My New Statesman essay on the life and thought of the Italian philosopher and revolutionary Mario Tronti, who died last month, can be read here.
1964
from Lenin In England:
“It is easy not to see it. We shall need to study, to look long and hard at the class situation of the working class. Capitalist society has its laws of development: economists have invented them, governments have imposed them, and workers have suffered them. But who will uncover the laws of development of the working class? Capital has its history, and its historians write it — but who is going to write the history of the working class?
We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned…
…In June 1848 (that fateful month, a thousand times cursed by the bourgeoisie), and possibly even earlier, the working class took over the stage, and they have never left it since. In different periods they have voluntarily taken on different roles — as actors, as prompters, as technicians or stage-hands — whilst all the time waiting to wade into the theatre and attack the audience. “
1967
from A Course of Action:
“Whoever is on our side can rest easy, then. If you see us abandoning the fossilised forest of vulgar Marxism, this is not because we want to run around the stadiums of contemporary bourgeois thought ... Saying no to today’s socialism does not mean having to say yes to yesterday’s capitalism. Lenin said, ‘when it comes to philosophy, I am one of those who search’. In philosophy today, there is nothing left to search for.
But when it comes to the problems that concern us, from the perspective of unleashing the decisive struggle against the power of capital, there are unknown worlds that are waiting to be explored. The fate of those who sought another route to India and ended up discovering other continents is very similar to our own present manner of proceeding. For this reason, it is fair enough that the seeds of the new have not yet grown to the maturity of a fruit-bearing plant. It is important to recognise the force of what is being born. If it is alive, it will grow.
You cannot criticise someone who is still continuing their research for what they have not yet found. Faraday discovered induced currents – the induction relation between magnets, current and the electric field. Someone asked him: what is this discovery useful for? His reply – what is a child useful for? Whitehead comments that once this ‘child’ had grown up to become a man, it constituted the basis for all modern applications of electricity”
1992
from ‘Without Title’, Con le Spalle al Futuro:
This point must be kept in mind: that this is not a landing, but a crossing. We are making our way through no man's land. And even as our intellectual journey convolutes, turns back, heads in unexpected directions as we attempt to break through the forces that encircle us, we must take care not to lose our direction: to understand the world in order to transform it. There is no going back from Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach in theoretical work, not even after our practical attempts have failed. It is essential to hold on tightly to the thread we follow now, to continue to go beyond ourselves, even if we do not know where it will all end.
We hear Zarathustra's cry today: the people are dead! How is it possible that you, old pilgrims, have not realised this? But the message that arrives with us from two centuries of working-class struggle, a struggle that itself was heir to a thousand years of rebellion by the poor and oppressed, the conviction that “we” are greater than “I” - this message of human solidarity can live again. What forms this will take, in what subjects it will be embodied, what strengths it will rely on, how long it will take to grow, to spread: it is all this that we do not know. And it is all this that we must learn.
"A Prophet,” says Father Turoldo, “is not one who announces the future/ it is one who in pain denounces / the present”. Coming to terms with the world - facing the great temptation of reconcilation with reality - is only endurable if you are already free inside, in mind and in spirit: if you are already outside and beyond. A mass movement, of men and women, is capable of this. And modern communism, in the beginning, between 1848 and 1917, wanted to be such a movement. Contrary to what everyone thinks, communism’s great fault is the same as that of the whole modern age, according to Nietzsche and Hòlderlin: it was unable to create new gods.
1996
from Theses on Benjamin, Tramonto della politica:
“Of Musil’s hero ‘who makes a mirror of the world of his time,’ Ingeborg Bachmann wrote: ‘Ulrich understood at the time that the era in which he lived, possessed of a knowledge superior to any preceding era, of an immense knowledge, was incapable of intervening in the course of history.’ That which was understood at the time was also forgotten in time. To the point that nobody realised anymore that history is without eras. In fact nothing happens. There are no longer events. There is only news. Look at the people at the summit of empires. And reverse the motto of Spinoza. There is nothing to understand. Only to laugh at or weep.
