Between sociology and political economy: Pizzorno’s analytical toolkit in the study of labour conflicts and trade union action

The aim of this article is to revisit the analytical toolkit that Alessandro Pizzorno used 50 years ago to understand the wave of labour conflicts that swept over Western Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The key concepts in that toolkit were: cycle of class struggles, formation of new collective identities, and political exchange. For each of them, the article tries to disentangle the aspects that have proved so historically bounded to make their current use basically misleading, from the insights that can still enrich more contemporary accounts of labour conflicts and trade union action. One might conclude from this review that Pizzorno provided a very sophisticated sociological analysis of the internal dynamics of workers’ mobilization in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but that the crucial role of the «mass» workers’ power resources, and the consequences of their eventual withering away, were largely underestimated. Yet, several insights from the research by Pizzorno and his team – especially the ones concerning how waves of class conflict may be spurred by the «formation of new collective identities» and how they may develop through time – can be generalized beyond the specific stage of capitalist development in which such waves took place, adding an agency-centred perspective to political economy analyses that are often over-deterministic