Class composition is the operaismo concept that the technical and social arrangement of workers at a given historical moment determines the forms of resistance available to them. It has two dimensions: technical composition (the machinery, processes, spatial arrangements, and skill requirements that structure work) and social composition (the social relations, cultural practices, and political traditions that workers bring to and develop within their workplaces and communities).
The concept’s power lies in its dynamic: capital decomposes, workers recompose. When workers develop effective forms of struggle — the assembly line produced the mass strike, the concentrated factory produced the workers’ council — capital restructures the labor process to break those forms. Automation, outsourcing, platform work, and gig economy fragmentation are not neutral technological developments. They are capital’s responses to the forms of solidarity that previous arrangements made possible.
Recomposition is the counter-movement: workers finding new forms of organization that correspond to the new technical arrangement. Each cycle of decomposition and recomposition changes what class struggle looks like. The factory worker’s strike looks nothing like the platform worker’s coordinated logout, but both emerge from the specific composition of their moment.
Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri developed the concept through the journals Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia in the 1960s.