Labor History

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Intellectuals at the factory gates: Early Italian

operaismo from Raniero Panzieri to Mario Tronti

Fabio Guidali

To cite this article: Fabio Guidali (2021): Intellectuals at the factory gates: Early Italian operaismo
from Raniero Panzieri to Mario Tronti, Labor History, DOI: 10.1080/0023656X.2021.1955095

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2021.1955095

Published online: 26 Jul 2021.

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LABOR HISTORY
https://doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2021.1955095

Intellectuals at the factory gates: Early Italian operaismo from

Raniero Panzieri to Mario Tronti
Fabio Guidali
Department of Historical Studies, University of Milan, Milan, Italy

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The article retraces intellectuals’ self-perception within early Italian oper­ Received 5 July 2021
aismo and is based on the periodicals Mondo Operaio , Quaderni Rossi, and Accepted 8 July 2021
classe operaia, and on the writings by Panzieri, Asor Rosa, and Tronti. KEYWORDS
Operaismo was a political tendency that found fertile ground in the Operaismo; Raniero Panzieri;
Italian non-orthodox Marxist political milieux as a response to the accel­ Mario Tronti; Alberto Asor
erated industrialization and the consequent harsh working conditions in Rosa; intellectuals; neo-
factories between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. It deemed factory capitalism
life the focal point of contemporary capitalist society, raising criticism
against the Italian Communist Party, and supported workers’ councils
rather than top-down led unions, investigating the lives of laborers at
their workplace in times of so-called neo-capitalism. The article highlights
the idea of a coincidence of theoretical and practical levels in the organi­
zation of class struggle, and the denying of universal values by taking the
one-sided point of view of the workers. It also posits that surveys pub­
lished in these periodicals, which nowadays are still significant sources for
studying the industrial environment of the time, must always be consid­
ered in the light of the conception of both the role of intellectuals and the
function of culture in society.

Introduction
In the complex post 1956 scenario featuring the consequences of both de-Stalinization after the
twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the brutal crash of the
Hungarian Revolution, in Western Europe many Marxist intellectuals broke their ties with the
communist parties and rejected the Soviet Union as a role model. They then joined either reformist
socialist tendencies or more radical forms of opposition to the so-called monopolistic capital. The
need for re-legitimization led to a rekindled interpretation of the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which
acquired more energy breaking away from Stalinist orthodoxy and going back to Marx’s early texts
(De George, 1968; Jacoby, 1981). In a time characterized by a plurality of lines of evolution, there
emerged, in particular, Marxist humanism in Eastern Europe, which problematized individuality and
displayed several points of contact with Western thinkers (for instance, Sartre, 1976), a relationship to
structuralism and semiotics and the fundamental work by Louis Althusser (Althusser,1969), and the
decisive influence on the birth of cultural studies (see Dworkin, 1997).
In Italy, too, the suitability of Marxism as a tool towards revolution in the West became a central
issue after 1956. Since the end of World War II, Italian Marxism had been resolutely shaped by
Palmiro Togliatti, Secretary of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI), which
was hegemonic in many sectors of Italian culture. Togliatti had assigned the workers’ movement the

CONTACT Fabio Guidali fabio.guidali@gmail.com Department of Historical Studies, University of Milan, via Festa del
Perdono 7, 20122, Milan, Italy
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 F. GUIDALI

task of replacing the bourgeoisie in order to achieve democratic goals instead of heading towards
a revolution (Alcaro, 1977; Corradi, 2005, pp. 91–148). He had committed the PCI to a vision of
declining capitalism, which had been taken for granted for years, as the PCI favoured historical
analysis rather than economic and scientific social analysis. This outlook proved wrong in view of the
actual economic growth and the concomitant transformation of society. Indeed, Italy notoriously
experienced a momentous transition between the 1950s and the 1960s, passing from reconstruction
to accelerated and previously unseen industrialization and economic growth (Castronovo, 2010;
Garofoli, 2014, pp. 37–51).1 As the country was sailing towards full employment, reactions by
unqualified laborers to both their rough working conditions in Fordist factories, where they carried
out simple and alienating operations leading to mass production, and their inadequate salaries came
to the surface (Causarano, 2015; Sangiovanni, 2006). Togliatti’s post-war analysis could not live up to
the demands posed by this new frame of reference.
In this context, a non-systematic left-wing political tendency known as operaismo [translatable as
Workerism] came to light. It considered factory life the focal point of the contemporary capitalist
society and refused both any moderate answer to the most urgent social and political issues and
Togliatti’s ideological approach. At the basis of operaismo were indeed the idea that the capitalist
bourgeoisie simply reacted to working-class struggles (as the former depended on the working class
itself), the insistence on the antagonism of the working class – as no real assimilation of the working
class into the capitalist system was deemed near –, the preference for workers’ councils rather than
top-down led unions, and the focus on the analysis of the workers’ lives in their workplace.
Operaismo showed some common traits with previous anarcho-syndicalist tendencies, since it relied
on the direct management of political and economic structures by workers, but never identified with
them, mainly because it did not share the belief that a protracted general strike alone could lead to
the breakdown of the capitalist system (Bologna, 2014). Italian operaisti were among the first voices
of Italy’s New Left; in fact, they maintained their autonomy from the traditional political formations
on the Left, supported an ideological revision of Marxism, and disapproved of the cultural approach
that had distinguished the PCI, which was a mix of historicism, neorealism, and national-popular
forms of art. Their new interpretations of Marx’s writings were certainly not a cerebral pastime, but
a way to bite into reality and shape new policies that were sure to have an impact on the workers’
lives. Early operaismo was never a menace to the predominant reading of Marxism in Italy, which was
still determined by the PCI, although the latter was gradually losing its grip from the ideological
point of view. Operaismo would become more influential only at a later point as the breeding ground
for forms of so-called autonomist Marxism in the 1970s and – after a hiatus – leave lasting traces in
more recent political debates, in a context in which blue collars have been replaced by service-sector
workers, for instance, in the well-known anti-globalization book Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000), just
to name one of the most influential recent publications in the framework of so called post-operaismo.
Also for these reasons, in recent years historiography mostly highlighted ideological issues and
the philosophical background of the actors alongside organizational aspects (Filippini, 2018; Filippini
& Tommasello, 2015; Wright, 2002; Zanini, 2010), especially regarding operaismo’s early groups and
periodicals such as Quaderni Rossi (1961–1966) and classe operaia (1964–1967). Operaismo’s original
contribution to the study of economics has also been investigated (Turchetto, 2008), as well as the
role of single personalities (Filippini & Macchia, 2012; Guidali, 2020b; Pianciola, 2014; Tronti, 2017).
Moreover, a philosophical tendency in biopolitics called Italian Theory has newly made its way; it
involves substantial references, among others, to Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri (see Filippini, 2016;
Gentili, 2012; Lisciani-Petrini & Strummiello, 2017; Montefusco, 2019), demonstrating that the typical
mindset of this tendency is still considered relevant and modern. Not by chance, several of its
intellectuals – like Tronti, Negri, Alberto Asor Rosa, and Massimo Cacciari – are still active as acute
commentators in the Italian public arena today.
This paper, based on publications and private writings by militants, means to examine aspects
that have not been interrogated so far, beginning with the conception of culture and intellectual
commitment emerging from early operaismo and its periodicals.2 By asserting the self-organization
 LABOR HISTORY 3

