2026-05-03.1_S Bologna - composizione di classe translation

note: this is a personal translation and in no way meant to be authoritative, i’m afraid you’ll have to learn italian for something close to that ;).

original text: https://www.infoaut.org/notes/operaismo-e-composizione-di-classe

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The concept of class composition is the frame (l’architrave) of the operaist copernican revolution, and one of the principal points of rupture with the marxist tradition and its ossifications. Through this concept the universal icon of the working-class, and its disembodied mythology functional to the needs of real socialism, is shattered to materially understand its partial existence, with its contradictions, differences and internal hierarchies. This text by Sergio Bologna, one of the key figures involved in the elaboration of this concept and of its transformations, is decisive to understand the origin, meaning and contemporary significance of this category, and of the relationship between technical and political composition. The result of a lecture held in 2012 in the context of a seminar cycle at Bologna di Commonware-UniNomade, the text was published the following year in the collection ‘Genealogie del futuro. Sette lezioni per sovvertire il presente’ (edited by G. Roggero and A. Zanini, ombre corte). The methodological input with which Bologna concludes: “look, before speaking you really have to know a lot”, is a compass for political and militant formation (formazione*).

For further engagement we recommend the volumes of the “Biblioteca dell’operaismo” (https://www.deriveapprodi.com/edizioni/catalogo/collane/biblioteca-delloperaismo/) and “Italian Operaismo” (Gigi Roggero, 2023); in addition, “Ceti medi senza futuro” (DeriveApprodi, 2007) is useful reading to analyze the developments of the concept of class composition in Sergio Bologna’s work.

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I asked myself if a term such as class composition could be effectively understood, in the meaning that we attributed to it, with one’s rear seated in some armchair or at a desk in some university classroom. Because if there is something specific or particular about the experience of the so-called operaisti I think that it was just this desire to understand, first and foremost, the complexity of the present. We’ll say that the term class composition was used with extreme nonchalance by the (communist) party and militants and by the unions, like a term that explained everything. Personally i always had the impression that the step forward that we contributed was pointing out that the term working-class, on its own, doesn’t mean much. In fact this concept presupposes an enormous complexity that we must understand. Therefore the concept of class composition was born from the need to engage this complexity. This seemingly all-encompassing term, class composition, was one of the tools we used to start to see what was hiding within the category of working-class: an idea of complexity, that is, a world full of contradictions, a world of difference from zone to zone, difference from sector to sector, difference within sectors themselves. Therefore I maintain that this was the true moment that determined the detachment of operaismo from the tradition preceding it, which had become ossified and stagnant even after the fifties and sixties; it’s very probable that this awareness of the complexity of the term working-class was already present from the very origins of the communist movement and the revolutionary movement. We were a group of intellectuals, probably ambitious and to some extent generous, who had to not only find ways to understand reality but also figure out our own field of action: what we wanted and what we had to deal with.

In reality our field of action was the factory, in which there were worlds, cities, in which thousands of people lived and worked. I think that surely our primordial intention, the most simple one, we may even call it apolitical, was that of wanting this institution to explode. We wanted this entire system, which is a system of discipline, as well as a system of production, to become a site of social unrest, in short, to become a site of a social or mass movement; we didn’t have to invent this, it was based on a series of preceding stories. I’ll say that, in my opinion, one in particular played a non-negligible role in this process and is not spoken of often: the 1960 strike by Milanese electromechanical workers. This episode is not remembered much, not even in our operaist literature, which has always attributed the beginning of the twenty year cycle of struggle to the 1961 battles and strikes at Lancia in Turin. In actuality this cycle began with the impressive strike organized by the electromechanics that involved 70.000 people, including workers, technicians and so on, in a city that hadn’t seen workers’ struggle in that intensity for a long time. Turin was the city of automobile industry, Milan was the city of light and heavy electromechanical industry; meaning it was in part the component city, we need only remember Marelli and Pirelli, but it was above all the city of heavy electromechanical industry, including production of trains, parts of train tracks and also materials for nuclear power plants. We can say that the working-class of this imposing sector woke up in conjunction with the expiration of the 1960 employment contract. Some years ago I started collecting testimonies from some survivors of these battles with a comrade that had been an executive of the Young Communists at that time. From the testimonies, a very high level of perfection of the struggle emerges, meaning it was made to outlast the boss by just one minute, it was made to bear the least damage in terms of wage to those that were conducting it. The forms of expression and demonstration (manifestazione) of that period of history would successively become generalized forms of struggle: for example the use of whistles spread to all workers’ demonstrations in the sixties, becoming a bit of a symbol. Then, the brilliant idea of the silent march: in many of these factories the workers made wooden clogs and they devised a silent march where the only audible sound was that of the clogs beating against the cobblestone, which sent shivers down your spine.

