Steve Wright

Romano Alquati played a crucial role in the development of operaismo from its beginning. Back in the early 1960s, he was responsible for formulating a number of the tendency’s central precepts, starting with the emblematic category of class composition. That in itself could have been enough of an accomplishment for most people, but instead his fertile mind continued to spill out perspectives and ruminations across the decades that followed. City-factory, operaio sociale, autovalorizzazione, conricerca, proletariato intellettuale, the tertiarization of labour: debates around each of these terms were propelled forward by Alquati’s contributions to their elaboration. While some of Mario Tronti’s most significant innovations seemed at times to emerge through sheer force of logic – above all, his notion of labour’s need to suppress itself as labour power in order to destroy the capital relation – the perspicacity of Alquati’s advances derived from an extraordinary sensitivity to the clash between material circumstance and mass subjectivity. Years later, Tronti (in Trotta & Milana 2008: 600) conceded as much, recalling that within the experience of Quaderni Rossi,

[Our] Roman group, like the Northerners, arrived at the notion of the political centrality of the working class and the factory. But the difference consisted in this: they arrived at this because they had that working class in front of them. They saw it, they studied it, whereas we arrived at that point by following a theoretical path, reading Marx.

Alquati has bequeathed a rich and complex legacy, one that we are only now (and slowly) beginning to unpack. His efforts to understand and engage with ‘the new forces’ of the 1960s, and their contribution to the revival of class struggle, continues to inspire important assessments of contemporary class composition, such as Jamie Woodcock’s 2016 book Working the Phones. In a similar if more subdued fashion, Alquati’s reflections on the “intellectual proletariat” from the 1970s also greatly influenced debates in the movement during that decade. By contrast, much less is known elsewhere about his writings in the 1980s and 1990s, aimed at developing a social theory adequate to an age of “hyper-proletarians”.

More than a few people outside Italy have heard of Alquati; rather fewer have actually read anything that he would write. It is probably fair to add that, even in Italy, Alquati’s work is not as well known as it could be and should be. In particular, relatively few have explored Alquati’s thinking in any depth. On the other hand, when Alquati’s work has been reviewed, it has often won a warm reception. Recently, for example, lavish praise has come in Michele Mezza’s book Avevamo la luna, which calls Alquati’s investigations at Olivetti from the 1960s “the only genuine example of a material encounter with the new world of production then beginning to emerge in Italy’s factories” – research, furthermore, as Mezza indicates, that was largely overlooked by the dominant tendencies within the Italian left both then and later. As Alquati (1975a: 9) himself noted when the collection Sulla FIAT e altri scritti first appeared in the middle of the 1970s, the essays contained therein had previously been sought by a variety of audiences, including

students forced to produce the usual thesis on the struggles of the 1960s; young cadres of the workers’ movement researching the sources of a series of dominant ideologies; sociologists, political and social scientists who felt the need to verify the thematics of the last decade, young entrepreneurs seeking inspiration for new strategies of capitalist development.

Given the complex nature of much of his work, and the ways in which it – like that of any significant thinker – could shift over time, it is sometimes difficult to pinpoint a specific argument and state categorically: “this is what Alquati believed about X”. On the other hand, Alquati has left us a rich body of material that returns again and again to themes that both pre-occupied him during his lifetime, and that continue to be central to anyone concerned with what Marx once called “the real movement that abolishes the present state of things”.^[1] Of these themes, the ones focussed upon below are three: class composition, the place of militants in class politics, and Alquati’s way of communicating with others through print. And since reading Alquati is a very particular experience, I intend to draw as much as possible on his own words in doing so.

“On Communicating”

with my peculiar writing style [scrittura], I have never written for intellectuals, but for militants (Alquati n.d.: 1).

