Operaismo

What did operaismo turn upside down?

Operaismo is Italian for “workerism”. It began as a disparaging label used by critics who thought the tendency focused too narrowly on industrial workers, and its adherents later adopted it. Unlike earlier kinds of “workerism”, such as council communism or the Stalinist cult of labour, Italian operaismo did not glorify or extend the condition of being a worker but sought to destroy it; it has been called a “workerism against work”.

What it inverted was the order of capital and labour. Traditional Marxism held that capitalism develops according to its own laws and that workers fight back as its contradictions pile up. Operaismo held instead that working-class struggle is the main force driving capitalist development: capital does not unfold by its own laws but is forced to restructure production, management and even the state in response to workers’ resistance. In the editorial “Lenin in England”, written for the first issue of the journal Classe Operaia in January 1964, Mario Tronti wrote that he and his comrades too had looked first at capitalist development and only then at workers’ struggles, and that this was a mistake: one had to turn the problem around, change its sign and start again from the beginning, “and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class”. This is the proposition usually called operaismo’s “Copernican revolution”.

Operaismo was a “political reading” of Marx’s Capital through the eyes of working-class struggle. In Tronti’s terms it set out to make an “internal history of the working class”, rather than the internal history of capital that Marxism had always written, its methodological principle. Hardt and Negri later defined operaismo by citing Marx’s remark in chapter 15 of Capital, volume 1, that a whole history could be written of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of arming capital against the revolts of the working class. Capital reacts; the working class moves first.

What state was the Italian left in during the 1950s?

Operaismo grew out of the crisis of the Italian labour movement in the 1950s. Post-war Italy went through a rapid industrialisation known as the “economic miracle”. Unlike in other Western countries, Taylorism (the fine division and timing of work) and Fordism (assembly-line mass production) only fully took hold in Italy in the 1950s. Huge numbers of people moved from the rural South to the industrial North, creating a new generation of factory workers with little experience of unions or of left-wing culture.

The mainstream left struggled to respond. The Italian Communist Party under Palmiro Togliatti pursued national unity and “progressive democracy”, putting productivity and reconstruction ahead of open class conflict. The unions were politically divided and employers took the offensive on the shop floor; the symbol was the Communist-aligned union’s loss of its majority at FIAT in 1955. In 1956 the crushing of the Hungarian revolution and Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin hit many Italian communists hard. The PCI weathered the storm by proclaiming an “Italian road to socialism”, while the Italian Socialist Party broke away from its alliance with the Communists towards a centre-left coalition.

In this setting the dissident socialist Raniero Panzieri became operaismo’s most important precursor. As co-director of the Socialist Party’s journal Mondo Operaio, and translator of the second volume of Capital, he rejected the identification of working class and party that Stalinism had consolidated and argued that class action meant the autonomy of the exploited. Pushed out of the co-directorship after the 1959 party congress, he moved to Turin, worked for the Einaudi publishing house and began investigating factory conditions with young militants and trade unionists. Another intellectual source was the Communist philosopher Galvano Della Volpe, whose rigorous materialist and “scientific” reading of Marx contrasted with the historicism dominant in the party; his pupil Tronti used it to move away from the official traditions of Italian Marxism, especially the version of Gramsci promoted by the PCI.

What did Quaderni Rossi do?

Operaismo’s first collective expression was the journal Quaderni Rossi (“Red Notebooks”), launched in 1961 by Panzieri, Tronti and others. It brought together intellectuals and trade unionists who had broken with the Communist and Socialist parties and published six issues between 1961 and 1965 (the last after Panzieri’s death in 1964). It rejected the idea that technology was a neutral, self-propelling progressive force. In his essay on the capitalist use of machinery in neocapitalism, in the first issue, Panzieri argued that the way capital uses machinery is itself a form of class domination; it was the first critique in Italy of the non-neutral character of technological development.

The group became known for “workers’ inquiry” (inchiesta operaia), a research method that combined sociological questionnaires and interviews with political work inside the factories. Its aim was not to “bring” consciousness to workers but to investigate, together with them, the concrete reality of exploitation and the resistance already forming, so it was also called “co-research” (conricerca). Romano Alquati’s studies at FIAT and Olivetti gave the first analysis of the “mass worker” (operaio massa): the young, semi-skilled assembly-line worker, often a migrant from the South, attached neither to the company nor to the established unions, who was developing new forms of autonomous struggle.

How did Tronti’s “Copernican revolution” come about?

In July 1962 young FIAT workers in Turin’s Piazza Statuto, furious at unions that had signed a separate agreement with management, fought the police for days. Panzieri and his supporters hesitated, but a more radical group around Tronti saw the riots as proof that the working class was becoming politically autonomous from the official labour movement. In 1963 Tronti, Alberto Asor Rosa, Massimo Cacciari and others broke away; from 1964 to 1967 they published Classe Operaia (“Working Class”), with Antonio Negri among the contributors. This began operaismo’s “classical phase”.

