The Labour Process and Class Strategies

This collection contains English translations of:

• R. Panzieri: Surplus value and planning: notes on the reading of Capital
• A. Sohn-Rethel: The dual economics of transition
• C. Palloix: The Labour process: from Fordism to neo-Fordism
• S. Bologna: Class composition and the theory of the party at the origin of the workers councils movement
• M. Tronti: Workers and capital

From the Introduction by CSE:

"The articles printed here, two of which appear in English for the first time, fall into two groups. Comrades Panzieri, Sohn-Rethel and Palloix each construct analyses of the development of capitalist division of labour in the workplace and its implications for the overallreprocgiction of capital. Panzieri and Sohn-Rethel use their analyses to investigate the basis for a transition to socialism created by the socialisation of capital within both the production and circulation spheres, while Palloix uses his analysis to situate the recent initiative of ‘humanisation of work’ within the present phase of capitalist development.

Comrades Bologna and Tronti analyse the response of workers to conditions of struggle created by capital in its development. Bologna investigates the forms of workers’ organisation in German industry at the turn of the century, before the advent of Taylorist job definition and Fordist mass production, as a means of locating the debates which took place in the international workers’ movement at the time about the theory of the party. Tronti analyses the protracted cycles of struggle between the forms of organisation taken on by capital and labour around work which have defined the major phases of the history of capitalist society since 1870, in order to assess the strategic needs of the working class movement today. We present this collection of work not because it contains solid and unshakeable results, but because it represents serious explorations into a vitally important and still poorly understood terrain: the meeting place, in the labour process, of the forces and social relations of production."