Workerism

Workerism is a name given to different trends in left-wing political discourse, especially anarchism and Marxism. In one sense, it describes a political position concerning the political importance and centrality of the working class.^{[citation needed]} Because this was of particular significance in the Italian left, it is often known by its Italian translation, Operaismo. In another sense, workerism refers to the glorification of the culture of the working class, independent of their historical role.

Workerism as revolutionary praxis

See also: Autonomism

Workerism (or Operaismo) is a political analysis, whose main elements were to merge into autonomism, that starts out from the power of the working class. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, known as operaist and autonomist writers, offer a definition of operaismo, quoting from Marx as they do so:

Operaismo builds on Marx's claim that capital reacts to the struggles of the working class; the working class is active and capital reactive.

Technological development: Where there are strikes, machines will follow. "It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt." (Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 15, Section 5)

Political development: The factory legislation in England was a response to the working class struggle over the length of the working day. "Their formulation, official recognition and proclamation by the State were the result of a long class struggle." (Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 10, Section 6)

Operaismo takes this as its fundamental axiom: the struggles of the working class precede and prefigure the successive re-structurations of capital. [1]

The workerists followed Marx in seeking to base their politics on an investigation of working class life and struggle. Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and others, they drew upon previous activist research in the United States by the Johnson-Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie . The Johnson-Forest Tendency had studied working class life and struggles within the Detroit auto industry, publishing pamphlets such as "The American Worker" (1947), "Punching Out" (1952) and "Union Committemen and Wildcat Strikes" (1955). That work was translated into French by Socialisme ou Barbarie and published, serially, in their journal. They too began investigating and writing about what was going on inside workplaces, in their case inside both auto factories and insurance offices.

The journal Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notebooks", 1961-5), along with its successor Classe Operaia ("Working Class", 1963-6), both founded by Negri and Tronti, developed workerist theory, focusing on the struggles of proletarians.

Associated with this theoretical development was a praxis based on workplace organising, most notably by Lotta Continua. This reached its peak in the Italian "Hot Autumn" of 1969.

By the mid-1970s, however, the emphasis shifted from the factory to "the social factory" - the everyday lives of working people in their communities. The operaist movement was increasingly known as autonomist.

Workerism as a negative cultural phenomenon

More broadly, workerism can imply the idealisation of workers, especially manual workers, working class culture (or an idealised conception of it) and manual labour in general. Socialist realism is an example of a form of expression that would be likely to be accused of workerism in this sense, but this also applies to Liberalism and Fascism, such as Franco's Falangist movement, which often used propaganda showing workers living and working in equitable conditions.^[1]

The charge of workerism is often levelled at syndicalists, but this is less justifiable.^{[citation needed]} While governments have used workerism to exploit the working class, whether they are Communist or Liberal governments, Syndicalists owe their very existence to the existence of a working class which they supposedly represent. Traditional communist parties are also thought to be workerist, because of their supposed glorification of manual workers to the exclusion of white-collar workers.

This use of the term was the most common English language use during the twentieth century.

Lenin's accusations of workerism

V.I. Lenin charged a number of Russian socialists with being workerist for opportunistically following the political or cultural movements of the working class, instead of holding a separate Marxist political position.

Further reading

• Steve Wright Storming Heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (University of Michigan Press ISBN 0-7453-1607-9) (Extract: The Workerists and the unions in Italy's 'Hot Autumn' at Libcom.org)

See also

• Autonomism
• Raniero Panzieri
• Mario Tronti
• Sergio Bologna

References

1. ^ Granada, "The Spanish Revolution."

External links

Workerism as revolutionary movement

• A critique of autonomism, which grew from operaismo, published by a Trotskyist group
• Interviews of members of the operaismo movement

Workerism as pejorative

• "Workerism". Antagonism. Archived from the original on 2006-02-14. http://web.archive.org/web/20060214161400/http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/our80s90s/workerism.html.  A critique of "workerism" with a Marxian definition of proletariat.
• A critique of workerism from an ANC (South Africa) internal bulletin in 1986. It differentiates three types of workerism.