The split had two sides. In theory, Panzieri rejected Tronti’s view that the working class was an immediately revolutionary subject; in practice, he judged that the time was not ripe to turn the journal’s work into political organisation. He called one of Tronti’s speeches a fascinating summary of a whole series of errors that a workers’ left could make at that moment: very Hegelian, a new philosophy of history, a “philosophy of the working class”.

Tronti set out his ideas in Workers and Capital (Operai e capitale, 1966), a book that strongly influenced the youth revolt and the wave of mobilisation of the following years. From this standpoint he read the economic planning of the centre-left government not as a step towards socialism but as capital’s attempt to control the main political threat to its rule, the wage struggles of the working class; the wage struggle was therefore a political struggle in its own right. He also called the condition in which the factory’s logic of production and command spreads to the whole of society, making the state itself an agent of the capitalist mode of production, the “social factory”.

Around 1967–1968 Tronti, who foresaw the defeat of workers’ spontaneity, broke with Negri. He turned to the problem of political leadership and mediation, theorised the “autonomy of the political”, moved back towards the Communist Party (he sat several times on its Central Committee under Enrico Berlinguer) and later served as a senator. Other workerist intellectuals such as Asor Rosa and Cacciari also returned to the PCI: one of operaismo’s founders ended up back in the party it had opposed.

What were operaismo’s key concepts?

The first was class composition. The way capital organises labour-power materially (the division of labour, skill levels, the kinds of machinery used and wage structures) is the technical composition; the way the working class actually struggles (its culture, needs and methods of self-organisation) is the political composition. A given technical composition creates the conditions for a certain political composition, and when that gains strength capital changes the technical composition to break up the class’s power. The concept treats class as a moving process of struggle and conflict rather than a fixed sociological category, rejecting traditional Marxism’s distinction between “class in itself” and “class for itself”.

The second was the refusal of work. Going beyond union demands for better wages and conditions, operaismo identified and theorised a working-class tendency to struggle against being a worker at all. Absenteeism, sabotage, slowdowns and demands for “more money, less work” were read not as apolitical deviance but as concrete expressions of antagonism towards the capital relation. The workerists even read the passivity of new workers who refused to strike as a refusal of the established unions that co-managed their exploitation.

The third was the workers’ inquiry described above; the fourth, the mass worker. The mass worker was the semi-skilled worker of the Fordist assembly line, without the occupational identity and craft pride of the older skilled worker and easily replaced, often a young migrant from the South. Deskilled and tied to the rhythm of the machine, he nonetheless shared a homogeneous condition and a common alienation that became the basis of a new, more radical mass struggle with egalitarian demands and direct opposition to the organisation of production. Tronti described this new subject as a “rough pagan race without ideals, without faith and without morals”, the opposite of the heroic, respectable worker of official labour-movement imagery.

What did Potere Operaio try to do after the Hot Autumn?

Operaismo’s theories seemed to find practical confirmation in the industrial unrest that swept Italy from 1968 and culminated in the “Hot Autumn” of 1969. Autonomous rank-and-file committees (CUBs) outside the control of the official unions led wildcat strikes, factory occupations and mass assemblies, above all at FIAT in Turin and Pirelli in Milan. The struggles were led by the mass worker and marked by egalitarian demands (the same wage increase for everyone) and a direct challenge to management’s control over the pace and organisation of work.

Operaismo now moved from journals to revolutionary organisations. The chief one was Potere Operaio (“Workers’ Power”), founded in 1969 by Negri, Oreste Scalzone and Franco Piperno. It adopted Tronti’s thesis that class struggle was built around the factory’s mass worker and made the refusal of work and “workers’ autonomy” the backbone of its action; its favourite slogans were “More money, less work” and “Work less, everyone work”. Lotta Continua (“Continuous Struggle”), formed the same year around a group from Pisa, was a rival organisation that also came out of operaismo.

But when the Hot Autumn’s factory struggles failed to turn into a direct political challenge to the state, Potere Operaio’s analysis grew increasingly pessimistic, and it began to stress the need for an “armed party” and an insurrectional strategy. From 1971 the group had a secret armed structure called Lavoro Illegale (“Illegal Work”). In April 1973, in Primavalle in Rome, people around the group set fire to the home of a local secretary of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, and his two sons died in the blaze. Amid the fallout of this case and the conflict between Negri and Piperno, Potere Operaio dissolved in June 1973.

Why did Lotta Femminista break away?

