The Sad Fate of the Productive Worker

In this section of Workers and Capital, Mario Tronti returns to one of Marx’s most unsettling claims: that to be a productive worker under capitalism is not a fortunate condition but a “sad fate.” Productive labour is not defined by its usefulness, its skill, its social necessity, or its contribution to human flourishing. It is defined by its relation to capital. Productive labour is labour that produces surplus-value, and therefore labour that produces capital itself. To be productive, in this precise capitalist sense, is to participate in the reproduction of the social relation that dominates you.

This is where Tronti’s argument opens onto the problem of the “social worker.” The worker is not simply an individual located in the factory, nor merely a seller of labour-power standing before the capitalist. Capitalist development increasingly socialises labour, drawing more and more forms of cooperation, knowledge, reproduction, circulation, and communication into its process of valorisation. But this socialisation does not liberate labour. It expands the terrain on which labour is made productive for capital. The worker becomes social not because society has escaped capital, but because capital has extended its command across society.

Tronti begins from Marx’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour. Labour is unproductive when it is exchanged directly with revenue rather than with capital (161). This distinction, Tronti argues, is correct, but only from the standpoint of capital. It tells us whether labour valorises capital. It does not tell us whether labour is useful, meaningful, necessary, or liberatory from the standpoint of the worker. A teacher, artist, servant, cleaner, organiser, or carer may perform socially necessary work, but that is not what makes labour productive in the capitalist sense. Labour becomes productive when it is inserted into the production of surplus-value.

The point is not moral but political. When Marx describes the productive worker as suffering a “sad fate,” he is not lamenting work in general. He is identifying the fact that the productivity of labour belongs to capital (162). Productive labour produces capital, and therefore continually reproduces capital’s dominion over the worker. This is the grim secret of capitalist productivity: the more productive labour becomes, the more it strengthens the power that confronts it. Labour’s own force returns to it as command.

This inversion is central to Tronti’s account. Capital appears as the bearer of the social productive power of labour. Workers encounter themselves in alienated form: their cooperation, knowledge, discipline, invention, and sociality are objectified in capital and turned back against them. Even when production depends upon the collective labour of many, capital isolates the worker as an individual unit of labour-power. In relation to the worker, capital appears as the social power of production; in relation to capital, the worker’s productive labour appears only as the labour of the isolated worker (170). On one side stands a mass of isolated individuals united by their common condition as sellers of labour-power; on the other stands the concentrated objectivity of “dead labour” (171).

The emergence of the social worker intensifies this contradiction. As capital develops, it does not merely command labour inside the immediate production process. It reorganises society as a whole around the reproduction of capital. The factory no longer names only a particular site of production; it becomes a model for the social organisation of labour. Education, culture, consumption, administration, welfare, communication, logistics, and social reproduction become increasingly implicated in the production and reproduction of capitalist command. Labour becomes social, but in a form already captured by capital.

This is why Tronti’s insistence on standpoint is so important. From the capitalist point of view, the movements of capital appear to precede and condition the movements of the working class (172). Capital seems to be the active subject of history, while labour appears as its dependent variable. This is not merely an illusion. It is how the relation really appears to capital and to its functionaries. Capital must constantly organise, anticipate, rationalise, and govern labour. But Tronti asks whether this can also be accepted from the working-class point of view. Must the working class understand itself as the object of capital’s movement? Or can the same process be read in reverse?

Tronti’s answer is that the same productive force can be counted twice. Labour’s productive forces are indeed transferred into capital. Yet labour also confronts capital as the force that produces it, and therefore as the force that can refuse to produce it (173). The same social power appears once within capital and once against capital. From one side, labour is capital’s productive force. From the other, labour is the possible interruption of capital’s reproduction. This is the political meaning of the social worker: not simply labour spread across society, but social labour whose cooperation has become both indispensable to capital and potentially antagonistic to it.

