Workerism

Workerism, sometimes known by its Italian name Operaismo, is a theoretical tradition within Marxism that emerged out of the struggles of the 1960s. It places a particular emphasis on the method of workers’ inquiry, and the framework of class composition. It gains its particular purchase by combining a focus on the political agency of the working class with empirical data gathered at the coal face of production. It uses these two sources to generate a new understanding of how the organisation of capitalist social relations is changing over time, and what impact these changes have on the lives and struggles of the people involved.