Ebook: Workers and Capital

Initially published in 1966, Operai e capitale is the first book produced by the political tendency known as operaismo.

Many such books followed over the next fifteen years, and some of these too would be best sellers. None, however, could match the shiver of recognition and excitement that Tronti’s volume evoked within a large part of Italy’s generation of 1968. In truth, for many Italian radical circles of the time, the book was treated as nothing less than a bible – above all by the group Potere Operaio, which briefly brought together a significant proportion of the country’s workerists, in pursuit of what Brecht once called ‘the simple thing / So difficult to achieve’.

United by a common belief that the leadership of the local Communist (PCI) and Socialist (PSI) parties did not understand the recent massive changes in working-class composition and politics, these various dissenters offered very different solutions to this conundrum. Amongst them, the workerists insisted that ‘a Marxian purification of Marx’ was indispensable for understanding and organising class conflict. So far, so usual: what made the operaisti less typical (although not unique) was an equal insistence that this task could only be achieved through an encounter between Marx’s critique of political economy and the realities of workplace power relations in contemporary Italy.