In this episode of Anarchist Book Club we discuss Steve Wright's 'Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism' (Pluto, 2017). Our conversation takes us through the roots of autonomism and its relationship to the PCI (Italian Communist Party) in post-war Italy, into reflections on the practice of work-place inquiry and the efforts to build a useful theory of class struggle and political change from this approach. We also reflect on the value of a historical approach, often lacking in in workerist theory and journals, with the notable exception of the journal Primo Maggio. We conclude by discussing the legacy and continuing relevance of autonomism in the present day.

Some contemporary applications of workerism mentioned in the show:

AngryWorkers recent publication Class Power on Zero Hours: https://pmpress.org.uk/product/class-power-on-zero-hours/. See also https://classpower.net/intro/

Notes from Below: https://notesfrombelow.org/, and their recent free ebook with Workers Inquiry Network on the COVID-19 crisis: 'Struggle in a Pandemic': https://notesfrombelow.org/issue/struggle-pandemic

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The podcast music is Stealing Orchestra & Rafael Dionísio,  'Gente da minha terra (que me mete um nojo do caralho).' Reproduced from the Free Music Archive under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

The podcast logo is an adapted version of the Left Book Club logo (1936-48), reproduced, edited and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence. Original available here

The image in this episode is 'Manifestazione di lavoratori in sciopero durante l'autunno caldo' (1969), an image in the public domain available here: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sciopero_autunno_caldo.jpg