Class composition as Leninist?

I'm pretty sure Negri referred to himself as a Leninist throughout the 70s. Check out Steve Wright's stuff here on libcom, in particular "A Party of Autonomy?" I'd also recommend Monty Neill's stuff on class composition and the zapatistas (it should come up in a google search) that gets into these issues.

Ogion, it seem like you should say "anti-Imperialism" or "privileged stratum analysis". Leninism seems too vague for what you're trying to say.

It sounds like the old Marxist line that self-management is a petty bourgeois notion, which fits with Leninism. A problem i have with a lot of the stuff about class composition is that it strikes me as crudely deterministic. I think the spontaneism falls out of this.

I've read the Bologna's "Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origins of the Workers' Council Movement" and by the end, it is clearly Leninist. Which was a great disappointment because the piece begins so well.

And it begs the question that I discussed with Red and some Endnotes comrades recently, which is: did the operaists follow the Althusserian stream, reject the Marxist critique of alienation and commodity fetishism (the Althusserians say to skip over chapter 1 of Capital because of its metaphysics), and throw the Hegelian baby out with the bathwater? Because class composition theory does have the determinism, that syndicalistcat mentions, in rejecting class consciousness and the self-activity of the class. Thoughts?

Is this text online?

Yeah, it's available here on libcom.

If the operaistas were influenced by Althusser, that could explain their determinism. Althusser is an example of a kind of Marxism that sees the structure as determining. This was characteristic of Third International Marxism. This was what led EP Thompson to his critique of Althusser. I think it's also probably an inaccurate interpretation of Marx's theory. For Marx I think in any social explanation you have the structural features, which provide the context, and then you have the stream of events. So Marx did not suppose that events that enter into explaining what happens, a course of struggle or whatever, are always economic or about the material conditions. On the contrary, in principle they could be anything...cultural or religious movements or particular political events or whatever. But the economic structure is always the context, that explains why a series of events lead to a particular outcome. So structures by themselves don't really explain. you also need to look at the concrete events.

Good question, I've only scanned the responses so apologies if this is repeating anything that's already been said.

- the Operaisists i've read definitely styled themselves as Leninists, only they argued that as historical materialists, theory must change with history. So Lenin was right in 1917 Russia but wrong in 1968 Italy. How much this was sincere, and how much it was an attempt to deflect accusations of heresy from the PCI I don't know (this is a pretty common manoeuvre for dissident Marxists; Rosa Luxemburg pulled something similar in 'the mass strike', citing Engles' smears of anarchism in order to avoid accusations of anarchism for advocating a shift from parliamentary to direct action).

- I don't see it as particularly determinist. If anything Operaist practice had something of a Leninist voluntarism to it (as you say, 'contradictory subjectivism'). As someone said on another thread - seeing the class struggle like a game of Risk - mapping the class then going to the factory gates and shop floors to agitate. So I'm not sure how much they saw the refusal of work as arising automatically from the conditions of the mass worker, rather they saw elements of this refusal and agitated to try and generalise it imho (it's a while since I've read any of this stuff though, so may be misremembering).

- However, I don't know how much these Leninist aspects are inherent to the concept of class composition itself. It seems perfectly possible to analyse the contemporary organisation of the labour process, family life, the striation of the labour market etc without then playing the armchair general. Really, any class analysis should be 'compositionist' in terms of analysing the make up of the working class, the (formal/informal) organisational forms predominating etc. But that doesn't need to lead to a load of student intellectuals salting themselves into production lines or whatever, it could just as easily be used to understand the relation of struggles in your workplace/locale to ones elsewhere, and to think about ways these different struggles can link up into a collective force ('political recomposition').

I don't think operaismo was influenced by Althusser. Many of the important operaist texts were written at a time when althusserianism was only coming into fashion in France. There is, however, a decisively anti-Hegelian twist to operiasmo, which has to do with their opposition to the Gramscian ideology of the PCI. I think philosophically one of the sources of operaismo was Galvano della Volpe's interpretation of Marx's method (which is critical of Hegel).

