Italian Operaismo

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 11: Italian Operaismo with Gigi Roggero

This episode of the Minor Compositions podcast is recorded as part of the Ultradependent Public School exhibition at BAK.

For this episode we are talking with Gigi Roggero about his book Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method. In this conversation we cover a range of topics including the birth and development of operaismo as a political tendency, the concepts of class composition and political formation, and rethinking how we approach and re-activate radical histories in the present.

“Italian Operaismo provides a clear overview of the central moments in that tendency’s development: from the Italian labor movement’s crisis of direction in the 1950s, the encounter with the “new forces” within the working class at FIAT and elsewhere in the early 1960s, and the political journals Quaderni rossi and Classe operaia, to the experience of Potere Operaio and other organizations a decade later. Roggero provides a rereading of operaismo that is both salutary and provocative, one that stresses above all the role within it of subjectivity and political engagement, demonstrating the continued relevance of its subversive method as a tool for reworking the categories of radical and revolutionary thought.

Bio: Gigi Roggero is a militant researcher, part of the editorial board of Machina and Commonware, and director of DeriveApprodi’s Input series. Among his various books and essays, he is author of The Production of Living Knowledge, Futuro anteriore, Gli operaisti, Elogio della militanza, and Il treno contro la Storia.

For more on Gigi’s book.

Opening / outro music: The Potere Operaio Anthem, as sung by Oreste Scalzone and Comrades