Tronti and Weber

I am just making a note here that I highly recommend the article "Workerisms' Inimical Incursions: On Mario Tronti's Weberianism" by Sara R. Farris, published in Historical Materialism 19.3.  Typically workerism, or operaismo as it was known in Italy, is taken as part of the New Left radical break with the orthodox Marxism of the day.  Operaismo laid the foundations for what would transform in the 1970's into autonomia and is today the ground for one wing of anti-political Marxism.  However the philosophical commitments of workerism have been largely under-analysed, not straying too far from a strict anti-Hegelianism and anti-dialecticial position most notably championed by Timparano and Colleti in Italy and Althusser in France (Althusser would later have a direct influence on theoreticisn of autonomia like Antonio Negri, though not per se on Tronti.)  Certainly, the connection between operaismo and Weber has been little explored and so we are indebted to Sara Ferris for doing just that.

This is important because for all of its claims to want to break with the stultifying influence of Orthodox Marxism, commitment to Weber ends up supplying a way for operaismo to reconcile itself with the right-wing shift of the 1980's and beyond.  There is a kernel of rapprochement in the very heart of Tronti's project that makes it suspect, and that allows us to see not the incoherence, but the fundamental coherence, of his drift back to a very statist Real Politik.

I highly recommend reading this alongside Marcel Stoetzler's excellent essays on anti-Semitism and the foundations of sociology.