Why am I passionate about this?
I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the concept of time, history, and politics. My first publications were in the philosophy of history. I started by translating some Left Hegelians. Then I moved toward Kant and Benjamin. My research background was constituted by the attempt to liberate Marxism from any kind of teleological philosophy of history. Recently, I began digging into concrete historical cases to extract political and legal categories. I’m interested in the reactivation of past possibilities to reconfigure the present and open alternative futures. I am now fortunate to teach courses on Temporalities and History in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC.
Massimiliano's book list on a Marxist’s conception of time, history, and politics
Why did Massimiliano love this book?
This book is one of the texts that gave rise to Italian “operaismo.”
For me, as for many other Marx scholars, it is a fundamental text that teaches how to look at capitalist relations from the perspective of class struggle. This shift in perspective means looking at capital as a response to a conflict that forces it into constant restructuring, innovation, and reconfiguration.
The conflict also innervates workers' institutions, so that sometimes a refusal to participate in a strike can also be read and acted upon as a refusal to participate in the union's reformist and compromising politics. It is a way of reading social relations to free their political potential.
1 author picked Workers and Capital as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most important work produced by operaismo, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and extra-parliamentary Left in Italy and beyond. In the decade after its first publication in 1966, the debates over Workers and Capital produced new methods of analysis and a new vocabulary for thousands of militants, helping to inform the new forms of workplace, youth and community struggles. Concepts like 'neocapitalism', 'class composition', 'mass-worker', 'the plan of capital', 'workers' inquiry' and 'co-research' became an established part of the Italian Left's political lexicon. Over five…