The protagonist of operaismo’s class struggle was the male factory worker. Women militants criticised the male chauvinism common in groups like Potere Operaio, which contributed to women members leaving and to the rise of an autonomous feminist movement. Its starting point was the women’s group that Mariarosa Dalla Costa and her comrades founded in Padua in June 1971. Dalla Costa worked as Negri’s assistant at the University of Padua and moved among activists who had gained political experience with Potere Operaio in the industrial zone of Porto Marghera. At a women’s meeting held in Potere Operaio’s office she presented a draft essay arguing that unpaid domestic labour is a structural element of capital accumulation.

The American activist Selma James attended that meeting. At fifteen she had joined the Johnson–Forest Tendency in the United States, led by C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, and the Italian Wikipedia counts this tendency, together with the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, as operaismo’s counterpart abroad. In Padua two currents from either side of the Atlantic that put workers’ own experience and autonomy first came together.

The group took the name Lotta Femminista (“Feminist Struggle”) in 1972. In July of that year members of Potere Operaio’s Rome branch burst into a women-only meeting the group had organised in Rome and assaulted the women present; the remaining members still enrolled in Potere Operaio left it in September. From then on Lotta Femminista shifted the centre of conflict from the factory to “the social”, treating home and neighbourhood as new sites of production and subversion; it carried Tronti’s “social factory” into the home. This analysis led into the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and English-language accounts describe it as an “immanent critique” that took operaismo’s concepts as given and exposed their limits from within. Silvia Federici also came out of this movement. Italian scholars still ask whether Lotta Femminista should be seen as a women’s version of operaismo or as one of the most original expressions of feminism.

How did operaismo pass into Autonomia?

As Potere Operaio fell apart, Negri substantially rewrote workerist theory. Capital’s restructuring in response to the mass worker’s struggles, he argued, had turned the whole of society into a “social factory” working for capital, so the central political figure was no longer the mass worker confined to the factory but the “social worker” (operaio sociale). This new proletariat included not only factory workers but students, the unemployed, precarious service workers and women doing unwaged domestic labour. Alquati, in his work on the university, had already pointed to the emergence of an “intellectual proletariat” of students forced to sell their labour-power.

This theory framed the political movement of Autonomia Operaia (“Workers’ Autonomy”) in the mid-1970s. Autonomia was not a party but a loose network of collectives joined by militants of Potere Operaio and of Lotta Continua, which dissolved in 1976. Outside the factory they waged rent strikes, squatted empty buildings and ran “self-reduction” campaigns in which communities collectively refused to pay increases in the price of public transport, electricity and food, and they gathered around free radio stations such as Radio Alice in Bologna. There was criticism within operaismo too: Sergio Bologna accused Negri of abandoning the concrete, material analysis of the factory for an overly abstract and voluntarist theory of a unified subject, and of ignoring the real divisions and defeats the mass worker was suffering.

The “Movement of ’77” marked both the height of Autonomia’s influence and the beginning of its end. In March 1977 a Lotta Continua student was killed by the Carabinieri in Bologna; universities across the country were occupied and the government sent armoured vehicles to clear Bologna’s university district. French intellectuals gathered around Jean-Paul Sartre, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, issued a manifesto against the repression. The movement’s confrontational style and the spread of political violence, including the actions of armed groups such as the Red Brigades, deepened the crisis.

What was established about the arrests of 7 April 1979?

After the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in 1978, Italy passed a series of special laws. On 7 April 1979 the Padua prosecutor Pietro Calogero ordered the arrest of Autonomia’s leading figures. Negri, Emilio Vesce, Scalzone and others were arrested; Piperno escaped to France. The warrants charged them with having organised and directed the Red Brigades as an armed band aiming at armed insurrection against the powers of the state. Negri was at first even accused of making the telephone call to Moro’s family during the kidnapping, but the call turned out to have been made by the Red Brigades leader Mario Moretti.

The trials began only in 1983 and lasted until 1988. The Rome court of first instance (1984) sentenced Negri to 30 years, the appeal court (1987) cut this to 12, and in 1988 the Court of Cassation essentially confirmed the appeal verdict. In the Padua trial (1986) Negri and 46 others were acquitted. Negri’s final convictions were for participation in a subversive association and an armed band and for “moral complicity” in a bank robbery in which a carabiniere was killed. Elected to parliament for the Radical Party in 1983 while in prison and released as a result, he used his immunity to leave for France; he returned voluntarily in 1997 and served the rest of his sentence. The judicial record’s conclusion is clear: no link between the Autonomia leaders and the Red Brigades or the Moro kidnapping was proved, and the Red Brigades were politically independent, although some former members of Potere Operaio had joined them.

There is also a documented record of violence being justified in the writings and organisations of the 1970s: Potere Operaio’s secret armed structure, described above, and Negri’s own late-1970s description of armed struggle as the “red thread” of the organisation of the multinational worker. The Court of Cassation held that Negri and other Autonomia leaders had promoted a subversive plot running from 1971 to 1979.

