Italian workerism had a big influence on the postwar left. As one of its key thinkers, Mario Tronti had to make sense of a world where those struggles went into sharp decline.

In 1964, Mario Tronti and a group of his comrades that included Antonio Negri founded the magazine Classe operaia (“Working Class”). While this may have been a minor event amid the global turmoil of those years, it resonated with the struggles of workers in the industries of northern Italy. The journal also left a deep mark on the subsequent development of the Italian far left and the history of international Marxism.

Classe operaia was born as a split from Quaderni rossi, a journal launched in 1961 by Marxist sociologist Raniero Panzieri, to which Tronti had also contributed. It gathered a group of activists and r

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