Workers and Capital by Mario Tronti

Author:Mario Tronti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

7

What the Proletariat Is

Already back in his day, Lukács had set these imposing words of Marx’s as the epigraph for one of his own later-disavowed youthful essays: ‘It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do.’ In the Holy Family, faced with the critical critique, the worker is presented as he who ‘creates everything’ to the point that even in his spiritual creations he puts all critique to shame; something of which the British and French workers had provided a great deal of evidence. ‘The worker creates even man’ for it is true that ‘man has lost himself in the proletariat’ but at the same time ‘has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need – the practical expression of necessity – is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity’. The form of this rebellion, first of all, comes out in the most evident, strident and immediately revolting way, on account of poverty and misery, as part of the contradictory essence of private property. The proletariat and wealth are, indeed, antithetical terms, within a whole that comprises both. ‘Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property. The proletariat, on the contrary, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat. It is the negative side of the antithesis, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property.’ The proletariat-class thus feels itself continually being destroyed in this condition and it, in turn, continually rebels in order to destroy this condition. ‘It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement.’ Out of the two antithetical terms, the first thus works to conserve the antithesis and the second works to destroy it. ‘Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.’ It is true that through its economic movement, private property itself heads toward its own dissolution, but only by means of a development that is independent of it, of which it is unconscious, and which takes place against its will. ‘Private property drives itself … towards its own dissolution … only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat … The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat.’1 This is the sense in which ‘Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today.

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