Workerism (or operaismo) is a political analysis, whose main elements were to merge into autonomism, that starts out from the power of the working class.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, known as operaist and autonomist writers, offer a definition of operaismo, quoting from Karl Marx as they do so: The workerists followed Marx in seeking to base their politics on an investigation of working class life and struggle.
Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and others, they drew upon previous activist research in the United States by the Johnson–Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie.
The Johnson–Forest Tendency had studied working class life and struggles within the Detroit auto industry, publishing pamphlets such as "The American Worker" (1947), "Punching Out" (1952) and "Union Committeemen and Wildcat Strikes" (1955).
Associated with this theoretical development was a praxis based on workplace organising, most notably by Lotta Continua.