Italian Marxist Raniero Panzieri on the capitalist use of technology and machines.

Introduction to Panzieri

It is well known that, for Marx, capitalism revolutionizes both "the groupings into which society is divided" and "the technical processes of labour". What is less well known is that Marx theorizes the unity of these two moments (social groupings and technical processes) as constituting "a specifically capitalist mode of production" (our emphasis). Taken in isolation from the technical processes of labour the social groupings (i.e. wage-labourers and capitalists) constitute what Marx calls a formal subsumption of labour under capital; but on the basis of this formal subsumption there is erected a set of "methods,means and conditions" of production which Marx terms the real subsumption of labour under capital. This is elaborated at length in Marx's recently published Results of the Immediate Process of Production (the so-called 'lost chapter' of Capital) - but the same perspective is abundantly clear in Capital itself, as was demonstrated nearly twenty years ago in the article by Raniero Panzieri printed below.

Born in Italy in 1921, Panzieri's adult life (tragically cut short by his sudden and unexpected death in 1964, at the age of forty-three) was that of a theoretical and practical Marxist militant. His formal affiliation was to the Socialist Party (PSI), of which he became a Central Committee member and Spokesman on Cultural Affairs in the 1950s. However, Panzieri broke with the strategy common to the PSI, PCI (Communist Party) and left-wing Trade Unions, of a corporate alliance aimed 'developing' Italy through a 'planned' consolidation at national level of the 'rationality' that capitalism established at plant level. To ground his rejection of this Strategy theoretically, Panzieri turned in earnest to Marx. On the one hand, Panzieri made his own contribution to extending the Italian corpus of Marxian texts, himself translating Volume Two of Capital (which proved central to his understanding of capitalism); on the other hand, he supplemented the primary texts with a series of theoretical elaborations, at first in the PSI journal Mondo Operaio, and subsequently, when these articles created a tension with the PSI leadership that obliged him to leave Rome for Turin, in the epoch-making Quaderni Rossi, of which Panzieri was cofounder and chief editor Panzieri's most articulate, but far from definitive exposition of his attempt to grasp the laws of motion of capitalist society was published in Quaderni Rossi in 1964, the year of his death. Focusing on the labour movement's favourite categories, namely, 'anarchy' and 'planning', Panzieri's concern to undercut the dominant reformist version produced a dual thesis: first, at the social level, capital is not simply 'anarchy', but social capital; as such, capital was capable of planning, and while this in no sense negated the contradictory laws of capitalist accumulation, it should be abundantly clear that there was nothing inherently 'transitional' about 'planning' in the abstract. The complementary proposition of Panzieri's argument was that, just as at the social level capitalist planning remains capitalist planning, so too does capitalist planning at plant level. To the dominant Marxist view of productive forces as the autonomous moving-force of history, Panzieri counter-posed the view that " the relations of production are within the productive forces" And to the equally prevalent idea of the inherent 'rationality' of technology, Panzieri counterposed the "capitalist objectivity of the productive mechanism with respect to the workers".

Fortunately, the article in question has been available in English for some time now, so there is no need for further details. However, the reader may well find the discussion of technology too condensed; this is because Panzieri had already, in the very first issue of Quaderni Rossi (1961), devoted an entire article to this question: it is this article which is printed below. Its significance in the present context is threefold: first, it establishes the basis on which machinery is theorized in Capital; second, it contrasts the latter with the orthodox Marxist perspective that Panzieri labels 'objectivism' (his term for 'technicism'); and third, it specifies the political dimension to the problem in terms of class consciousness, strategy and revolutionary transition.

In the two decades since the article first appeared, Panzieri's pioneering work has been developed considerably, largely by others due to his early death. First in line came Mario Tronti, whose involvement with Quaderni Rossi led to the single most important book of the revolutionary Italian left of the 1960s, Workers and Capital. Following Panzieri's view of the "capitalist objectivity of the productive mechanism with respect to the workers", Tronti argued that a revolutionary class consciousness presupposed "The Strategy Of the Refusal"? Since the factory