Co-research and Worker’s Inquiry

Co-research is not simply worker’s inquiry. Although it retains some of the hereditary features, co-research represents a radical reformulation of the Marxist model of inquiry, a methodological and political reinvention in a changed context and according to new objectives. The following extract from Romano Alquati (taken from Walking to Realize a Common Dream, Velleità Alternative, 1994, pp. 70–81) measures this gap, trying to indicate the affinities and divergences between the author’s argument and the practice of worker’s inquiry, with the aim of proposing a schema of co-research valid for the range of social conflicts that have taken shape following the crisis of the Fordist compromise and the Keynesian politics of the postwar period.