Danilo Montaldi has often been mentioned as a formative influence on Alquati, and would remain an important reference point throughout his life.^[2] From their common political activities in Cremona during the 1950s, through to their concern for co-research [conricerca] as a form of both knowledge co-creation and of organising, from the attentive regard for the intricacies of working class struggle to the championing of proletarian autonomy from capital, the state, and the official institutions of the labour movement: all of these are thematics shared by Montaldi and Alquati alike, even if each understood them in somewhat distinctive ways. Indeed, half of the book Camminando per realizzare un sogno comune is devoted to Alquati’s later reflections concerning his intellectual and political relationship with Montaldi – what perspectives they shared in common, and what differences separated them. In a preface introducing the text, the anonymous author (1994: 2) argues that

it’s evident that, when he wrote, Montaldi did not give the best of himself – he was much better in dialogue, in the midst of his scholarly and political engagement – through militancy – more so than in his writings.

Whether or not this is a fair assessment of Montaldi, it is reasonable to say that Alquati’s own relationship with writing, and his writing’s relationship in turn with the spoken word, was a complex one. Anyone who has grappled with Alquati’s texts knows that he had a way of writing that was often individual to the point of idiosyncratic. At the same time, Alquati’s style is a great part of his writing’s charm. While the subject of much of what he wrote about was difficult, complicated, intricate – even more so from the 1970s onwards, as he began to develop his own peculiar vocabulary and model-building – his written work itself is always shot through with a certain playfulness that (usually) makes all the extra effort seem worthwhile. Hints of that playfulness can already be seen in the notes that accompany the journal articles reprinted in Sulla FIAT e altri scritti, but this dimension of Alquati’s work really came into its own with his publications of the 1990s, with their amusing asides and colourful language.

The other aspect that is most distinctive about Alquati’s writings – above all, his later output – is that they are typically based on the spoken word.^[3] As he pointed out in Camminando (1994: 4),

This text is not a transcript of lectures, but rather a transcription of talks presented in some social centres in the North. It’s still the record of live speech, that’s how I work. For now, I don’t much care about being a ‘writer’, or about writing itself. Nor do I see these ‘booklets’ as little books, but – I’ll say it again – as little machines. And so their form, to me, is purely about ‘logical structure’, not about literary style.

Books as “little machines” – the reference to the opening arguments in Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus is an obvious one.^[4] And as another pamphlet from the previous year makes clear, Alquati took very seriously the injunction of the French authors that texts be created so as to be reshaped into tools – and, if need be, into weapons:

My volumes are not – and don’t aim to be – mere ‘books’, but little machines. And they’re not just for reading. They’re for learning, certainly but above all, they’re for operationalizing – even if that sometimes means fully translating them into hypertexts, or exploring new and alternate paths through them.

Especially since they’re built in fairly autonomous blocks of text, ready to be disassembled and reassembled differently, with other threads (red ones, I hope…!). It all depends on the imagination and commitment of the reader. But some have already done it. They can even be collectivized this way, plugged into processing networks [reti elaborative]. I could do it myself right now with a modem – and maybe soon, I will (Alquati 1993a: 59).

In this sense, like Franco Fortini (Balicco 2006), Alquati (1994: 4) did not write “for everyone”. Instead, and despite the facetious comment earlier about “sociologists, political and social scientists” and “young entrepreneurs”, he also made it clear that the primary purpose of republishing such material from Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia was political. In terms of audience, as Alquati (1975a: 9) would state in the very first sentence of Sulla FIAT e altri scritti, the book was targeted first and foremost “at young cadres of the so-called ‘movement’”. In a similar fashion, a number of his later texts would be “aimed at anyone who identifies – in any way – with an organisation that calls itself ‘communist’” (Alquati 1994: 27).

Linked to the question of communicating is Alquati’s sense of curiosity, along with his preparedness to question commonly-held assumptions. On this score, Alquati’s contempt for the narrow-minded mindset of the “official” Marxist mindset that dominated the Italian workers’ movement following the Second World War was another constant theme in his work. During the crucial years immediately following 1956, for example, he would argue that advances in understanding could only occur when such orthodoxy was cast aside, and attention turned instead to the changes then unfolding in Italian class society. As he observed at the time, a leading role in all this was then being taken by those

who, disgusted by the ‘study centres’ and ‘workers’ parties’ are now, in every city, gathering together in groups to continue, ‘in the limits of the possible’, a culture that is critical in the Marxist sense … Today, for those who seek a dialectical hook to structure, the reality of the ‘base’ is so mystified and unknown that sometimes it is enough to describe (without even seeking ‘descriptive protocols’, much less ‘phenomenological descriptions’) at the level of common sense and in everyday language to produce a work of political and cultural interest. This is possible above all where backward [arrestrate] situations conserve primary forms of life that facilitate personal contact. Other circumstances require instruments which, at a certain point, become imperative to master (Alquati 1960: 95).

