The workerisT MaTrix: iNTroducTioN To

Mario TroNTi’s Workers and CapItal aNd

MassiMo cacciari’s “coNfroNTaTioN wiTh
heidegger”
TiMoThy s. MurPhy, uNiversiTy of oklahoMa

For most of its first four decades, the importation of European “theory”
into the Anglo-American study of literature and culture has been dominated
by French and German figures, from Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud
through Lacan, Derrida, Habermas and Foucault to Deleuze, Irigaray and
Badiou. Relatively few thinkers working in other languages, European or oth-
erwise, have achieved similar levels of influence. This situation has begun to
change over the past decade, particularly with respect to Italian thought. Antonio
Gramsci had long been acknowledged as a major figure for Marxist criticism
(and, following the rise of the Birmingham model in the nineteen-seventies,
for cultural studies more generally) and Gianni Vattimo had acquired a reliable
readership among the same dissident Heideggerian critics who embraced Derri-
da’s work. But a broader engagement on the part of English-speaking scholars
with Italian thought only began to emerge with the resurgence of anti-capitalist
protest and struggles over globalization at the start of the new millennium. Much
of this engagement has focused on the unique strain of Italian Marxism, distinct
from Gramsci’s legacy, called workerism [operaismo].1 The most prominent fig-
ure of this tradition, at least from the viewpoint of English translations, is Anto-

1
Not all of it, however: Giorgio Agamben’s work on what he calls “bare life” and the “state of
exception” (see Agamben 1998 and 2005) has found a wide audience in the wake of George W.
Bush’s War on Terror. While it resonates with globalization theory generally, Agamben’s connec-
tion to workerism is very slight.
GENRE XLIII - FALL/WINTER 2010 - 327-336 COPYRIGHT © 2010 BY THE UNI-
VERSITY OF OKLAHOMA. ALL RIGHTS OF REPRODUCTION IN ANY FORM
RESERVED
328 GENRE
nio Negri, co-author with American Michael Hardt of three widely read books
on globalization: Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009).
Their description of the new world order as a post-nationalist, decentered empire
of data and capital flows contested by a hydra-headed multitude made up of irre-
ducibly singular subjectivities has aroused widespread praise and opprobrium,
and helped to make globalization studies an area of tremendous growth both
within and outside the academy. Twenty volumes of Negri’s solo writings have
already been published in English translation, with more on the way.
Despite his increasing visibility as a representative of the workerist tradi-
tion’s continuing vitality, Negri is neither that tradition’s founder nor its only
major thinker. Other important participants in workerism whose writings are
beginning to make their way into English include the media theorist Franco
“Bifo” Berardi, the economist Christian Marazzi, and the political philosopher
Paolo Virno, but they represent a new generation of theorists who are updating
the workerist tradition, like Hardt and Negri are, in response to the mutations
of “digital”, “cognitive” or “cyber” capitalism.2 A fully adequate understanding
of the contemporary relevance of workerism requires some familiarity with the
writings of the early workerists, activist thinkers who built alliances among fac-
tory workers, scholars and students during the tumultuous nineteen-sixties and
seventies but who are not generally well known outside Italy. Foremost among
them are Mario Tronti, the political philosopher who is credited with the first
formulation of workerism’s defining hypothesis, and Massimo Cacciari, a phi-
losopher of modern culture who served an apprenticeship in militancy alongside
Tronti and Negri. Both contributed key ideas to the development of workerism,
but they also instigated a split in the movement by providing a philosophical
rationale for the kind of traditional party and union politics that workerism had
originally eschewed. The texts translated here can serve as an introduction to
their work, and to the broader range of critical methods and approaches to which
the workerist movement gave rise. But no doubt many readers will first want to
know: what is workerism?
In conventional Marxist polemics, workerism is generally a derogatory
term used to denounce a crude and exclusive devotion to the industrial work-
ing class on the part of certain leftist thinkers and organizers. In postwar Italy,

