Industrial democracy between neocapitalism and postfordism. The political and intellectual trajectory of Bruno Trentin (1926-2007)

Francesco Sabato Massimo ()
Additional contact information
Francesco Sabato Massimo: CSO - Centre de sociologie des organisations (Sciences Po, CNRS) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: During his long political trajectory Bruno Trentin (1926-2007) never ceased to question the relationship between work and democracy. The Italian intellectual and trade union leader denounced the domination of the «productivist ideology» of scientific management over the entire social and political Left. According to this ideology, trade union action was reduced to the animation of distributive conflict, while the political struggle was played out outside the economic sphere, through the conquest of the state. Contrary to this vision, the 1960s were the source of a new self-management political culture, born of the encounter between the Marxist, Christian and libertarian traditions of the labour movement, which aimed to make workers and their unions «political subjects» in their own right by gaining real decision-making power over the organisation of work. The decline of Fordism offers an opportunity for a new "contract" in which work can achieve its political recognition and autonomy within the workplace and not from outside. It is from this history that Trentin draws to defend the actuality of a project of liberation from subordinate «work». In this article I reinscribe Trentin's reflections in the long history of his career as an intellectual, trade unionist and political activist, as well as in the controversies and the impasses that have shaped his life and the history whole Italian and European labour movement during the twentieth century.

Keywords: Organisational democracy; Unions and labour history; Industrial relations; Neocapitalism; Postfordism; Italian and European Left; Democrazia organizzativa; Storia del sindacato e del lavoro; Relazioni industriali; Neocapitalismo; Postfordismo; Sinistra italiana ed europea (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pol
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04512692
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Studi organizzativi, 2023, 2, pp.27-50. ⟨10.3280/SO2023-002002⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04512692/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04512692

DOI: 10.3280/SO2023-002002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().