This sensibility would be a constant refrain in Alquati’s work, to the point where he could be heard arguing in the late 1970s that “the first step in research is to take to the field in order to engage with one’s interlocutors” (Alquati 1977: 13). Connected to this was a fascination with the nature of the learning process, a question as crucial for the formation of political militants as for learners in general. Learning, researching, changing the world: all were intimately connected for Alquati.^[5] Co-research, as the mapping of class power relations in a given context, involved “conducting research alongside those who before were considered only the objects of interviews” (Alquati n.d.: 33). It was, in other words, a two-way, shared exercise in the construction and communication of mutual learning between so-called “educator” and “educated” – a relationship about which Marx himself, as we know, had firm thoughts.^[6] For Alquati, this further meant that learning was not simply about “content”, but that it equally entailed “teaching how to wield and sharpen critical capacities.” (Alquati 1977: 14). After all, “communicating changes both the receiver and sender” (Alquati 1994: 101). And although conricerca, being arduous at times, was not for the faint-hearted (Alquati 1993a: 119), it was nonetheless an obligatory part of any “exploratory work for struggle, for the mobilisation and organisation of militants old and new towards new objectives” (Alquati n.d.: 6).

Class Composition

When we spoke of class composition, we spoke of a long and difficult apprenticeship. These were not things that could be learned in a day, nor things that could be read in a book (Bologna 2013: 115).

Key amongst those instruments that Alquati helped to develop in the 1960s was the notion of class composition. For a brief period at least, its political utility was considerable, and helped the operaisti to place their own special mark on class politics during the “creeping May” of the 1960s and 1970s. It is also fair to say that, for all its effectiveness at the time, the class composition analysis of that period is today far from adequate in helping us understand both the nature of divisions imposed by capital in the spheres of reproduction and production, and the means by which these divisions can be overcome.^[7]

While Sergio Bologna’s (1972) essay about the Northern revolutionary struggles of a century ago offered the first explication in print of some of the key workerist assertions associated with class composition, it is Alquati who is typically credited with initially developing this thematic. Indeed, in the words of Bologna (2013: 116) himself, class composition was “a term invented by Romano Alquati”. At the same time, it is difficult to locate within Alquati’s work any systematic and sustained discussion of this analytical tool, such as can be found in Bologna’s own short but extremely rich talk published in 2013. Instead, we are left with a number of observations scattered here and there through Alquati’s writings and interviews. It will take a more talented investigator than me to bring all these arguments together and critically engage with them – in the meantime, I would like to offer some brief thoughts concerning some of what Alquati wrote on the topic.

Alquati’s essays from Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia are perhaps the most obvious first port of call for exploring his views on class composition. Tracing the theme through these writings, we can see the slow but steady emergence of the category, with Alquati’s article on Olivetti playing a crucial role in the endeavour. This is for a number of reasons, perhaps the most important being that, while Alquati never explicitly makes the link, it is clear that a crucial connection exists between “the organic composition of capital” (and thus labour process) on the one hand, and the various forms assumed by workers’ behaviour on the other. Beyond this, it is important to note that with the important exception of two essays concerning the structure of the working class, most references to class composition within Sulla FIAT e altri scritti actually concentrate on the question of class recomposition: that is, the process by which workers seek to overcome the divisions imposed by capital, and launch a project based instead on their autonomous needs. Turning to one of those exceptions, we can see that even here, Alquati’s consideration of the “internal composition of the working class” never strays far from the question of recomposition:

Hitherto the discourse on the working class had been carried out by us in a general way, focussing primarily on the moment of struggle. What concerned us at this point was to begin to address the problem in a social way, focussing above all on the internal composition of the working class, in a specific historical context, that of Italy. Our ultimate objective was to recover, in concrete terms, the political unity of the class, which before all else must be the unity and univocity of the movements of the various parts that historically make up the working class, with the goal of struggling against the collective boss (Alquati, 1975: 220).