2
All three of these writers are published in English by the unconventional independent press
Semiotext(e), which was also a pioneer in the translation of works by Jean-François Lyotard, Paul
Virilio and Deleuze and Guattari.
 THE WORKER IST MATRIX 329
however, workerism was the name adopted by a radically innovative approach
to Marxist theory and practice that first appeared among the contributors to the
dissident socialist journal Quaderni rossi [Red Notebooks], which was organized
by Raniero Panzieri. A leading member of the Italian Socialist Party, Panzieri
was disturbed by the increasing distance that was developing between the Italian
working class and its institutional mediators—the Italian Communist and Social-
ist Parties (hereafter PCI and PSI respectively), which had the largest member-
ship of all the left parties in Europe, and the unions—in the wake of both par-
ties’ abandonment of anti-capitalist confrontation and worker militancy in favor
of electoral participation and political alliance-building within the terms of the
new Italian constitution of 1948 (see Togliatti). By the late nineteen-fifties that
distance was threatening to throw those institutions into crisis.
If the crisis of the organizations – parties and union – lies in the growing difference
between them and the real movement of the class, between the objective conditions
of struggle and the ideology and policy of the parties, then the problem can be con-
fronted only by starting from the conditions, structures and movement of the rank-
and-file. Here analysis becomes complete only through participation in struggles.
(Panzieri cited in Wright 2002: 21)

This programmatic statement already contains in embryo the central method-

ological innovation of Italian workerism, on which all of its participants would,
in different ways, rely: the empirical study of class composition. As an ana-
lytical concept, class composition itself had two poles: technical composition,
which is the set of social and disciplinary relationships and skills that the labor
process imposes on workers in a specific historical conjuncture, and political
composition, which is the form of worker organization that corresponds to and
struggles with the technical composition.3 In essence, Panzieri and his collabora-
tors argued that only by investigating the experience of work both objectively
and subjectively could labor organizers and workers’ parties find appropriate
ways to unleash the pent-up power of the growing working class in a politically
productive direction.
The Italian working class was indeed growing rapidly as the “economic mir-
acle” of industrialization accelerated after the collapse of Fascism (see Ginsborg:
chapter 7), but Italian social science was largely unprepared to analyze it, so the
workerists (like the Frankfurt School Marxists, to a certain extent) looked to

3
The closest English-language analogs of class composition analysis can be found in the historical
work of E.P. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class [Thompson 1963]) and George
Rawick (From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community [Rawick 1972]).
330 GENRE
American empirical sociology for methodological inspiration. The most impor-
tant proponent of class composition analysis was Romano Alquati, whose socio-
logical studies of the structure of work at FIAT, the largest Italian auto manu-
facturer, and Olivetti, the business-machine manufacturer, appeared regularly in
Red Notebooks and its successor journal, Classe operaia [Working Class], and
were later collected in the book Sulla FIAT e altri scritti [On FIAT and Other
Writings]. Like T.W. Adorno, however, the Italian workerists were conscious
that the American sociological techniques they were borrowing had originated in
the social and political context of capitalist efforts to control workers, and thus
were effectively hostile partisan instruments despite their appearance of academ-
ic neutrality. To combat this ideologically concealed methodological bias, the
workerists explicitly acknowledged the proletarian partisanship of their inqui-
ries, which they called conricerca [co-research] or “inchieste operai [workers’
inquiries]”, and involved workers in their studies’ design and interpretation (see
Wright 2002: 21-25). Such partisanship was not merely a matter of good inten-
tions, however; it also expressed itself directly in the most explicit and basic
assumption of all workerist research, the assumption that has come to be called
“the workerist hypothesis”. The most concise and influential statement of that
hypothesis was written by Mario Tronti in his manifesto “Lenin in England”,
which appeared in the first issue of Working Class in January 1964 and was later
collected in his influential 1966 book Operai e capitale [Workers and Capital]:
We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and
workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its
head, reverse the polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is
the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital,
capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows
behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s
own reproduction must be tuned. (Tronti 1964: 1)

The workerists’ assumption of the logical and practical priority of working-class

activity was a rebuke not only to capitalist ideology, which attributed all creativ-
ity and organizational agency to capital and treated workers as passive instru-
ments to be commanded, but also to the dogma of the institutional left, which
similarly attributed agency and organization to the union and the party while
granting the workers themselves only spontaneous, blind and transitory initia-
tive.4

