The Living Ferment

In Tronti’s view, it quickly became evident that the political limitations of Togliatti’s leadership reflected deeper theoretical and philosophical constraints, particularly the historicist ideology espoused by the party. As he put it: “They could agree with the Red Army’s invasion, precisely because they were historicists.”

For Tronti, the term “historicism” referred to the ideological construct fashioned by the PCI, fusing an idealist interpretation of Antonio Gramsci’s “philosophy of praxis” with elements of Hegelianism and dialectical materialism. Serving as the foundation of the PCI’s cultural politics, historicism had transformed Marxism into a kind of national-popular ideology, shaped by a logic of compromise in which everything was mediated, interpreted, and gradually transformed, but never overturned.

Throughout his intellectual journey, Tronti consistently resisted the temptations of historicism. In contrast, he found inspiration in the scientific Marxism of Galvano della Volpe, whose materialist approach decisively broke with Hegel and the idealist imprint of Italian Marxism. The young Tronti thus strove to construct a workers’ science capable of grasping and intervening in the explosive political dynamics of 1960s Italy.

“Great things are made by abrupt leaps,” Tronti once wrote, adding that “the discoveries that matter always break the thread of continuity.” Leaps — so dear to Lenin as a reader of Hegel’s Science of Logic — were central to Tronti’s theory and praxis. The experience of Classe operaia epitomized a major leap in his political and intellectual trajectory. It also played a crucial role in shaping the path of many radical activists who were educated in the school of operaismo.

The pieces Tronti wrote for the journal in 1966 were collected in Workers and Capital, a book that is considered the cornerstone of Italian workerism. Rooted in a heterodox reading of Marx, it became what Tronti would later describe as a “Bildungsroman for young antagonistic minds.” In Marx’s Grundrisse, Tronti encountered the notion of living labor, which he used as the lever for his conceptual “Copernican revolution.”

Instead of the commodity, which Marx took as his starting point in Capital, it is workers’ labor qua living labor and labor power that serves as the pivot for Tronti’s understanding of capitalist development. Because of labor, he argued, the function of the working class must be understood as double, or must be “counted twice”: both within and against capital.

On the one hand, labor is an integral part of capital; on the other, it is an autonomous force that opposes capital and provokes its responses. Twisting Marx’s classical discourse, Tronti arrived at the conclusion that “without the working class, there is no capitalist development,” and that the struggles of workers are the living ferment of capital.

In this distinctive interpretation of Marx, two of Tronti’s key intuitions emerged. First was the idea that the working class dictates the pace of the antagonism between labor and capital. Second was the recognition of workers’ insubordination and refusal of work as the driving force of the working-class struggle.

End of an Era

In 1967, Classe operaia ceased publication. For Tronti, the events of the following year already marked the end of an era, not in spite of, but precisely because of the international protest movement of 1968. This was a revolt against authority that he saw as being ultimately aligned with the route of capitalist progress, and that never attracted his sympathy.

In retrospect, the 1960s appeared almost like a chimera in Tronti’s view: “We saw red. But it wasn’t the red of a new dawn; rather, it was the red of sunset.” While student and worker protests erupted worldwide during that period, not least in Italy, Tronti looked back at the decade to analyze the reasons for what he saw as the already accomplished defeat of the class, which he attributed in the Italian context to the lack of an organizational infrastructure.

“The workerist revolutionary demand,” he would remark many years later, “could have materialized if it had found organization and political leadership not in a group of willing militants, but in a great already existing popular force.” What was lacking in his view was not the will of brave and unsubordinated rank-and-file workers — “the rude pagan race,” as Tronti dubbed them — but rather such a force.

At that time, Tronti needed to locate the promising intuitions of Workers and Capital in a more specific time and space. Not only did these intuitions apply to a very particular phase of capitalist development in Italy — that of industrial capitalism, including the socially organized mass worker — but even within that context, their limits became apparent. As Tronti reflected in his 2009 work Noi operaisti: “At a certain point, we realized . . . the working class itself could no longer sustain the struggle. It could not defeat its class adversary without equipping itself with a political armor.”

Thus began Tronti’s departure from the earlier workerist framework, leading him towards a new intellectual path centered on the autonomy of the political and culminating in the 1990s in his diagnosis of the “twilight of politics” — a condition that in his view, continues to haunt our present.

From the late 1960s, Tronti started reflecting on the relationship between class, party, and state. Critical of the PCI leadership from an anti-reformist perspective, he opposed at the same time the paths taken by the extra-parliamentary Italian left, which had absorbed prominent figures from the operaismo milieu, including Negri. Tronti’s primary concern was for the PCI to develop a politics capable of reclaiming a hegemonic role within the workers’ and student movements while avoiding the pitfalls of reformism and ultra-left extremism.

