By Frederick H. Pitts · Monday, August 13, 2012 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Frederick H. Pitts looks at Mario Tronti’s “Social Capital” in Telos 17 (Fall 1973). An earlier post on Tronti’s critique of trade unionism appeared on Friday.
 In a previous post, I discussed Tronti’s critique of trade unionism. Here I investigate the suggestions Tronti offers as to how the complete integration of organized labor within the capitalist system can be surpassed in order to erect an effective working-class challenge against capitalist domination. Tronti begins his piece “Social Capital” by outlining the way in which fully developed capitalism witnesses the all-encompassing socialization of the class relation. The unorthodox and controversial appeal of Tronti’s text consists precisely in the way in which he treats class struggle not as some external hazard facing capitalism, but as an integral part of its operation as a system. The class struggle, far from posing a threat to capital, becomes a constitutive part of its reproduction, maintaining the collective capitalist and collective workers as clearly demarcated and, crucially, organized participants in the continuing success of the system. Trade unions, for Tronti, perform the valuable role of organizing workers as a working class so that they can assume their position in capitalist production.
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By Frederick H. Pitts · Friday, August 10, 2012 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Frederick H. Pitts looks at Mario Tronti’s “Social Capital” in Telos 17 (Fall 1973). A second post on Tronti’s article will follow on Monday.
The labor movement is in crisis, with trade union density falling and its political parties increasingly discredited by their complicity with capitalist austerity programs. New fronts of anti-capitalist activity have been opened, away from the traditional structures of socialism and working-class organization, including the trade unions and the parties of labor. Mario Tronti’s article “Social Capital,” from 1973, presents a critique of trade unionism that possesses significant contemporary relevance in the light of these developments. Tronti presents trade unions as a central element in the capitalist regulation and organization of workers. The fatally compromised nature of trade unions under capital points the way toward different means of building struggles based not upon the maintenance of a status within society as “workers” but along alternative matrices of identity. An example is the Occupy movement’s clarion call of the 99% stacked against capital.
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By James Santucci · Thursday, August 9, 2012 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, James Santucci looks at Paul Piccone’s “Towards a Socio-Historical Interpretation of the Scientific Revolution” in Telos 1 (Spring 1968). This essay was also republished as part of the anthology Confronting the Crisis: Writings of Paul Piccone, available from Telos Press.
Paul Piccone begins this essay with a word of caution for anyone looking back at the scientific revolution:
The scientific revolution of the 16th century is popularly thought of as having freed mankind from superstition and myth. This account, however, runs into difficulties when it is realized that superstition and myth are still with us and, furthermore, that institutionalized irrationality is a predominant feature of 20th century society.
 The popularly held view that Piccone mentions doesn’t just arrive at different conclusions about what happened in history; it requires a completely different view of how history happens. History, in this view, has been continuously building toward modernity, and the triumph of rationalism and science in the sixteenth century were culture’s first steps toward the superior ways of being and thinking that we have today. The signal that our ways of being and thinking today are superior, of course, is that we have them today, and what could possibly be more modern?
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By Juan Carlos Donado · Wednesday, August 8, 2012 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Juan Carlos Donado looks at Heidegger’s 1933 letter to Carl Schmitt, published under the title “Heidegger and Schmitt: The Bottom Line” in Telos 72 (Summer 1987).
 The date was August 22, 1933. Only ten days before, Winston Churchill had spoken publicly for the first time about the dangers of German re-armament. Almost exactly two months later, Germany would withdraw from the League of Nations. During that same year, Martin Heidegger would controversially speak in public about Hitler’s referendum, stating: “The National Socialist revolution is not merely the taking over of a present-at-hand power in the state by another power that has grown sufficiently [strong] for it, but rather this revolution brings the complete overturning [Umwälzung] of our German Dasein.”
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By Matt Applegate · Tuesday, August 7, 2012 A new manifesto for the radical Left is vital, and it is to emerge from whispers, riddles, and aphorisms without lapsing into dogma, pure utopia, or party politics. Its focus will be on practice and action, but it will refuse to take command of the future. A new manifesto is, if it is to be all of these things at once, improvisation. These are a few of the basic features and premises of Adorno and Horkheimer’s 1956 dialogue, posthumously titled Towards a New Manifesto. Writing and dialoging in the wake and in the midst of fascist reign in Western Europe and Imperial Japan, Adorno and Horkheimer attempt to revision a primary genre of resistance by critically assessing what gains and what limitations philosophy presents for the Twentieth century. Indeed, at the time of their dialogue, political forms and power constellations are at a crossroads. Democracy has emerged as the dominant political form in the free world, and the stage is set for the global emergence of free market capitalism. At the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer are skeptical of their current political situation in the West and claim that “it is not just worse” than prior moments in history, it lacks direction in the face of horrific human rights violations and a shifting political landscape.
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, August 1, 2012 Telos Press Publishing is pleased to announce the upcoming publication of Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios, now available for the first time in English translation. Pre-order your copy at the Telos Press website and save 10% off the cover price.
The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios
by Ernst Jünger
 Translated by Thomas Friese
Edited by Russell A. Berman
With an introduction by Eliah Bures and Elliot Neaman
Release date: September 1
The 1938 version of Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios must be considered a key text in the famous German writer’s sprawling oeuvre. In this volume, which bears comparison to the Denkbilder of the Frankfurt School, Jünger assembles sixty-three short, often surrealistic prose pieces—accounts of dreams, nature observations, biographical vignettes, and critical reflections on culture and society—providing, as he puts it, “small models of another way of seeing things.” Here Jünger experiments with a new method of observation and thinking, uniting lucid and precise observation with the unconstrained receptivity of dreams.
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