Athens and Jerusalem, ancient and modern: both look incredulously at the end of the millennium. The fate of communism and Christianity, these two symbolic orders that we have yet to fully understand, has been to retreat into obscure corners of contemporary consciousness, their age ended. But here, without omens, without unrest or apocalypse, is the novelty. We hear it in the desperate cry of Fr Turoldo: ‘Lord, send prophets again/ to tell the poor to hope again/ to break the new chains/in this infinite Egypt of the world.” The true God that failed, the true defeat of God in this century, is in the promise and the lack of realisation of human freedom, for anybody and for everyone. Here is the conclusion of what we have spoken of: this freedom in interiore homine, this need and this negation, reached for and revealed in the tragic history of the 20th century. From here we depart: not from new beginnings but from interrupted paths.”
2010
from a speech given at the Historical Materialism conference:
“I ask myself if, in the changed conditions of contemporary work –fragmentation, dispersion, individualisation, precarisation – and of the corresponding change in the position of the worker we can once again, here and now, combine the analysis of capitalism with the organisation of alternative forces. And I do not have an answer.
What I do know with certainty is that, without organisation, there will be no real, serious struggle, capable of victories. No social conflict is capable of defeating the class-adversary if it lacks political force. This is what we have learned from the past. If the new movements do not pick up the legacy of the great history of the workers’ movement, to take it forward in new forms, they have no future.
Look. Capitalists are afraid of the power of workers, not of the politics of the Left. The first they cast down among the demons of hell, the second they welcome into the halls of government. And we need to make them afraid. It is time that another spectre start to haunt not just Europe, but the world. The resurrected spirit of communism.”
2021
from an interview collected in La rivoluzione in esilio:
“Revolts are there, of various kinds, in various countries. Fragmented, improvised, sometimes instrumentalised, always provisional...They indicate problems they don’t resolve. They must be observed and followed, because they pose questions, they illuminate crises, they present actions in need of explanation…The unrest creates but it cannot overthrow.
That is why it is necessary to start again; this time, from the very beginning. If we are in a pre-Marxian situation, Marx's move from the League of the Just to the Communist League must be reversed. More than that: the leap from the ideology to the theology of revolution must be organised - I repeat, organised. This is what political theology is for.
There has been a theology of liberation. Its limitation was that it was not a political theology. And here everything is still to be thought through. I am not naming something definitively concluded, but hinting at something that has only just begun. It is a style of thought that needs not only interpreters, but also, and perhaps above all, successors. I leave seeds sown in the soil. For those seeds to grow, that soil must be cultivated. I do not have the confidence of Gustav Mahler to say, as he did: my time will come. What will follow awaits a world, and a time, that is yet to come.”
The title of this newsletter is drawn from a quotation from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire that Tronti and the other editors of Classe Operaia placed on the journal’s masthead: “…But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically…”.
Marx’s words were written in recognition that the revolutions of 1848 had failed. “All classes,” the preceding passage runs, “equally powerless and equally mute, fall on their knees…” But there are times in history where such recognition can be, itself, an obscure form of defiance.
That the revolution is travelling through purgatory is, for Marx as it would be for the operaists, an expression of pessimism, but not of despair. Hell is a pit. Purgatory is a mountain: a mountain, the poet writes, easier to climb the higher we ascend. And - compelled by a movement of the spirit, purified, prepared, made ready - ascend we must. Everything awaits us.
Forty years on, in his memoir Noi operaisti, Tronti sees the sign reversed. The path the operaists set out on was not, in the end, the one they walked. Travelling through purgatory… I don’t know, Tronti writes. Look around you. We’ve ended up in hell.
Aside from my NS essay on Tronti, I have a review in this week’s TLS on David Hollinger’s Christianity’s American Fate, which you can read here.
I will be speaking at Plough’s issue launch in Oxford on 27 September; details here. And I will be speaking at the launch of the first French edition of Herbert McCabe’s writings in Paris on 12 October; details TBC.
Thank you for all your prayers and goodwill over the course of my retreat. Looking forward to the coming year; wishing you a quiet night and a perfect end. ☩