I agree with Joseph K above about determinism (or, more precisely, the lack of it) in operaismo.

All good points. It's a while since I read the Wright book, but iirc there isn't a singular concept of class composition, rather it's developed and contested by different theorists. I remember thinking the specific diagnoses of 'mass worker', then 'social worker' (and subsequently 'multitude') were pretty funny: the Operaists declared production line workers the leading antagonistic subject, just as things began kicking off with the students, squatting movements, feminism etc. Then hastily reformulated it as 'the social factory' to say once again, 'we were right then, but conditions have changed, so we're right now too'. However, that might just apply to Negri (who I'm most familiar with) and not people like Tronti, Bologna et al.

So I'm not sure how much the compositionist approach requires a privileged subject. Maybe it does, if you look how latter day post-Operaists scrabble around to laud the 'cognitariat', 'immaterial labourers' etc (and ironically, having come full circle, the supposed revolutionary agency of these subjects arises from their supposed skills and identification with the - ontological/biopolitical - labour process, not their refusal of it! And indeed communism is conceived as throwing off the neo-feudal shackles of capital and self-managing the immaterial commons!).

I didn't take away the 'privileged subject' thing when I first read this stuff, but maybe it is there. And perhaps when you take that away, and strip out the stricter 'cycle of struggle' stuff linked to technology and management techniques you're not doing class composition analysis, but just decent class analysis a la E.P. Thomspon. I'd have to re-read stuff to see what I make of it now, so I dunno really.

Late Negri has this weird similarity to Orthodox Trotskyism. For Negri, capital has already reached the point foretold in "The Fragment on Machines" where everything can be done by machines, work is only imposed on proletarians as a means of social control not for surplus value extraction. Thus communism already "exists" and we only need to overthrow the state to realise full communism. Which is similar to the ortho-Trots who said the USSR was a deformed workers state and that socialism there only required the overthrow of the Stalinist regime.

I think the objection you raise to the Trontian theory of history is valid, but like Joseph, I don't think you necessarily can reduce the notion of class composition to the Trontian operaismo of Classe Operaia. Remember that the notion of class composition dates back to Quaderni Rossi and the work of Raniero Panzieri and radical sociologists like Romano Alquati. I'm not suggesting that the split of Classe Operaia away from Quaderni Rossi was in any way related to differences of opinion over Leninism per se (see the Panzieri-Tronti Theses, which display strong signs of a leninist conception of the party - also Alquati accompanied Tronti into CO), but operaismo should not been seen as a unitarian or monolithic development where all the diverse conceptions can be seen as synonymous labels for a single theory.

Of course Panzieri's untimely death in 1964, just after the split, does mean that operaismo is retrospectively identified most strongly with Tronti's conceptions. Nonetheless there is a contradiction between the search for the new "central historical figure" (and the organisational forms to which they best correspond - the question that was to lead to the later split between Tronti and Negri, followed by the re-integration of the former into the PCI and the creation of Potere Operaia by the latter) and the original twinned notions of class composition and conricerca, which it substitutes and subsumes.

The notion of class composition, as I understand it, comes out of Panzieri's work in translating Marx (particularly volume 2) and reflecting on the role of machinery and technology in the immediate process of production, as a moment in the class struggle. Together with Alquati's investigations into the FIAT wildcats of '63. The distinction between the technical composition of the class, and the political composition, is drawn by inspiration from Marx's technical and organic composition of capital, and his discussion of how the latter is a strategy of capital (relative accumulation) in response to the working class's resistance to the extension of absolute surplus value. It remakes the relation between class, capital and consciousness into an ongoing dynamic process, rather than the static conception of the orthodox Marxists of a class, essentially unchanged since its formation by primitive accumulation, to which there corresponds basically a single 'correct' consciousness in the era of capitalist social relations. In that sense it is a break from both economic determinism and the static objectivism of orthodox Marxism, and is a tool - in conjunction with the practice of conricerca or worker's inquiry (understood as genuine knowledge discovery, rather than simple proselytisation or 'transmission belt' style recruitment, as practiced by Negri) - that could potentially be used by any project for class war and revolution.

