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 withdraws from antagonism. This is not an argument against study. If anything, it is an extraordinarily intense conception of study. But study here ceases to be the production of knowledge about an object and becomes participation in the struggle over the object’s continued existence. Perhaps this is what it means to take Marx seriously as something other than Marxism. Once Marx’s work becomes a doctrine, it can be agreed with or disagreed with, interpreted more or less elegantly, positioned within an intellectual history. But Tronti wants Marx’s thought returned to the place from which it came: not the history of ideas but the history of struggle. Theory becomes one of the things struggle does. And the question addressed to a concept is consequently not only is it true? but what can it do? What force does it gather? What does it allow us to see because we want to destroy what we are looking at?

This is the force of Tronti’s extraordinary proposal for a “non-objective social science without pretensions to objectivity” (238): a deliberately unilateral knowledge capable of grasping the totality from one side, “not to know” society but “to overthrow” it. There is no embarrassment about partiality here. Partiality is precisely what allows the whole to become visible. Capital imagines the view from everywhere because it wants everything to continue functioning. The working-class point of view sees from somewhere because it wants the functioning to stop. This changes the meaning of the famous Copernican inversion. To say that capital follows working-class struggle is not simply to correct the chronology of capitalist development. It is to “break and invert” the subaltern history of workers’ movements, reading capital itself as a moment in working-class political development. What appears from the capitalist point of view as innovation, modernisation, restructuring, technological progress can then be reread as reaction: the accumulated history of capital trying to escape the people upon whom it depends.

The inversion is almost comic in its implications. Capital likes to imagine itself as the active party: entrepreneur, innovator, creator, organiser. But Tronti reverses the verbs. “It really is the capitalist who creates work. The worker is the creator of capital” (244). Capital is the jobs creator, not the wealth creator. Capital organises labour because labour has already produced capital; it restructures production because workers have made the previous organisation unworkable; it develops technology because living labour remains troublesome. Thus exploitation itself can be reread as an attempted escape. The history of capitalist domination becomes the history of the capitalist class’s repeated attempts to “emancipate itself from the working class” (245). It is an intentionally scandalous formulation, but its scandal clarifies the relation. Capital possesses factories, machines, money, states; what it does not possess without remainder is the living capacity upon which all of them depend. Its power begins from dependency. Command is the political form through which it attempts to manage that dependency.

This is why technology loses its innocence. Machinery does not simply arrive and subsequently transform class relations. Technological change belongs inside the history of class struggle. The machine is sedimented conflict: a technical solution to a political problem, yesterday’s insubordination hardened into today’s infrastructure. What appears as neutral development carries within it the memory of the behaviours it was designed to discipline, bypass, measure or eliminate. But the workers remain there. Capital can rearrange them endlessly without eliminating the antagonism that makes them workers in the political sense. Indeed, the development of social capital intensifies the contradiction. When all the conditions of society confront workers as capital, labour’s productive power becomes simultaneously political power. The factory expands beyond its walls until society itself becomes part of the organisation of production. And precisely there Tronti imagines one of the mature forms of antagonism: “the frontal clash between the factory as working class and society as capital” (241). The strike acquires its importance here. Its significance is not that the worker withholds something still legally belonging to them. Labour-power has already been sold; the product already belongs to capital. The strike refuses something more fundamental: command. It interrupts capital’s capacity to organise living activity as labour. The worker says no not simply to work but to being made to work in this form, at this moment, according to this organisation. There is a whole politics contained in that no.

Refusal is sometimes mistaken for withdrawal, as though saying no meant stepping outside politics. Tronti suggests almost exactly the opposite. Capital continuously solicits workers’ positive participation: collaborate, propose, improve, innovate, make demands that can be translated into another round of development. Even victories can become motors. Better conditions and capitalist development have historically been capable of travelling together; demands can become information through which capital learns how to reorganise exploitation.  The problem is therefore not simply how to demand more but how to make demands cease functioning as contributions to capitalist intelligence. Hence the peculiar power of the demand-as-refusal: a demand whose importance lies less in the positive thing requested than in the crisis its pursuit opens. What happens when workers cease proposing themselves as the solution to capital’s problems? When organisation refuses the invitation to become another articulation of capitalist society? Tronti’s answer is stark: the mechanism begins to block. 

And yet refusal cannot simply be romanticised. Passivity, non-collaboration and withdrawal can remain entirely spontaneous. They are material facts from which politics begins, not politics completed. At some point the passive no has to turn over into its active form: refusal becoming “political, and therefore active, subjective and organised” (260). Refusal becomes antagonism when it acquires organisation without surrendering the negativity that made it dangerous. This brings us back to the problem of party and class. The class exists before its institutional representation. There can be a class without the party; there cannot, Tronti insists, be a capitalist class without the state of capital. This asymmetry matters enormously. Working-class power has a capacity to exist informally, diffusely, beneath and beyond the organisations claiming to speak in its name. Capitalist power continually needs institutions through which to stabilise itself. Non-institutional political power belongs peculiarly to the working class. 

