Panzieri Tronti Theses

"Panzieri-Tronti Theses" (1962)

1. Deviation between the logic of _Capital_ and analysis of the factory

Enchantment of method and a blockage of research. The terrain of study and of experimentation (hypothesis): no formula can resolve the problem.

1.1. Verification is given by/in struggle
- struggle as anticipation
- hypothesis as provocation (knowledge).
- theory as thought of the revolution

2. Scientific concept of the factory
Critique of the ideological concept (premise for the correct definition of the concept). The ideological concept of the factory presents itself as vulgar materialism and as empiricism in sociology (empirical sociologism).

The recovery of the concept of the factory in political economy
- that is: in the critique of political economy, unity of economy, sociology and politics is essential.

2.1. The two levels.
Error of the separation of the two levels as idealist illusion of the passage of the first in the second level. The unity of economy, sociology, and politics in the old scientific concept must not stop at one of the two levels.

Demystification of ideology and verification of the hypothesis in the collective worker = the non-correspondence between the critique of ideology and working class science (insubordination). The first is only a premise to be conceived as a function of the second. The abstraction of empirical sociologism (illusion of critique at the level of capital) manifests itself as critique:
- of mobility
- of capitalist planning
- of the Political State
- of alienation

from these critiques stem
- the institutionalization of working class organisms (unions and parties) in the dynamic development of the system
- democratic planning
- the democratic road
- the struggle for socialist humanism.

That is: the critique of ideology becomes the impotence of scientific analysis and the illusion of an objective social science. Reduction of marxism to general sociology. As functional premises of scientific analysis (recovery and critique of political economy), 'critiques' must lead respectively to
- the collective worker
- revolutionary strategy of self-management
- dictatorship of the proletariat
- the laws of development of total capital.

That means: for every aspect, the passage from the critique of ideologies to scientific analysis _always_ implies the verification of the hypothesis of the collective worker, which is never implicit in the sphere of the critique of ideology, whilst always implicit in working class science.

2.2.1 Bourgeois science and working class science

Impossibility of reducing bourgeois thought to mere ideology: that is, the level of worker science reveals bourgeois science. Moment of capitalist development in which bourgeois science takes form as the generalized rationality of the system. The intrinsic anarchy of the system is mediated in bourgeois science, which thus is, as a whole, functional to the stablization of the system and revelation of the crisis (and culture in crisis itself).

3. Analysis of the factory = social relation of the factory.
Verification commits itself to revolutionary class strategy.

3.1 Revolutionary strategy as motor element of analysis, as guiding hypothesis.

3.2 Verification not in the given struggle but rather in that which contains the elements of revolutionary insubordination (verification and hypothesis).

3.2.1 Since revolutionary insubordination is such as strategy, as terrain of verification it must possess a global and determinate character. That is to say, one that is generalizable and specific with respect to capitalist society.

3.2.1.1 The moment of the transformation of capitalism in Italy signals the latter, at the level of collective capitalism's laws of development, as a significant place on the international level.

3.2.1.2 Revolutionary insubordination is measurable with anticapitalist content, in its aspects of generality and determinateness (insubordination as determinate abstraction).

That is to say: verification excludes "co-research" (con-ricerca) and the experimentation of the refusal of capitalism through prefigurative groups, and implies the process of the unitary global recomposition of the class.

3.3. The distinction between microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis (or microsociological and macrosociological) and short-term and long-term action must be considered as false problems. The first of these false problems is typical of bourgeois thought; the second problem is that of reformist praxis, even in its anarchist version.

4. Political organization of the class as constitution of the class wholly outside of capital.

4.1 Constitution of the class wholly outside of capital is not the surpassing of the party, but rather the condition of its foundation. In reformist praxis that seeks to constitute the class "inside" capital, the class political party does not exist.

4.2 To the current praxis of the democratic-centralist mass party there corresponds, as mere negative copy, the idea of the spontaneity of the class' organisation.

To the hypothesis of the successful overthrow of the system there corresponds the maximum of organization and violence.

4.21 Critique of parties in function of a new theory of the party (critique of the ideology and positive analysis).

4.3 The class party as indispensable moment of revolutionary strategy.

The demand for a theory of the party is internal to the elaboration of strategy and this conditions the practical process of development.

4.3.1 The political party of the class is not the prefiguration of working class self-management inside capitalist society, it is more the foundation of self-management inside the revolutionary process.

4.4 As the class constitutes itself outside of capital, in the same way its political party constitutes itself outside of the bourgeois State.

4.4.1 As the constitution of the class outside of capital is the concrete mode of blowing up capital, in the same way the constitution of the class political party is the material means for smashing and pulverizing the machine of the bourgeois State and substituting it with the dictatorship of the proletariat for it: that is, with the class that self-organises itself in a new type of State.

4.4.1.1 Characteristic trait of the political party of the working class is the conscious organization of its own extinction. Characteristic trait of the worker State is its immediate process of deterioration.

5. The organization of Quaderni Rossi's work is the organization of political work.

5.1 Such political work excludes the contra-position of two levels, that of research and that of practical commitment in struggle.

5.2 Activity is plannable inside the development of the revolutionary strategy of the class.