From the Collective Capitalist to Working-Class Strategy

To read Workers and Capital today is to confront a provocation that has lost none of its force: that capital does not develop autonomously, according to its own internal logic, but is compelled, reshaped, and reorganised by the struggles of the working class. What appears as the rationality of capital – its planning, its institutions, its capacity for coordination at the level of the whole of society – is, in fact, the historical product of antagonism. At a certain level of development, capital no longer appears as a fragmented set of individual enterprises but as a social power. The emergence of what Mario Tronti calls the collective capitalist marks this transformation: capital becomes capable of organising itself as a totality, a “functionary of the total social capital,” coordinating production, circulation, and reproduction across the entire social field. This is not simply an economic shift but a political one. The “plan” of capital – its capacity to govern itself and, through that, society – is the highest expression of this development.

Yet this plan does not originate from capital’s own initiative. It is forced upon it. Capital must plan because it confronts a working class that has become increasingly collective, increasingly social, increasingly capable of acting as a unified force within production. The socialisation of capital is therefore inseparable from the socialisation of labour. But this does not produce socialism. Instead, it produces what might be called a paradox: the growth of working-class power within the capitalist system. This is the terrain on which Tronti intervenes. Against any linear conception of history in which capitalism develops the conditions for its own supersession, he insists that the relationship is inverted. “To a given rate of labour exploitation,” he writes, “there corresponds a given level of capitalist development – and not vice versa.” Development follows struggle. Capital reorganises itself in response to the pressures exerted by labour, and in doing so extends its command across the whole of society.

The factory, in this sense, does not disappear. It expands. The division between necessary and surplus labour is not abolished but generalised: what was once confined to the immediate labour process becomes a social relation. Surplus labour is extracted not only in the workplace but across the entire field of social reproduction. The result is the emergence of social capital, and with it social surplus value: the profit of a system that now organises the totality of social life. This process culminates in a new form of domination. Capitalist society becomes capable of governing itself, a form of “self-government” in which the collective capitalist appears as the political subject of the system. Democracy is transformed accordingly: no longer the domain of small proprietors, it becomes the administrative form of large-scale capital. The population is reduced to labour-power, while capital itself takes on the attributes of a political state.

And yet this development intensifies, rather than resolves, contradiction. The more capital succeeds in integrating its external limits – absorbing crises, managing conflict, extending control – the more it is forced to expose its internal antagonism. The socialisation of production does not undermine private property; it becomes its most effective mediation. Social production is organised for capital, not against it. The contradiction between social labour and private appropriation is not automatically explosive; it is stabilised, managed, and reproduced. The problem, then, is not simply to identify contradictions but to understand how they can become points of rupture.

Tronti’s answer lies in a strategic reorientation. It is not enough to wait for crisis. Revolutionary possibilities can emerge “at different levels of capitalism’s development,” including periods of expansion. The decisive factor is not the objective state of the system but the political organisation of the working class. A rupture becomes possible when workers are able to transform their position within capital into an antagonistic force against it. This requires a break with the dominant forms of working-class organisation. Trade unionism, when it claims autonomy without a political project, becomes a mechanism of integration. Even the party, when functioning as a “transmission belt,” risks reproducing the logic of capital within the workers’ movement. At the highest level of development, reformism is not an error but a structural tendency: the organisation of labour in a way that stabilises capital.

Against this, Tronti proposes something more radical: the organisation of working-class irrationality. As capital becomes increasingly rational – planned, programmed, coordinated – the working class must become its limit. Not by withdrawing from production, but by refusing its political integration within it. The task is not to perfect the system but to disrupt it from within. The working class must become “the only anarchy that capitalism is unable to organise socially.” This is not a call for spontaneity in the naive sense. On the contrary, it is a demand for a new kind of organisation: one capable of managing and directing this anarchy, of transforming refusal into strategy. If capital plans its own development, then the workers’ movement must plan the revolutionary process. Insurrection ceases to be an art and becomes a science.

Here the figure of “Lenin in England” acquires its full meaning. It is not a question of importing a model from elsewhere, but of reinventing revolutionary practice at the highest level of capitalist development. The problem is no longer how to seize power in a relatively undeveloped context, but how to organise antagonism within a fully socialised system of production. This requires a return to a rigorously one-sided perspective. The working class must refuse to present itself as the “people,” must reject any claim to represent the general interest of society. Only by maintaining its partiality – its position as a class against capital – can it avoid being absorbed into the system it opposes. “Nothing will be done,” Tronti insists, “without class hatred.” This is not a rhetorical excess but a methodological principle: only a partisan standpoint can grasp the totality of capitalist development and turn it against itself.

At the same time, this one-sidedness opens onto a global horizon. The unification of capital at the international level creates the conditions for a corresponding recomposition of the working class. Wherever industrial labour-power concentrates, similar forms of struggle emerge, suggesting the possibility of a new, transnational class unity. But this unity remains latent without organisation. The gap between tactics and strategy – between immediate struggles and long-term political direction – remains a central problem. It is here that Tronti introduces one of his most important ideas: the right to experiment. There is no ready-made form of organisation adequate to the present. The workers’ movement must discover it through practice, through a process of trial and error grounded in struggle itself. Theoretical clarity cannot be immediately translated into political programmes; it must instead guide a process of experimentation that remains open, provisional, and responsive to changing conditions.

This brings us back to the starting point. The mistake, Tronti argues, has been to begin from capital and only then turn to the working class. The task now is to reverse this orientation. To start from struggle, from the concrete practices and behaviours of workers, and to read the development of capital as a response to these. Only in this way can theory become a weapon rather than a reflection. If capital plans, it is because it must. If it governs itself, it is because it confronts a force that threatens to disrupt its order. The question is whether that force can organise itself as such – whether the working class can transform its position within capital into a conscious, collective antagonism capable of breaking the cycle of reproduction.

The answer, Tronti suggests, will not be found in the abstract movement of history, but in the practical organisation of struggle. The point of rupture will not occur where capital is weakest, but where the working class is strongest. And at that point, the most elementary forms of struggle – mass strikes, assemblies, collective refusals – may return with renewed force, no longer as spontaneous eruptions but as moments within a consciously organised process of revolution. Sixty years on, the challenge remains. Not to interpret the plan of capital, but to construct, against it, a plan of struggle.