of the working class, its autonomy from top-down parties, and its antagonism with respect to the
capitalist system, operaismo proposed a new way of considering the relationship between subject
and object of analysis on the one hand and between intellectuals and workers on the other. It even
postulated, in its most radical expressions, that political theory and militancy coincide. I therefore
argue that operaismo eroded and subverted the previous understanding of culture as a set of
universal values valid under any circumstances. At the same time, operaismo maintained a function
for intellectuals: certainly not as guardians of a superior ethical or philosophical good, but as allies
to the working class in their rediscovery of subjectivity and of their own point of view. The fact that
a strict anti-cultural orientation met the defence of the function of intellectuals in society was
assuredly an original feature of operaismo. Furthermore, it can be deduced that the material on
factory life collected in the periodicals published by operaisti was not neutral, because in it
researchers were very likely to both self-justify their activism and question their own role in
society. Accordingly, these documents should be read through the lens of the intellectual self-
perception of the time. The paper thus lays emphasis on the importance of the industrial world for
a group of Marxist philosophers and literary critics, whose political response to the new context in
Italy had a strong cultural component and could even – at least for some of them – manage
without any reference to the traditional labor movement. On the other side, the article allows
acknowledging the role some intellectuals had in the development of laborers’ self-perception,
which was all the more significant in a period of serious tensions in the factories and in society in
the early 1960s.

Raniero Panzieri, the precursor

The deal for joint politics sealed in the aftermath of World War II between Italian Communists and
Socialists had soon proven a mistake for the latter. Indeed, within a few years the PCI prevailed over
the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano, Italian Socialist Party) and gained influence over the trade unions,
also becoming culturally hegemonic.3 Nevertheless, and despite the existence of several competing
trends inside the PSI, Socialists were still mostly determined to use all the jokers up their sleeves to
avoid being politically obliterated by their communist allies. This was possible by virtue of pre-
existent libertarian and Luxemburgian cultural traditions, which fuelled a concept of the party as
a bottom-up initiative grounded on the self-organization of the working class, something the PCI
disdained as an alleged menace to the idea of the party as political pacesetter in the process towards
Socialism. This disposition took shape around socialist leaders like Rodolfo Morandi, an expert on
large-scale industries and still in favor of a class alliance with the PCI, although with diversified
positions.4
Also a champion of this approach was Raniero Panzieri (1921–1964), who in 1953 was appointed
head of the PSI’s Press and Propaganda Commission. Panzieri had a philosophical and juridical
background and had taught at the University of Messina, in Sicily, on the recommendation of the
Neo-positivist philosopher Galvano Della Volpe, a Marxist and communist militant. Together with his
wife, the scholar of German Pucci [Giuseppina] Saija, Panzieri had also translated Marx’s second
volume of Das Kapital into Italian, and at the same time was a socialist leader linked to Morandi and
involved in grassroots activities among militants. He immediately supported autonomy in the
elaboration and organization of culture, though bearing in mind the importance of maintaining
the cohesion of the working class (Ferrero, 2005; Pianciola, 2014; Ripensando Panzieri trent’anni
dopo, 1995).
Between 1953 and 1956, Panzieri insisted on both the necessary autonomy of the working class
with respect to top-down parties and the fight against bureaucratic culture. He was in fact convinced
that the free development of culture is an essential part of the free development of a society, and he
believed that a left-wing party should support rather than steer its militants. The same went for both
intellectuals and workers, who had to be free to find their own political way, and this was most
4 F. GUIDALI

certainly a distinct model of militancy compared to the regimental one proposed by the PCI at that
stage.5
Panzieri then became head of the PSI’s Cultural and Study Section and was in charge of the
newborn Morandi Foundation (the socialist politician suddenly passed away in 1955) just as the
twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the tragic failure of the
Hungarian Revolution put the PSI in the best position to regain the support of writers and scholars
who were now leaving the PCI because the Italian Communists had approved of the Soviet inter­
vention in Budapest. Panzieri soon became a point of reference for a wider range of Marxist
intellectuals, but he still understood his mission as an engagement for working class grassroots
rather than for the few. In fact, his criticism of Stalinism revolved around the very need to create new
forms of direct democracy; it was not up to intellectuals – not even party officers themselves – to play
a leading role: any decision and motivation should come instead from the working class, recognized
as ‘in itself bearer of revolutionary clarity, that is of scientific and political capacity at once’ (Panzieri,
1986, pp. 14–15). The political party should simply act as a channel, and culture a tool, for political
action. After 1956, the PSI finally broke the agreement with the PCI, but it was bitterly divided over
a potential future political alliance with the Christian Democracy (DC, the majority party), as a way to
penetrate into State institutions, from which socialists had been banned since 1947. On the one
hand, Antonio Giolitti, Riccardo Lombardi, and scholars close to periodicals like Passato e Presente
and Tempi Moderni posited that social classes traditionally excluded from power should take
possession of the State in order to determine the direction of development by controlling produc­
tion and investment. On the other hand, this approach was criticized by those who deemed it merely
convenient and opposed it with workers’ antagonism rather than assimilation into the system
(Strinati, 1980, pp. 195–208; Favretto, 2006). Indeed, in the meantime, in Italian factories the number
of unskilled workers, all of them in the lowest salary groups, was growing. They mainly came from the
South and were devoid of any experience regarding union action. Moreover, the balance of power
inside the factories was tending to shift, because full employment was near and the number of strike
hours was rising to a new record following a phase in which the unions had suffered resounding
defeats in the mid-1950s (Favretto, 2019).6 In the PSI there was speculation on how to deal with so-
called neo-capitalism, that is the drift towards the integration of workers into the capitalist system
through reforms and consumerism, which involved the potential overcoming of class struggle
through converging interests towards common well-being. The antagonism between capital and
workforce might be ended thanks to automation and capable managers (as opposed to owners), but
at the same time this was seen as a ‘plan by capital’, a way to expand the organization of factories to
society as a whole.
Panzieri was promoter of the latter vision from the columns of the PSI’s ideological journal Mondo
Operaio [Working World], of which he became co-editor in 1957 together with Francesco De Martino
(Scirocco, 2019, pp. 54–84). Bearing in mind that capitalism was finding new ways of cornering the
working class, Panzieri was against any collaboration between laborers and owners in a social
democratic sense, and persuaded that a Marxist – though undogmatic – response was needed,
that is new political and cultural tools. According to him, workers’ control was the solution, and it had
to be put into practice through laborers’ representative bodies. In February 1958, he published in
Mondo Operaio ‘Sette tesi sulla questione del controllo operaio’ [Seven theses on the issue of
workers’ control], written with Lucio Libertini (Libertini & Panzieri, 1958), in which he asserted the
need to obtain democracy from below through democratic institutes, following in the footsteps of
the first Soviets or of the Turin workers’ councils in 1919–1920, which had briefly ended up with the
task of setting the economic course of the factories. This meant rejecting the parliamentary system
and the mediating role of political parties on the path towards Socialism.
This vision was in accordance with current elaborations in the field of Marxist sociology known
under the name of conricerca (translatable as ‘with-research’), which entailed an active joint partici­
pation of the observer (the sociologist) and the observed (the worker), both tending towards the
same political goal. This kind of workers’ inquiry had much in common with the methodology of oral
 LABOR HISTORY 5

