"Workers and Capital"

Mario Tronti

The Progressive Era

The working class after Marx can be approached historically in two ways. One is chronological. It reconstructs the great cycles of the labor struggle from the 1870s, followed by a series of facts that constitute its history. It would include the history of labor in industry, of industry in capital, of capital in politics and in political events, along with the great theorization -- what was once called the history of ideas -- the first sociology, the last systematic form attained by economics, and the birth of a new scientific discipline: that theory of technological reality which is the science of labor and the enemy of the worker. Traditional historiography encapsulates it between 1870 and 1914. To be generous and to avoid constantly upsetting the mental habits of the average intellectual, it may even be possible to enclose this epoch's first great block of facts in "their" history and move towards us and the new labor struggles constituting the real political drama of our side of the story -- even if it is only at its beginning

The other approach is to move through great historical events by pausing on macroscopic groups of facts yet untouched by the critical consciousness of labor thought (Pensiero operaio) and therefore excluded from a class understanding that translates them into a political use of their consequences. When relevant, these events isolate a fundamental aspect of capitalist society. They cut a cross-section that goes from a series of struggles to a set of political-institutional, scientific, or organizational answers.

"The Dialectic and 'The Party':

Lukács' History and Class Consciousness Reconsidered"

Peter Hudis

The startling discovery, made several years ago in an archive in Moscow, of a
heretofore unknown manuscript defending History and Class Consciousness by
its author, Georg Lukács, seemed destined to impel a reconsideration of one of
the most important chapters in the history of Marxism.
From the moment of its publication in 1923, History and Class Consciousness
was renowned for its creative attempt to restore the revolutionary nature of
Marx's thought through an extension and renovation of Hegel's dialectic. Neither
the Communist International's denunciation of the book in 1924, nor Lukács'
later "self-criticism" of it when he capitulated to Stalinism, lessened its
appeal for several generations of radicals drawn to its innovative discussion of
class consciousness, reification, and the dialectical interrelation between
subject and object. Nevertheless, Lukács' failure to speak out in defense of his
book following the attacks on it in 1924 led many to conclude that he
abandoned its perspective soon after its publication.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Raoul Vaneigem, Refusals and Passions"

An Interview with Francois Bott

CONVERSATION: The author of Treatise on Living for the Young Generations pursues his quest for happiness.

Lovers of Existence. In The Knight, the Lady, the Devil and Death, Raoul Vaneigem takes stock in the manner of the navigators. These aren't his Memoirs. He's asking the time. What time is it in my own existence? "It is a time in which the years efface themselves," Vaneigem writes in the Preamble. "They abandon us all the more easily because we have refused to count them. They only leave us in a forest that is both strange and familiar, worrisome and peaceful. . .."

Born in 1934 in Lessines, Belgium, Raoul Vaneigem was, in his youth, one of the strollers of the big cities who plotted against the market society, and one of musketeers of the Situationist International, which spread the most subversive ideas. Published in 1967, his Treatise on Living for the Young Generations and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle inspired the May 1968 movement and revived revolutionary hopes among the even the least dreamy.

Thirty-five years have passed. Guy Debord committed suicide on 30 November 1994. Retired to the countryside, not too far from Brussels, Raoul Vaneigem has continued to write, complement his Treatise with such works as The Book of Pleasures, Address to the Living, Declaration of Human Rights, The Era of the Creators. . .. Rustic writer, writer of the dawn, the old musketeer has lost none of his critical verve with respect to a world subservient to the dictatorship of money. This great lover of existence, launched since his youth in search of happiness, despite bad weather and bad days, has kept his refusals and passions with us.

Question: In The Knight, the Lady, the Devil and Death (editions Cherche Midi), you speak of your own existence, which is a manner of asking for the time. What time is it? [translator: English in original] "Where are you in time?" wrote the boxer-poet Arthur Cravan. Perhaps at a certain moment of their lives the fashion in which the writers asked the time was definitive and different. . ..

"Harass the Brass:

Some Notes Toward the Subversion of the US Armed Forces"

A friend who was in the U.S. military during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War told me that before President G.H.W. Bush visited the troops in Saudi Arabia, enlisted men and women who would be in Bush's immediate vicinity had their rifle and pistol ammunition taken away from them.  This was supposedly done to avoid "accidents."  But it was also clear to people on the scene that Bush and his corporate handlers were somewhat afraid of the enlisted people who Bush would soon be killing in his unsuccessful re-election campaign.