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Neil Gray is a working class autodidact based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a former editor for Variantmagazine 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).

In issue #194 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Gray's Take Over the City. Here he examines how 1970s Italian housing, workplace, and urban struggles coalesced into a broader autonomist movement that challenged capitalist social reproduction, inflation, and environmental degradation beyond the factory floor.

In the seventies, housing was the largest nexus for social movements outside the Italian workplace. If housing struggles during the fifties and sixties were fragmented, this changed in 1968 when housing occupa-tions in various cities joined together, linking up with other social move-ments led by students, industrial workers, and women. These struggles intensified against austerity and inflation after the 1973 “oil crisis.” In the industrial North, public housing demands and “autoreduction” of rents became core practices (“autoreduction,” the collectively determined reduction of prices, will be explained more fully later in this chapter), while in the cities of the center and South, where the industrial fabric was less developed, the housing movement operated as something like a “functional equivalent” of the workers’ movement, with trade unions and extra-parliamentary groups realizing that the urban question was relatively autonomous from industrial conflict, requiring a specific organizational structure.

The mass construction of surplus private flats at the expense of public housing produced thousands of empty new homes across Italy. In the census of 1971, 11.7 percent of all rooms in Italy were unoccupied—either too expensive for widespread purchase or kept deliberately void to realize speculative inflated prices. This context generated widespread social discontent and a signature autonomist politics of urban appropriation. Over twenty thousand apartments were occupied in Italy between 1969–75. In Milan, fifty thousand workers demonstrated in support of housing occupations, and in Turin, factory council strikes wedded to mass housing occupations forged direct links between workers and struggles in the sphere of reproduction. These struggles, according to urban theorist Maurizio Marcelloni, founded “an alternative form of territorial organization and power.”

But if housing was an increasing preoccupation for the extra-parliamentary groups, it would be a mistake to separate struggles which were often deeply imbricated. A central catalyst for the Hot Autumn was “The Battle of Corso Traiano” on July 3, 1969, a conflict emerging from a one-day trade union strike under the banner of “No More Rent Rises.” Unimpressed by union control of the rank-and-file, the worker-student assemblies organized an independent demonstration with several thousand workers from Mirafiori and adjacent factories chanting “What do we Want? Everything!”—a slogan that was “destined both to earn it immortality and to send a shiver down the collective spine of the Italian business class.” Street-fighting with the carabinieri on neighboring streets was soon followed by mass assemblies in the factories involving thousands of workers and students. A demonstration for the reduction of rents, as Monica Quirico observes, thus became “the prelude to the greatest mobilisation of workers in Italian history.” But if housing was an increasing preoccupation for the extra-parliamentary groups, it would be a mistake to separate struggles which were often deeply imbricated.

If housing and urban territory more generally were central to the new concerns, perhaps counter to prevailing conceptions of operaismo, the movement was also at the forefront of early praxis around “working class environmentalism.” Lorenzo Feltrin’s study of the paper, “Against Noxiousness,” 1971—by the Political Committee of the Porto Marghera Workers (an alliance between Potere Operaio and il Manifesto)––shows how workers denounced in “words and deeds” the environmental deg-radation carried out by the polluting chemical industries of the Veneto region. The fight against “noxiousness” was rooted in operaist concep-tions of the refusal of work and the social factory, collapsing distinctions between a noxiousness traditionally understood—i.e., tangible factors of toxicity and hazard—and an intangible noxiousness inherent to the cap-italist organization of work. Adding “working-class environmentalism” to the repertoire of operaismo, the social factory conception was evident in solidarity for contracted workers, who were doubly-exploited by the main company and the sub-contractors, and who were over-exposed to the toxic conditions of work, resulting in a three-month strike and a riot. Demands for free transport and for commuting time to be paid as work-time represented a fundamental challenge to the time of (unwaged) employment extending beyond the factory.

Recognizing that “inflation was eroding in the sphere of circulation what workplace struggles had gained in the sphere of production” (a consistent theme throughout the seventies), the autonomous assembly at Porto Marghera—working with neighborhood committees and fem-inist collectives—also engaged in autoreduction practices incorporating utility bills, transport fares, consumer goods, and housing occupations. In December 1974, thirteen thousand electricity bills were successfully autoreduced, and an agreement reached between unions and government decreased utility prices.

The social factory thesis is also discernible in the practice of the Magnetti Marelli workers’ Committees, Milan, who were active in the assemblies and meetings of ancillary occupied factories, various forms of autoreduction against the rising cost of living, transportation and street blockades, and resistance to the Cassa integrazione. The Cassa was a “redundancy fund” employed as the bosses’ weapon to secure division by bribing workers into unemployment, facilitate mass redundancies, block recruitment, and increase exploitation via an expanded labor surplus.

Despite such struggles emanating from the factories, after 1973 the power of many (if not all) workers’ assemblies was undercut by industrial decomposition, and the factory was no longer necessarily seen as the primary terrain of socialization and confrontation given its increasingly contingent and undervalued status. At the same time, the austerity plan led by the Christian Democrat (DC) party, and sanctified by the PCI, reduced public expenditure drastically and shifted the burden of crisis reform onto the working class through massive price hikes in the sphere of consumption. Industrial decomposition, the urbanization of capital, and inflation: these were the material factors leading to a spatialized recomposition of political struggle by women, young people, the unwaged, and the mar-ginally employed, alongside industrial workers. As members of the workers’ autonomy movement recollected from prison in the early eighties, in addition to workplace struggles the “new social subject” of the seventies was now also concerned with “conquering and managing its own “spaces’” and “the concrete and articulated exercise of power on the social terrain.”39 Meanwhile, the PCI, PSI, and associated unions sought to contain urban struggles within their own structures, pressuring existing institu-tions for limited reform (with limited success) rather than challenging the capitalist organization of society as a whole. I will address these contra-dictions more fully in this chapter’s conclusion, but before then I provide a necessarily partial summary of urban revolt in sixties and seventies Italy, primarily focusing on Milan, Rome, and Turin. First, by way of the “Take over the city” slogan and campaign of Lotta Continua, and second with reference to the waves of autoreduction struggles that traversed the peninsula in the seventies.

Excerpted with permission from Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy by Neil Gray, published by Common Notions Press.

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