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Operaismo (Italian language for " workerism") was a heterodox Marxism political and theoretical tendency that emerged in Italy in the early 1960s. Its foundational insight, a "Copernican revolution" in Marxist thought, was to invert the traditional relationship between capital and labour, positing that the struggles of the working class were the primary driving force of capitalist development. Capital, in this view, does not develop along its own internal laws but is forced to restructure and innovate in response to working-class antagonism.
Originating from dissident circles within the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and Italian Socialist Party (PSI) during Italy's post-war "economic miracle", operaismo
At its height in the late 1960s and 1970s, during a period of intense social conflict in Italy known as the "Hot Autumn", operaismo provided the theoretical framework for revolutionary groups like Potere Operaio and, in its later development, the broader Autonomia Operaia movement. Key concepts such as the "refusal of work" and the analysis of the "mass worker" and later the "social worker" ( operaio sociale) were influential, as was its critical engagement with aesthetics and culture. Following the decline of the movements in the late 1970s and increased state repression, operaismo as a coherent tendency collapsed. Its legacy, however, continued through its influence on Autonomism, post-Marxism, the theoretical work of figures like Michael Hardt and Negri; and even post-war Italian anarchism.
The core of operaismo was its "political reading" of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, which sought to structure its entire approach around the immediate development of working-class struggle. This involved rejecting abstract theorising in favour of grasping concepts only within the concrete totality of struggle they designated. The most distinctive feature of operaismo was the importance it placed on the relationship between the material structure of the working class and its autonomous behaviour, a relationship it termed the nexus between "technical composition" and "political composition". As Mario Tronti proclaimed, operaismo sought to establish the idea of an "internal history of the working class" as a methodological principle, countering the traditional Marxist focus on the internal history of capital. For operaismo, Marx's work was not an ideology of the workers' movement, but its "revolutionary theory".
The mainstream left, dominated by the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), struggled to respond to these changes. The PCI, under Palmiro Togliatti, pursued a strategy of national unity and "progressive democracy", prioritising productivity and economic reconstruction over open class conflict. This policy, combined with the political division of the union movement and an employer offensive in the workplace, led to the left's increasing isolation from the shop floor, symbolised by the PCI-aligned union's loss of its majority at Fiat in 1955. The events of 1956—the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution and Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Joseph Stalin—deepened the crisis, having a "heartbreaking" impact on many Italian communists. While the PCI weathered the storm by formally committing to an "Italian road to socialism", the PSI experienced a fundamental break, moving away from its alliance with the Communists towards a centre-left coalition government. It was within this context of political and theoretical malaise that a new approach to Marxism began to form.
Another significant intellectual influence was the philosopher Galvano Della Volpe, a Communist whose "scientific" or "Galileo Galilei" reading of Marx stood in sharp contrast to the historicist tradition dominant in the PCI. Della Volpe argued that Marx's method was a rigorous materialist science based on "determinate abstractions"—concepts worked up from concrete historical observation and continually re-submitted for verification. His insistence on returning to Marx's critique of political economy, and particularly his focus on Capital as a scientific analysis of a specific historical society, provided the methodological groundwork for the future operaisti, particularly Mario Tronti, to bypass the dominant traditions of Italian Marxism and rethink Marx from scratch.
The group became known for its use of "workers' inquiry" ( inchiesta operaia), a method of militant research that combined sociological techniques with political work inside the factories. Drawing inspiration from the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, the American Correspondence group, and the research of militant sociologist Danilo Montaldi, researchers like Romano Alquati conducted detailed studies of working-class life and attitudes at major factories like FIAT and Olivetti. Alquati's "Report on the New Forces" at FIAT was a pioneering analysis of the new "mass worker" ( operaio massa): the young, often Southern migrant, semi-skilled assembly-line worker who was alienated from both the company and the traditional unions, but who was beginning to develop new forms of autonomous struggle. This method of inquiry sought to uncover the "class political line" immanent in the daily behaviours and attitudes of workers themselves. Alquati's approach, which he termed "co-research" ( conricerca), was distinct from Panzieri's "workers' inquiry". While Panzieri's method sought to analyse struggles as they happened ( inchiesta a caldo, or inquiry in the heat of the moment), Alquati sought to anticipate them in the "gray zone" before they erupted ( inchiesta tepida, or tepid inquiry), seeing coresearch as "simultaneously the production of organization and of counter-subjectivity".
In the first issue of the journal, Tronti articulated operaismo
This was the "Copernican revolution" of operaismo: working-class struggle was not a result of the contradictions of capitalist development, but its motor. Capital is forced to constantly revolutionise its methods of production, management, and even its political structures (the state) as a reaction to workers' antagonism. This led Tronti to analyse the modern state's turn to economic planning (such as the centre-left government's policies) not as a step towards socialism, but as capital's attempt to control the primary political threat to its rule: the wage struggles of the working class. For Tronti, the wage struggle was therefore an inherently political struggle that could "place in crisis the economic mechanism of capitalist development". This perspective also led Tronti to develop the concept of the "social factory", in which the factory's logic of production and command extends to dominate the whole of society, and the political state itself becomes an agent of the capitalist mode of production.
