Autonomism (Italian: autonomia) is a Marxist-inflected political tradition that originated in Italy in the 1960s–1970s, centered on the claim that working-class struggle is the motor of capitalist development — not its response to it — and that the most radical form of struggle is the refusal of work itself. Where orthodox Marxism treats capital as the active subject and labor as the exploited object, autonomism inverts the relation: workers’ resistance forces capital to restructure, automate, and reorganize.
The tradition begins with operaismo (workerism), associated with Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, and the journals Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia in the early 1960s. Tronti’s “Strategy of Refusal” (1966) argued that the working class should be understood not through its productive capacity but through its capacity to refuse production — to withdraw labor, sabotage routines, and break the identification of life with work.
In the 1970s, autonomia became a mass movement in Italy, extending beyond the factory to encompass students, the unemployed, feminists, and precarious workers. Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework campaign extended the analysis to social reproduction: domestic labor, care work, and biological reproduction as forms of unwaged labor that capital appropriates. The movement was crushed through mass arrests in the late 1970s (the April 7 trials), but its intellectual lineage continues through post-operaismo (Negri, Hardt, Virno, Lazzarato) and through its influence on anarchist anti-work theory, including Alfredo Bonanno’s insurrectionary approach.
For this research program, autonomism provides the political-economic analysis of why work is not merely exploitation (the Marxist category) but a structure of domination that reorganizes relations between persons, land, time, and community — which connects to the decolonial analysis of waged labor as a colonial technology.
Key figures
- Mario Tronti — Strategy of Refusal
- Silvia Federici — Wages for Housework, Caliban and the Witch
- Alfredo Bonanno — insurrectionary anarchist influenced by autonomism
Related
- Anti-work — the broader tradition
- Operaismo — the founding tendency
- Refusal of work — the central practice
- Social reproduction — the feminist extension
- Anarchism — the tradition that inherits autonomism’s refusal