SubStance

"Workerism" (operaismo) was a current of Italian Marxism that emerged during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Associated with journals such as Quaderni rossi [Red Notes] and Classe operaia [Working Class], workerist theorists such as Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna, and Antonio Negri developed a reading of Marx that emphasized the autonomy of labor vis-à-vis capitalist exploitation and state power, thereby departing significantly from the state-centered and reformist policies of the Italian Communist Party (Partito comunista italiano, PCI). The theoretical investigations of the workerists were rooted in an intense practical engagement with the labor struggles that shook Italy during the period of post-1945 industrialization. Many of these struggles, such as the wildcat strikes and labor-police clashes that took place in Turin during the "Hot Autumn" (Autunno caldo) of 1969, were characterized by a high degree of self-organization on the part of workers; they were frequently conducted independently of and against the policies of the PCI and the trade unions.¹

On the basis of these struggles, the workerists developed a strong interest in what they termed "class composition." The concept of class composition addresses both the "technical" organization of the working class within the capitalist mode of production and the forms of "political" subjectivity that emerge within the working class. A central hypothesis of the workerist approach is that, given a certain level of capitalist development, transformations in political composition precede and determine transformations in technical composition.² This means that the labor struggles accompanying the emergence of a new political subject force entrepreneurs to implement processes of economic re-structuring. In the workerist interpretation, such economic re-structuring constitutes an attempt to contain the revolutionary transformations that capitalist development produces and depends on, even as these transformations continually call into question capitalism's material foundations, private ownership of the means of production, and entrepreneurial command over alienated labor.

The Italian labor struggles of the 1950s and 1960s occurred in the context of an accelerated transition to a Fordist economy. The workerists took Fordism to be a coincidence of three economic phenomena: Taylorism, or the "scientific" organization of the production process in accordance [End Page 3] with the principles of "time and motion management" and the massive recruitment of unskilled labor; Fordism in the narrow sense, or a form of consumption planning that uses comparatively high wages to ensure a rise in purchasing power within the working class; and Keynesianism, the ensemble of macro-economic instruments (welfare, state investment) that the nation-state uses to avert economic crises and contain labor unrest. The accelerated transition to Fordism that occurred during the early years of the post-1945 Italian republic also involved a dramatic increase in internal migration, with many young proletarians abandoning the rural south in order to work on the assembly lines of corporations such as FIAT, in the north. By refusing to identify with northern Italy's political and economic organizations—the PCI, the trade unions—and by engaging in ferocious struggles characterized by absenteeism, sabotage, wildcat strikes, and riots, the new generation of workers prompted the workerists to call out a new labor subject, the Fordist "mass worker" [operaio massa], displacing the traditional subject of skilled labor, the "craft worker" [operaio professionale].³

The struggles of the 1960s corresponded to what the workerists termed the "strategy of refusal" [strategia del rifiuto]—that is, the generalized rejection of Fordist factory labor and of the forms of contractual negotiation and political representation associated with it.⁴ By the late 1970s, these struggles had led corporations such as FIAT to introduce new, post-Fordist production techniques, in particular the implementation of microelectronic systems and automated production cycles that reduced entrepreneurial dependence on labor.⁵ This development, also linked to the outbreak of economic recession in the wake of the oil crisis, reached its climax with the mass layoffs announced by FIAT in 1980. In the meantime, student struggles and the emergence of both a highly combative feminist movement and new, strongly politicized youth cultures had shifted the terrain of struggle away from the factory. The new political subject, which Antonio Negri termed the "socialized worker" [operaio sociale] had...