The Socialisation Capital Cannot Produce

Capital cannot produce social cooperation by itself. It must make living labour carry it – and that dependence is where struggle begins.

The history of the working day is not, for Marx, the story of enlightened reform gradually moderating the excesses of industrial capitalism. It is the record of a “protracted and more or less concealed civil war” (202) between capitalists and workers. The isolated worker, formally free to sell their labour-power, is powerless to determine the conditions under which that power will be consumed. Left alone in the marketplace, the worker “succumbs without resistance” (202). It is only through workers acting collectively that limits can be placed upon capital’s apparently unlimited right to command labour. This changes how the struggle over the working day must be understood. It is not simply a dispute about how the products of society should be divided: how much goes to wages, how much to profit, who receives more and who receives less. The apparent laws of distribution are produced elsewhere, in what Tronti calls the “dark laboratory of production” (204). Distribution is the visible result of relations of force established within production itself. This is why attempts to challenge capital principally at the level of distribution so often arrive at the reformist fantasy of “capital without capitalism” (204). They seek a fairer allocation of wealth while leaving untouched the relation through which capital acquires its power to organise social life. But the decisive question is not simply how much workers receive. It is who commands the activity through which society is produced.

The Uneven Socialisation of Capital
Tronti’s most important argument in this section begins from an apparent impossibility. Can there be a point within capitalist society at which the relation of forces necessarily favours the working class? How could this be possible when capitalist society lies under the command of capital, which continually attempts to subordinate everything to itself? Tronti’s answer is emphatic: such a point not only can exist; it must exist. Capitalist production brings workers together, coordinates their activity and makes individual labour increasingly dependent upon a much wider process of social cooperation. Production becomes social long before the society in which it takes place is consciously organised as such. Capital therefore develops through a continuous socialisation of the class relation. It is compelled to construct ever more complex forms of cooperation, communication and interdependence, even while preserving private command over the results.

Yet capital cannot directly produce this socialisation by itself. It has to make labour-power carry it. Here lies the gap Tronti identifies between “capital as a production relation” and “capital as capitalist society” (207). The socialisation of production continually runs ahead of capital’s capacity to organise society. Capital attempts to convert cooperation into command, but the cooperation itself is enacted by living labour. Workers bear the knowledge, relationships, habits and capacities through which production becomes social. Capital can organise the conditions in which these capacities are exercised, but it cannot generate them independently of the workers whose activity it commands.

This gap is ordinarily converted into a source of capitalist power. Capital presents the social productivity of labour as though it were the productivity of capital itself. Cooperation appears as an attribute of the organisation, the factory, the platform or the technological system rather than of the workers whose relations animate them. What workers produce socially returns to confront them as an external power. But the same gap also establishes the possibility of struggle. The social relation is never fully contained by its capitalist organisation. Labour-power must remain capable of cooperation if capital is to use it, and therefore capital can never completely eliminate its autonomy. It must continually “break the autonomy of labour-power without destroying its antagonistic character” (219). The opening for action lies precisely within this contradiction.

When Workers’ Victories Become Capital’s Development
The difficulty is that the initiative of workers does not automatically escape capital. Again and again, working-class struggles have forced capital to transform itself. Workers fight over hours, wages, conditions and control. Capital resists until resistance becomes impossible or too expensive. It then reorganises production around the new conditions imposed upon it. The result is one of the most troubling patterns in the history of capitalism: workers win a struggle, but their victory later becomes a condition of capital’s renewed development.

Tronti insists that this should not be explained primarily through mistakes made by workers or the diabolical cunning of capitalists. Workers do not struggle in order to modernise capitalism. They struggle “to defeat the boss, not in order to develop capital” (208). But capital can subsequently take the results of that defeat and incorporate them into a new strategy of accumulation. The struggle for a shorter working day may compel capital to intensify production, introduce new machinery or reorganise the labour process. Demands for greater security may contribute to the construction of institutions that stabilise the reproduction of labour-power. Workers’ refusal of intolerable forms of work may force capital to invent new ones. The present defeat of an individual capitalist can become the future victory of capital as a whole.

This is possible because labour-power occupies a peculiar position. It is internal to capital as its variable component, yet it remains living labour: the active subject that capital must purchase but can never finally possess. Capitalist development is repeatedly driven by something that capital does not originate and cannot entirely control. The distinction between a form of struggle and the use later made of it is therefore crucial. The fact that capital can appropriate the consequences of a struggle does not reveal that the struggle was secretly capitalist all along. Nor does it mean that workers should cease making demands because every victory risks recuperation. It means that no partial victory can be treated as a final institutional solution to the class relation.

There are “never decisive victories and defeats” (208) within capitalist development. When workers win, capital attempts to turn their victory into a new basis for accumulation. When capital defeats an organised movement, it may subsequently discover that living labour has withdrawn the initiative, cooperation and enthusiasm on which production depends. Open defeat can be followed by less visible forms of obstruction, passivity and refusal. The struggle changes form rather than disappearing.

