From the Archives

This Concerns Everyone (1981)

Robert Linhart and Patrick Lyons January 17, 2022

In all capitalist countries, organizing work means dividing workers: exploring ever new “labor reserves,” just as one begins production on a new mining deposit, wearing down and laminating its dense cores. The organization of labor never stabilizes, even in periods where technology remains constant. Workers resist a mode of exploitation which seeks, limitlessly, to intensify work and make labor-power more lucrative and capitalism strives to detect and deepen weak points within worker resistance.

The Autonomy of the Political (1972)

Mario Tronti February 26, 2020

We must think of capitalist society as something in which there are a number of engines running at the same time; and we must take them all into account if we want political action with concrete meaning, in other words, if we want a chance to practically realize the goals that we seek.

A Betrayal Retrieved: Mario Tronti’s Critique of the Political

Andrew Anastasi and Matteo Mandarini February 25, 2020

The provisional hypotheses of 1972 appear to be less a ruptural betrayal than an experimental development (however controversial and contingent) in Tronti’s uniquely political theorizing of relations between workers’ struggle and capitalist development.

Lenin, Communists, and Immigration (1973)

Étienne Balibar January 14, 2019

Lenin’s analysis forces us to consider immigration – the living and working conditions of immigrant workers – starting from the theory of imperialism, outside of which the contemporary forms of immigration remain unintelligible. The concrete knowledge of the causes and effects of immigration is, reciprocally, a guiding thread towards an understanding of imperialism.

Workers’ Anthropology and Factory Inquiry: Inventory and Problematics (2001)

Sylvain Lazarus January 9, 2019

If the figure of the worker can no longer be deduced from the forms of collective consciousness of a group (workers’ consciousness) otherwise objectively constituted – the working class – then it is necessary to build a new dispositif of investigation and analysis of the intellectual field of workers.

May ’68, from the Critique of Society to the Critique of Political Economy

Riccardo Bellofiore May 29, 2018

I arrived in Turin with my parents in September of ‘68. It was the dawn of what would later become the workers’ ’69: the great absence – as I will argue – in the commemorations of these years, squeezed between the twentieth anniversary of the student struggles and the bicentenary of the French Revolution.

The Idea of May Day on the March (1913)

Rosa Luxemburg May 1, 2016

The brilliant basic idea of May Day is the autonomous, immediate stepping forward of the proletarian masses, the political mass action of the millions of workers who otherwise are atomized by the barriers of the state in the day-to-day parliamentary affairs.

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