Class Meets Land

Class Meets Land reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in the transition to twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Challenging our understanding of land financialization as a recent phenomenon propelled by high finance, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero foreground 150 years of class struggle over land as a catalyst for assembling the global financial constellation. Narrating the close-knit histories of industrial land, industrial elites, and the working class, the authors offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a “lived” process: the outcome of a relentless, socially embodied historical unfolding, in which shifts in land’s material, economic, and symbolic roles impact both local everyday lives and global capital flows.

 

Contents

List of Illustrations 

Acknowledgments: The Academic Manuscript as a Collective “Labor of Love” 

Introduction: A Timeful Analysis of Class Struggle as a Force of Spatial Production 

PART I. CITY OF INDUSTRY: LAND AS THE MEANS TO FORGE A NEW ANTHROPOLOGICAL TYPE OF WORKING
MEN AND WOMEN (1880–1939)
1. Class Meets Land: Turning Flexible Peasantry into Disciplined Industrial Labor (1880–1922) 
2. Land as Catalyst for Forging Class Consciousness (1922–1939) 

PART II. CITY OF WORKERS: LAND AS SPACE FOR COMMONING AND RADICAL POLITICAL ACTION
(1939–EARLY 1970s)
3. Land as Citadel of Workers’ Anti-Fascist Resistance (1939–1945)
4. “Italy’s Stalingrad” and the “Years of Lead”: Radicalizing Social Claims over 
Industrial Land (1945–Early 1970s) 

PART III. CITY OF TECHNOLOGY: LAND REVANCHISM AS A MEANS OF TRANSITIONING TO HIGH-TECH
CAPITALISM (EARLY 1970s–early 1990s)
5. Land Revanchism and the Unmaking of the Working Class (Early 1970s–1985)
6. The Eureka Moment: “Discovering” Industrial Land as Asset (1985–Early 1990s) 

PART IV. CITY OF FINANCE: LAND AS PURE FINANCIAL ASSET (EARLY 1990s–2020)
7. Land Financialization as a “Lived” Process: From Industrial Commodity Production to 
the Production of Land as Financialized Asset (Early 1990s–2000)
8. Decaffeinated Urbanity: Financialized Land as No-Man’s-Land (2000–2020)
Epilogue: Financialization as “Lived” Process: Moving the Field Forward

Notes 
References 
Index