history but was programmatically partial and politicized. It was aimed not so much at mere knowl­
edge of the working conditions in Italian factories but rather at empowering the laborers: through
sociological surveys, the purpose was to raise levels of awareness among blue collars about their
own situation, since the working class was not considered as a given entity once and for all, but the
outcome of a political process of self-awareness, as opposed to simplistic leftist interpretations. In
this way, the struggle in factories would be more effective thanks to a clearer overview of the
situation. While the elaboration of a new way of considering the relation between subject and object
of analysis was underway, the relationship between the intellectual (a sociologist or an educated
party official) and the worker was also entering a new dimension (Alquati, 1974, 1993; Carocci, 1960).
The seven issues of the Supplemento scientifico-letterario [Scientific and Literary Supplement] to
Mondo Operaio (Scirocco, 2019, pp. 60–66), published between March and December 1958, also
followed the same logic. Panzieri’s idea was to bring together scientific culture, which had tradition­
ally been marginalized in Italy, and literature, in order to shape new ways of penetrating the reality of
factories. The literary critic and former PCI militant Carlo Muscetta and the physicist Carlo Castagnoli
were editors of the Supplemento, and the editorial secretary was the young Alberto Asor Rosa (born
in 1933). Asor Rosa himself was probably the author of the introduction to the factory journal 30 mesi
alla Savigliano – Cronaca di fabbrica by Giovanni [Gianni] Alasia, a union official, and Domenico
Tarizzo (Alasia & Tarizzo, 1958), a writer who had the task of ‘bringing to light’ the truth of factory life
from Alasia’s experiences, in the awareness that ‘It is first of all up to the workers (though intellectuals
alongside them cannot be disinterested in this) to make the situation known’. This was the definition
the Supplemento gave of ‘party literature’, which was seen as a way ‘not to give up on any cultural
direction and introduce it to more rigorously democratic forms’ (Letteratura di partito, 1958).
In the pages of Mondo Operaio and its Supplemento under Panzieri’s direction, a twofold proposal
was thus outlined. On the one side conricerca and the workers’ inquiry, on the other an idea of party
literature by and for workers. In both cases, factory laborers were to be the protagonists, while
scholars should merely play a maieutic role causing the workers’ feelings, impressions, and hopes to
emerge, but also their fights and decisions, that is their subjectivity. A major function was therefore
assigned to culture, though it was a merely instrumental one.

The early stage of operaismo: Quaderni Rossi

It was through Asor Rosa that Panzieri got in touch, amongst others, with Mario Tronti, Mario
Coldagelli, and Ester Fano, politically engaged young Communists who had met at the Sapienza
University in Rome. They were already attentive to the world of the factories and convinced after
1956 that proletarian democracy should come from below. They had in fact entered into contrast
with the PCI, not only upholding the cause of the Hungarian rebels against Soviet intervention, but
also on a cultural and ideological level. They were also critical of postwar Italian Marxism as
promoted by the PCI, which had made itself the self-proclaimed heir of the democratic and laic
tradition of the Italian Risorgimento, staking everything on the idea of a ‘national roadmap towards
Communism’ in order to both gain political autonomy from Moscow and take root in Italy. Instead,
they were influenced by Della Volpe, in whose opinion Marxism was a science, a methodology suited
to studying society – and not a philosophy or a general worldview –, and capitalism must therefore
be studied within a more general and international frame.
These young militants based in Rome were not Panzieri’s only contacts outside the PSI. As he was
replaced at the head of Mondo Operaio after a lot of complaints from within the PSI, in which the idea
of a coalition with the Christian Democracy party was gradually catching on,7 he moved to Turin, not
by chance the city where Fiat – Italy’s biggest automobile industry – had its headquarters, in order to
work for the left-wing publishing house Einaudi. There he established connections with sociologists
already focusing on life in the factories, grassroots unions, and non-unionized struggles such as
sabotages or worker-driven production slowdowns. By means of conricerca, Vittorio Rieser, Giovanni
Mottura, and Dario and Liliana Lanzardo were in fact bent on discovering the employees’
6 F. GUIDALI