By contrast, considerations on class composition as a tool of analysis often make only an intermittent appearance in Alquati’s later work. Admittedly, this “mitica” term does figure as what he called “One of the most sacred icons” (1993b: 44): but here again, much of the focus is upon recomposition, and the related question of the place of militants within that process. In fact Sacre Icone is a work where Alquati (1993b: 48) expresses doubts about the efficacy of some of the key terminology associated with class composition, starting within the notions of technical and political composition: “these adjectives”, he ventures, “don’t work, they create confusion”. Indeed, a couple of years before, these doubts had been expressed even more firmly, when he argued in an interview that

The concepts of political and technical composition need to be abandoned. The first one because we need to start distinguishing between ‘la politica’ and ‘il politico’, whereas political composition assumes ‘il politico’– a dimension or valence that is simultaneously social. And what is technical composition? It refers to technique, but the most important things are culture and organisation – and if I include them, then I need to include needs as well. So this terminology just doesn’t work. The technical composition of the class is its articulation as variable capital, but along with technique, this entails its culture, its ideology, its organisation. Political composition, then, is simply the genuine recomposition of the class. All of this means that these two adjectives need to be modified, because now we’ve given them meaning (Alquati 1991).^[8]

And just to complicate matters further, some notes from a decade later suggest some sort of rethinking of Alquati’s part, for here he is suggesting instead that “In the triangle formed by technical composition, political composition and recomposition can be found ambivalences that should neither be flattened nor denied – rather, they must be explored. The fundamental tension at play within them is the essence of politics [la politica]” (Anonimo 2001: 1).

Let’s go back for a moment to Alquati’s interview of 1991, where he argued that the organisational dimension was more important than the technical: this assertion may be surprising for those with only a passing acquaintance with his work, which after all has done much to help us understand how workers have battled with assembly lines and the like. And yet, for all the attention that he would pay to the relationship between dead and living labour, this stress upon the organizational dimension of capital’s domination can be identified as a constant theme in Alquati’s thinking starting from his earliest contributions to Quaderni Rossi. In his writings on students and class composition from the 1970s, for example, he argued that this is one field that opens up space for universities to foster the valorization process directly:

Innovation today is above all “organisational innovation”. Restructuring itself has innovated organisation, and if it wasn’t for working-class resistance [tenuta] … restructuring would have won! The “technological leap” that everyone was anticipating took place, but the left missed it, because it fantasised some new machinery, when instead a new form of organisation was created. And this reaffirmation of organisation as the royal road of capitalist development and accumulation means that whether in production, in reproduction, in governance, it’s the science of social relations that matters most for understanding what is happening and what has occurred historically. Not simply the science of living labour and its exchange with dead labour, but social science in a latent sense. And it is precisely those university faculties that are most connected to industry (for example, engineering) that are obliged most urgently to devote more space to social science. Similarly those faculties that are tied to reproduction (see how medicine is changing): these are developing social science as in terms of “governing the territory” (Alquati 1977: 65-6).

In a similar fashion, then, something more was necessary for circumstances to advance towards the “liberation of humanity from the value form itself, and thus from the commodity-form – as well as from capital and the capital form” (Alquati 1994: 31). The beginnings of this had already been present within the culture of the mass worker, since

These new workers adopted the slogan “more money, less work”. They could be defined as fordist nihilists, potentially mobilising even against themselves … But this new working class reference point had its limits, and only a new political organisation could lead the new working class to overcome those limits through recomposition (Alquati, in Borio, Pozzi e Roggero 2005: 46)

Militants

Our time is the time of militants (Montaldi 1971: 393).

