Never before translated texts powerfully present Italian autonomist Marxist Mario Tronti’s resonance with contemporary questions of revolutionary organization. Mario Tronti was the principal theorist of the radical political movement of the 1960s known in Italy as operaismo and in the Anglophone world as Italian workerism, a current which went on to inform the development of autonomist Marxism. His “Copernican revolution”—the proposal that working class struggles against exploitation propel capitalist development, which can only be understood as a reaction that seeks to harness this antagonism—has inspired dissident leftists around the world. Tronti’s influence as a theorist thus already reaches far beyond Italy to activists and writers working in different sectors on different problems historically and geographically. While his imposing and acclaimed Workers and Capital has only recently appeared in English translation, Tronti has influenced many of the most creative social and political theorists of our time.