subjectivity, which allegedly could not be expressed in the unified and leveling workers’ organiza­
tions. This kind of research was in tune with Panzieri’s concept of policy being developed from
below.
The timing of the people’s antifascist demonstrations ignited in the whole country in Summer
1960 by the government’s approval of the congress of the neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale
Italiano being held in Genoa, a city that had been awarded the Medal of Honor for its part during the
Resistance movement, was perfect. Among the protesters, there were indeed many workers, and this
encouraged Panzieri to declare that the democratic process ‘had been maturing for a long time [. . .]
mostly outside the lines and objectives pursued by the left-wing parties’ (Panzieri, 1994, pp. 19–21).
Panzieri was openly looking for a third way between the centralized party model and spontaneity of
the workers: the working class was supposed to find the right tools and means to fight the specific
battles they were facing in their particular situation.
Beyond this common platform, discrepancies between the Turin sociologists and the Rome
militants8 soon came to the surface, because the former saw the situation in one of the biggest
establishments in Italy first-hand without facing ideological issues, while the latter expressed
a purely philosophical approach. Mario Tronti (born in 1931) had already cleared the field of any
doubt by stating that every investigation had to be traced back to the frame of Marxism: ‘The
existence of a researcher offering raw material to the theoretician, who then re-elaborates and
theorizes, can never be allowed. [. . .] there is instead an uninterrupted unity, due to the fact that this
unity is already obtained within Marxism’ (Tronti, 1959, p. 79). This indicated that from the very
beginning the way the two groups considered intellectuals, their tasks and their relationship to the
factories diverged, and Panzieri acted as the bubble in the bubble level, being attracted to both
Tronti’s philosophical elaborations and the Turin sociologists’ methodology and practical research.
The permeation between theoretical analysis and empirical investigation was a central issue
around which Quaderni Rossi [The Red Notebooks] started its publication in September 1961 under
Panzieri’s guidance. Its first issue, a 250-page hybrid between a journal and a book, was shaped in
cooperation with Turin’s Camera del Lavoro [Trade Union Offices] and opened with an essay by
Vittorio Foa (a prominent trade unionist and well-known anti-fascist activist), in which he stated that
workers’ demands were just one of the stages leading to the control of production by the workers
(Foa, 1961). Even more explicit was Panzieri’s essay entitled ‘Sull’uso capitalistico delle macchine nel
neocapitalismo’ [On the Capitalist Use of Machinery in Neo-Capitalism], which was a reading of
Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ from the Grundrisse (Panzieri, 1961).9 On a political level, the text
addressed the PCI, which had always presented itself as a party for a broad spectrum of voters,
including farmers and the left-wing bourgeoisie, claiming on the contrary the need for a class-driven
policy. At the same time, it addressed Antonio Giolitti and the idea that industrial development could
be steered in favor of the working class, warning that technological progress is ‘a mode of being of
capital’ (Panzieri, 1961, p. 54), and thus not neutral. Fully automated factories seemed to Panzieri to
hold sway over employees, and science and progress themselves part of the owners’ power system.
On an ideological level, Panzieri’s essay turned up the heat of the controversy on the interpretations
of Marx, just as the PCI was inaugurating a debate on the suitability of its ideological analysis as an
answer to the coming into being of the new centre-left coalition between PSI and DC (Cassano, 1973;
Pesenti & Vitello, 1962).10 Moreover, Panzieri introduced the idea that ‘The class level expresses itself
not as progress, but as rupture’ towards the unjust power structure of capitalism (Panzieri, 1961,
p. 60). All these issues would become central in Italian extreme Left, because Quaderni Rossi was the
first to return to topics that had been neglected by Marxists for a long time, such as self-management
of the economic system or the refusal of any mandate to the working class party. The group would
be at the origin of various political formations that established after several ruptures and reconnec­
tions, such as Potere Operaio and Autonomia Operaia. Operaismo was officially born.
In Quaderni Rossi’s first issue a cultural turn became evident compared to the dominant thinking
in the Italian left-wing political area, but not until the second issue did the intellectual, self-aware re-
thinking of the innovative aspects of this tendency directly come into play. The economist Franco
 LABOR HISTORY 7

Momigliano, a former partisan and a leading figure at Olivetti in Ivrea, one of the most advanced
manufacturers of the time, emphasized that the group around Quaderni Rossi addressed the relation­
ship between politics and culture ‘not only in the activity of social inquiry, but also, and especially in
the practical activity of participation in trade union struggle’. This suggested that ‘the social
researcher does not conceive her/himself [. . .] simply as an external objective observer, but as an
active protagonist directly engaged in workers’ struggles.’ It again pursued the idea that intellectuals
played a maieutic function towards the factory workers, since research was seen as ‘an element for
encouraging a new process [. . .] of bottom-up participation’ (Momigliano, 1962, p. 100).
Momigliano’s commentary was followed by a disheartened and disenchanted letter by the poet
Franco Fortini, prophetic as regards the fragility of any intellectual aggregation (Fortini, 1962), but
most importantly by an essay by Alberto Asor Rosa, which was the foundation stone of his following
remarkable critical endeavor, the book Scrittori e popolo (Asor Rosa, 1965). Asor Rosa emphasized the
fact that culture as traditionally expressed by the labor movement was basically bourgeois, demo­
cratic, reformist, and certainly not antagonistic; in it, the working class was just ‘one of the forces
forming a people’s alliance’. This contrasted with a Marxist idea of culture, which should be
‘intimately linked to the scientific analysis of social reality’ (Asor Rosa, 1962, pp. 120, 123). By the
same token, Asor Rosa asserted not only that no new approach could become manifest without the
awareness of what was happening around oneself, but also – and more radically – that culture must
always be ready to respond to reality and its changes. According to this perspective, besides being
obviously instrumental, culture appeared per se devoid of values, perceptions, planning, and could
only be filled by reality. This was a relativistic concept of culture, which only remained standing for
operational purposes, that is for the struggle against capitalism. In the same tone, Asor Rosa
concluded by declaring that any cultural proposal was internal to the capitalist system, while an
authentic socialist culture should be demystifying and hence a form of liberation.
Asor Rosa had virtually been made responsible for dealing with the cultural issues most closely
linked to labor matters inside the Quaderni Rossi group, and from his words one could infer both
classical and innovative motifs. Culture as a liberating force was a common idea in post-war Italy
(Guidali, 2016, pp. 198–206) but Asor Rosa aimed for a socialist culture, intrinsically anti-bourgeois
and grounded on the knowledge that the working class itself (and not the writer or the artist) had of
its estrangement. Culture was seen as self-awareness of class alienation, hence being theory and
practice at once, in the sense that it could not help but advocate direct social use towards the
transformation of society. It was therefore a crucial element in the theoretical construct initiated by
Quaderni Rossi, since cultural and theoretical tools were deemed to be essential to the working class
in order to escape integration into the system, which would have entailed total alienation.
It was up to the workers’ parties and unions to provide employees with the proper tools to attain
a socialist culture, as happened through the workers’ inquiry. In fact, notwithstanding his increas­
ingly frayed relationship with the PSI, Panzieri wrote to Asor Rosa in May 1962 that he had no
intention to break with the party, because the situation entailed both ‘the most meticulous refusal of
any remaining sectarian [. . .] attitude’ and the desire to be ‘factors of reunification and not deseg­
regation of class elements’ (Letter from Panzieri to Asor Rosa, 1962, pp. 178–179). What Panzieri
could not imagine was that very soon it would become impossible for him and his fellows to remain
within the official workers’ movement.

