elements that were so effective in this earlier period is a non-starter.
The birth of the political as a problem lies at the origins of capitalist society. The impact, the intertwining, the exchange, the conflict is between the state subject and the transition to capitalism. Without the State, from its origins, no capitalism.
Written towards the end of what we might call the “second period” of Tronti’s reflections, that of the so-called “autonomy of the Political,” sandwiched between the more famous phase of Operaismo and the – almost completely unknown to the Anglophone world – “third period” political theological phase, that of the twilight [tramonto] of the political, the short text translated here will come to many Anglophone readers of Tronti as a surprise.
I. Patriarchy and/or Capitalism: Reopening the Debate It is standard to find references to “patriarchy” and “patriarchal relations” in feminist texts, tracts, or documents. 1 Patriarchy is often used to show how gender oppression and inequality are not sporadic or exceptional occurrences. On the contrary, these are issues that traverse all of society, and are fundamentally reproduced through mechanisms that cannot… Read more →
In order to appreciate the intervention made by Fortunati – beginning over a quarter century ago, along with the other founding members of the group Lotta Femminista, including Mariarosa Dalla Costa – we must first jettison some of our Marxist baggage.
In 1880, La Revue socialiste asked an aging Karl Marx to draft a questionnaire to be circulated among the French working class. Called “A Workers’ Inquiry,” it was a list of exactly 101 detailed questions, inquiring about everything from meal times to wages to lodging.
Tags: Inquiry
There exists an America that no one talks about, which is to be found beyond the myth of the refrigerator, the automobile, and the television, and beyond the myth of affluence for all. It is the America of the factory: an unknown America whose history is made of strikes, exploitation, and proletarian misery.
Tags: From the Archives, Inquiry
We present here an unprecedented document of great value about the lives of American workers. This appraisal stems not only from the fact that it definitively puts paid to both the absurd claim that American workers don’t have class consciousness, and the myth of the comfort and luxury of the American proletariat.
Tags: From the Archives, Inquiry
Since our work unfolds as a renewal of a direct contact with class situations in order to find a way to organize the embryos of antagonistic class consciousness that reproduce themselves amongst workers, it is worthwhile precisely to the degree that it becomes a revolutionary consciousness of this unfolding story.
Tags: From the Archives, Inquiry
Viewpoint Magazine