# Autonomism
**Autonomism** (also called autonomist Marxism) is a form of anti-authoritarian Marxism that emphasizes the autonomy of the working class from capital, from official parties, and from trade unions. It emerged from the Italian political current known as operaismo, or "workerism," in 1960s Italy, and it is often misidentified by anarchists as a Marxist deviation and by Marxists as a form of anarchism; it is in fact something in between, a Marxism with a strong bent toward localism, horizontal decision-making, and anti-authoritarianism.[1](https://pure.aber.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/10682869/Marshall_Thomas.pdf) • [2](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1521/siso.2015.79.2.221)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Definition | A form of anti-authoritarian Marxism premised on the autonomy of the proletariat from capital, parties, and unions[1](https://pure.aber.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/10682869/Marshall_Thomas.pdf) • [3](https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/942) |
| Origins | Operaismo, founded by dissidents in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in the early 1960s[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) |
| Founding journals | *Quaderni Rossi* (1961), launched by Raniero Panzieri, and *Classe Operaia* (1964), founded by Mario Tronti[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) |
| Peak of struggle | The "Hot Autumn" of 1969, when 5.5 million workers, 25% of the Italian labor force, went on strike[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) |
| Core concepts | Class composition (technical and political), the "mass worker," refusal of work, the social factory, immaterial labor, the multitude[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) • [5](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263276408097794) |
| End of the Italian phase | State repression from 7 April 1979, with about 15,000 activists imprisoned, and the defeat of the workers at Fiat in 1980[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) |
| Later reach | Hardt and Negri's *Empire* (2000) and *Multitude* (2006) carried autonomist ideas into the English-speaking academy[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) |
## Origins in Italian operaismo
Operaismo emerged in the early 1960s when young dissidents in the [Italian Communist Party](https://www.edgepedia.org/italian-communist-party) and the [Italian Socialist Party](https://www.edgepedia.org/italian-socialist-party) applied Marx's critique of political economy against both capitalism and the social democratic Left. It was a recalcitrant "workerist" response to the planned integration of workers into a popular-front program of rapid industrial development, managerial prerogatives in the factories, and a notion of "neutral" technology that elided antagonistic class relations at the point of production.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347)
**Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia.** In *Quaderni Rossi*, the first operaist journal, founded in 1961, Raniero Panzieri advocated a renewed investigation of working-class reality "from below and in forms of total democracy" as a means to challenge the PSI's dogmatic conception of socialism. *Classe Operaia*, founded by Mario Tronti, broke from *Quaderni Rossi* in 1964, and a series of extra-parliamentary journals and groups followed, including *Contropiano*, *Lotta Continua*, *Potere Operaio*, and *Autonomia Operaia*.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) Antonio Negri, a leading figure of the current, later described so-called operaismo as an attempt to reply politically to the crisis of the labor movement during the 1950s.[6](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18fs7pq)
The movement's method included workers' inquiries conducted as "co-research" (conricerca) between intellectuals and workers, pioneered by Romano Alquati at FIAT in 1961. These inquiries broke down the researcher-researched dichotomy of conventional sociology and underpinned the emerging concepts of class composition and the "mass worker," the relatively undifferentiated, unskilled assembly-line worker of Taylorism-Fordism.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) • [7](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-review-of-social-history/article/transnational-radicals-labour-dissent-and-political-activism-in-detroit-and-turin-19501970/FB2BF7737F1D260A47DD2CFC58E18F91)
## The Copernican inversion and refusal of work
The theoretical core of operaismo was what its adherents called a "Copernican revolution" of class perspectives: instead of treating capital's development as the driving force that shapes labor, it placed workers' struggles first, as the driver of capitalist development. This reading drew on Marx's investigations into workers' demands for a shorter working day in the mid-nineteenth century, which forced capital to develop its technological basis and concentrate production in the [factory system](https://www.edgepedia.org/factory-system), inadvertently creating the conditions for massified workers' struggles.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347)
From this premise followed the "strategy of refusal," the struggle against work itself, which Mario Tronti made a primary objective of operaismo and which distinguishes autonomist approaches from union practices aimed only at better conditions within work.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) Operaismo reworked Marx's phrase that the proletariat, in winning its own emancipation, will free all humanity, into the claim that the working class, by pursuing its own partial interests, creates a general crisis in the relations of capital.[8](https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii73/articles/mario-tronti-our-operaismo.pdf)