The clashes at Piazza Statuto as an accelerator of cultural change

In early July 1962, while Quaderni Rossi’s editorial staff was gathering in Turin to develop the third
issue of the journal, protests against the trade union UIL (Unione Italiana del Lavoro), which had
signed a separate agreement with Fiat – thus breaking trade union unity without any regard for the
length of work shift – ended in three days of violent confrontations between police and young
workers at the elegant Piazza Statuto. Because of a misunderstanding, Quaderni Rossi, notoriously in
favor of the self-organization of the working class, was accused of having instigated the clashes by
8 F. GUIDALI

means of an anti-union leaflet.11 In Turin, the relationship between Quaderni Rossi and the Camera
del Lavoro was broken and the group’s political stance, to the left of both the PSI and the PCI, was
harder to maintain. The Piazza Statuto fights brought to light the fact that workers, especially the
young, non-unionized Southerners, were not easily manageable, but this was also the origin of
diverging interpretations of the degree of maturity of the working class and thus of the future steps
Quaderni Rossi should take.
A letter by Tronti to Panzieri, written in January 1963, was symptomatic of an ongoing transition.
After what had happened in Turin, Tronti was convinced that ‘the field in which “Quaderni Rossi”
exercises its influence can not be the political field offered by traditional organizations, it must be
a political field of a new type’. According to Tronti, political action and theoretical discourse coincided,
indeed he maintained that ‘a first fullness of time has already come’ and that ‘we have to begin to talk
to the workers’. Tronti came to this conclusion as a way to prevent Quaderni Rossi from being
a ‘pressure group addressing an illuminated elite’, as feared by Fortini, but above all because he
deemed it important to directly intervene in the capitalist system. In his suggestive words, it was time
to ‘Slash the nerve centre of the system [. . .] Slash this nerve centre not only by using the tools of
theoretical analysis, but the tools of a first political organization’. This was not a conceptual observa­
tion, considering that Tronti was perfectly clear in his own mind what measures had to be taken: the
‘nerve centre’ was, in his vision, the Fiat and the factories in its supply chain.
Tronti’s letter reveals that a shift had come about from worker’s inquiry, which implied that
a situation still needed to be analyzed, to an attack against the capitalist system. Investigations and
studies, that is cultural activities, had now been replaced in Tronti’s view by mere political, better still
revolutionary action. As Asor Rosa had anticipated as regards ‘socialist culture’, when the situation
changes, the idea of culture has to change too, since culture itself was seen as a dependent variable
linked to society. Not by chance, in that same letter to Panzieri Tronti pleaded the case for creating
a journal addressing Fiat workers alone, who were for him the workers’ nucleus of Italian factories.
This journal was to be ‘an exchange of theoretical and practical experiences, in which it is not true
that theory must always come from us and practice from the workers, but in which the exact
opposite can occur’ (Letter from Tronti to Panzieri, 1963, pp. 258–259).
The idea of intellectuals’ political commitment as understood in the post-war period, that is as
public responsibility in the name of universal values (and, in its left-wing version, in favor of the
working class), had ostensibly been overcome. Even more significantly, here the very statute of
culture and the congruence of analysis and militancy were disputed. According to this vision, the
analysis of class struggle on a theoretical level coincided with the practical organization of class
struggle itself; in this way any separation between intellectuals’ theoretical approaches (even the
workers’ inquiry) and militant action by the workers was removed. This was a paradigm shift: not only
were culture and politics deemed to coincide (as preached in traditional forms of political commit­
ment), but also culture could only exist as workers’ culture – the so-called ‘scienza operaia’ [workers’
science] – in which blue collars, allegedly being vanguard of the struggle against the capitalist
system, gave their own shape to the cultural tools at their disposal. Theory and militancy merged
here into something new: ‘talking to workers’, that is a practical activity, was admittedly ‘theoretical
work’ and vice versa (Letter from Tronti to Panzieri, 1963, pp. 260–261). Beyond the obvious political
connotations, this was unquestionably a new way of considering the existence of intellectuals and
the sense of their function, which went well beyond the current labor struggles.
This meant turning the page, also within the Quaderni Rossi group, on the very sense of the
political activities carried out until that moment. The change was so dramatic that it was not even
put into focus at first. Indeed, a break within the group initially occurred not because of Tronti’s
ideas, but because of a disagreement on a practical level, that is his intention to create a journal
targeting Fiat workers. The laborer’s political maturity was the most debatable issue, as Tronti’s
certainty that they were ready for revolution was not unanimously shared, not to mention the fact
that focusing only on Turin would have meant marginalizing other contacts and experiences
Quaderni Rossi had already developed in Milan and in the Veneto region («Quaderni rossi», una
 LABOR HISTORY 9