I remember that this strike of Milan was my first point of contact with the struggles of the rank-and-file/mass worker (operaio di massa), and it lasted for over a year taking all possible forms. This battle was still conducted by the old antifascist avant-garde, in a certain sense by persons, by workers that had participated in the last years of the resistance and who were seventeen in 1944; consequently they knew every type of struggle, but most of all they knew the cycle of production to perfection and were therefore able to know which points to block to stop the entire cycle; in particular the toolmakers/riggers (attrezzisti) were those most involved, meaning those that prepare the processing machine (la macchina utensile), they were those in charge of the lathes, therefore were inside the figure of the old specialized worker, not yet the so-called mass worker. The most impressive thing was that for the first time women burst onto the scene of the struggle in a predominant way. The women were in charge of the assembly line, they represented the mass worker, making the mass worker an essentially feminine figure. Most of all at Siemens, big factories that already had strong serial production, men were the specialized workers, if we want we could call them the so-called labor aristocracy, while women were in charge of the assembly, of the serialized operations. There is a beautiful interview with a union woman from that time about that struggle which we reproduced in the accompanying booklet to our documentary ‘Oltre il ponte. Storie di lavoro’; she was a rank-and-file union woman, that is those that stood in front of the factory gates all day to wait for the workers. She provides a wonderful testimony, also about the role of women in that factory.

This first example, a struggle that started from the management/direction (direzione) of the Fiom (the Italian federation of metalworkers), and therefore was almost in contrast with the Cgil (the Italian general confederation of labor), and definitely in contrast with the Pci (the Italian communist party), also lead to some complex moments. This first big demonstration made us understand in a substantial manner that these factories can effectively “explode” and above all it made us understand what exploding means. We understood then that this was a possible path; it wasn’t certain that we had to take it, but we did have to favor it. The first step on this path was knowing the cycle of production perfectly in order to be able to communicate, among other things, with the working-class. I’d say that this may have been the first step in our operaist development/formation (formazione operaista), that is, starting to understand how factories work, what is the technical logic that holds the cycle in these massive gadgets, in these massive factories, what kind of relations existed between one workshop and another, and so on.

Allora** there were some fundamental functions at Mirafiori: that of the mechanic workshops, that of the foundries, the presses and, the major part, the so-called car bodies (carrozzerie). Therefore this structure coincided with the fundamental cycle of production: the foundry, where the sheets (lamiere) were prepared; the press department where these sheets were pressed and then the doors came out and the body and sides were prepared; at the same time the mechanical parts were being prepared, meaning the motor, and everything came together in the big department called car body (carrozzeria), although it would have been more apt to call it assembly. Thus we had begun to understand how the automobile cycle worked: first there was this, then this, and from there we understood that if the cycle in a given point stopped, everything stopped. We thus started to comprehend some small aspects (logiche) that were obvious to the workers, but you had to first become familiar with them. This is the depiction of the components of an automobile; therefore during the cycle obviously these parts must be prepared and mounted, in short, it was a relatively complex cycle.

So bit by bit one had to become able to understand what was going on inside a factory, what technologies were involved, because the definition of the class composition, as we will see later, was substantially and closely tied not only to the cycle but also to the technologies. Why was this so important to understand? Because the contact you could have with the working-class always happened at the exit and the entry to the plant, meaning the gates, the doors to the various sections, the mechanical section, the press section etc., those were the moments in which you could approach these people. Therefore not only was it necessary to have a clear notion of the productive cycle, of its sequences, but you had to have a minimum of knowledge about how the entrance doors were arranged, so that you’d know at which door at Mirafiori the assembly workers entered, at the next those of the other section and so on. You had to start to know the places of your interlocutors because the gate was really a strategic point. In fact it was very often that wildcat strikes (gli scioperi improvvisi, gli scoperi spontanei) either happened in the entire workshop (the people entered and just stopped at a certain point), or the gate was blocked; at times the internal committees would use this form of struggle and it could last just an hour: one entered one hour late. In any case the gate was the key point of contact.

