The classic text of Italian workerism available in English for the
first time.
Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most
important work produced by operaismo, a current of political thought
emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and
extra-parliamentary Left in Italy and beyond. In the decade after its
first publication in 1966, the debates over Workers and Capital
produced new methods of analysis and a new vocabulary for thousands
of militants, helping to inform the new forms of workplace, youth and
community struggles. Concepts like 'neocapitalism', 'class
composition', 'mass-worker', 'the plan of capital', 'workers'
inquiry' and 'co-research' became an established part of the Italian
Left's political lexicon. Over five decades since it was first
published, Workers and Capital has been a key text in the
history of the international workers' movement, yet only now appears
in English translation for the first time. Far from simply an
artefact of the intense political conflicts of the 1960s, Tronti's
work offers extraordinary tools for understanding the powerful shifts
in the nature of work and class composition in recent decades.