The journal's visual identity, designed by artist and group member Manfredo Massironi, used a lowercase title and the classicist Bodoni font, creating a style of modernist graphic design aligned with its political activism. It also featured cartoons by artist Mario Mariotti that gave visual form to the workerist conception of the working class as a monstrous, "anti-social", and "pagan" force, starkly contrasting with the heroic and respectable imagery of the official labour movement.
Sergio Bologna's 1967 essay on the German council movement was a foundational text. It analysed the skilled workers of the German machine industry as a specific class composition whose project of workers' self-management, while ultimately defeated, was able to "provoke the crisis and to freeze capitalist development". Another early figure, the militant sociologist Danilo Montaldi, conducted "participatory and militant inquiry" into the lives of marginalised political figures and immigrant workers, using oral history to document their experiences. Other important works included studies of fascism as a political response to working-class insurgency, and detailed reconstructions of specific cycles of struggle. Workerist historians showed a particular fascination with the history of the American working class and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which they saw as a historical example of a class movement that combined radical struggle with an indifference to traditional socialist ideology. Later, the journal Primo Maggio, founded by Bologna in 1973, became a key vehicle for a "militant history" that was explicitly "subordinate to struggle" and made extensive use of oral history to explore the complexities of working-class culture, memory, and experience. More recent scholarship has expanded the field, exploring the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of the movement, including its relationship with architecture, design, and the visual arts.
This period saw operaismo move from being a primarily journal-based tendency to informing a number of revolutionary organisations, chief among them Potere Operaio (Workers' Power), formed in 1969. Potere Operaio attempted to generalise the struggles taking place inside the factories, linking them to conflicts in the broader society, such as housing struggles and student protests. Artists and designers affiliated with the group, such as Mario Mariotti, Giovanni Anceschi and Gianfranco Baruchello, contributed to its visual culture through posters, journal layouts, and militant artworks that reflected its political line. However, disappointed by the failure of the Hot Autumn's factory struggles to translate into a direct political challenge to the state, the group's analysis became increasingly pessimistic. It began to stress the necessity of an "armed party" and an insurrectional strategy to break the political impasse, a shift that marked a departure from its earlier focus on the immanent power of workers' struggles.
This theory provided the framework for the political movement of Autonomia Operaia ("Workers' Autonomy") in the mid-1970s. This loose network of collectives engaged in a wide range of struggles beyond the factory, including rent strikes, squatting, and "self-reduction" campaigns where communities collectively refused to pay increased prices for public transport, electricity, and food. The movement's aesthetics reflected this new, diffuse social subject, with journals like Rosso and A/traverso adopting a graffiti-like, proto-punk style that contrasted with the modernist austerity of earlier workerist publications. The concept of the social worker represented an attempt to find a common basis of political recomposition for these diverse struggles.
The state's crackdown culminated in the mass arrests of 7 April 1979, in which Negri and other intellectuals and militants associated with Autonomia were accused of being the secret leaders of the Red Brigades. Although the specific charges were later shown to be unfounded, the arrests and subsequent trials effectively decapitated the autonomist movement and marked the collapse of operaismo as an organised political force. The memory of this period of struggle and its repression continued to be explored by affiliated artists in the 1980s. The 1983 Milan Triennial installation La casa in comune (The House in Common) by Paolo Deganello and Alberto Magnaghi, for example, used the motif of the house to reflect on issues of community and memory for former militants.
Despite its organisational defeat, operaismo has had a significant intellectual legacy. Its theories were a major influence on the development of autonomism in France, Germany, and beyond. In the English-speaking world, its ideas were explored in journals such as Zerowork and influenced feminist currents like the Wages for Housework campaign, which drew on the workerist analysis of unwaged domestic labour. The work of Negri, particularly his collaboration with Michael Hardt on books like Empire (2000), has brought many of operaismo
The tendency was also marked by significant internal debates and critiques. The initial split between Panzieri's faction in Quaderni Rossi and Tronti's in Classe Operaia revolved around tactical differences and fundamental theoretical disagreements. Panzieri's group accused the more radical faction around Alquati of "extremism", calling them "Zengakuren" after the radical Japanese student group. Feminist militants criticised the male chauvinism prevalent in groups like Potere Operaio, which contributed to the departure of female members and the development of an autonomous feminist movement. In the 1970s, as Negri developed his theory of the operaio sociale, he faced criticism from other workerists like Sergio Bologna. Bologna accused Negri of abandoning the concrete, material analysis of the factory for an overly abstract and voluntarist theory of a unified proletarian subject. He argued that Negri had neglected the real divisions and defeats being suffered by the mass worker and had simply "washed his hands" of the movement's difficulties.
In the afterword to Steve Wright's Storming Heaven, Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba argue that Negri's later work represents an operaismo that "develops in a self-referential manner, almost without further relationship to the social reality it seeks to draw upon and express." They contend that in Negri's thought, "development, crisis, revolution are now the same thing" and that it becomes "pointless to seek mediations, or to claim verifications of reality, in an idealist and subversive apparatus that is self-reproducing". This "irrational" turn, which Gigi Roggero describes as a re-identification of "tendency" with "teleology", transforms the working class into a "hypostasised" subject with a "presumed independent ontological reality", while capital is reduced to a "merely reactive reality". They contrast this with a "materialist" workerism that remains attentive to the concrete and contradictory dynamics of the labour process.
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