Thus we finally start to enter into this idea of class composition, because knowing the cycle one could know, just to make the first big distinction, that in the mechanical workshops, that for example in particular in the presses and then surely also in the foundries there were specialized workers because they worked on the car, therefore they had to know the process machines (macchine utensili), they had to be toolmakers, they therefore had to know a whole series of elements that one in charge of the mounting didn’t know; in the assembly, on the other hand, there were assembly line workers, the unskilled, and one learned that these two worlds were very different from another, even beyond communication at times. This was the first element of class composition; namely class composition means that we have different categories within the working-class, categories that if we consider them simply/only as union categories we won’t be able to understand the complexity, if we see behind these categories not only the job and the relationship with the paycheck, but also a whole series of deeply rooted and cultural elements, we begin to truly enter this complexity. In fact we talked of two forms of class composition: political composition and technical composition. Cultural factors obviously played a key role in the political composition. For example:

– geographical origin: southern workers, workers who came from the countryside; workers who had previously gone abroad;

– gender;

– work experience/position; this was a fundamental factor, for example among the leaders of the workers’ struggle at Fiat in those years there were southern or venetian workers who had emigrated to Germany or Belgium five or ten years earlier, and who had worked in the most modern factories and thus had a much greater experience and culture of industry than their colleagues, these workers returned to Italy because they had the possibility to when Fiat started hiring again in 1957; but they were top-notch people who also had union experience. Therefore they were people who really knew the technologies well, they made the comparison, how the press department was at Volkswagen, how it was here, thus they would give you a whole series of cultural elements that then became fundamental in the elaboration of their list of demands. Professional mentalities and ideologies, exactly, for example the toolmaker, a classic worker of the labor aristocracy, was one who at times looked down from above on the assembly worker (l’operaio di montaggio);

– family composition: obviously, single workers would not necessarily have more courage, but they would probably have more capacity/availability for struggle than a worker with their family behind them;

– place of residence: workers living in the cities, living in the countryside, having a plot of land that they worked, living in the periphery/suburbs, what were the problems they experienced in the periphery/suburbs, in summary: what was the community the worker belonged to?;

– other cultural factors of political composition and then, above all, trade union and political training: what experience did they have in the party, what experience did they have in the union?

Therefore it was necessary to keep in mind that the person was extremely complex, that they brought with them a plethora of knowledges and experiences that you simply had to learn from, one needed to stay and listen and learn something; you had persons with/to whom you couldn’t write a flyer like almost all political and non-political groups did back then, conceived in a section of the party or in some small group: “the working-class must fight…”, then you go and you give it to someone who, how to put it, knows more than Bertoldo about any technological aspect. In short, you were dealing with people that had an absolutely extraordinary political and technical culture.

Technical composition on the other hand consisted of all that was tied tightly to the workplace and to the technology involved in the work. For example, if someone worked in the painting department it was clear that they had to have certain characteristics or, in any case, characteristics derived from the fact that they were working in extremely harmful department, which required them to have a whole range of self-protection skills if the company did not provide protection, starting with masks, goggles, gloves and so on. Therefore the same applied to skilled workers, specialized workers, toolmakers, and machine operators.

