.jpg)
Workerism
Sign in to saveOperaismo (Italian for "workerism") was a heterodox Marxist 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.
Article
21 sectionsContents
- Etymology and definition
- Origins
- Political context: Italian left in the 1950s
- Intellectual precursors
- Early development and journals
- ''Quaderni Rossi''
- ''Classe Operaia'' and Tronti's "Copernican revolution"
- Key concepts
- Historiography
- Later development and fragmentation
- "Hot Autumn" and Potere Operaio
- Negri and the "social worker"
- Collapse and legacy
- Criticism
- See also
- References
- Works cited
- Further reading
- External links
- Workerism as revolutionary movement
- Workerism as pejorative
Operaismo (Italian for "workerism") was a heterodox Marxist 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's key thinkers included Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna, and Romano Alquati. Their analysis was initially developed in journals such as Quaderni Rossi (1961–1965) and Classe Operaia (1964–1967). The central analytical category of operaismo was "class composition", which examines the relationship between the material structure of the working class (its technical composition) and its capacity for political self-organisation (its political composition). This analysis was often informed by a novel method of "workers' inquiry" (inchiesta operaia), a form of militant co-research (conricerca) conducted with factory workers.