The worker’s Katechon: Mario Tronti’s theoretical challenge in the laboratory of the twentieth century
by Damiano Palano
pp. 165-194 Issue 20 (10, 2) - July-December, 2023 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: https://doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2023.10.2.8
Abstract
This article examines the primary sequences of Mario Tronti’s reflections over approximately sixty years. Following a singular suggestion from Tronti himself, it argues that within the story of Italian workerism (and in that of post-workerisms), two different perspectives can be recognized: an eschatological perspective, with Antonio Negri as its main exponent, and a ‘katechontic’ perspective, which Tronti himself would embody. Although this distinction is recent, this article shows how traces of the katechontic perspective can already be found in Tronti’s early works, which began to study capitalist development in the wake of the 1956 crisis. The subsequent theoretical turns —represented by the ‘autonomy of the political’ and the arrival at ‘political theology’— should therefore be interpreted as consistent developments of a reflection that, even in historically diverse contexts, always proceeds from the same vision of the relationship between the factory and society and from the same image of capitalist Vermassung.