Sartre’s Second Volume

‘Everything is given in the least punch…’

Serge Mallet

When the last concentrated burst of class struggle in Europe’s industry receded in the early to mid seventies, two broad visions of industrial politics had come to coexist on the Left. In many ways, these two positions were diametrically opposed political readings of the massive changes that had swept through industry in post-war capitalism in the fifties & sixties. The first was an attempt to restate the case for workers’ control not in terms of abstract theory but by looking at changes in the working class and, behind the class, in the nature of industry as a whole. This was a French innovation and its defining text was Mallet’s 1963 book La nouvelle classe ouvrière (The New Working Class). The other stream was peculiarly Italian and went back to the splits that resulted when Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri broke with Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) and formed their own review Classe Operaia in 1964. The overall perspective of this current, more nebulous than ‘workers control’, is best conveyed by the slogan ‘the strategy of the refusal’.