2026 marks the 60th anniversary of the first publication of Workers and Capital, Mario Tronti’s landmark intervention in Marxist theory and political practice. To mark this anniversary – and the long-awaited appearance of the text in English – Minor Compositions and the COVER Research Centre will host a year-long, monthly reading group dedicated to a collective engagement with this foundational work of Italian workerism (operaismo). First published in 1966, Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most important theoretical text produced by operaismo, a current that reshaped both institutional and extra-parliamentary politics in Italy and reverberated internationally. Tronti’s central provocation – that working-class struggle precedes and forces the development of capital, rather than merely reacting to it –overturned orthodox Marxist assumptions and generated an entirely new way of analysing capitalism from the standpoint of workers’ antagonism. In the decade following its publication, debates around the book helped forge new methods of analysis and organisation, informing workplace struggles, student movements, and community-based forms of resistance. Concepts such as class composition, the mass worker, workers’ inquiry, and co-research became durable elements of the radical political vocabulary.
This reading group will follow the book closely over eleven monthly sessions, situating Tronti’s arguments in their historical context while also testing their relevance for the present moment. Far from being a relic of the intense conflicts of the 1960s, Workers and Capital offers powerful tools for thinking about contemporary transformations of work and class: the fragmentation of labour, logistics and platform capitalism, financialization, the persistence of racialized and gendered divisions of labour, and the changing forms of political organization and refusal. Tronti’s insistence on analysis from within struggle – rather than from the standpoint of capital or the state – raises urgent questions about how antagonism appears today, where it is blocked, and how it might be recomposed. These sessions are open to researchers, organizers, students, and anyone interested in critical theory, labor politics, and the history and future of workerist thought. Sessions will combine close reading with collective discussion, drawing connections between Tronti’s concepts and ongoing debates around automation, crisis, social reproduction, and political strategy. As we read Workers and Capital sixty years on, the aim is not only to interpret a classic text, but to ask what it still enables us to see – and to do – in the present.
2 February Foreword & Introduction
2 March Marx Yesterday and Today; Factory and Society, 1-35.
6 April The Plan of Capital; A New Type of Political Experiment: Lenin in England; An Old Tactic for a New Strategy, 36-80
4 May 1905 in Italy; Class and Party, Initial Theses; Marx, Labour Power, Working Class, Hegel and Ricardo 81-128
8 June The Exchange of Money for Labour; Critique of Ideology; Woe to June!; The Particularity of the Commodity Labour-Power; 129-159
6 July Productive Labour; What the Proletariat Is, 160-198
3 August The Forms of Struggle; Labour as Non-Capital, 199-222
7 September The Labour Theory of Value as Watchword; The Class; The Strategy of Refusal, 223-262
5 October Tactics = Organisation; The Struggle Against Work! 262-276
9 November Postscript of Problems, 277-326
7 December Our Operaismo & Overall Discussion, 327-348
All Sessions will take place online @ 7:00 UK Time. To register and for more information, including Zoom links, email coveres [at] essex.ac.uk
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