I know from talking with Steve W that one of the reasons he did the research that became Storming Heaven, was his frustration with how the promising embryonic idea of class composition was in practice foreclosed and substituted by Tronti and Negri before it had chance to achieve its possible potential.

As for the project of looking for the new "central historical figure", it does indeed follow in the substitionist line of leninist thought. In this vein, I reminded of this passage from the FARJ:

So we have the Tronti-Negri theory of history as the succession of "central figures" of the proletariat, from skilled worker to mass worker, from mass worker to social worker, from social worker to the immaterial worker/cognitariat/proletariat, and finally, and from all the latter to the "multitude"(TM). That the concept of the multitude is supposed to be the negation of the process of substituting a central figure for the proletariat (in Virno's Grammar... for e.g.), just makes Negri's appropriation of it for precisely that very purpose just a further example of the shameless opportunistic genius of the cattivo maestro.

I stand corrected on the determinism and connection to Althusser. But operaists do overtly reject class consciousness by replacing it with class composition. It seems like this anti-Hegelianism runs through the whole milieu. Which always struck me as mechanistic and clunky since it emphasizes new modes of production, e.g. "social factory," over agency and new methods of struggle. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think many of them looking at North America mistakenly looked to the wildcats at places like Lordstown as "zero work" rather than as strikes against the speedup and the increasing alienation of production work. Because at core, aren't all militant strikes a rejection of work?

This seems to be a thread that runs all through Midnight Oil, where class struggle is reduced to being merely resistance to the imposition of work discipline. I read it long ago, but like Negri they seemed to have rejected the labor theory of value too.

I thought that the operaists argued that technological development was a response to class struggles? As in the shift from the 'skilled' to the 'mass' worker thru the development in technology was a direct attack on the 'older labour movement'. Well, that's what i remember from reading Tronti and Panzieri anywayz.

I agree with Joseph. And I believe Tronti's actually a Hegelian marxist when he did his operaist writing and early Negri was a hegelian as well. That's in some book by Franco Berardi (which is an otherwise really disappointing book), about the importance of the concept of alienation to those writers. I also think that people do a lot of different things with concepts and vocabularies. There's deterministic Hegelian marxism, and nondeterministic Althusserian marxism, there's deterministic and nondeterministic versions of the class composition stuff. But anyway, no, the operaists weren't anti-hegelian as such. Negri later took a strongly anti-hegelian turn but I don't think his politics really change with that. I think Negri's politics and theory were problematic across most of his writing and the changes in theoretical vocabulary are more a matter of a new vocabulary in which to state stuff he previously said in another vocabulary. And it's not the case that the operaists reject an idea of class consciousness even if the term isn't used. Negri is often weirdly technologically determinist and inattentive to working class culture and so on - treating technical conditions as determining working class forms of organization etc - but that's not a problem of class composition analysis per se, that's a problem of Negri. Some others, particuarly Panzieri, got it the right way round. Steve Wright's got some articles on some of the better figures from the operaist milieu, who are largely untranslated unfortunately. Negri's academic success has really done what I think is surprisingly little to encourage translation of material from the political and intellectual and social movement milieu that Negri participated in. Loads more of that stuff has been translated by volunteers (movement people) and I think that translation has mostly stopped. (I think in a way Negri's academic fame may actually discourage attention to the older stuff, in part because Negri talks a bit about himself and is treated as summing up that tradition, as if any one person could sum up a whole political and intellectual and social movement milieu).

I do think that a lot of the writing from those cats is shaped by their leninism, particularly in looking for a single fraction of the working class that will become hegemonic and unite the class behind/around it. The Monty Neill piece is quite good on that.

Indeed. As SW says:

Yeah, good thread, I have enjoyed the discussion thus far. My knowledge of all this is fairly limited to a few basic texts.

I have two questions:

1. hegelianism / anti-hegelianism - although I have read some material on hegelian thought in general and what gets called hegelian marxism I am not sure what hegelian marxism is meant to mean in this context. In other threads discussing value theory, it seemed that a lot of posters and the writers that they are influenced by tend to relate favourably to hegelian-influenced marxism (the only user I can think of who has made a point of being anti-hegelian has been ocelot).