situazione nuova (gennaio ’63), 1963). Only a couple of months later, the break became explicit on
the ideological level, too. Indeed, Panzieri accused Tronti of dogmatically interpreting Marx’s
writings on a very precise point, as the young Roman considered the current stage of capitalist
development the ‘final’ one, connecting it directly to revolution and at the same time program­
matically rejecting any coming to terms with the long-established organizations of the working
class – with which Panzeri still had links. According to the founder of Quaderni Rossi, political
intervention did not forthwith modify the conditions of class struggle, but had to be considered as
an ‘experiment that provokes induced consequences provided that we are able to control them’
(«Quaderni rossi», il dissenso (marzo 1963), 1963, p. 277). In so stating, Panzieri was dismissing
Tronti’s belief that political theory and militancy coincided, since he affirmed the permanent need
for a mediation between the two poles through a party or unions as the real expression of the
workers’ movement.
The editorial of Quaderni Rossi’s third issue, finally published in June 1963, was in this same
tone. Though officially signed by the whole of the editorial staff, the text had been authored by
Panzieri and by those within the group who had a strong sociological background, as one can infer
from the structure of the article and the insistence on conricerca. The editorial took an open stance,
assuming that criticism by workers against organizations (something that had occurred many
times in those past months) did not prove either their political awareness or the possibility of
developing a global revolutionary strategy, because of the lack of ‘a unitary political plan’. Actually,
‘Only specific political research amongst the workers can establish the mediation needed for
political organization in the anti-capitalist struggle’ (Q. R. [Quaderni Rossi], 1963). This was
definitely an objection to those who, within the Quaderni Rossi group, felt that the time of research
was over and were therefore ready, as Tronti and Asor Rosa declared they were, to intervene in the
workers’ struggles.
Furthermore, the editorial advocated keeping the political and the cultural timing separate, the
latter being the intellectuals’ only task. What was now discernible was the whole entity of the break,
which entailed not only differing viewpoints on the action to take, but also a distinct concept of the
relationship between culture and politics and of the relationship between intellectuals and factories.
According to Panzieri, the sociologist, the ideologist, or the critic should not stop outside the factory
gates, but neither should they presume to pour their theory into political practice, which remained
a matter for the workers behind those same bars. Tronti’s error was considered to be that he was
repeating a philosophy of history in Hegelian terms.
Panzieri refused to make the same philosophical leap dared by Tronti. Indeed, he planned to
design ‘a non-mass revolutionary vanguard, whose political thesis for a predictably long time
cannot coincide with the real movement, but can only aim at this coincidence in perspective.’ For
him, it was consequently a mistake to assume the responsibility for political turmoil, while he
approved of ‘the continuous, incessant, systematic dissemination of the analysis of the current
aspects of the struggles’, which nevertheless was very different from taking the lead of the
movement (Panzieri: separare le strade, 1967, p. 312). From this perspective, intellectual action
still coincided with political action, but was also divided into distinct sub-sections, one of analysis
and one of action, which were in contrast to one another. A synthesis between the two should
not be taken for granted unless confirmed by the situation on the ground. The words used by
Panzieri (‘non-mass revolutionary vanguard’, ‘analysis’, ‘actual direction of the movement’)
demonstrated to what extent he still clung to the sociological investigations of his Turin
collaborators and to a sort of two-stage approach, in which the traditional working class
organization still carried weight. Panzieri, therefore, responded to Tronti’s – doubtless hazardous –
philosophical epiphany by keeping a clear head thanks to his long experience as a PSI party
official, even though not only intellectual, but also human relations would be severed with the
younger activists from Rome to whom he was very attached. He was to die shortly afterwards
when he was just 43 years old and the latter bitterness and regret were presumably not
uninvolved in his passing.
10 F. GUIDALI

classe operaia: apotheosis of intellectual operaismo

The periodical classe operaia [Working Class] was the fruit of the daring new path followed by Tronti,
who was supported among others by Alberto Asor Rosa, Romano Alquati, and militants in the Veneto
region around Antonio Negri, who were very active in connecting with workers from factories in
Padua and Porto Marghera. Subtitled Mensile politico degli operai in lotta [The Struggling Workers’
Political Monthly], classe operaia intended to tackle the situations in factories and become involved
with the organization of workers’ unrest, stating that it did not want to be a publication devoted to
detached analysis.
Its first issue was published in January 1964 – just a month after the new alliance between the DC
and PSI had come into being – and it manifested Tronti’s political change of direction. Tronti
assumed that ‘the political discourse is [. . .] the overall class viewpoint’ (m.t. [Mario Tronti], 1964b,
p. 20). This implied having a ‘new Marxist practice’ (Sommario, 1964) – and not the theoretical
approach commonly supported by left-wing parties and unions – as a starting point. The group
around classe operaia defined the working class as homogeneous on an international level, yet
references to foreign situations and experiences seemed to aim at simply confirming ideas that
already existed, mainly the fact that workers’ insubordination was growing everywhere in the
industrialized world. Local tension in Italian factories was the main topic of the periodical, and all
instances of it were interpreted as signals of the workers’ comeback and growing impatience against
the allegedly apolitical attitude and corporatism of the unions (m.t. [Mario Tronti], 1964c).
In its early months, classe operaia confirmed its distinct intellectual setting compared to Panzieri’s
Quaderni Rossi. Against any idea of a two-stage approach, Tronti stated in May 1964 that the new
periodical believed that the political discourse does not merely vulgarize the formulae and indica­
tions stemming from theory, but ‘translates them into real situations’ (Tronti, relazione al convegno
di Piombino, 1964, p. 378). Nonetheless, in the June 1964 issue things already appeared to have
changed. classe operaia presented fourteen points, probably with a mocking reference to Woodrow
Wilson’s Fourteen Points, in order to provide ‘a tool for discussion and a work program’ concerning
the form that workers’ struggles should take at that stage. Point twelve, in particular, seemed to be
a step backwards compared to the position expressed at the time of the break with Panzieri, since it
stated that ‘The current degree of workers’ autonomy has to be considered totally inadequate’.
Although they saw a disposition towards the battle, ‘the possibility to organize it in autonomous
forms is very limited’. Moreover, point fourteen affirmed that organizing workers’ struggles was
a ‘long, slow, systematic, and patient’ (Intervento politico nelle lotte, 1964, p. 20) job, which had to be
done while waiting for the maturation of the working class, directly linked to the development of
capitalist society.
This further shift was not without connections to the new context in Italy. An adverse economic
situation as from Summer 1963, which was characterized by the decrease in employment and
reduction of working hours as consequences of deflationary policy, made the workers’ bargaining
power less effective, thus preventing them from having any influence on society as a whole. In the
meantime, the relationship between intellectuals and blue collars was also undergoing significant
changes, as emerges from a letter written by Romano Alquati from Turin, who had noticed that
intellectuals had lost interest in the working class. On the one hand, in early 1964 the first centre-Left
government, whose program comprising economic planning aroused enthusiasm, contributed to
turning several left-wing intellectuals away from the idea of revolution, as the system seemed
possible to reform; on the other hand, it cannot be excluded that the perspective on the working
class was changing now that workers were apparently on the verge of becoming an autonomous
subject that would be harder and harder to orientate, thus transferring power away from mediators
(Alquati ai “compagni direzionali”, 1964). Moreover, according to Alquati, only the workers and not
the cadres of the PSI and PCI understood the novelty of classe operaia’s vision, but of course this was
an ideologically biased opinion, which tended to confirm what the group was looking for, that is
a mature working class ready to grasp the meaning of the new discourse. Tronti himself asserted that
 LABOR HISTORY 11

