The Secret Is Not a Law but a Capacity. On Workers, Capital, and the Organisation of Refusal
These sections (223-262) push the inversion already underway in the earlier parts of Workers and Capital much further. What begins as the methodological priority of working-class struggle over capitalist development becomes something stranger and more demanding: an attempt to think knowledge, history, technology, organisation, even capitalism itself, from the standpoint of the force capable of abolishing it. The working-class point of view is not another interpretation of the same world. It changes what counts as knowing the world in the first place . There is something wonderfully improper in Tronti’s demand for the “right to be despised as scholars” (224). Research conducted from the working-class point of view has no particular interest in proving that it can play by the rules of recognised knowledge. It takes on instead what he calls the “honour of isolation”: working clandestinely, underground, refusing the fantasy that knowledge becomes more truthful the further it wi...