Weapon of Organization

Mario Tronti is a philosopher and politician. In the 1960s he was among the founders of operaismo (Italian “workerism”), a heterodox school of Marxist thought, and later he played a leading role in the Italian Communist Party. He has been a newspaper editor, university professor, president of the Centro per la Riforma dello Stato, and Senator of the Italian Republic. He is the author of Workers and Capital and many anthologized essays as well as other books in Italian.Andrew Anastasi is a member of the Viewpoint Magazine editorial collective and a doctoral candidate in Sociology and Critical Theory at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the translator of numerous works from Italian as well as the editor of The Young Mario Tronti, a dossier on the early philosophical and political development of one of the founders of Italian operaismo . His doctoral research investigates relations between New Left movement organizations and the U.S. capitalist state during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the War on Poverty and its afterlives. Anastasi has worked in public high schools and colleges for the past decade and currently teaches courses in political sociology, social movements, and social theory at Queens College, City University of New York.

“This illuminating collection provides not only an understanding of Tronti’s influential anticapitalist theses but also a window into the political dynamics out of which they grew: the scene of revolutionary theory and practice in 1960s Italy.  As Andrew Anastasi argues in his excellent introduction, Tronti’s theses ought to be—and, in some senses, already are—centralpillars of our own, contemporary political thought.”—Michael Hardt, coauthor Empire, Assembly, and Commonwealth  “Mario Tronti is one of the great intellectual and political figures of our age. The recognition of the importance of his work, not only as a contribution to revolutionary activism, but as a leap forward into the unknowns of speculation and praxis, after the 'end of history,' was long overdue. The beautiful anthology assembled and introduced by Andrew Anastasi will make this clearly visible for a generation of new English-speaking readers.”—Étienne Balibar, coauthor of Reading Capital“The Weapon of Organization is a breakthrough in scholarship on Italian workerism, and the recovery of the history of revolutionary theory for the present. Andrew Anastasi has collected and translated pivotal texts, as well as situated them with his careful and illuminating commentary.”—Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity Praise for the Author“Tronti was the first and one of the most original and influential theoreticians of the historical moment of the radical left in postwar Italy and it is essential to have his works accessible in English.”—Fredric Jameson, author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism“In the early 1970s I read Tronti religiously.”—Silvia Federici, author of Revolution At Point Zero and Caliban and the Witch“Every generation of revolutionary anti-capitalists has to come to terms with how to read afresh the classic formulations of Marx and Lenin in ways appropriate to the conditions of their times. How Tronti and some of his close colleagues did this in the 1960s is a spectacular and inspirational example of how to re-theorize class formation and the practices of class struggle from a ground-up and workerist perspective. While our contemporary world may be very different, there is much to be learned not only conceptually but also methodologically from Tronti’s brilliant and incisive interventions at all levels in the politics of his era.​”—David Harveyauthor of Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason

• PrefaceExperiments and Explosions: Tronti's Work of the 1960s (by Andrew Anastasi)Part One: From Investigation to InterventionOn Marxism and Sociology (April 1959)Letter to Raniero Panzieri (June 1961)Closing Speech at the Santa Severa Seminar (April 1962)Panzieri-Tronti Theses (June 1962)The Strike at FIAT (July 1962)Part Two: The Strategic OverturningLetter to Raniero Panzieri (January 1963)The Copernican Revolution (May 1963)The Two Reformisms (July 1963)Letter to Antonio Negri (September 1963)A Replacement of Leadership (Autumn 1963)Report at Piombino (May 1964)Part Three: The Problem of OrganizationThe Party in the Factory (April 1965)A Balance Sheet of the “Intervention” (April 1965)After the Reunion in Mestre (May 1965)Single Party or Class Party? (June 1965)It’s Not Time for Social Democracy, It’s Time to Fight It for the First Time from the Left (April 1966)Within and Against (May 1967)Appendix: A Mario Tronti Bibliography, 1958–1970Bibliography of Works CitedIndex