When the Factory Disappears. Does the Most Developed Explain the World?”

Today we’re reading two sections from Workers and Capital: “Marx Yesterday and Today” and “Factory and Society” by Mario Tronti. What strikes me immediately is that Tronti is not trying to interpret Marx historically. He’s issuing a methodological and political challenge. He writes that any research project concerned with the contemporary validity of Marxism “has to engage with Marx not in his time, but in our own.” Capital should be judged on the basis of the capitalism of today. So the question is not: what did Marx mean in 1867? But: what does Marxism become when confronted with the most developed form of capitalism now?

Tronti insists on a key methodological principle taken from Marx: it is the most developed point that explains the backward, not vice versa. Capital explains ground rent, not the reverse. This becomes a way of thinking politically: the highest development of capitalism reveals its inner structure most clearly. That means analysis must begin from the advanced forms of capital, not from residues or survivals. At the same time, in our previous sessions we raised questions about this kind of developmental narrative – particularly how postcolonial critiques challenge the idea that “advanced” capitalism provides the key to all other forms, and how groups like the Midnight Notes Collective complicate linear models of development by foregrounding enclosure, primitive accumulation, and ongoing forms of internal and external colonisation. So one question hovering here is whether Tronti’s methodological wager risks reinstating a Eurocentric or stagist account of capital, or whether his focus on the “most developed” can be re-read in a way that avoids that trap.

He then reframes Marxism itself. Marx is not the ideology of the workers’ movement but its revolutionary theory. In fact, Tronti makes the provocative claim that any ideology is bourgeois, because ideology is always the mystified reflection of class struggle within capitalism. If the workers’ movement constructs its own “ideology,” it risks becoming a passive articulation of capitalist development. Marxism, in this view, begins as the destruction of ideology, not the construction of a new one. This leads to a strong thesis: theory is not a neutral reflection but a moment of class struggle. The theoretical task must be conceived as internal to the struggle. And today, Tronti says, the analysis of capitalism must precede the critique of ideology: it must provide its foundation.

In “Factory and Society,” this becomes more concrete. Tronti tracks how capital increasingly integrates labour-power into itself. The worker comes to understand the production process only through the mediation of capital. Paid and unpaid labour blur. Capital presents labour as the creator of value, yet sees value as its own self-valorisation. The labour process is subordinated to the valorisation process. As capitalist development advances, production penetrates all social relations. The relation between factory and society becomes organic. At the highest level of development, society becomes an articulation of production. The whole of society lives in function of the factory, and precisely at that moment, the factory as such seems to disappear. When everything becomes factory, the factory dissolves into society. This is what Tronti calls the deepest mystification of bourgeois social relations. Capital appears as society’s objective wealth. The specific antagonism of the production relation becomes obscured. Even science risks becoming a wage-labour activity reduced to technology.

Against this mystification, Tronti proposes a “scientific unilateralism” of the working-class point of view. Not a mystical reduction, but a fierce insistence on looking at distribution, exchange, and consumption from the standpoint of production. The totality can be grasped either from the partiality of the collective capitalist or from that of the socially combined worker. And here the stakes sharpen. Capital attempts to dismantle the collective worker; the worker must recompose themselves against capital. The working class must discover itself as part of capital in order to oppose the whole of capital. Labour must see labour-power as commodity: as enemy. The integration of the working class into the system may provoke the rupture of the system.

For Tronti, the development of the productive forces is capitalism’s historic mission, but the highest productive force is the working class as revolutionary class. The contradiction is not primarily technological; it is between the socialisation of production and private appropriation. And the working class becomes the irresolvable contradiction of capitalism at the moment it self-organises as a revolutionary class. So the scientific conception of the factory today is not descriptive. It is a way to comprehend the present in order to destroy it.

Questions for Commiseration

∑ Marx in our own time – What would it mean concretely to judge Capital on the basis of capitalism today? If we follow Tronti’s principle that the most developed explains the backward, where do we locate the “most developed” form of capitalism now?

∑  Is all ideology bourgeois? – Tronti claims that any ideology is bourgeois, and that a workers’ ideology is necessarily reformist. Is this persuasive? Can revolutionary movements function without ideology, or does Tronti redefine theory as something fundamentally different?

∑  Theory as class struggle – What does it mean to conceive theoretical work itself as a moment of class struggle? How does this shift how we understand our own intellectual or academic practices?

∑  Factory and society – Tronti argues that when the factory extends over the whole of society, it appears to disappear. What might this look like today? Does platform capitalism, logistics, or knowledge work confirm or complicate this thesis?

∑  Integration and rupture – The integration of labour into capital is described as both deepening domination and intensifying contradiction. Under what conditions does integration produce rupture rather than absorption?

∑  Recomposition of the collective worker – What would it mean today to “recompose the material figure of the collective worker”? Is there still a coherent figure to recompose, or must it be rethought?

∑  Productive forces and consciousness – Tronti says the level of productive forces is measured not by technology but by the working class’s degree of revolutionary consciousness. How should we understand this claim? Is it strategic exaggeration, or a methodological principle?