If the first great theme which Quademi Rossi appropriated from the dissident Marxism of the 1950s was that of autonomy, the second concerned the possible utility of 'bourgeois' sociology as a means to understand the reality of the modern working class. Indeed, what Diane Pinto (1980: 243) has called Quademi Rossi's 'parallel sociology' was to be formed precisely at the intersection between the group's rediscovery of Capital and its examination of certain recent developments in radical social science. [Page 21]

Despite this, workerist perspectives did succeed in touching some sections of the British and North American left. The advocates of 'Wages for Housework', whose controversial views were to spark a lively debate amongst feminists (Malos 1980), drew many of their arguments from the writings of the workerist-feminist Maria Rosa Dalla Costa. In a Similarly iconoclastic vein, the male editors of Zerowork set about reinterpreting contemporary working-class struggles in the US and abroad from a viewpoint strikingly different to those of other English-speaking Marxists (Midnight Notes 1990). [Page 191]

Yet if most preferred risate rosse ('red laughter') to the Brigate Rosse, the use of force was not alien to consistent sectors of the new movement. [Page 198]

When asked their opinion, many of the new hands were to define their time at work only in negative terms. In an anecdote of which he never tired relating, Revelli recounted the view of one of his worker-students, who had proclaimed that 'Every day when I leave, I say to myself, I've lost eight hours of my life' (quoted in Barkan 1984: 239). [Page 220]