So political composition and technical composition were two distinct things: for example, a night shift worker obviously had different characteristics than a worker that always worked the day shift. The salary structure is one of the fundamental elements in the relationship, think of the role played by piecework. People were paid on a piecework basis, therefore in their paycheck the fixed part gradually decreased while the variable part increased more and more, in order to increase and incentivize productivity and therefore exploitation. In fact, one of the major dynamics of the struggle of those years was the struggle against piecework: individual piecework, collective piecework, contingency and production bonuses were all objects of struggle. Reading a paycheck was an extremely complex thing and one needed to know how to do it, otherwise you would talk to these people and come across as an idiot trying to sell a worn-out ideology while being unable to speak their language. I am still of the opinion that if we managed to do something more than other groups it was due to this: we studied and deepened, we had respect for these people, considering them in their enormous complexity and not just as the mythic worker who holds in his hand sickle and hammer, the worker of the unbearable rhetoric belonging to other groups. Therefore, when we talk of class composition we’re talking of a long and difficult process of understanding/learning (apprendimento). These weren’t things you could learn in a day, and they weren’t things you read in books. I don’t remember having read most of these things anywhere, I learned them a bit at a time, getting up at five in the morning and going in front of these factories: you felt like the biggest idiot in the world, what the fuck am I doing here? What am I, a college graduate, doing with these people, who, I must say, were nice and didn’t treat you badly. But then when you started to create a minimum of organization, by involving some of these workers in your group, as it was in Marghera in particular, the whole thing took on a different dimension. Here was what I am convinced was the winning strategy/weapon, namely, understanding that there existed an enormous complexity within which you had to have some tools of recognition, analyses, that allowed you to have those elements of dialogue, those elements with which you could understand how it could/might go. In fact, it’s no coincidence that there were a few particularly lucky times when you got it just right (I remember one in 1964 at Innocenti in Milan). You who were outside of the factory, who didn’t have the articulation of the Communist Party, knowing all these things you at times managed to make a well-timed intervention in the moment when there was a growing internal tension that you had heard about, and by making an intervention you actually managed to put a wildcat strike into motion. I remember that time at Innocenti where surely there was something latent that had been simmering for a while and that we had, in part, grasped. We decided to write a flyer designed (calibrato) in a certain way, which among other things contained some information that only someone on the inside could give us, the result: we found ourselves with 6000 workers who at once left and invaded the city-center of Milan. There were certain times you had the impression that you mattered more than you did. This was, I believe, the winning card that, along with the idea of class composition, a term invented by Romano Alquati that I then utilized often, was the important element.

In Italy after the electoral losses of 1948 and especially of 1953 we had a very heavy period of repression inside the factories, where the communist cadres in the internal committees got taken out. So from 1953 to 1960, when this struggle of the electromechanics exploded, there was a period of grave regression of workers’ struggles, the repression was truly extremely strong. The electromechanic strike repeated itself in 1963, when the contract of the electromechanics was renewed and there was another big struggle; in the meantime there had also been the strikes of 1961 and 1962 at Fiat. The situation changed when there was a very negative phase of economic development, with the new period of negative development which goes from 1963 to 1967. Then in 1967 there was a rebound, but in the meantime a enormous movement against the Vietnam war had been created. From now on the factories won’t be alone, while before they were “the workers without allies” (which was a title of “classe operaia”). In the meantime this anti-imperialist movement about the war in Algeria, about Cuba and so on had been created. In 1967 Che Guevara was killed, Hanoi was bombed, in short, a big anti-imperialist movement forms which surely creates a situation of mobilization external to the relations of production. The university struggles started in 1967 at Berkeley and afterwards the year 1968 bursts onto the scene.

How did we arrive at this deadline? And which role did we have in this story? These things matured by themselves inside the factory, they certainly didn’t need us; but i think we had an important role when we managed to intervene in the student movement that was born in 1968 as an anti-authoritarian movement; thus, the whole idea of the complexity underlying the world of production and the working-class, was simply swept aside. In the anti-authoritarian movement, which in any case played an important role in 1968, the relationship was between the subject of the student and the education system as a system of discipline, as the model of a hierarchal system. Therefore the hierarchal system of the factory was obscured, or it was simply not taken into consideration. We who continued to say that the working-class was the decisive subject were somewhat mocked: “yes yes, you delegate to others, the poor workers, what you yourselves should be doing”. This phase only lasted for a bit because the French may came to put things in order; the impact here was made not only by the students but also the workers who occupied the factories and kept the country locked down for about a month. And in the reading of this phenomenon we provided we contributed to once again shifting the attention of the movement. As a result when the 1968 of the workers really started, at Pirelli in Milan, with the rank-and-file committees, we were more or less able to respond and understand. Then from Pirelli we arrive in summer, may to june of 1969, the wildcat strikes at Fiat and then the heated autumn (all’autunno caldo).