2. contemporary class composition analysis - I intend to read more into some of this stuff on back of some the recent threads. I was wondering is their any examples of contemporary class composition analysis or writers in particular that people would recommend. I have seen Hiero. recommend the late Will Barnes writings on class relations in the US, altho not sure if he was influenced by operaismo.

The most coherent text by Will Barnes on class composition is here on libcom.

He was aware of operaismo but followed in the tradition of the descendents of the German/Dutch council communists, like the Situationists and other contemporary anti-Bolshevik communists. His critique of political economy was thoroughly within the Hegelian Marxist tradition; his class analysis was informed by Lukács, E.P. Thompson and Debord.

I've kind of stopped following the operaist (and definitely the post-operaist/immaterial labor) stuff so I don't know about anything in the past 5-7 years. I remember liking stuff by Kolinko and Wildcat (the German one), they both draw from that material. My sense is that a lot of the operaismo and even more so post-operaismo stuff will more talk about the importance of class composition analysis than they'd actually do much class composition analysis. I've not been in touch with Steve Wright for a long time unfortunately so I'm not sure I remember this right but I think Steve told me that there's some better class composition analysis stuff in the operaist tradition that's not translated. I dunno for sure, looking at Steve's stuff and especially his articles would be a good place to go if you want stuff tied specifically to the Italians. Beyond that, and I think more interestingly, anyone who is doing serious attempts to analyze capitalism and the working class is in a sense doing something you could call class composition analysis. As in, someone doesn't have to use the phrase "class composition" to be analyzing the composition of the working class (just like people using the phrase and invoking it doesn't necessarily mean they're actually doing class composition analysis - I think some of Negri's recent work uses the term but he seems to mostly be making stuff up or greatly magnifying location or strata specific information into huge global claims, which isn't much real analysis of contemporary class composition).

One other thought: I think if mean 'class composition' to mean the entire working class then we're actually talking about a very diverse thing, and most analyses that aren't that huge and macroeconomic are more like analyses of strata or specific struggles more than the entire class as such. I think that that kind of smaller scale analysis is probably more useful because none of us are macroeconomic actors, we all live lives at much smaller scales, and extrapolating from massively huge facts about the entire class to smaller locations is kind of clumsy. Which sometimes happened among the Italians. There's some video documentary about people in Potere Operaio who were organizing in factories, metalworkers I think, and in the material that accompanies it there's a PO militant being like "we were left with questions like 'why did the day shift fight more than the night shift, if they shared the same class composition?'" which seems to like it speaks to the limits of the analysis their group practiced.

Both Kolinko and Wildcat once put a lot of energy into doing their own versions of Marx's Workers' Inquiry, using this tool they learned from operaismo to engage their coworkers. I was passing through the Ruhr Valley in 1999 and helped one of the Kolinko founders edit the English version of the inquiry, which eventially ended up being used to interview their fellow call center workers. I was impressed at how their class composition analysis was based on face-to-face interviews. I even remember Wildcat comrades who learned Turkish to be able to do an inquiry with immigrant coworkers in an appliance factory near Berlin.

I've always thought this approach is one of the best gauges of class awareness since it's based on first-hand discussions with those directly affected by changes in class composition.

In answer to Hieronymous' question on fetishism the short answer is yes. There is no real engagement with either fetishism or the commodity in their work - and thus they can make a series of weird comments about value. I have written a bit about this in academic contexts, if comrades want me to send them the papers or chapters just PM me.
cheers
Dave

On fetishism and Hegelianism, I don't think you can really come down hard on it as a movement. It's a bit like asking "does the north American anarchist movement accept the dialectics as the correct method of revolutionary social enquiry?"

