New Uses for Old Thought: Mario Tronti’s Copernican Revolution, 50 Years On

Abstract

Long a household name in Italy, Mario Tronti has finally arrived on Anglo shores. Although his influence has rumbled through social theory and activist circles for decades, it has taken 53 years for his landmark book Workers and Capital to appear in a full English translation. And what a bolt of lightning it is. Reading Tronti today remains a bracing experience, with his acerbic wit and radical brio reminiscent of Lenin, and lyrical prose bolstered by a rigorous analysis of Marx's oeuvre. The writing, rendered in English here by David Broder, has lost little of its charm, and Verso's edition promises to multiply its resonance on a global scale.The first edition of Operai e capitale was published in 1966, presenting articles published between 1962 and 1964 alongside a new essay from 1965 and an introduction. A second edition was published in 1971 with a new "Postscript" (included in all subsequent reprints [Tronti, 2006] and most translations, including Verso's), written after an important turning point in the author's career. In 1967, Tronti had ceased the publication of classe operaia (Working Class), the "political monthly of workers in struggle" produced in collaboration with a group of militants including the philosopher Antonio Negri. Unlike Negri (2005), who would become a major figure of Italy's extra-parliamentary left, Tronti (1980a) would watch the post-1968 flowering of new social movements with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. His theoretical work after Operai e capitale increasingly focused on state institutions and what he would call "the political" (Tronti, 1977(Tronti, , 1980b, and his ongoing struggle was waged not against but within the Italian Communist Party (PCI), whose Central Committee he joined in the early 1980s. 1 But if the "Postscript" does belong to a different moment, it nevertheless should not be grasped as the lone deviation from an airtight monograph. In his 1966 introduction, "A Course of Action," Tronti had underscored the processual character of his political-theoretical work, likening its rhythm to that of science: "theoretical premises" serve to inform "political experiments," and experiments are then consolidated into an "initial heap of conclusions" (p. xx). 2 Those who "know

From autonomous to autonomist geographies

“…This project is part of a diverse, ongoing research agenda re-engaging with the underexplored current of Operaismo, including recent high-profile translations of classic work from Mario Tronti (Anastasi, 2020; Tronti, 2019), Balestrini and Moroni (2021), and a second edition of Steve Wright’s (2017) seminal movement history. Long before ‘autonomist’ thought was belatedly introduced to academia, activists in search of practical insights were busy scouring translations and interpretations of Operaismo from radical magazines and journals, some representing political organisational structures themselves.…”