Throughout his work, Alquati consistently argued that since militants played an indispensable role in the process of class recomposition, their formation, consolidation and expanded reproduction was a matter worthy of considerable attention. Already in his Olivetti essay, he expressed the view that despite capital’s efforts to divide and encapsulate the workers within its valorisation process,

The working class returns with greater force to struggle, but its struggles are still functional to the system. They are still the struggles of atoms, they are still blind struggles. Surpassing blind empiricism is the great collective task of revolutionary militants within a capitalism that rationalizes all aspects of social life, that plans exploitation on a global scale (Alquati 1975a: 83).

Alquati’s thoughts concerning the function of militants were deepened by the time of Classe Operaia, at which point he believed it possible to identify an emergent generation formed within the workplace conflict of the early 1960s – in part through their encounter with others (comrades from an earlier generation; even, sometimes, “external” militants like Alquati himself), but most of all from their own experiences in challenging capital on the job:

It is important to address this new figure of the militant, clarifying its ambiguities, its transitory characteristics, its dangers, but also the wholly positive function in the current situation of the new militants.These must be considered as part of the working class, seeing as: they are definable precisely on the basis of actions that unfold within workers’ struggles; they already express, at a potentially subjective level, the action of creation, connection and discovery of the mechanisms of the unification and selection of movements of workers’ struggle.Therefore the content of this new figure of the militant is not merely ‘organisational’: it entails a capacity that expresses itself in relation to workers’ struggle … these militants are an unknown and uncontrollable force. If they remain isolated, they will ebb [rifluiscono], and it will be a long time before the tide turns again. If organised, they can provide the first step towards a new leap in the political struggle (Alquati 1975a: 226, 227, emphasis in the original).

More difficult to ascertain was the relationship of such militants with the existing parties. If during the Classe Operaia experience this meant some sort of engagement, however tortuous, with the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), the situation only became more complex once the latter made explicit its intention to enter Italy’s governing bloc, and sought to subordinate working class rebellion to that goal.^[9]

A decade later, Alquati was of the view that “this political unification of the working class at the level of the socialised worker” – now dependent in part upon the intellectually trained within tertiary education – “is today the task of a party, and this can only occur on an international scale” (Alquati 1977: 34). For all his affection and respect for some members of the new left groups of the 1970s, however, Alquati was sceptical of the ways in which they attempted to supplant the PCI; interviewed many years later, he would hold that “Not even in the early 1970s were the [new left] little parties taken seriously by the workers, even if they used them to communicate, coordinate, extort etc. Instead they voted for the PCI” (Alquati n.d. : 10).

None of which meant that Alquati considered subsequent efforts at the organisation of revolutionaries to be pointless or doomed to fail. Reflecting on the question in the 1990s, Alquati would argue that a commitment to making internal structures as “horizontal” as possible still required a minimal degree of hierarchy to coordinate the activities of those involved: “as certain comrades of ‘Socialisme ou barbarie’ once said, refusing organisation because of a fear of bureaucracy is like preventing bad thoughts by cutting off your head” (Alquati 1994: 59). Within this process too, a special pride of place was assigned to militants, “the living nodes of the network that constitute and connect the class within the multiplicity of the movement” (Alquati 1994: 193). And since militants only become such through (learning in) struggle, the connection is made once again to conricerca, and we are brought full circle: “The very idea of our version of co-research starts not from members or the grassroots [base], but from militants” (Alquati 1994: 192; cf. Alquati n.d.: 33).

In Conclusion (for Now)

Much of what Alquati has left us are puzzles: fascinating lines of enquiry into the dynamics of class politics that, in being incomplete, still await their final resolution. For example, his intuition that value and information may in some way be connected is one of the most intriguing (but undeveloped) aspects of his early reflections on the struggles between the Olivetti firm and those who worked for it:

Information is the most important thing [l’essenziale] about labour-power: it is what the worker, by means of constant capital, transmits to the means of production upon the basis of evaluations, measures, elaborations, in order to work [operare] upon the object of labour all those changes in form that give it the use value required. The ‘disposability’ of the worker leads them to be a qualitative indice of socially necessary labour time, by which the ‘product’ is valued as the ‘recipient’ of a certain quantity of ‘information’ … ‘Productive labour’ is defined in the quality of the ‘information’ elaborated and transmitted by the worker to the ‘means of production’, with the mediation of ‘constant capital’, in a manner that is increasingly [tendenzialmente] ‘indirect’, yet completely ‘socialised’ … ‘Information,’ by enabling ‘automation’ as the overarching methodology of exploitation within its regulated, quantified, and programmed flow, clarifies the irreducible role of the worker within accumulation (Alquati 1975a: 115, 116).^[10]

Another puzzle to consider relates to the cycle that leads from struggles to the restructuring and the decomposition of labour, only to inspire new struggles in turn. Once, during the time of the mass worker’s hegemony in the twentieth century, the commodity labour-power was able to act as more than a simple input within capital’s cycle. The fact that this was apparently no longer the case after the 1970s was a large part of operaismo’s eventual crisis, and certainly led so many of its former exponents to abandon class composition analysis (and indeed, value analysis) altogether. Has this temporal pattern been suppressed forever? Perhaps, Alquati ruminated in the mid 1990s, the wage might return to become “the strategic variable … despite the exit from fordism. Today, however, it is certainly not the independent variable, as profit has resumed that role instead” (Alquati 1994: 139). This problem, posed by Alquati more than three decades ago, still remains unanswered – and our ability to address it effectively will do much to determine the relevance or otherwise of class composition analysis in the future.

Then there are the ties between abstract labour and concrete labour, and how these might change over time through the cut and thrust of social conflict. At the end of the 1970s, only months before his arrest, Toni Negri (1979: 11) had asserted that “the fundamental thesis underlying the theory of workerism is precisely that of a successive abstraction of labour parallel to its socialisation”. Given that this premise likewise seems debatable today, it may be worth reconsidering Alquati’s view – based on his reading of the class enemy’s responses to the struggles of the mass worker in Piedmont during the 1960s – that on the contrary, “at times, [capital] seeks to appropriate for itself the dissolution of the historical bond between the secular process of simplification and that of labouring capacity’s abstraction” (Alquati 1977: 32).

Finally we come to one of Alquati’s most complex categories, a notion that also retains considerable relevance in our current period of renewed automation: what he termed the “tertiarisation of labour” as “the flipside of mechanisation”:

I assume here as “tertiarisation of labour” the absolutely specific process of evolution of that part of living labour which (following that other parallel and complementary process of the mechanisation of the other part of labour, which becomes “dead labour”), is not transmitted to the machine, that is not mechanised and ‘cybernised’ even at the highest levels currently reached by technological process. Rather, it grows socialising itself precisely with the extension of machinery passing to ever new, more productive functions (productive of surplus value).Therefore: the “tertiarisation of labour”, far from meaning on the one hand the simple “proletarianisation” of the middle classes, and on the other above all the end of the working class, is instead precisely (in Marx’s sense) its fullest realisation: the transformation of labour-power that allows [consente] the realisation of the fullest specificity of the working class; the realisation of labour-power in its exclusive peculiarity as the only commodity which alone valorises all the other productive forces of capital (from society to machinery to science) and must unite them [unirsi] in order to produce surplus value, in order to accumulate capital, in order to enlarge the power of the capitalist class.^[11]

At a time when capital seeks not only to supplant workers with technology, but to design machinery able to mimic human activity, it is all too easy to forget that capital’s quest to sever completely its dependence upon labour power is nonetheless quixotic. If the boundaries between “what machines can do” and “what workers can do” is a continually shifting one, Alquati reminds us nonetheless of the strategic importance of grappling with this “the flipside of mechanisation”, along with the possibilities latent within it in terms of “the qualitative growth of the potential of this living [labour], of its intensification and development [potenziamento]” (Alquati 1975b: 6).^[12]

Once, in a discussion with friends, Alquati would complain that

Throughout my life, things have always gone badly for me. While I have always been ahead of my time, such foresight never did me any good. Instead, I ended up just handing ideas to others, who then put them into practice at the right moment. They won, and I was marginalised (Alquati 2002: 16).

