2023-08-07 15:37:44
by ANTONIO CARIOTI
He taught moral philosophy and then political philosophy at the University of Siena for 30 years. was elected to the Senate in 1992 in the ranks of the Democratic Party of the left and in 2013 in the ranks of the Democratic Party
Maximum theoretician of workerism, then a lover of realist political thought, always a communist and admirer of Lenin even as a senator of the Democratic Party. The philosopher Mario Tronti, who died on August 7 at the age of 92 in Ferentillo (Terni), was a complex and original figure. An intellectual of the twentieth century, openly biased, conservative and revolutionary, who had drunk from a young age to the masters of suspicion Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, but also recognized the importance of the religious sense as an antidote to the commodification of human relationships.
Certainly, however, it was not the more mature Tronti who left the deepest trace in the culture of the Italian left, the one who reasoned on the autonomy of the politician and who for many years had been president of the Center for State Reform founded by Pietro Ingrao. It was the little more than thirty-year-old director of the magazine Classe Operaia who struck and galvanized an entire generation of restless young people, the future protagonists of 1968. The imaginative pen that defined industrial workers as a rude pagan race, drawing daring comparisons between Italy in the 1960s and Russia in 1905, the scene of the first failed revolution that had seen the birth of the Soviets.
Born in Rome on July 24, 1931, Tronti came from a working-class family and had joined the Communist Party as a boy. In 1956, as secretary of the Roman university section, he had been among the signatories of the letter of the 101, which sympathized with the Hungarian revolution, judged vice versa as reactionary by Palmiro Togliatti and the leadership of the PCI. But the detachment from pro-Soviet orthodoxy had not led Tronti to reevaluate social democracy, on the contrary it had pushed him more to the left, to collaborate with Raniero Panzieri, founder of Italian workerism, and with his magazine Quaderni Rossi, created in 1961.
The basic idea that moved that cultural current was that unskilled mass workers assigned to the assembly line, often immigrants from recent urbanization, could become the protagonists of a season of social struggles so intense as to jam the machine of consumerist neo-capitalism and stop the slide of the left-wing parties, the PSI but ultimately also the PCI, towards a reformist landing place. The growing conflict of the early 1960s, in the factories and in the squares, seemed to make that hypothesis plausible.
After breaking away from Panzieri, too tied to a sociological approach, in 1964 Tronti, Toni Negri, Alberto Asor Rosa and other combative intellectuals founded Classe Operaia, a magazine with an ephemeral life, but very influential on young people dissatisfied with the too cautious conduct of the left historic. The first of Tronti’s editorials, entitled Lenin in England, envisaged a revolutionary rupture in the realities where capitalism had reached the most advanced point of development, ideally reuniting Marx’s vision of history, who expected the great upheaval in England, and the political practice of Lenin, who instead had achieved it in backward and peasant Russia.
The writings of that period, truly remarkable for their aesthetic taste and ideological radicalism, were later collected by Tronti in the book Workers and capital (Einaudi, 1966; DeriveApprodi, 2013), his most famous and most widely read work, of which nurtured an entire generation of militants in the long Italian sixty-eight. Much later, in the book Politics at Sunset (Einaudi, 1998), he would admit the mistakes he made by observing that he and the other workerists, imagining a red future, had fallen into a misunderstanding: There was red on the horizon: only which were not the flashes of dawn, but of twilight.
It must be added that even at the time of the working class Tronti had never thought of creating a new political formation. Allergic to minority experiences, terrified by the idea of creating a small sect, he aspired to condition the Communist Party and the trade union, instead considered irrecoverable by most of his travel companions, first of all Negroes, who then founded the movement of Power worker.
Instead Tronti had remained in the PCI, albeit always on critical positions. Having become a professor of moral philosophy and then of political philosophy at the University of Siena, where he had taught for many years, he had turned his research to the dimension of the state and of power, applying himself to authors such as Niccol Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, even the German theorist of decisionism (and adherent of the Third Reich) Carl Schmitt.
The fact that for Tronti it was not so much a question of thinking about the crisis of Marxism, a very fashionable topic between the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, but of facing a more general inadequacy of the modern political subject, that is to say of such as the nation-state, the party form, the labor movement as a whole. From that analysis was born another magazine, published by Einaudi, Laboratorio politica, which saw Tronti in the role of coordinator soliciting an unscrupulous discussion with personalities such as Massimo Cacciari and Giacomo Marramao.
Also in that case the publication did not last long, from 1981 to 1983, but it transmitted important signals of awareness about the stalemate in which the politics of the PCI, a party to which most of the collaborators belonged or was close, had ended.
In more recent years, Tronti had published several essays rethinking the twentieth century political experience and had not even disdained to participate directly in parliamentary activity. Convinced that the fall of the Soviet bloc and the post-industrial transformation of capitalism had marked a decisive turning point in history, he never tired of reproaching the heirs of the PCI for a disconcerting theoretical vacuum.
The ability to hold together a vision of the future and attention to everyday life had been lost, while the world of work had been completely left on its own. On the other hand, Tronti recognized that the Marxian project of a classless society had no scientific basis. But he believed it was essential to combine realism with passion. In this, his attitude really had a religious dimension, which led him to compare St. Paul and Lenin. A bold parallel, no doubt. But philosophy needs unscrupulous thinkers like Tronti. They help to reflect even those who feel very distant from them.
August 7, 2023 (change August 7, 2023 | 15:41)
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