Labour Against Labour-Power
Tronti approaches this contradiction through Marx’s description of “labour as non-capital” (213). Against objectified labour stands subjective labour; against dead labour, living labour. Labour is not simply one productive resource among others. It is the active element confronted by the accumulated products and conditions of its own past activity. Capital can be separated from any particular capitalist. The individual owner, entrepreneur or manager may be replaced without disturbing the capital relation. But capital cannot be separated from “the capitalist who as such confronts the worker” (216). Capital is not ultimately a thing possessed by an individual. It is a social relation organised around the subordination of living activity to an alien power.

To begin from labour as non-capital is therefore to begin from the worker not as a component within the productive apparatus but as the living subject opposed to its dead objectivity. Labour is the “vital ferment of capital” (217): without it, accumulated wealth cannot reproduce or expand itself. But precisely because labour animates capital, the production process is also the point at which capital is most vulnerable.

Production is not one location of struggle among many equivalent locations. It is the moment at which capital must bring its antagonist inside itself. The act of producing capital is simultaneously “the moment of the working-class struggle against capital” (218). This does not mean that every workplace is automatically militant or that workers are always consciously stronger than their employers. It means that capital’s command encounters an objective limit at the point where instructions must be converted into living activity. Machines, rules and management systems can structure this activity, but they cannot entirely replace it. Production continues only insofar as workers actively perform, interpret, coordinate, improvise and cooperate.

At this point, the relation of forces contains something that cannot be read from the juridical ownership of the workplace. Capital may own the machinery, the building and the finished product. But it does not possess labour in the same manner. Labour-power must repeatedly be induced, disciplined and organised into activity. The worker enters production as labour-power purchased by capital but remains, potentially, labour as non-capital.

Refusal as Attacking Power
This is why the strike possesses such conceptual importance for Tronti. A strike is not merely the temporary absence of labour. It reveals that what appears as capital’s productive power depends upon an activity that can be withdrawn. When living labour refuses activity, the separation between labour and capital begins to collapse. Capital can no longer appear as an autonomous power confronting workers from the outside because its dependence upon their activity becomes visible. The apparently self-moving machinery of capitalist production stops moving.

The strike is therefore a recovery of autonomy. It interrupts the process through which capital breaks the autonomy of labour-power and reincorporates workers’ cooperation as one of its own attributes. Workers cease acting as labour-power for capital and reappear, however provisionally, as labour against capital. This also helps explain Tronti’s observation that “rejection of the struggle can, in certain cases, itself be a form of struggle” (209). Not every refusal announces itself as an open confrontation. Withdrawal, absenteeism, reduced effort, silence, indifference and the refusal to identify with work may all express the antagonism that capital is unable to eliminate. What appears from above as passivity may contain an active refusal to supply the subjective energies that capitalist organisation requires.

Marx, Tronti reminds us, spoke of the “attacking power” of the working class and the “power of resilience” of capital (211). This reverses the conventional picture in which capital innovates while workers merely react. The supposedly dynamic capitalist entrepreneur is turned inside out. The initiative belongs to the masses of workers whose struggles continually force capital to respond, reorganise and develop. Capital is resilient. It absorbs defeats, appropriates victories and converts opposition into development. But resilience is not the same as initiative. Capital moves because it is compelled to manage an antagonism that it cannot abolish.

A Science Adequate to the Struggle
This strategic reversal also demands a change in the form of working-class knowledge. Historical materialism cannot remain a settled doctrine applied in the same way to every new composition of labour and capital. To write the science of future struggles with a “medieval scribe’s quill” (210) is to mistake fidelity to inherited formulas for fidelity to the working-class point of view. Every major transformation in working-class struggle poses anew the question of what kind of knowledge the struggle requires. A science adequate to living labour must itself remain living. It must begin not from capital’s description of the economy but from the forms of cooperation, antagonism and refusal that capital is trying to contain.

The central political question is therefore not how workers can be more successfully integrated into the development of production, nor how the wealth produced by capital might be distributed more fairly after the fact. It is how the social power already exercised by labour can be separated from its capitalist organisation. The socialisation of production runs ahead. Capital follows behind, attempting to organise, measure and appropriate it. Between the two lies a historical and political margin: the distance between the living relations through which people produce the world and the dead structures that claim ownership of that production.

Capital continually tries to close this gap. It cannot succeed without ceasing to be capital, because it needs labour-power both subordinated and antagonistic, dependent and autonomous, internal to its organisation and never wholly reducible to it. Struggle begins in that impossible requirement. It begins wherever living labour recognises that the social cooperation attributed to capital is its own power appearing in an alien form. And it becomes dangerous when labour ceases merely to negotiate the terms of that alienation and begins instead to withdraw the activity through which capital lives.