![工潮 [gʊŋ'ʧaʊ]](http://www.gongchao.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/cropped-main-gongchao-banner-scaled-1.jpg)
(To download the Chinese book-PDFs, please, click on the covers of the three volumes.)
The Italian Marxist current operaismo (workerism) developed out of the social conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s and the failure of the contemporary socialist and communist parties to analyze and understand the changes of class politics at the time.
The legacy of operaismo is not an encapsulated political ideology but rather a set of experiences, tools and methods of analysis and intervention into class struggle that the protagonists developed to regain an understanding of class struggles in Italy – and to be able to participate.
The similarity of Italy’s development in the 1950s and 1960s (that brought about operaismo) is striking when compared to China’s 1990s and 2000s: rapid industrialization, changing relations of production, new industrial technologies, mass internal migration, the making of a new class composition, increasing numbers of strikes and other forms of labor unrest, and the change of the situation of women.
That is why we think that the concepts and experience of Italian operaisti would be an inspiring contribution to the debate on Marxist thought and social conflicts in China and do help with the understanding of processes of class composition there.
So we, a circle of people from several continents, initiated this project to translate and publish central texts from operaismo – as well as critical contributions from a feminist perspective – in Chinese.
A first compilation of such texts was published in Chinese as a book in late 2017, and the Chinese translation of several articles appeared in 2018 (all documented on the Chinese project page: 工人主义及其批判).
Two more volumes were published in November 2018 under the title “The Proletariat Goes to Paradise: Class Struggle and Theoretical Exploration in Italy’s 1960s and 1970s” and include these texts:
Raniero Panzieri. The Capitalist Use of Machinery, 1961:
机器的资本主义运用
Mario Tronti. Lenin in England, 1964:
列宁在英格兰
Romano Alquati. Struggle at FIAT, 1964:
菲亚特铸造厂的野猫斗争
Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Women and the Subversion of Society, 1971:
妇女与社会颠覆
Antonio Negri. Crisis of the Planner-State, 1971:
计划国家的危机
Sergio Bologna. The factory-society relationship as an historical category, 1974:
作为历史范畴的社会–工厂关系
Silvia Federici.(Wages Against Housework, 1975:
反抗家务劳动的工资
Autonomous Assembly of Alfa Romeo. Against the state as boss, 1973:
政府做老板 工人也能反
As an introduction for these volumes we conducted an interview with Ferruccio Gambino (2018: 工人而非那些外人或许就会有最终决定权) that we also document in English here: “The workers may have the last word, not those who are on the outside“.
Another volume includes the Chinese translation of Nanni Balestrini’s novel “Vogliamo tutto” (1971; We want everything) which is, actually, based on interviews Balestrini conducted with a worker from southern Italy who was involved in wildcat strikes and other protests in the late 1960s in Turin and other cities in the north. His name is Alfonso Natella. We conducted a short interview with him in early 2018 (它是我的故事) which serves as an introduction to the Chinese edition. Here is the interview with Alfonso in English: “It is my story“.
Guido Borio wrote a chronology of operaismo and class struggles in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s (documented here in English and Chinese), and we added two glossaries with explanations on the most important terms and actors (glossary of terms documented here in Chinese).
