I say we, because I believe I can speak for a handful of people inseparably linked by a bond of political friendship, who shared a common knot of problems as 'lived thought'. For us, the classic political friend/enemy distinction was not just a concept of the enemy, but a theory and practice of the friend as well. We became and have remained friends because we discovered, politically, a common enemy in front of us ...

... the boys who stood outside the gates of the Mirafiori factory in Turin in the early morning went home at night to read the young Lukacs Soul and Form. Strong thought requires strong writing. A sense of the grandeur of the conflict awoke in us a passion for the Nietzschean style: to speak in a noble register, in the name of those beneath.

... we brought together a fine old madhouse. During our meetings, we would spend half the time talking, the rest laughing.

... such selfless public interventions, free of all personal ambition; such a straightforward sense of commitment; and not least, such a disenchanted, self-ironising way of sharing collective work.

Mario Tronti, Our Operaismo