Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life is a short book, but it casts a long shadow. Behind it looms the entire history of the labor movement and its heretical wing, Italian workerism (operaismo), which rethought Marxism in light of the workers’ struggles (strikes and sabotage) of the 1960s and 1970s. For the most part, though, it looks forward. Abstract intelligence and immaterial signs have become the major productive force in the “post-Fordist” economy we are living in, and they are deeply affecting contemporary structures and mentalities. Virno’s essay examines the increased mobility and versatility of the new laborers, whose work time now virtually extends to their entire lives. The “multitude” is the kind of subjective confi guration that this radical change is liberating, raising the political question of what we are capable of. Workerism has a paradoxical relation to traditional Marxism and to the offi cial labor movement because it refuses to consider work as the defi ning factor of human life. Marxist analysis assumes that capitalist exploitation is what makes work alienating, but workerists blame alienation on the reduction of life to work. They are against work, against the socialist ethics that is used to exalt work’s dignity. They do not want to reappropriate work (“take over the means of production”) but reduce it. Trade unions or parties are concerned about wages and working conditions. They do not fi ght to change the workers’ lot; at best, they make it more tolerable. Workerists pressed for the reduction of labor time and the transformation of production through the application of technical knowledge and socialized intelligence. In the mid-1930s the leftist philosopher Simone Weil experienced the appalling abjection of the assembly line fi rsthand by working at a factory. She wondered whether Lenin or Stalin could ever have set foot in a workplace and celebrated workers’ labor. “The problem is, therefore, quite clear,” she concluded in Oppression and Liberty after renouncing Marxism and breaking with the organized workers’ movement. “It is a question of knowing whether it is possible to conceive of an organization of production” that would not be “grinding down souls and bodies under oppression.” 1 But it was too early to achieve this goal through automation, and