the periodical should ‘not even be discussed on the traditional political level’, because he claimed
that it expressed a relationship between intellectuals and workers that was not mediated by party
organizations. In his view, it was the periodical that should be the tool to use and not party hierarchy:
‘There must be a point at which the journal, having overcome this obstacle, this need for political
mediation, identifies itself with the moment of intervention’ (Tronti, relazione al convegno di
Piombino (1964), pp. 384–385).
The estrangement of many other intellectuals not only from the working class, but also from
classe operaia could actually not be blamed, if one considers that culture, in its view, had lost its
autonomy to politics, and that even the few poems and literary pieces that were published in the
periodical (by Brecht or Babel) were placed at the service of militancy and activism. As Asor Rosa
would later write in Rivista storica del socialismo referring to the late classe operaia militant Giovanni
Francovich, ‘Studying the birth of the working class in Piombino and handing out flyers in front of the
Florentine factories are exactly the same thing, they belong to the same set of problems, because
they converge towards the same goal’ (Asor Rosa, 1966). Deciding to analyse capitalism from the
point of view of this ‘workers’ science’ entailed rigorous one-sidedness and the decision to give
priority to the material aspects of the struggle, not to the moral or cultural ones that intellectuals are
comfortable with.
The role culture was relegated to was evident in an essay by Asor Rosa in the second issue of the
periodical. As mentioned before, in April 1962 Asor Rosa had published an article in Quaderni Rossi
devoted to a ‘socialist culture’ in the making, which had to be manipulated for political reasons but
was still very alive. Less than two years later, he now praised the end of every ‘cultural battle’. He
observed that, in the modern capitalist society, allegedly oppositional culture (characterized by
antifascism, the defense of the values put forward by the Italian Liberation movement, and huma­
nitarianism) was a conditioning and alienating tool used by the bourgeoisie. He deemed it crucial to
rethink and overturn the common forms of culture of the labor movement by rejecting not only
historicism, idealistic interpretations of Marx, the references to the national tradition and the need
for alliances between classes, which had been the main features of the PCI’s cultural politics from
1944 onwards, but more importantly the very idea that culture produced values and that a workers’
culture could display universalistic traits opposed to the egoistic tendency of the bourgeoisie.
According to Asor Rosa, the capitalist system could only be destroyed by reducing ‘every intellectual
research to the meaning and functions of the workers’ peculiarity’ (a.a.r. [Alberto Asor Rosa], 1964).
This was the sense of supporting the so-called ‘workers’ point of view’ in cultural terms: advocating
one-sidedness instead of universality.
Asor Rosa’s reasoning involved the self-destruction of ‘bourgeois cultural disciplines’ by
intellectuals themselves, who should aim to ‘get to the bottom of bourgeois cultural structures
and functions’, and ‘penetrate the heart of the capitalist force’ at a cultural level. This meant using
disciplines such as sociology, economy, urban planning as a technique rather than as value-bearer
(a.a.r. [Alberto Asor Rosa], 1965b, p. 40). The scientific nature of any discipline was thus repu­
diated, declaring that the abstract battle of ideas had to be permanently put aside in order to
search for tools suitable for class struggle. The criticism of Quaderni Rossi’s use of sociology after
Panzieri’s passing was already sketched here and was later openly expressed in May 1965, as Asor
Rosa harshly reproached his former companions for letting workers believe that they needed
intellectuals to point out to them the ideal aims to reach (a.a.r. [Alberto Asor Rosa], 1965b, p. 38).
On the contrary, classe operaia dismissed any value, hence also any mediation by intellectuals,
who were therefore deprived of any social function. In hindsight, Asor Rosa would admit that at
the time ‘the denial of any possibility of an alternative use of cultural tools’ was ‘more radical,
more total’ because of ‘privileging politics and praxis over all the rest’ (Asor Rosa, 1998, p. 673). In
fact, the refusal of culture reached its peak within the Italian Workerist movement in classe
operaia, while later experiences – especially the periodical Contropiano (1968–1971) – tried to
relaunch a discourse on the possibilities of culture (Guidali, 2020b).
12 F. GUIDALI

Notwithstanding the periodical’s all-embracing and radical approach, Tronti began to realize that
classe operaia alone could do little. On the one hand the barren economic situation, which was
unfavorable for workers’ struggles, on the other the death of the long-time PCI Secretary Palmiro
Togliatti in Summer 1964 and the resulting dispute regarding the party’s leadership contributed to
move the spotlight to the issue of the political party, a topic that also became central in classe
operaia in late 1964 and in 1965. As was current within the movement, it was once again the new
circumstances (or at least the perception of them) that again caused the intellectual debate to
change.
Assuming that the PSI was believed to be lost, having been supposedly incorporated by capitalist
reformism after the alliance with the Christian Democracy party, classe operaia significantly never
closed the door on the links to the PCI, arguing that the working class still did not have a replacement
for it (m.t. [Mario Tronti], 1964a, p. 16). The group therefore committed itself to preventing the
process of social-democratization of the PCI by insisting on it re-establishing relations with the
workers and going back into the factories, from which it was accused of having been absent for the
past decade, as the drop in the number of militants amongst the workers demonstrated (a.a.r.
[Alberto Asor Rosa], 1965a). Even though not explicitly, Tronti was now aiming at finding a way to
influence the PCI from the inside, according to the motto ‘inside and against’: inside the PCI but
against this PCI (Tronti, 1967). In so doing, classe operaia distanced itself from other New Left groups
of the time, which, for their part, having once broken off their relationship with the PCI, never
reconsidered this step, not even in the long run.
The strategy to follow – which was the best attitude towards the PCI and whether to keep on with
political agitation among workers or shift to the cadres of the labor movement – stood at the origin
of a further break in the Workerist movement. The group around Antonio Negri, which was also
joined by Asor Rosa, was more optimistic than Tronti. From its point of view on the factories in the
Veneto region, it was persuaded that ‘our political discourse has plenty of room for circulation and is
present to some degree at all levels’ (Letter from Negri to Tronti, 1966). On the contrary, and
notwithstanding the renewed strikes at Fiat in 1966, Tronti believed that the time for agitation
was over and urged getting back to theoretical work, through which he intended to influence trade
unions and party officials. His book Operai e capitale (Tronti, 1966), which is grounded on the
enhancement of ‘workers’ subjectivity’ established from a specific given situation in a factory, was
a first result of this new strategy and from then on an authoritative source for operaismo, even
though Tronti never returned as leader of a New Left group in the following years.
This break was less traumatic than the one that had occurred with Quaderni Rossi, because it
neither affected personal relationships nor questioned Tronti’s understanding, as later writings by
Asor Rosa would demonstrate (Asor Rosa, 1967). The end of classe operaia in spring 1967 never­
theless represented a further crack in the non-orthodox Marxist Left, and it happened when a new
phase was just about to begin, in which young protesters and militant intellectuals already active in
workers’ uprisings would find new ways of collaborating within little groups and movements (as
a general reference Giovagnoli, 2018; Lumley, 1990; Tarrow, 1989). While several operaisti (included
Tronti and Asor Rosa) would enter the PCI’s orbit, the main ideas at the basis of operaismo would flow
into autonomist Marxism, giving shape to a new ideological constellation.

