Take Over the City - by Neil Gray (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Take Over the City provides the first 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, David Harvey and other urban thinkers, 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 early urban struggles carry important lessons for contemporary struggles and social conflict in the sphere of social reproduction. They drew attention to a tendency that has only become more entrenched since the 1970s: the centrality of urbanization and real estate to the political economy of national economies. If urbanization has become increasingly central to capital accumulation, 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. This should be of interest to those interested in Operaismo and autonomist theory and practice more generally, and those interested in radical urban history and contemporary urban struggles.

Review Quotes

"Take Over the City 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 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).