This is a crucial distinction. The social worker is not a sociological category in the narrow sense. It does not simply name workers outside the factory or the expansion of wage labour into new sectors. It names a transformation in the composition of class power. Capital’s development depends increasingly on the socialisation of labour, but that very process creates new possibilities for refusal. If capital must organise society as a productive apparatus, then antagonism can also emerge across society. The struggle is no longer confined to the wage relation narrowly understood, because the wage relation itself has become one moment in a wider organisation of social command.

For Tronti, the political history of capital is the history of its attempts to govern this antagonism. Capital’s mature vocation is to move from division toward unity (175). It seeks to overcome the disruptions generated by working-class struggle by incorporating them into new forms of development. Capital does not simply repress antagonism from the outside. It tries to use antagonism, to rationalise it, to make it productive, to transform refusal into a higher level of command. This is why capitalist development often appears as innovation, reform, restructuring, or modernisation. But from the working-class point of view, these are also responses to struggle.

Here the problem of the official workers’ movement becomes decisive. Tronti argues that capital has placed the functional apparatus of bourgeois ideology into the hands of the officially recognised workers’ movement (163). This is one of his harshest claims. The workers’ movement can become an ideological mediation internal to capital, managing the appearances of class society on capital’s behalf. It can translate antagonism into representation, refusal into negotiation, organisation into discipline, and working-class power into a developmental resource for capital. Rather than breaking with capital’s point of view, it can attach that point of view to the working class itself.

This is why Tronti calls for a working-class auto-critique (164). Such a critique is not a moral denunciation of past failures. It is a political necessity. The working class must examine the historical forms through which its own organisations have become incorporated into capital’s development. It must ask when organisation has expressed working-class autonomy, and when it has merely mirrored the existing level of capitalist command. A passive correspondence between working-class organisation and capitalist development is not enough (169). Revolutionary organisation must actively exceed capital. It must organise itself at the highest point conceivable in the present, even if that point is not yet materially given.

This anticipatory dimension is essential to the social worker. If capital has already socialised labour, then working-class organisation cannot remain attached to older images of the worker or older institutional forms of mediation. It must begin from the present level of capitalist socialisation but not remain confined to it. It must discover forms of organisation adequate to a class composition that is dispersed, social, reproductive, communicative, and cooperative, while still antagonistic. The task is not to represent labour as it exists, but to organise the refusal of the form in which labour has been made to exist.

This is why Tronti’s argument culminates in the refusal of labour itself. The enemy of the workers is not only the capitalist, but also labour as it is organised by capital (187). This does not mean rejecting activity, creativity, cooperation, or collective life. It means refusing the mode of activity through which these are subordinated to capital. Previous revolutions, Tronti notes through Marx, may have redistributed labour differently. They may have changed who performs which activities, or how the products of labour are allocated. But the communist revolution must be directed against the existing mode of activity itself. It must abolish labour as a form of class domination.

The social worker is born inside this contradiction. Capital socialises labour in order to extend command; the working class discovers in this same socialisation the possibility of refusing command. Capital unifies society as a productive apparatus; the working class can turn that unity against capital. Labour produces capital; but because capital depends on labour, labour can refuse to produce it. This is the double character of socialised labour: one time within capital, another time against capital.

The stakes of Tronti’s argument are therefore not simply theoretical. He is not offering a better definition of productive labour, nor a more subtle sociology of the working class. He is developing a political method. Every category must be read from the standpoint of struggle. Productive labour, social labour, capitalist development, workers’ organisation, even the workers’ movement itself: none of these can be understood neutrally. From the standpoint of capital, the socialisation of labour is the expansion of command. From the standpoint of the working class, it is the terrain on which refusal can become general.

The “strange birth” of the social worker is strange because it is not the birth of a new positive identity to be celebrated. It is the emergence of a new antagonistic capacity within capital itself. The social worker is the worker whose productive force has been extended across society, but whose power lies not in being productive for capital. It lies in the capacity to interrupt productivity, to refuse labour as capital’s mode of activity, and to turn the social cooperation captured by capital into a force against capital. In Tronti’s terms, the working class is inside capital, but not reconciled to it. It is part of the enemy it must fight, and precisely for that reason it holds the power to bring that enemy’s development to a halt.