Abstract

Operai e Stato is a collection of essays which grew out of a conference held at the University of Padua in 1967. With the exception of U.S. historian George Rawick, the authors are, or have been, connected with the Institute of Social and Political Sciences of that university, and are militants in the Italian extraparliamentary left. Several of these essays were widely circulated among militant groups and have served as a basis for discussion, especially during the outburst of student and worker struggles in 1968 and after.

One of the most important functions of these essays is to provide an example of class analysis in the context of advanced capitalist society where the mystificatory incrustations of bourgeois social science have had the net effect of “engulfing the class struggle and planning it”, and where certain Marxist currents still bound to a Third International tradition continue to locate the class struggle almost exclusively in the imperialist moment of capital's development.