<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p><b><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1666">Workers
Against Capital: Mario Tronti Sixty Years On
Organised by
Minor Compositions and the COVER Research Centre</a></b><br>
<br>
<img moz-do-not-send="false"
src="cid:part1.wWWKSeMl.VBBmUbdD@gmail.com" alt="" width="500"
height="280"></p>
<p><br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
All Sessions will take place online @ 7:00 UK Time. To register
and for more information, including Zoom links, email
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:coveres@essex.ac.uk">coveres@essex.ac.uk</a><br>
<br>
<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.minorcompositions.info">https://www.minorcompositions.info</a>
Linktree of all our stuff: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions">https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions</a></pre>
</body>
</html>