4
For a much more robust history of early workerism, see Wright 2002: chapters 1-3. For a more
thorough explication of Tronti’s overall theoretical contribution, see Toscano 2009: 114-22.
 THE WORKER IST MATRIX 331
Tronti, who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Siena as well
as a workerist political theorist, derived this hypothesis from his reading of the
newly accessible text of Marx’s rough drafts for the Capital project, the Grun-
drisse (Marx 1973). In the Grundrisse Tronti discovered an intensive focus on
the subversive subjectivity of the working class that was almost totally effaced
by the objectivity of capitalist economic categories in the final text of Capital.
The Grundrisse would become the primary reference point for the workerists
and the subject of Negri’s most influential solo book, Marx Beyond Marx: Les-
sons on the Grundrisse (1979), but that legacy was due largely to the originality
and force of Tronti’s pioneering explication in Workers and Capital, important
chapters of which are translated below. His focus on worker subjectivity as an
active but historically variable phenomenon immediately set workerism apart
from both the abstract, transhistorical humanism of Erich Fromm and Georg
Lukács then dominant among western Marxists and the anti-subjectivism of
the other important strands of theoretical Marxism to emerge from the postwar
period, the Frankfurt School’s negative dialectics and Louis Althusser’s struc-
turalism, which effectively stripped working-class subjectivity of all possible
agency for social/political transformation. Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno’s
analysis of “administered life” in works like Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
emphasized the extent to which the formation of subjectivity under advanced
capitalism was pre-programmed and controlled by institutions like the mass-
media “culture industry” (see Horkheimer and Adorno), while for Althusser the
very form of subjective interpellation was the defining characteristic of capitalist
ideology and therefore could not constitute an agency of struggle or resistance
(see Althusser 1971 and 1976). Tronti’s formulation shared with these schools
an attention to the new conditions of postwar consumer capitalism that had to
be addressed by any valid analysis of domination, but unlike them, his approach
gave new life to the other necessary pole of Marxist theory: the identification
and construction of adequate agents—and organizations—of resistance.
The PCI, the PSI and the unions were not impressed by the workerist
hypothesis, which clearly threatened their own representative hegemony over
the working class, so during the course of the nineteen sixties workerist theo-
rists, researchers and activists operated largely outside the institutional structure
of the traditional Italian left. In alliance with factory workers who were disil-
lusioned with the complacency of their unions, the workerists experimented
with old tactics of resistance like wildcat strikes, new tactics like assembly-line
332 GENRE
slowdowns and high-tech sabotage, and new organizational structures like non-
union shopfloor committees and reading groups focused on philosophy and
political economy. However, the likelihood of long-term success was very dif-
ficult to predict; in the late sixties a massive restructuring of capitalist industry
to forestall the new movement got underway, and methodological disagreements
arose among different workerist factions regarding the most appropriate way to
consolidate and protect the workers’ gains. In 1969, as Negri and other intran-
sigent workerists were helping to found the radical extra-parliamentary worker/
student alliance known as Potere operaio [Workers’ Power] to contest the PCI’s
ongoing and intensifying collaboration with capital, Tronti and other prominent
workerists like Massimo Cacciari decided that the PCI, despite its strategy of
electoral accommodation and compromise, offered the best possibility for realiz-
ing the political potential of the working class, so they joined the PCI in the (ulti-
mately vain) hope of transforming the party from within. Their justification for
doing this lay in what they theorized as the “autonomy of the political”, the idea
that the political sphere was independent of the economic and social spheres and
therefore had its own internal logic that sometimes required political representa-
tives (like the PCI) to act without coordinating their activities with the needs of
their constituents.5 At that point Tronti’s theoretical work began increasingly to
diverge from its original workerist basis, and by the late seventies he had entered
the PCI’s inner circle and accommodated his ideas to the party’s official line.
A generation younger than Tronti and Negri, Massimo Cacciari began
organizing factory workers while still a graduate student in philosophy at the
University of Padua; he and Negri, then a professor of political science at Padua,
set up a Capital reading group for the petrochemical workers of Porto Marghera,
adjacent to Venice, in 1963-64. Like Negri, Cacciari led a double life as a labor
organizer and a university professor. His writings during the sixties and seven-
ties alternated between concrete analyses of new labor processes and proposals
for new organizational forms on the one hand and erudite studies of modern phi-
losophy, art and architecture on the other, with virtually no overlap between the
two. Unlike Tronti, Cacciari’s most important theoretical work emerged after his
break with workerism and his entry into the PCI; nevertheless, it is definitively
marked by his workerist background and it had profound consequences for
workerism’s further development. He provided the most sophisticated and pow-