In my view there were three strata of militants that determined this change: the first was still that of the old antifascist worker militants, those that always had something to say, meaning they had great deal of political experience, they were people that had done politics when there was blood and death, in short, when there were concentration camps, they were people that you can’t even start to compare to the politicians of today, even the best of them. The second strata was the generation of the rank-and-file worker. It’s important to note that these militant workers, who came up from the departments, often had a great deal of experience and had worked in Belgium or Germany; they were the key element to everything that happened, because they were inside the factory and therefore more than the general struggle, their battleground was the department; they were those who knew every department by heart and knew if you stopped that workshop there you stopped everything. They were the decisive factor and took shape throughout the 1970s, then they were almost completely kicked out of the factories: around ten thousand persons of this strata were expelled after 1980. Surely these people that were in the factory, who were tied to us, who therefore lived this experience, they had a notable role; they were people that very often had experience in the Communist Party or in the Cgil and then gave us a decisive advantage when they entered into contact with our little operaist group.

This, put plainly, is class composition. I won’t get into specifics, but in short the substance of the matter is this: understanding that there is an enormous complexity behind this term, behind this word “working-class”, starting to understand and analyze it, starting to break down this complexity from the technical, cultural and political point(s) of view and making it become a factor of conflict, flipping it into a element of conflict. Because, in my opinion, the temptation this generation of operaists faced is to simply become sociologists, and it is no coincidence that some of Italy’s leading sociologists emerged from there: Massimo Paci, Vittorio Rieser, Givanni Mottura, we filled the Italian universities with distinguished figures, both prominent and less so, all sociologists of the highest caliber. Others, however, wanted to become something other than sociologists, and this term “class composition” was the way we expressed the desire to understand this complexity, which was constantly changing.

What followed was what we all know: the great technological revolution that was also a organizational revolution. It was brain of productive capital itself that started reasoning differently, in a very refined manner, and hence the transition from fordism to toyotism: the installation of the robot, by now moving towards 1980, that is, after ten years during which Fiat had been put under pressure alongside the front line activity of the Brigate rosse (red brigades). Fiat was one of the leading companies in the world on a technological level: the welding robots installed at Fiat in 1980 were at the cutting-edge. So ten years of struggle did that accursed company good, while twenty years of social peace destroyed it: Fiat in 2002 was a failing factory and it still is. In other words, a factory like this will never be built [again]; after twenty-two years of absolute social peace it is shambles, after ten years of struggle it was truly at the vanguard of technology.

And so when you see a factory of today and you compare it to the factory back then, you must admit that in the meantime there has been a technological and organizational leap between them. Following that there was the closure, precisely where there had been no investment in technological innovation: the great revolution that came with the 1980s was that of outsourcing, meaning the company transformed into a company-network. Thus the auto factory that bears the brand does a series of operations, like the design/planning, but other productive operations are delegated externally, for example the body is manufactured by another company. Therefore everything that was done internally before is now done externally. For another example if you go to Volkswagen you’ll see that it kept a couple elements: certainly the entire planning process, but it also kept some elements of the mounting and assembly processes; but other operations were decentralized to other specialized manufacturers who work for other automobile companies, for example, they always make the body for both Volkswagen and Renault. Therefore the working-class is divided, becomes fragmented and at that point we weren’t there anymore, not as a group, nor as a theoretical articulation. In short, this theoretical articulation ceased to have an influence over these movements and therefore our cycle, the operaist cycle, closed alongside fordism. Now we have the new factories in China which, if you will, reproduce the old fordist factory. I speak of China but the same could be said of many countries of the Far East [sic!], in Africa, in South America and so on. Cristina Comencini made a documentary titled ‘In fabbrica’, which is a collage of old Rai documentaries about the struggles of the sixties; the last ten minutes are footage she took inside Brembo, one of the few things in which Italy is still a world leader. Bremo is a factory near Brescia that produces breaks for cars and motorbikes; that factory changed a lot compared to the ones seen by us, those we entered because the workers let us in.

So now we’re dealing with the absence of [blue] collar workers, and one asks: this concept of class composition, can it still be of use with today’s scattered, fragmented and primarily cognitive work? All in all I think that today there is no need to point out that there is enormous complexity, any idiot understands that; what I don’t know is how we can manage to make it an element of unification and recomposition in the present. In any case I think that the methodological input that we gave at the time: “look, before speaking you really have to know a lot”, still stands today. You call it multitude, but one must work within it for a long time to understand anything.

* For more on the translation of formazione see Clara Pope’s translators note in “Italian Operaismo” by Gigi Roggero.

** i refuse to even try to translate this.