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 historically specific exchange of labour-power for money. Capital is not founded upon labour as such. It is founded upon the compulsory sale of labour-power.

What follows from this is a remarkable re-reading of Marx’s discussion of cooperation. The development of collective labour, increasing social interdependence, and the growing productive capacities generated by cooperation do not initially belong to workers. The social productive power of labour, Tronti insists, “does not exist outside of capital.” The transition from the individual worker to the social worker occurs through the development of capital itself. Labour becomes socialized only insofar as capital organizes, coordinates, and commands increasingly collective forms of production. This is where Tronti’s account differs significantly from many later readings of operaismo. The social worker appears here not as a figure of liberation but as a figure of incorporation. The birth of the social worker is simultaneously the birth of a new stage of capitalist command. The cooperative capacities of workers appear immediately as productive powers of capital. Social labour presents itself as capital’s labour.

Indeed, Tronti goes even further. The socialization of labour is not itself the formation of the working class. Rather, it is an intermediate moment in the historical development of class antagonism. Capital organizes workers collectively because it requires their cooperation for valorization. Yet this same process creates new possibilities for collective resistance. Socialization therefore possesses no intrinsic political direction. It can be utilized by either side depending upon the balance of forces. This point seems particularly important when read against the trajectory of autonomist Marxism in the 1970s. In Negri’s work, especially from Proletarians and the State onward and later in Marx Beyond Marx, the socialization of labour increasingly becomes the basis for an expansive political optimism. The emergence of the socialized worker, and later the social worker (operaio sociale), points toward forms of cooperation that increasingly exceed capitalist command. Social cooperation begins to appear as something that capital captures rather than creates. The productive capacities of social labour are understood as possessing a degree of autonomy that capital can never fully contain.

Tronti’s formulation is considerably more cautious. The social productive powers of labour do not precede capital. They emerge through capital’s development. The social worker is born inside capital, not beyond it. Social cooperation is not an autonomous commons waiting to be liberated but a terrain of struggle constituted through capitalist social relations. The political stakes of this difference are considerable. Negri’s account allows one to locate within contemporary forms of cooperation the material basis for post-capitalist social relations. Capital increasingly appears parasitic upon forms of social production that it no longer organizes directly. Tronti, by contrast, directs attention toward the persistence of command within socialization itself. The fact that labour has become social does not mean that capital’s power has weakened. Indeed, it may indicate the opposite.

This concern becomes particularly clear in Tronti’s extraordinary reflections on the possibility of a capitalism without capitalists. Long before discussions of managerial capitalism, state socialism, or contemporary platform economies, Tronti imagines a society in which capital has become fully socialized. The individual capitalist disappears. Ownership becomes diffuse. Distribution becomes increasingly egalitarian. Yet exploitation continues unabated because the social relation of capital remains intact. One arrives at what he provocatively describes as “the realization of socialism as the ultimate phase of capitalism.” What is being challenged here is the assumption that socialization itself is inherently emancipatory. The disappearance of individual capitalists does not abolish capitalist domination. On the contrary, it may perfect it. Once capital becomes fully socialized, workers can no longer easily identify their adversary. Exploitation becomes embedded within the very structures of collective life.

In this sense, Tronti’s analysis points toward a problem that would become increasingly important in subsequent decades. If capital itself becomes social, if exploitation operates through cooperation, communication, knowledge, and social reproduction, then political antagonism can no longer be understood simply as a confrontation between workers and identifiable owners. The terrain of struggle shifts toward the organization of social cooperation itself. Yet Tronti refuses any easy conclusion. The socialization of labour remains an ambivalent process. The same collective capacities that serve capitalist valorization also generate workers’ collective power. Capital’s need to organize labour socially continuously produces the possibility of resistance. The social worker emerges as a productive force of capital, but also as the material basis for new forms of antagonism.

Perhaps this is the enduring importance of these passages. Rather than celebrating socialization as an emerging commons or condemning it as total domination, Tronti presents it as a contradictory process through which both capital and the working class are simultaneously constituted. The social worker is neither the subject of an inevitable communist future nor merely the object of capitalist command. It is the unstable product of a historical process in which cooperation, exploitation, and antagonism become increasingly inseparable. The challenge that follows is not simply to identify social cooperation wherever it appears, but to understand the conditions under which socialized labour ceases to function as a productive power of capital and becomes instead a productive power of its own struggles.