[This is another re-homed post, from October 2008.]
[This is another re-homed post, from October 2008.]
I certainly have my differences with Mario Tronti. For instance his loyalty to the PCI and a certain nostalgia for Lenin, have no resonances for me at all – quite the opposite. But I have been an admirer of much of his "labour of articulation" nonetheless, from operaismo to the current day. I also have some interests in the whole Deleuze & Guattarian trends in recent radical political thought. However I had to smile at this rather dry sarcasm from Tronti on this subject:
The famous transformations of work are like the equally famous transformations of capitalism: when everything has been said, nothing has changed. The storytellers of the social come and describe the state of affairs: the liquid instead of the solid, what melts into air rather than what sediments on the ground, the whole that must become flexible, the production that becomes molecular, the power that is everywhere and nowhere like the holy spirit, because it is micro and no longer macro, and then the immaterial, the cognitive, the politics that is bios, made to measure for the asocial individual – forget about women and men of flesh and bone who organise themselves for the struggle. With limitless patience we read and listen, careful not to let what we don’t know slip through our fingers.
Ouch! Touché, signor Tronti!
This is excerpted from the Institute of Conjuctural Research blog’s translation of a recente article from Il Manifesto "Politics at Work" http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2008/10/old-guard-on-new-crisis-pt-2-mario.html