Mario Tronti: dalla fine al principio

The question of inheritance – of the content of the legacy and its recipients – becomes a central theme in Mario Tronti’s thought towards the end of the twentieth century. It is a matter for him – with a profoundly Benjaminian gesture – of the legacy that the labor movement leaves to the new generations from its defeat and of the prevalence of homo œconomicus over homo politicus, a supremacy made possible by the final affirmation of liberal democracy. Today, when liberal democracy itself is going through a crisis that is in some ways irreversible, the latest Tronti tries to recover – against the neo-populisms currently in the ascendancy – an idea and composition of the people quite different from that “people-all” that, according to the first operaism, neutralized class conflicts; rather, it is possible to recognize a new “composition of the people”: a people of the “forgotten” from which a partisan political point of view can proceed.