Its very clear that Negri is an anti-Hegelian, but even there that became much, much more prominent after he moved to France and started hanging out with Deleuze and Guattari. If you read his Marx Beyond Marx, despite its problems, I don't think you could say that it is an anti-Hegelian work or even a clearly non-dialectical work. And there as well there is a lot of attention paid to value and fetish, which. although problematic, are very interesting and move in a similar direction to where the Neue Marx Lecture was going at the same time. Now this direction of research was abandoned after Negri moved to France, so it never really gets that far, but this brings me to the second point.

It is EXTREMELY important when looking at operaismo/autonomia to distinguish it from post-autonomia (the recent work of Negri, Bifo, Virno, Lazzarato etc.) What ever the merits or otherwise of the latter work, it is very dramatically different to the movement that preceded it by 20-30 years.

Looking at operaismo/autonomia through postautonomia is a bit like looking at the German New Left (SDS, APO, RAF, RZ, K-groups, RK etc) through what Joschka Fischer did as Foreign Minister.

Also, it important to divide up this movement.

You have operaismo proper which starts of based around journals (Quaderni Rosi and the Classe Operaia) and then out of the struggles of the late 60s two major operaista groups are set up Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio. Potere Operaio being the more ortho-marxist. And then in Potere Operaio the group around Negri is one wing. (Broadly there are two wings, those based more around academia and favoured moving towards armed struggle and those based more around the student-worker assemblies and the factory committees who favoured concentrating on building those, Negri et al being the the former wing). And at the same time also emerging from the were a variety of other extreme left groups, some of which were also inspired by the earlier operaismo others were not. And at the same time there was the growth of a movement not organised through party-like groups, and of course it was into that milieu that PO ultimately dissolved themselves.

The point of that history lesson is to really try to ram home that Negri and milieu around him (those who today are postautonomia) were not the majority of the movement and saying things like "operaismo/autonomia believed x about hegel/dialectics/value/whatever" on the basis of what negri and Virno have written in the last 30 years is completely wrong, but even making that claim on the basis of what Negri et al wrote in the 60s and 70s is also wrong.

If you want to see the closest modern groups politically to operaismo today then look at wildcat in Germany and its off shoots (kolinko, prol-position, gurgaon workers news, gongchao) and mouvement communist.

I agree w/ George.

I agree, H. I think that's probably the best that can come of the operaismo stuff as a direct political practice, their workers inquiry stuff. Also... I was trying to say that if we think class composition is a social thing that really exists, then it's possible to analyze class composition without saying class composition. Likewise I think that it's possible to do the kind of face to face activity that's been done, in part inspired by operaismo and the class composition analysis/workers inquiry stuff, without using that vocabulary or even knowing about those traditions. I was initially really interested in the workers inquiry stuff and some of its offshoots ("co-research", "militant research", etc) but I think that basically any serious activity that engages with working class people, and any social movement, already has components quite a bit like this. And so it's harder to see what the 'workers inquiry' kind of thing actually amounts to. I think it was important for me as a sort of bridge for me as an individual, as someone largely politicized early on by my individual experiences of life under capitalism and by reading, more than by collective experiences of struggle. And I think a lot of the earlier formulations of inquiry and so on were about people who saw themselves (and maybe actually were) outside the working class and who wanted to figure out how to relate to working class people. I wonder if this stuff would have the same kind of importance for working class people politicized more by collective experiences of struggle and discussion/reflection. I doubt it, but I could be wrong.

As far as I remember Midnight Oil is perhaps the only autonomist group that takes value theory seriously. Or at least George Caffentzis takes value theory seriously, especially his work on machinery. Indeed, I think his "On Africa and Automata" is a decent value theoretic version of dependency/world systems' theory (although it is not the goal of the article to write that).

Negri rejected the LTV/value as bourgeois metaphysics already in Marx Beyond Marx.

I meant the book Midnight Oil, where I found the analysis of the oil industry to be based on the idea that such a high level of organic composition of capital makes labor superfluous and work is only imposed as a system of discipline. Which I don't agree with.

But I've had conversations with George Caffenzis and I agree that among the Midnight Notes group, he takes value theory most seriously. I first talked with him about the critique of political economy in the late 1990s and hearing him present on the Grundrisse a couple years ago, I think he's strengthened his use of value theory.