## Class composition
**Class composition** is widely regarded as operaismo's most important and enduring category. It links the forms of struggle to the changing forms of production through two aspects: technical composition, the technological and supervisory means by which capital and the state control and divide workers in the workplace and community, and political composition, how workers and the unwaged seek to overcome those divisions through unification, massification, and recombination.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347)
As class struggle and structural changes in production shift the composition of the class, the appropriate form of counter-organization must change too, in continual processes of composition, decomposition, and recomposition. The US journal *Zerowork* gave an influential four-part framework: analysis of the struggles themselves; study of the dynamics of different sectors of the working class; the relation of the working class to official organizations such as unions and workers' parties, without identifying the class with those organizations; and the relation of all these to capitalist initiative in investment, technology, and social planning.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347)
## From operaismo to autonomia
The worker-student agitations of 1968 produced a new composition of struggle in the "Hot Autumn" of 1969, when 5.5 million workers, 25% of the labor force, struck. The mass worker deployed tactics including wildcat, checkerboard, and hiccup strikes, sabotage, working to rule, base committees, occupations, and internal factory demonstrations. From the late 1960s antagonism shifted beyond the factory walls to education, urban struggles over housing, transport, and utilities, and feminist struggles in social reproduction.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347)
**Autonomia as a mass movement.** In the 1970s autonomia emerged as a mass movement uniting women, young people, cultural workers, migrants, the unwaged, and students, culminating in the "Movement of '77." The movement's theory and practice of workers' autonomy and the [refusal of work](https://www.edgepedia.org/refusal-of-work) from 1973 to 1980 is treated as the historical core of Autonomia, an evolution of Italian workerism.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) • [9](https://repository.mdx.ac.uk/download/2e9ee5f824fcab0d56a18bf476b6e764896536e1d3738df1bcb0652bcf38f630/16168572/Cunninghame.phd.pdf)
[The Italian](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-italian) phase ended under repression. Between 1979 and 1983 a sweeping state crackdown on the [Red Brigades](https://www.edgepedia.org/red-brigades) served as an alibi for the exceptionalist imprisonment of 15,000 movement activists in "special prisons," beginning with arrests on 7 April 1979. The defeat of the workers at Fiat in 1980 popularly dates operaismo's demise in its original Italian phase.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) Mario Tronti's memoir draws a sharp distinction between classical operaismo and its "distant echo," autonomism, which persisted on the counter-cultural margins of Europe's cities from the late 1970s and re-emerged, in his phrase in a more hygienic form, in Hardt and Negri's *Empire* at the turn of the century.[8](https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii73/articles/mario-tronti-our-operaismo.pdf)
## Key concepts and later development
Autonomist writing introduced or developed a set of concepts that circulated widely beyond the movement. The social factory names the intermeshing of sociality with the dictates of capital, the idea that capitalist command extends across society rather than stopping at the factory gate; what were formerly qualities of private, affective, and intimate life become kinds of labor that can be commodified.[10](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/8280/6647) Immaterial labor and the multitude are associated especially with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose concepts have been particularly influential in interrogating labor exploitation in the digital economy.[5](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263276408097794) • [10](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/8280/6647) The general intellect, drawn from Marx's *Grundrisse*, became an iconic autonomist concept, developed for contemporary conditions by writers such as Paolo Virno and Maurizio Lazzarato.[11](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08935696.2018.1502309)
After *Empire* (2000) and *Multitude* (2006) became best sellers, the English-speaking academy took up other Italian thinkers associated with the current, including Franco Berardi, Paolo Virno, and Lazzarato, as well as theorists such as Harry Cleaver and John Holloway. For geographers this work spoke against "capital-centric" analyses and to the forms of agency and resistance in the alter-globalization movement.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347) From the early 1970s onward, groups in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere, including *Zerowork*, *Midnight Notes*, *Big Flame*, and *Wildcat*, translated and applied operaismo's conceptual lexicon to their own circumstances, and recent autonomist-inspired work addresses call center labor, the commons, platform capitalism, social-reproductive struggles, migration, logistics, and resistance to racial capitalism.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347)
