L'opéraïsme et le pouvoir ouvrier dans l'usine – le cas de Porto Marghera

To study how workerism understands workers' power in the factory, we start from texts of different kinds (theoretical, political, artistic, testimonial, etc.) written by Porto Marghera activists and workers. While workerists conceive of workers' power as autonomy (from both capital and established workers' organizations), for them this does not mean to positively exercise this workers’s power, either in the factory (where it would be a matter of directing production) or in society as a whole. In contrast to such a positive model of workers' power, which Gramsci espoused during the Turin factory council movement (1919-1920), the workerists develop a negative approach, seeing workers' power primarily as resistance and as the interruption of production, and more generally as the intensification of the proletariat's antagonistic capacity, in the perspective of the refusal of work. In concrete struggles (around wages, working hours, noxiousness, etc.), the development of this workers' power certainly implies exercising certain types of control over the work process (modifying its rhythm, organization, etc.). But this does not, at least for the actors involved, amount to calling into question the fundamental negativity of workers' power, since such an indirect controlI s often no more than the effect of specific negations (interruption of work at specific times or places, for example), and is seen only as a moment aimed at intensifying the struggle and the capacity for interruption at a later date.