[Minorcompositions] Workers Against Capital: Reading Mario Tronti Sixty Years On

[Minor Compositions]

*Workers Against Capital: Mario Tronti Sixty Years On 
Organised by 
Minor Compositions and the COVER Research Centre 
<https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1666>*


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.

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


-- 
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
https://www.minorcompositions.info

Linktree of all our stuff:https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions
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