Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy

Take Over the City provides the first comprehensive spatial analysis of Italian operaismo and the extraordinary urban struggles of 1970s Italy.

Take Over the City is the first systemic spatial account of Italian operaismo. Drawing on the Marxist urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and others, the book situates the struggles of operaismo, especially in the 1970s, within an incipient-yet-tendential phase of global urbanization. In doing so, the book draws attention to previously neglected urban struggles in the wider social factory, recognizing these as immanent to the new spatial composition of capital in Italy.

The book argues that these innovative urban struggles carry important lessons for contemporary forms of organization and social conflict in the sphere of social reproduction. They drew attention to, and acted within, a tendency that has only become more entrenched since the 1970s: the centrality of urbanization and real estate to national political economies. If urbanization has become increasingly central for capital accumulation processes, it follows that urban struggle must become increasingly central to anti capitalist struggle. The struggles to ‘Take Over the City’ in 1970s Italy provide an important marker of how this might be done in the current era.

By excavating the urban struggles of 1970s Italy with a spatialized understanding of operaismo’s signature theoretical contribution—class composition—the book provides both an important contribution to radical urban history and a window into how current urban struggles might be theorized. It seeks to both spatialize readings of operaismo through the concept of spatial composition and to radicalize urban theory with Italian autonomist Marxist thought and practice. This should be of interest to those interested in autonomist praxis more generally, and those interested in radical urban history, contemporary urban struggles and social reproduction.

What People Are Saying

“Addresses a gap in the existing scholarship on Italian operaismo by turning attention to the spatial dimensions of a tradition that has been examined primarily through the lens of factory politics and philosophical category-building. Neil Gray offers a productive framework for thinking through the relationship between urban space and political struggle. Methodical and convincing.” —Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital

“Take Over the City is an extremely original book. Neil’s use of ‘spatial composition’ is a significant moment in the ongoing rethinking of political theory, one that is informed by an excellent grounding in critical geography.” —Steve Wright, author of Storming Heaven

“Across a highly readable account of operaismo and autonomist movements from the 1960s to the 1977, Gray elaborates how a politics of space was largely overlooked by operaist analyses of class composition and yet central to the struggles of the new social subjects, women, internal migrants, students, and the youth proletariat.” Miriam Tola, co-editor of Handbook of Ecomedia Studies

About the Author

Neil Gray is a working class autodidact based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a former editor for Variant magazine and his writing and research have appeared in numerous magazines and academic journals. He is a long-term housing and anti-gentrification activist and is the editor of Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle (2018).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Spatialities of Italian Operaismo

PART I

1. Class Composition

2. Spatial Composition and the Tendency

3. The Social Factory

PART II

4. Urban Restructuring, Italian Style

5. Take Over the City

6. The City and Social Reproduction

Conclusion: The Future at Our Backs?