Bruno Trentin's theoretical research represents, together with Antonio Gramsci's Notebooks, the most original and important contribution to the culture of the Italian left of the twentieth century. Positioning himself from the point of view of the subordinate worker, he notes that this condition of hetero-direction shapes the entire structure of modern society, deforming its citizenship, and that this condition can only be overcome by setting in motion a process of individual and collective emancipation based on conquest of forms of freedom at work. The transformations that work undergoes after the crisis of Fordism, and the new intertwining of work and knowledge, favor this growth of freedom and creativity in work and re-propose the person in work, previously denied by Taylorism, as the central issue of democratic development.