L'enquête ouvrière opéraïste par ses archives. Premières hypothèses à partir d'une recherche en cours

This article attempts to reconstruct the workers' inquiry methods used by Italian workerists in the 1960s. To this end, it analyses a corpus of archives that had not previously been used in studies on this subject, and sets out to renew our understanding of this historical experience. After reviewing the ways in which the workerists conceived the inquiry and pointing out the limits of an interpretation of this practice that would confine itself to these discourses, it focuses more particularly on how this type of workers' inquiry became a 'militant inquiry'. Going through the archival materials available, dividing them into groups corresponding to the different stages of a survey (conception, execution, processing and reporting of results), the article seeks to understand how these operations can involve a militant dimension, by trying to identify the underlying type of relationship between intellectual investigators and the workers surveyed. Contrary to a reading that would have us believe that 'co-research' is a practical achievement of this experience, it points to the fact that the act of politicising the investigation here relates above all to the way in which the workers' testimony elicited by the investigators is then mobilised in the arena of the 'symbolic confrontation' that pits them against the 'orthodox' marxists. The article concludes with a proposal to broaden the analysis by examining the training of the workerists in the field of investigation in the context of the formation of the new Italian left, and by briefly modelling the 'metacritical marxism' that developed as a result of this experience.