Mario Tronti Quotes
Mario Tronti was an Italian Marxist political philosopher, the founding theorist of operaismo or workerism, and a senator of the Italian Republic. His Workers and Capital reversed the classical Marxist priority by arguing that the working class, not capital, is the constitutive agent of capitalist development, since capital must always run after the struggles by which living labor refuses to be absorbed. The quotes below are attributed to Mario Tronti, organized by topic.
Mario Tronti on Politics
-
Attributed to Mario Tronti:
“Working-class struggle is what moves capital, not the other way around.”
-
Attributed to Mario Tronti:
“Marxism without the autonomy of the working class is bourgeois social science.”
-
Attributed to Mario Tronti:
“The political is not the application of theory; it is the moment in which thought becomes action.”
-
Attributed to Mario Tronti:
“Defeat is the school in which revolutionaries learn to think.”
-
Attributed to Mario Tronti:
“We must read capital from the standpoint of labor, not labor from the standpoint of capital.”