Mario Tronti

Who is Mario Tronti?

Mario Tronti is an Italian philosopher and politician, considered as one of the founders of the theory of operaismo in the 1960s.

An active member of the Italian Communist Party during the 1950s, he was, with Raniero Panzieri, amongst the founders of the Quaderni Rossi review from which he split in 1963 to found the Classe Operaia review. This evolving journey progressively distanced him from the PCI, without ever formally leaving, and engaged him in the radical experiences of operaismo. Such an experiences, considered by many to be the matrix of the Italian New Left in the 1960s, was characterised by challenging the roles of the traditional organisations of the workers' movement and the direct engagement, without intermediaries, with the working class itself and to the struggles in the factories.

Influenced philosophically by the work of Galvano Della Volpe, which lead him to distance himself from the thinking of Antonio Gramsci, or at least the official version promulgated by the PCI, Tronti dedicated himself to the formulation of a politics, basing theory on practice, which could renew traditional Marxism and contribute to re-opening the revolutionary road in the West.