In the workers’ movement there has been for a long time, and in successive periods, a discussion of the question of the modes and temporalities of the transition to socialism. One tendency, which occurred in various forms, believed it was possible to schematize the temporality of this process, as if socialist construction had to be preceded, always and in every case, by the “phase” of construction of bourgeois democracy.
The past twenty years have witnessed a “return of the citizen,” 1 resulting in manifold proposals to redefine and expand the notion of citizenship and its links to the nation-states, giving rise to terms like post-national, denationalized, and transnational citizenship. 2 In the last decade, a new concept has emerged that has received particular attention in the citizenship discourse: “biological” 3… Read more →
We asked several contributors to write on the theme of the state and revolutionary strategy, for a roundtable discussion revolving around the following prompt: “In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the socialist movement spilled a great deal of ink debating the question of state power. Lenin’s work was perhaps the most influential, but it also provoked a wide… Read more →
I. The Revolutionary Crisis 1. Attempts at a Definition In several places throughout his work, Lenin tries to define the notion of a “revolutionary crisis,” especially in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and The Collapse of the Second International. However, he outlines a notion more than he establishes [fonder] a concept, as the descriptive criteria that he enumerates remain subjective assessments.… Read more →
The English translation of Daniel Bensaïd’s autobiography, Une lente impatience, is a welcome event in the Anglophone Marxist world. 1 Not only does it contain a rich history of some of the most decisive moments for the French Left from the ’60s to the present, it also deepens our understanding of the heterodox sources that coexisted within Bensaïd’s unique form… Read more →
The State Stripped Bare It seems almost a paradox, or perhaps just an anachronism, to suggest that it is possible to describe the global situation from the vantage point of the state. Flows and scapes, transnational corporations, migratory movements, financialization, supply chains, the “unholy trinity” of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO – these are the actors, processes, and entities… Read more →
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.
Viewpoint Magazine