Autonomist theory has also shaped the understanding of specific movements. Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, John Holloway, and Harry Cleaver broadly influenced how both scholars and activists understand the [Zapatista uprising](https://www.edgepedia.org/zapatista-uprising), reading it as transitional between the "old" hierarchical Leninist party form and the "new" distributed network form of the multitude.[12](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327996044_Autonomist_Marxist_Interpretations_of_the_Zapatista_Uprising_A_Critique) In post-2008 social movements, the autonomist approach to commons places political action in a relation with capital, unlike Marxist approaches such as neo-Gramscian social movement theory, and frames movements as "commons movements," as in the Bene Comune movement in Rome and Occupy Oakland.[13](https://research.aber.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/autonomist-marxism-critique-and-the-commons-in-post-2008-social-m/)
## Critiques
Critics have targeted both the new concepts and the reinterpretations of Marx. One line of criticism addresses the post-workerist new class subject and concepts such as immaterial labor, the general intellect, and the "knowledge- or information-based capitalist"; another concentrates on autonomist reinterpretations of major Marxist subject matters, including the law of value, "The Fragment on Machines," and the connection between the forces and relations of production.[14](https://open.metu.edu.tr/bitstream/handle/11511/110883/Thesis%20Template%20%282%29.pdf) Within this second line, postoperaist scholars' charge that the Marxist law of value is obsolete has itself been critically addressed in the recent literature.[15](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21598282.2024.2431468)
Linda Martín Alcoff and José Alcoff, writing in *Science & Society*, identify three lines of critique of autonomism: its handling of the relation of class and race, its refusal to work with organized labor, and what they call the fetishism of autonomy itself.[2](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1521/siso.2015.79.2.221) An empirical test of the framework against the Bene Comune and Occupy Oakland movements found the autonomist method successful at offering a thick description of the movements, their participants, and local issues, but less successful at theorizing the relationship between movement practice and capitalism, a problem the thesis author traces to a conflation of the logic of the political with the structural conditions of capital.[13](https://research.aber.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/autonomist-marxism-critique-and-the-commons-in-post-2008-social-m/) Critics within the tradition have also argued that post-autonomous theory tends to abandon the grounded, materialist analysis of class composition for imprecise, totalizing concepts that flatten class reality, with the "fuzzy concept" of the multitude cited as the exemplary case.[4](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347)
## References
1. [Marshall, T. J. H. (2015). Autonomist Marxism, critique and the Commons in post-2008 social movements (thesis summary), Aberystwyth University](https://pure.aber.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/10682869/Marshall_Thomas.pdf)
2. [Alcoff, L. M., & Alcoff, J. (2015). Autonomism in Theory and Practice. Science & Society 79(2)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1521/siso.2015.79.2.221)
3. [Autonomist Marxist Theory and Practice in the Current Crisis. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies](https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/942)
4. [Gray, N., & Clare, N. (2022). From autonomous to autonomist geographies. Progress in Human Geography 46(5)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325221114347)
5. [Gill, R., & Pratt, A. (2008). In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work. Theory, Culture & Society 25(7-8)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263276408097794)
6. [Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18fs7pq)
7. [Transnational Radicals: Labour Dissent and Political Activism in Detroit and Turin (1950–1970). International Review of Social History](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-review-of-social-history/article/transnational-radicals-labour-dissent-and-political-activism-in-detroit-and-turin-19501970/FB2BF7737F1D260A47DD2CFC58E18F91)
8. [Tronti, M. (2012). Our Operaismo. New Left Review II/73](https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii73/articles/mario-tronti-our-operaismo.pdf)
9. [Cunninghame, P. Chapter Four: the theory and practice of workers autonomy and the refusal of work, 1973–1980, Middlesex University thesis](https://repository.mdx.ac.uk/download/2e9ee5f824fcab0d56a18bf476b6e764896536e1d3738df1bcb0652bcf38f630/16168572/Cunninghame.phd.pdf)
10. [Laundering women's history: A feminist critique of the social factory. First Monday](https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/8280/6647)
11. [An Autonomist Marcuse? Rethinking Marxism 30(2)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08935696.2018.1502309)
12. [Autonomist Marxist Interpretations of the Zapatista Uprising: A Critique, ResearchGate](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327996044_Autonomist_Marxist_Interpretations_of_the_Zapatista_Uprising_A_Critique)
13. [Marshall, T. J. H. (2016). Autonomist Marxism, critique and the Commons in post-2008 social movements. Doctoral thesis, Aberystwyth University](https://research.aber.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/autonomist-marxism-critique-and-the-commons-in-post-2008-social-m/)
14. [Critiques of Autonomism (chapter 3), METU thesis](https://open.metu.edu.tr/bitstream/handle/11511/110883/Thesis%20Template%20%282%29.pdf)
15. [The Autonomist Thesis of the Crisis of Value: Critiques and Perspectives. International Critical Thought 14(4)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21598282.2024.2431468)
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