5
In 1977 Tronti would publish a book-length defense of this perspective entitled Sull’autonomia del
politico (Tronti 1977).
 THE WORKER IST MATRIX 333
erful rationale for the autonomy of the political in his breakthrough work, Krisis
(Cacciari 1976), which proposed a complex synthesis of Nietzsche, Heidegger
and Wittgenstein that he called “negative thought [pensiero negativo]”. Negative
thought, like deconstruction to a certain extent, entailed a critique and refusal of
the recuperative power of Hegelian (and Marxist) dialectical negation, the nega-
tion of negation that produced the positive development of the system. Along
with Negri, Cacciari identified dialectical negation as the motor of capitalism,
the key to its ability to transform its opponent—the working class and its strug-
gles—into the source of its own expansion. Unlike Negri, he denied dialectical
negation its necessary transcendence not by insisting on the immanent ontologi-
cal priority of subversive subjective agency (following the workerist hypothesis)
but by eliminating the ontological referent of that transcendence: drawing on
Wittgenstein, Cacciari reduced the politics of class struggle to the irreducible
autonomy of free-floating language games.
As Matteo Mandarini convincingly shows in a detailed explication of the
divergence between the extraparliamentary workerists represented by Negri and
the PCI entrists, Cacciari’s conception of negative thought privileges technical
rationality (which Heidegger calls “Technics”) over the workerist conception
of a historically determined succession of subjective forms, and therefore the
autonomy of the political can only be understood as “the decisionistic manage-
ment of the multiplicity of fragmentary rationalities, as the working class—in
the form of the PCI—taking control of the administration of the state” because
“it is only once one has abandoned faith in a political subject as foundation of
revolutionary political change that one can rediscover a professional political
class that can take over the administration of the actual to bring change from
above” (Mandarini 2009: 61-62). In an argument that prefigures Lyotard’s Post-
modern Condition, Cacciari adapts Wittgenstein’s notion of language games
to justify political opportunism: “On the one hand, the Political is a language
game like the others, with its own specific rules and immanent possibilities of
transformation and, on the other hand, it has other language games for its con-
tent. The Political then situates itself in such a way as to keep the confrontation
between the various language games continuously open” (Mandarini 2009: 67).
The metaphysical transcendence that negative thought eliminated by negating
the ontological and subjective referents of all language games returns in the
form of the autonomy of the political sphere itself, and the dialectical synthesis
of capitalist development is reborn as party- and state-centered socialist reform-
334 GENRE
ism that passes itself off as communism. The strong but historically variable
class subject whose composition the workerists tried to map is transformed into
the abstract, universal subject of Heidegger’s critique of humanist essentialism,
which must delegate its agency to the masters of the specialized language game
of politics if it wishes to prevail in the struggle between antagonistic rationalities
of production. In the essay translated below, from the sequel to Krisis (see Cac-
ciari 1977), Cacciari follows out this logic in order to proclaim Nietzsche’s will
to power and Heidegger’s critique of technical rationality to be the true heirs
of Marx’s theory of class struggle, and hence the best sources of working-class
political strategy. Here Cacciari’s workerism turns itself inside out, reserving to
the party’s technocrats the militant agency that Tronti’s original hypothesis had
attributed directly to the workers themselves. When, in 1979, the party he had
so ingeniously defended joined with the Italian right to criminalize and suppress
the remaining workerists and the legions of other militants allied with them,
Cacciari could offer little beyond personal sympathy to his former comrades and
friends like Negri, who was labeled a terrorist and held for four years awaiting
trial by a PCI-affiliated judge.
Like Tronti, who eventually became a member of the PCI’s central com-
mittee, Cacciari found mainstream political success following his entry into the
traditional party system. He was first elected to the Italian parliament in 1976
(an event that Negri lampooned as “Nietzsche went to parliament” in his 1977
pamphlet Domination and Sabotage [Negri 2005: 253-258]), and after the mas-
sive re-organization of the Italian left following the collapse of the Soviet Union,
he joined the center-left coalition organized by Romano Prodi on the model of
the US Democratic Party and later served two somewhat controversial terms as
mayor of Venice before retiring from politics. For the past forty years Cacciari
has continued to alternate between writings on party politics on the one hand
and increasingly abstruse studies of modernist art, architecture, music and phi-
losophy on the other. He often provided the late Marxist composer Luigi Nono
(who was also a member of the PCI’s central committee) with libretti for his
experimental musical pieces, including the quasi-operatic “tragedy of listening”
Prometeo (1985), and he continues to teach aesthetics at the University Vita-
Salute San Raffaele in Milan.
Tronti’s and Cacciari’s writings and career trajectories demonstrate—espe-
cially in comparison with Negri’s—how complex, overdetermined and diver-
gent the original workerist intellectual and political matrix was, and how many
 THE WORKER IST MATRIX 335
unrealized possibilities for intercultural dialogue and critique still lurk within it.
Their attention to new and controversial sources of theoretical and political inno-
vation gave workerism both a rich intellectual basis and an enormous impetus
for growth, refinement and diversification that continues to mark the movement
and its legacy today. The fundamental disagreement registered in their writings,
between centralized, hierarchical party control and decentered, immanent sub-
jective invention, remains unresolved among globalization partisans, and Marx-
ists in general, to this day. A clearer understanding of the original workerist
movement’s diversity and sophistication, its birth, death, and afterlife, can help
us to better grasp the complexities of our own situation, and the translations that
follow will serve their purpose if they encourage and enable such understanding.

Works CITed
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stan-
ford: Stanford UP), translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
---. 2005. State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago P), translated by
Kevin Attell.
Alquati, Romano. 1975. Sulla FIAT e altri scritti (Milan: Feltrinelli).
Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin
and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review), translated by Ben Brewster.
---. 1976. “Remark on the Category: ‘Process without a Subject or Goal(s)’” in
Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books), translated by Grahame
Lock.
Cacciari, Massimo. 1976. Krisis: Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da
Nietzsche a Wittgenstein (Milan: Feltrinelli).
---. 1977. Pensiero negativo e razionalizzazione (Venice: Marsilio).
Chiesa, Lorenzo, and Alberto Toscano, eds. 2009. The Italian Difference (Mel-
bourne: re.press).
Ginsborg, Paul. 1990. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics
1943-1988 (New York: Penguin).
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP).
---. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York:
Penguin P).
---. 2009. Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard UP).
Horkheimer, Max, and T.W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stan-
ford: Stanford UP), translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Mandarini, Matteo. 2009. “Beyond Nihilism: Notes Toward a Critique of Left-
Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s” in Chiesa & Toscano
2009.
336 GENRE
Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse (New York: Penguin), translated by Martin Nico-
laus.
Negri, Antonio. 1979. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (Brook-
lyn: Autonomedia), translated by Harry Cleaver et al.
---. 2005. Books for Burning (New York: Verso), translated by Timothy S. Mur-
phy et al.
Rawick, George. 1973. From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Com-
munity (Westport: Greenwood P).
Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class (New York:
Vintage).
Togliatti, Palmiro. 1944. “The Communist Policy of National Unity (1944)” in
On Gramsci and Other Writings (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1979).
Toscano, Alberto. 2009. “Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Sub-
ject of Antagonism” in Chiesa & Toscano 2009.
Tronti, Mario. 1964. “Lenin in England” in Working-Class Autonomy and the
Crisis (London: Red Notes, 1979), translated by Ed Emery.
---. 1971. Operai e capitale enlarged edition (Turin: Einaudi). Reissued by
DeriveApprodi in 2009.
---. 1977. Sull’autonomia del politico (Milan: Feltrinelli).
Wright, Steve. 2002. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Ital-
ian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press).