Final remarks
Left-wing and Marxist milieux were struck by surprise as students became a new political subject
when protests broke out in 1967, while for years it had been repeated that everything revolved
around factories. It has been insightfully noted that reading New Left publications of the time
gives the impression of being in a vicious circle of self-referentiality, marked by a growing loss of
contact with reality (Ventrone, 2012, p. 73). This limit was paradoxically the consequence of their
strength, that is the choice of a specific point of view – that of the working class – or, as one
could say today, class reductionism. Yet again, as later recalled by Tronti, while the revolts and
 LABOR HISTORY 13

demonstrations of 1967–1968 originated from the modernizing needs of capitalist societies,

non-orthodox Marxists around Quaderni Rossi and classe operaia were trying to respond to the
crisis that followed de-Stalinization (Tronti, 2008, pp. 30–31). The search for an answer to that
same crisis was conducted mainly on a cultural level, also when it pertained to life in the
factories.
In fact, in the course of de-Stalinization and of the process towards the birth of a centre-left
reformist coalition between Socialists and the Christian Democracy party in the early 1960s, several
factors were at play in Italy: the increasing attention given to factories and the workplace, which for
some time had been neglected by the left-wing parties also in the wake of the defeats suffered by
the unions in the mid-1950s; the impression shared by many in the Marxist Left that the working
class was still not assimilated into the capitalist system, contrary to what seemed to have been
resignedly suggested for years; a process of revision of Marxism in the shadow of the strong
economic growth and the wave of internal migration. It is therefore significant that in a time of
crisis intellectuals felt the need to meditate on both the values that any society points to – even if
they reject them – and the role they play in society – even if they annihilate it. In fact, ideas about
intellectual commitment also changed within the Left at the same time; in the immediate post-war
period, the PCI had asked its many artists and scholars to place themselves at the service of the
workers, maintaining the indisputable mediating role of the party itself, while this article has shown
that during the 1950s – mainly in the PSI around Raniero Panzieri – a new idea took shape, according
to which intellectuals must help workers to bring to light their consciousness in a Socratic sense,
without taking any lead or playing a mediating role. Parties and unions were thus seen as tools in the
hands of the working class, and could be used or dismissed depending on practical situations.
Nevertheless, Panzieri never rejected the traditional organizations of the labor movement and at
some point even proposed once again a two-stage approach in which investigation and action were
divided. On the contrary, Tronti asserted that ‘men of culture of a new type’ were required, not
working for a party but for factory laborers. By taking the one-sided point of view of the working
class, the defense of universal values, which had been the very reason for intellectuals’ political
commitment in the post-war period, was abruptly brought to an end. Even the idea of culture was
damaged, since it lost any non-technical function. As testified by one of the operaisti, Rita Di Leo, ‘we
all had the illusion not to act as intellectuals, but to be producing something material’ (Di Leo, 1998,
p. 638). Operaisti never wanted to teach something to laborers and humbly referred to conricerca and
workers’ experience, but they never denied the usefulness of their own intellectual activity, as they
assigned intellectuals the task of standing shoulder to shoulder with workers in order to enhance
their subjectivity and improve their tools of self-perception, without mingling with them. In their
view, this operation could also take place from the heights of a university chair – as both Tronti and
Asor Rosa became professors, respectively in Siena and in Rome. For this reason, too, whenever
confronted with labour issues in Italy at the turn of 1950s and 1960s it appears crucial to deal with
the accompanying process of shaping self-awareness undergone by militants and Marxist research­
ers, without which any glance at the sources they produced would be impoverishing and misleading.

Notes
1. All translations from the Italian are the author’s.On Italian society: Ginsborg, 1990, chap. 7, Kindle; Sassoon, 1997,
chap. 2, Kindle; Crainz, 2003; Foot, 2018, chap. 2, Kindle.
2. For an overview of Italian New Left periodicals see Guidali, 2020a; Mangano, 1979; Mangano & Schina, 1998.
3. On the PCI in the postwar period, see Gozzini & Martinelli, 1998.
4. On the PSI’s long-term history see Ciuffoletti et al., 1993; Mattera, 2010. Specifically on the post-war period,
Mattera, 2004; Scroccu, 2011. As regards cultural issues, see the essential Scotti, 2011.
5. On PCI’s cultural strategy, Ajello, 1979; Vittoria, 2014.
6. Still significant as a long-period reference is the first edition of Turone, 1973.
7. A new reformist centre-left coalition between PSI and Christian Democracy party came into being early in the
1960s: Favretto, 2015; Tamburrano, 1971; Voulgaris, 1998.
14 F. GUIDALI

8. A third component of the milieu around Panzieri was the one of the ‘activists’ such as Romano Alquati, Pierluigi
Gasparotto, Romolo Gobbi, and later Goffredo Fofi.
9. An English translation by Quintin Hoare is available at https://libcom.org/library/capalist-use-machinery-raniero-
panzieri. The Fragment on Machines was a text of paramount importance also in the years afterwords, and was
even dubbed as the summit of Marx’s revolutionary thought in Negri, 1991. For a recent critical assessment of
the Grundrisse, see Bellofiore et al., 2014.
10. According to Tronti, Panzieri had been convinced by his friends in Rome to study Marx’s first volume of Das
Kapital, devoted to production, while he had translated the one on circulation. See Tronti, 1998, p. 600.
11. It should be noted that Panzieri had already given reason to consider his position on unions as problematic,
having encouraged Einaudi to publish Mothé, 1960.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Fabio Guidali holds a PhD in contemporary history and is a fixed-term research fellow in the Department of History of
the University of Milan. His main research fields are the history of 20th-century culture and journalism, European studies,
and digital history. He is the author of several essays on European intellectuals and organizations, and of two books, Il
secolo lungo di Gabriele Mucchi. Una biografia intellettuale e politica (Milan 2012) and Scrivere con il mondo in testa.
Intellettuali europei tra cultura e potere (Milan-Udine 2016). He also co-edited with Matteo Mario Vecchio Chi mi parla non
sa | che io ho vissuto un’altra vita. Antonia Pozzi e la «singolare generazione» (Forlimpopoli 2018). He is a member of the
ESPRit Committee (European Society for Periodical Research).

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