And yet at least one of his many imaginings from the 1970s – one that may well be the most important – continues to haunt the present, namely of “an eventual new political recomposition or reunification, which [as] a threat to the capitalist system will dwarf that of the mass worker in 1969” (Alquati 1977: 75). What better way therefore to honour the looming anniversary of the “workers’ Autumn” than to seek, within the encounter between Alquati’s work and “engaging with one’s interlocutors”, the clues that might help make that dream a reality?

Bibliography

Alquati, R. (1975a). Sulla FIAT e altri scritti. Milano: Feltrinelli.

Alquati, R. (1975b). Terziario terziarizzazione sindacato. Foglio di zona, 1-2, 1-6.

Alquati, R. (1977). Università, formazione della forza lavoro intellettuale, tertiarizzazione. In R. Tomassini (a cura di), Studenti e composizione di classe (pp. 65-66). Milano: Edizioni aut aut.

Alquati, R. (1991). Storiografia e movimento del ’77 [Intervista di L. Perrone]. Torino.

Alquati, R. (1993a). Per fare conricerca. Padova: Calusca Edizioni.

Alquati, R. (1993b). Sacre icone. Padova: Calusca Edizioni.

Alquati, R. (1994). Camminando per realizzare un sogno comune. Torino: Velleità Alternative.

Alquati, R. (2001). Chiacchierata con Romano Alquati — 14 agosto 2001.

Alquati, R. (2002). Seminario sull’intervista di Guido — 4 gennaio 2002.

Alquati, R. (n.d.). Sul secondo operaismo politico.

Anonimo. (1994). Prefazione. In R. Alquati, Camminando per realizzare un sogno comune (p. 2). Torino: Velleità Alternative.

Anonimo. (2001). Sintesi della chiacchierata del 25 settembre 2001.

Armano, E., Sacchetto, D., & Wright, S. (2013). Coresearch and Counter-Research: Romano Alquati’s Itinerary Within and Beyond Italian Radical Political Thought. Viewpoint Magazine, 5. https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/coresearch-and-counter-research-romano-alquatis-itinerary-within-and-beyond-italian-radical-political-thought/

Balicco, D. (2006). Non parlo a tutti. Franco Fortini intellettuale politico. Roma: Manifestolibri.

Bologna, S. (1972). Composizione di classe e teoria del partito alle origini del movimento consiliare. In Operai e stato (pp. 13-44). Milano: Feltrinelli.

Bologna, S. (2013). Operaismo e composizione di classe. In G. Roggero & A. Zanini (a cura di), Genealogie del futuro. Sette lezioni per sovvertire il presente (pp. 115-116). Verona: Ombre Corte.

Borio, G., Pozzi, F., & Roggero, G. (2005). Gli operaisti. Roma: DeriveApprodi.

Galimberti, J. (2022). Images of Class. Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988). London: Verso.

Meriggi, M. G. (1978). Le classi sociali nello sviluppo e nella crisi capitalistica. Terziarizzazione e ricomposizione di classe. Una proposta di discussione. In Composizione di classe e teoria del partito (pp. 1-20). Bari: Dedalo.

Mezza, M. (2013). Avevamo la luna. Roma: Donzelli.

Milanesi, F. (2010). Militanti. Un’antropologia politica del novecento. Milano: Edizioni Punti Rossi.

Montaldi, D. (1971). Militanti politici di base. Torino: Einaudi.

Negri, T. (1979). Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale. Intervista sull’operaismo. Milano: Multhipla edizioni.

Pasquinelli, M. (2011). Capitalismo macchinico e plusvalore di rete: Note sull’economia politica della macchina di Turing. Estratto da http://www.uninomade.org/capitalismo-macchinico/

Roggero, G. (2016). Elogio della militanza. Note su soggettività e composizione di classe. Roma: DeriveApprodi.

Trotta, G., & Milana, F. (a cura di). (2008). L’Operaismo degli anni sessanta. Roma: DeriveApprodi.

Woodcock, J. (2016). Working the Phones. Control and Resistance in Call Centres. Londra: Pluto.

---