Operaismo as Method: Gigi Roggero, Silvia Federici, and the Art Workers’ Inquiry

Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, October 10 at 7pm for a panel discussion with Gigi Roggero, Silvia Federici, and the Art Workers’ Inquiry.

Gigi Roggero’s Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method (MIT Press, 2023) follows the historical development and the revolutionary impulses foundational to Italian operaismo. It offers the opportunity for a consideration of how the “heretical” Marxist current remains relevant today. However, in Roggero’s words, it “does not set out to explain the ‘true’ operaismo.” Such a truth was never in the cards for a movement that took its cues from the way that historical shifts in the technical composition of labor fundamentally challenged what so many of the mid-century mass unions, orthodox theorists, and reformist parties took to be truths of how class struggle was supposed to unfold. Breaking ranks with them, the early operaisti saw in the emergent revolts of the early 1960s evidence of new patterns of class composition and proletarian refusal, which in Italy were marked especially by massive internal migration from the South to the North and new forms of industrial production. As Roggero puts it: “For revolutionary militants, truth is never something that needs to be explained, but is always something that must be fought for, just like the point of view.”

Here, we will turn to contemporary expressions of key operaist “discoveries”: Mario Tronti’s “Copernican Turn” that inverted the story of the development of capital and placed working-class resistance prior to the technological and social forms that sought to control and outflank it; class composition as a dynamic process for forming and abolishing the proletariat; and the turn to a critical involvement with popular working-class culture in revolutionary struggle that would pave the way for autonomist social movements in the following decades. Proletarian culture would also be key to burgeoning autonomist inquiries; as Toni Negri once quipped, the greatest discovery they ever made was learning that autoworkers smoked joints. 

We invite you to a gathering at e-flux that will look at operaista thought in 2023 to think about contemporary struggles confronting twenty-first century capitalism. We will ask: How are social movements for autonomy today related to historical factory and cultural struggles in Italy during the postwar development of Taylorism and then post-Fordism? What are the relations between feminist critiques of the capitalist division of labor and operaista theory? How are contemporary artistic and working-class movements confronting the question of composition and decomposition through tactics like the worker’s inquiry or expressions of urban rebellion like the riot? 

Speaking in part from his role as the editor-in-chief of the publishing house DeriveApprodi, Gigi Roggero will report on the historical and theoretical work being undertaken in Italy as different extra-parliamentary currents are reexamined to confront present struggles. Silvia Federici will respond to those remarks and speak to how operaismo informed feminist struggles in the 1970s and how it reverberates today. Lastly, the Art Workers’ Inquiry will present on their use of the worker’s inquiry form in their contemporary research on the connections between cultural production and liberatory politics. 

The panel will be introduced and moderated by e-flux journal editors Andreas Petrossiants and Evan Calder Williams. 

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility                    
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.         
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                  
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.