Interpretations remain divided. Calogero’s hypothesis that the Autonomia leaders were the organisational brain of a plan for armed insurrection became known, ironically, as the “Calogero theorem”. Amnesty International criticised the long pre-trial detention and procedural irregularities; the Radicals, the Socialists, the New Left, the jurist Luigi Ferrajoli and the writer Leonardo Sciascia, among others, called the investigation an abuse that violated the right of defence and constitutional freedoms. Calogero himself and journalists such as Indro Montanelli and Marco Travaglio, on the other hand, hold that the verdicts bore out its premises. Berlinguer’s Communist Party backed Calogero from the start. Few dispute that the mass arrests and trials effectively decapitated the Autonomia movement and ended operaismo as an organised political force.

How did the PCI see operaismo, and how did operaismo see the PCI?

The two sides criticised each other sharply from the start. To the workerists, the Communist Party subordinated class to party, demanded productivity and national unity from workers, and treated technology and economic planning as neutral or progressive, mistaking plans with which capital sought to tame workers’ struggles for a road to socialism. The Communist Party and the traditional left, in turn, dismissed operaismo as “extremist” and its analyses as stubbornly resistant to reality, and the party weekly Rinascita criticised it as “factoryist” for its exclusive focus on industrial workers.

The conflict deepened in the mid-1970s as the PCI turned to Eurocommunism and the “historic compromise” with the Christian Democrats. The party condemned Autonomia’s violent methods and championed struggle within democratic institutions. On 17 February 1977 Luciano Lama, leader of the Communist-aligned CGIL union, was driven out of the occupied University of Rome after a clash between autonomists and the union’s stewards; Berlinguer then called the autonomists “squadristi rossi” (red squadristi, evoking the fascist action squads) and “untorelli” (little plague-spreaders, recalling those accused of spreading the plague in seventeenth-century Milan).

A few questions sort the two positions. Is the subject of revolution the working class as represented by the party, or the class itself, autonomous from party and unions? Is the wage struggle an economic demand or a political struggle in its own right? Are technological development and economic planning a progress socialism will inherit, or instruments of capital’s domination? Are reforms and alliances within institutions an advance, or the taming of class struggle? The political consequences differed too: the PCI’s road led to influence in parliament and local government and to compromise with the established order; operaismo’s led to autonomous struggles in factories and streets, part of which collapsed into armed struggle and under state repression.

Where did Negri and Hardt take operaismo?

Operaismo collapsed as an organisation, but its theory strongly influenced autonomist movements in France, Germany and elsewhere; in the English-speaking world it was taken up by the journal Zerowork and by the Wages for Housework campaign. In the twenty-first century it reached a global audience through the trilogy Negri wrote with the American philosopher Michael Hardt: Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). There they recast workerist concepts such as the social factory and class composition as the “multitude” and called for the reappropriation of “the common”, beyond both private and state property. Empire was even called a bible of the anti-globalisation movement.

Some of the original workerists view this diffusion with suspicion. The scholar Gigi Roggero argues that the term “post-operaismo” was coined in Anglo-Saxon universities to depoliticise operaismo, turning a militant “movement of thought” into an academic “school of thought” and abstracting it from conflict and class composition. The economists Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba argue that Negri’s later work develops in a self-referential way, almost without relation to the social reality it claims to express, turning the working class into a hypostasised subject and reducing capital to a merely reactive reality; against it they set a “materialist” workerism attentive to the concrete and contradictory dynamics of the labour process.

How should operaismo be judged?

Judgements of operaismo depend heavily on where one stands. For those who belonged to operaismo and Autonomia it was an attempt to go beyond an official labour movement frozen in Stalinism and reformism and to revive Marx not as the ideology of the workers’ movement but as its revolutionary theory. From the standpoint of the PCI and orthodox Marxism it was an extremism that slighted party and institutions, part of which slid into armed struggle and gave the state a pretext for repressing the whole labour movement. Critics within operaismo such as Panzieri, Bologna, Bellofiore and Tomba pointed to the danger when a philosophical optimism that sees the working class as an immediately revolutionary subject takes the place of concrete analysis of class composition. The feminists of Lotta Femminista and the Wages for Housework campaign pushed operaismo’s concepts furthest while exposing their blind spot: their confinement to the male factory worker.

To place a position, ask: does it locate the motor of capitalist development in capital’s laws or in workers’ struggles? Does it centre organisation on the party or on the autonomy of the class? Does it see work as something to be liberated or something to be refused? Does it confine the revolutionary subject to factory workers or extend it to students, the unemployed and women doing housework? And where should a movement draw the line when faced with state violence and armed struggle? The same questions return today in debates about platform work, care work and the commons.