1970s
A01=Neil Gray
Author_Neil Gray
autonomist theory
Category=JPFC
Category=JPFF
Category=KNXN
Category=KNXU
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
class
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
factory
forthcoming
industrialization
Italian Marxist Autonomous
Italy
Operaismo
public housing
radical
social
social reproduction
spatial analysis
urban studies
Urbanization
worker
Product details
- ISBN 9781945335631
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 30 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Common Notions
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Neil Gray is a proletarian autodidact currently 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).