During this period, various representatives of operaismo distanced themselves from Tronti, questioning his belief that the traditional organizations of the workers’ movement could still be the vehicles for class power and struggle. For his part, Tronti was skeptical of the radical turn taken by those who focused on organizing outside the party and remained convinced of the necessity of aligning with the strongest force at its peak, namely the PCI.

The question of political organization was decisive and took precedence over class struggles. In his view, the party may at times deviate from the class’s intended direction precisely in order to act in its best interest, i.e., consolidating class power within the political sphere. On a Pascalian note, one might say that for Tronti the party has its reasons, of which the class itself knows nothing.

Twilight of Politics

The 1970s marked a retreat from politics for Tronti, ushering in a long period of study and philosophical meditation on the classics of political realism. He engaged with the work of various thinkers, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt and from Niccolo Machiavelli to Max Weber, while teaching moral and political philosophy at the University of Siena.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Tronti was serving as a member of the PCI’s Central Committee. He saw a renewed opening for effective politics, tied to the PCI’s growing electoral strength over the previous decade as the largest communist party in any Western country. However, Tronti’s hoped-for political vision never materialized, and the PCI ultimately dissolved itself to become a conventional center-left party in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.

For Tronti, the end of communism and the disappearance of communists — “the only ones capable of really frightening capital” — inaugurated the “twilight of politics,” a true political tragedy in which our times are still fully immersed. What triumphed, in his eyes, was not capitalism alone but political democracy. It was the triumph of democracy, not merely the dynamics of an economic system, that diluted the dual antagonism of class struggle into the pluralism of mass politics — one in which the mass worker was eventually dissolved.

Facing the end of politics, in those years, Tronti turned to political theology, drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Jacob Taubes, and Saint Paul in search of critical weapons to keep alive the spirit of communist transcendence and resist the swamp of anti-politics. In this phase of ideological regression, Tronti’s theoretical mission was to reaffirm the side of the workers, even when it disappeared from the surface of history, and to uphold the idea of communism as a concrete utopia.

The language of political theology suited his search for the heights of transcendence in opposition to the world below, a world fully subsumed by the logic of capital and dominated by the spirit of homo democraticus. The viewpoint of the workers as an epistemically privileged site for comprehending capitalist reality remained central in Tronti’s philosophy as the irreversible intellectual discovery of operaismo, a unique school and style of thought, as he would write in the 2000s, and a “political way of looking at the world and a human way of acting within it.”

A paradoxical touch of idealism colored Tronti’s late thought, despite his professed political realism. This manifested itself most strikingly through his attempts at intervening in the ranks of the post-communist Democratic Party (PD) — a party that had long since forgotten the workers and had, in fact, abandoned their cause — when he was elected to the Italian Senate in 2013.

In these years, for Tronti, it was memory rather than daily politics that could keep the communist flame alive amid the ashes. One must hurl the grand history of the twentieth century against the timeless void of the twenty-first and the paralysis of “presentism,” which dulls radical thought. Obsolescence becomes a weapon of resistance, although it can offer nothing more than a wager without guarantees.

Right to Experiment

A determined effort to make sense of the historical conjuncture pushed Tronti’s thought forward in times of theoretical despair. “Extreme thought, prudent action” became the guiding motto of his final years, emphasizing the need to disentangle theory and praxis for the sake of both. Alongside the passionate invitation to “reconnect the ideal and the real of this [communist] history within a shared horizon,” Tronti’s work left behind enduring lessons for the radical left.

First, a partisan epistemology that encourages us to hold firm to the partisan viewpoint and its truths. For Tronti, “knowledge is tied to struggle” and “only those who truly hate can truly know.” Secondly, a call for experimentation that connects the late Tronti with his younger incarnation, who claimed for the working class and his militant generation “a right to experiment, which is the only one truly worth claiming.”

The late Tronti often reminded us that the experience of “actually existing socialism” lasted just over seventy years in total. This time frame, he insisted, amounted to a short-lived experiment, “a breath in the ‘longue durée’ of historical processes.”

In his final work, Il proprio tempo appreso col pensiero (2024), Tronti reflected upon the aftermath of the undisputed victory of democratic capitalism. It is the end of the end, when the fog lifts to reveal what remains of the once-glorious history of the workers’ movement, “a dead city, devastated by time.” It is precisely at this end of the end that Tronti suggests the possibility of beginning anew — a possibility that can only be cultivated through a militant mode of thought.