The question of organisation is therefore not how to give an otherwise shapeless class political existence. The political already exists in antagonism. Organisation gives that antagonism an objective force capable of acting strategically. And this produces the impossible standard by which Tronti judges the party: “The working class cannot constitute itself as a party within capitalist society without preventing this society from continuing to function. As long as it continues to function, this party is not the working-class party” (243).  Organisation is measured not by its permanence but by the interruption it can produce.

This is perhaps why Tronti has so little patience for tradition. Institutions accumulate history in order to justify their continuation. The working class has another archive: “only one continuity – that of their own, direct political experiences; and only one tradition – that of their struggles” (250). Memory matters, but not as inheritance to be dutifully preserved. The past survives insofar as it can become a weapon in a present antagonism. The same destructive orientation animates Tronti’s attack on working-class culture. There is no need to provide the proletariat with its own equivalent of bourgeois culture, its own improved collection of institutions, values and intellectuals. “Working-class culture” risks becoming another affirmative project, another request for inclusion within the division of intellectual labour. Instead, critique must become a critique of culture, working toward the “dissolution of all that already exists.” 

The refusal to become intellectuals belongs here. This is not a refusal of intelligence, thought or study. It is a refusal of the social role that separates thinking from struggle and then offers that separated knowledge back as expertise. Industrial sociology becomes Tronti’s exemplary obscenity because it studies workers precisely in order to render them governable. Against this, “a theory of revolution means the direct practice of class struggle.” Knowledge does not stand outside antagonism describing its participants. It chooses a side and accepts the consequences. Perhaps this also clarifies Tronti’s extraordinary distinction between explanation and destruction. Capital may understand the working class better. It has every reason to: the worker is capital’s central political problem. It can develop sociology, management science, surveys, metrics, human relations, algorithmic monitoring – an enormous apparatus devoted to knowing labour. But there is one thing this knowledge cannot accomplish. “Capital can explain everything about the working class theoretically but cannot eliminate it practically” (235). The working class, conversely, might fail to explain capital completely and still possess the capacity to destroy it. 

This is a remarkable demotion of explanation. The working class is the secret of capitalism not because it provides the missing theoretical key through which everything finally makes sense, but because it contains capitalism’s practical possibility of dissolution. The secret is not a law. It is a capacity. And capacities do nothing by themselves: this one “does not function objectively, but rather has to be imposed subjectively” (236).  Hence revolution cannot be awaited as the culmination of historical tendencies. There is no cold logic that arrives at the proper hour and politely announces that conditions are mature. Tronti’s lovely impatience with such sobriety appears in his insistence that reason itself must be moved by class hatred, and in his defence of Marx and Lenin against those who complain that they kept seeing revolution around the corner or wanting it at the wrong moment. Revolution is always, from the standpoint of existing order, badly timed.

But neither is it simply the spectacular event imagined by bourgeois political mythology. Tronti distinguishes the revolutionary process from the brilliant flash of regime change: the coup, the seizure, the dramatic transformation whose excitement rapidly settles into another administration of society. Working-class revolution is process because the working class occupies a place from which antagonism continually reproduces itself. It does not merely replace those who command. Its tendency is to interrupt the relation that makes command possible. This is why theoretical reconstruction and practical destruction have to move together, “as the two legs of that single body which is the working class” (250). One cannot walk very far without the other. Theory without destruction becomes scholarship; destruction without theoretical reconstruction risks remaining spontaneous refusal, capable of blocking but not of strategically extending the blockage.

And perhaps that is the thread running through all of these pages: how to prevent antagonism from becoming development. Capital is extraordinarily capable of feeding upon what opposes it. Workers struggle; capital restructures. Workers demand; capital modernises. Workers refuse one organisation of labour; another is invented. Antagonism becomes innovation. The working class is simultaneously an “articulation” and a “dissolution” of capital, and capitalist power continually attempts to seize the first possibility while neutralising the second.  Tronti’s wager is that this conversion can itself be refused. Not by searching for some uncontaminated outside of capital, nor by constructing a better programme for administering it, but by organising the very dependency capital cannot escape. The workers already hold, as Tronti beautifully puts it, “the conditions of capital” (244). They do not need to become the positive managers of another economy before exercising power. Their power begins negatively, in their capacity to make this one fail.

The no is therefore not emptiness. It contains an entire unrealised world, but refuses to describe that world too quickly. Perhaps its radicalism lies precisely there. Capital continually asks what workers want so that it can discover what it must become next. Tronti suggests that there are moments when the most politically sophisticated answer is not to provide the information. To refuse collaboration. To refuse the programme. To refuse the demand that refusal explain what comes after. And then – to organise that refusal until what had appeared merely negative becomes a material force. At that point the working-class point of view ceases to be a perspective upon capitalist society. It becomes something closer to a lever placed beneath it: knowledge produced not for a more adequate representation of the world, but to find where the weight might shift. Class strategy and party tactics have to remain together because neither knowledge nor refusal is sufficient by itself.  The point is not to understand the dance better. It is to discover how, having forced capital to dance, we might finally stop the music.