Never before translated texts powerfully present Italian autonomist Marxist Mario Tronti's resonance with contemporary questions of revolutionary organization.
“This illuminating collection provides not only an understanding of Tronti’s influential anticapitalist theses but also a window into the political dynamics out of which they grew: the scene of revolutionary theory and practice in 1960s Italy. ?As Andrew Anastasi argues in his excellent introduction, Tronti’s theses ought to be—and, in some senses, already are—centralpillars of our own, contemporary political thought.”
—Michael Hardt, coauthor Empire, Assembly, and Commonwealth
“Mario Tronti is one of the great intellectual and political figures of our age. The recognition of the importance of his work, not only as a contribution to revolutionary activism, but as a leap forward into the unknowns of speculation and praxis, after the 'end of history,' was long overdue. The beautiful anthology assembled and introduced by Andrew Anastasi will make this clearly visible for a generation of new English-speaking readers.”
—Étienne Balibar, coauthor of Reading Capital
“The Weapon of Organization is a breakthrough in English-language scholarship on Italian workerism, and the recovery of the history of revolutionary theory for the present. Andrew Anastasi has collected and translated pivotal texts, as well as situated them with his careful and illuminating commentary.”
—Asad Haider, author of Mistaken Identity
Praise for the Author
“Tronti was the first and one of the most original and influential theoreticians of the historical moment of the radical left in postwar Italy and it is essential to have his works accessible in English.”
—Fredric Jameson, author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
“In the early 1970s I read Tronti religiously.”
—Silvia Federici, author of Revolution At Point Zero and Caliban and the Witch
“Every generation of revolutionary anti-capitalists has to come to terms with how to read afresh the classic formulations of Marx and Lenin in ways appropriate to the conditions of their times. How Tronti and some of his close colleagues did this in the 1960s is a spectacular and inspirational example of how to re-theorize class formation and the practices of class struggle from a ground-up and workerist perspective. While our contemporary world may be very different, there is much to be learned not only conceptually but also methodologically from Tronti’s brilliant and incisive interventions at all levels in the politics of his era.?”
—David Harvey
author of
Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason