The Strange Birth of the Social Worker
One of the most striking aspects of these sections (p129-159) of Workers and Capital is the way that Tronti develops a conception of socialization that is simultaneously central to later autonomist Marxism and yet markedly different from the forms it would take in the work of Antonio Negri. Reading these passages today, one encounters not an anticipation of the socialized worker as a figure of emerging autonomy, but rather a careful analysis of how the socialization of labour first appears as the socialization of capital itself. The argument proceeds from a deceptively simple observation. Labour-power is not naturally capital. Nor are the means of production. They become capital only within a historically specific social relation. For Tronti, the decisive question is therefore not labour in the abstract but the transformation of labour-power into capital through the wage relation. The secret of capitalist production lies not in humanity’s generic capacity to labour but in the historica...