The Plan of Capital in the Death-Throes of Globalisation

Reading Tronti in 2025

_{(All quotes taken from The Plan of Capital and Strategy of Refusal by Mario Tronti)}

The history of capitalism is the “history of the capitalist class' successive attempts to emancipate itself from the working class, through the medium of the various forms of capital's political domination over the working class.” Globalisation was one such form/instance, an attempt by capital to rid itself of the (domestic, spatially proximate) class relation, now exhaustively developed beyond practicality. Throughout the entire history of capitalist development it is always “the working class' directly political thrust that imposes economic development on capital – a development which, starting from the site of production, extends to the general social relation,” in the case of globalisation the primary sites of production increasingly concentrated far beyond the primary sites of consumption, at once causing the appearance of a suspension of (local) class struggle while simultaneously extending the zone of contestation across the largest possible terrain. In the twilight of globalisation, that the third world (more correctly, the proletariat of the third world) is developing beyond acceptable bounds for globalised exploitation, we see with increasing sincerity the demand of the capitalist class to concentrate production back in the local west. The phenomenon of third world national/ethnic sovereigntism demonstrates that the sites of off-shored production have attained a sufficient level of productive development to assert something of their own ‘domestic interest’ in opposition to western capital. These emergent regimes can (by virtue of the knowledge accrued from the experience of developed socialised-capitalism and Chinese Socialism) progress both economically and politically at an accelerated rate from the vantage of a higher stage, effectively bypassing formal, ‘classical’ developmental barriers; these regimes can operate ‘before the fact’ as planning regimes of advanced socialised capital in local material conditions which would otherwise, in historically equivalent stages of development, necessarily preclude such advanced forms of organisation. The material consequence on the part of capital here in the west being the demand for a reinstallation of the circuit of exploitation at home. The period after globalisation is necessarily the period of re-proletarianisation, the return of domestic productive labour, ideologically communicated in two ways: first, a national security demand, invoking the fear of China; second, an existential demand, anxious desire for forms of solidarity emergent to the factory floor and the workshop. In other words, it is sold within terms acceptable to social democracy: the site of proletarian socialisation – therefore consciousness – which globalisation aimed to eradicate through offshoring, a suspended form of sociality now re-formed by capital, interpolated as the site of authenticity, social meaning, community, and (of equal significance) as the ‘home front’ in the war against Chinese Communism.¹

Globalisation has played its part in the history of capital to develop the productive forces of the whole world. The possibility for an intensification of globalisation granted by the west’s inward retreat is taken up by the Chinese and their partners who aim to construct an architecture for trade amongst relative economic equals through the Belt & Road Initiative and the accompanying procedural purport of multilateralism. As Marx championed the global regime of free trade in the 19th Century, globalisation and its successor regimes are positive contributory factors to the further socialisation of capital, the intensification of capital’s self-dissolving contradiction, the further socialisation of private profit. That sovereigntism emerges at once in the third world and the first, in the dual figure of Ibrahim Traore and JD Vance, in the Sahel Alliance and Palantir, in the specificity of the Chinese iteration of globalisation assuming sovereignty as a necessity, forces the disclosure of class struggle, formerly buried, at both its local and global instances.² Each novel form produced in the process of capital’s socialisation “arrives historically not as a peaceful and gradual passage from one phase of capitalist development to the next but as a genuine and abrupt leap, full of dangerous contradictions for the capitalist class and of miraculous opportunities for the workers' movement.” However, that the Metacartel regime is determined to reinitiate domestic re-proletarianisation ought not be met with a simple, arithmetic approval: the romance of the labour movement, the inheritance of past struggles which act on the subconscious of the socialist/communist, that the playing board will now be “re-set” and make all the old books make sense to us again as roadmaps to proletarian revolution, is itself a covert formal acceptance granting capital the means to deliver the poor and dispossessed from the indignity of unproductive labour to the indignity of productive exploitation. Rather, our present “miraculous opportunity” is, as it has always been, refusal: “The history of the successive determinations of capital – which is to say, the development of the historical contradictions of capitalism – can offer, at many points and different levels, the possibility of breaking the cyclical process through which capitalist social relations are produced and reproduced.”

“The growing organisation of exploitation, its continual reorganisation at the very highest levels of industry and society are […] capitalist responses to the working-class refusal to bow...” Globalisation was pursued precisely as a counter-maneuvre by capital in response to the domestic working class’ refusal, by the mature stage of political development attained by the western working class forcing capital to extend the terrain of exploitation. In kind, the post-globalisation order is also born of refusal, the refusal of the third world proletariat articulated in sovereigntism: “This is the reason capitalist exploitation, a permanent form of the extraction of surplus-value within the production process, has throughout the history of capital been accompanied by the development of ever more organic forms of political dictatorship at the level of the state.” In the social-democratic period which preceded globalisation the form taken by capitalist dictatorship developed so as to integrate the labour representation apparatus into its own planning regime, aiming to engender mutual deference to forestall a revolutionary confrontation between labour and capital. The history of the working class has not been one of perpetual failure, but more horrifically one of ever-compounding political ‘victories’ which have served to further integrate the productive element within the cycle of exploitation and accumulation, the survival of the class by means of concession from capital to labour. The dynamics of the prior period objectively led to the strengthening of the labour movement in its social-democratic and institutional form yet proved incapable of actually averting the contradictions inherent to the class relation, culminating in Britain in the ‘winter of discontent’, the point of historical demarcation between the ‘post-war’ order and the ‘neoliberal’ order. In general terms, that labour and capital still found themselves within the dynamics of class struggle even at the height of placation on the part of the capitalist state necessitated a transformation of the democratic-planning regime into what became the globalisation regime, the regime of off-shoring and domestic financialisation, the development of a service sector financially reliant on the intensified, concentrated exploitation of third world productive labour. Today the demand to reforge this global arrangement ‘in-house’, to further develop the service economy off the back of a domestic productive industrial economy, amounts not to a reversal of ‘neoliberalism’ but to the objective next phase in their development, as it was to social democracy, all phases belonging to the development of the socialisation of capital. In the leap from one phase to another, from global ‘neoliberalism’ and de-proletarianisation to that of intensified, concentrated domestic production and re-proletarianisation, Communism might only gain a legitimate, proactive position by announcing again the strategy of refusal. The demand for free time shouldn't be deferred to some abstract future point after the re-proletarianisation of the west, but now, immediately, in the interregnum between the past and future form of socialised-capitalist dictatorship, to break the cycle of exploitation and accumulation, rather than waiting for it to develop to approximate conditions wherein a ‘classical’ Marxism might be adequate enough to address it.

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