With the increasing financialization of our everyday lives, land financialization has been a pressing concern for critical geographers and urbanists alike. Typically, studies on the phenomenon take a grand view, focusing, for example, on the role of global capital flows, or treating financialization as a ‘new’ regime of accumulation. But the more practical implications of financialization tend to stay underexamined in these more macro-level analyses. In Class Meets Land: The Embodied History of Land Financialization, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero – professors in Urban Planning and Political Geography respectively –take a different direction: they approach the financialization of land from a historical and embodied perspective. More specifically, they are interested in how the financialization of the neighbourhood of Bicocca, Milan, relates to past class struggles in the neighbourhood.
They present two main arguments. First, land is never neutral; it is a material expression of past class struggles, as well as a potentially mobilizing force for future class struggles – even when, as in the case of Bicocca, the land was initially imagined to pacify such struggle. Second, both financialization, as well as resistance against it, always imply a certain form of production – challenging the idea of finance being somehow ‘unproductive’ and purely speculative. The book thus engages with debates on what financialization is and how it works, while re-centring land’s role in class struggle.
The book does so following a clear methodological trope: what preceded the financialization of Bicocca, and what happened before that, and before that? They describe this as a ‘timeful’ approach, a term they borrow from the American geologist Marcia Bjornerud. In her book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (2018), Bjornerud argues that geology’s attention for hundred- or even thousand-year time spans can be useful beyond the discipline. Kaika and Ruggiero firmly underscore this message; Class Meets Land covers a 150-year timespan, from the late 1870s to the present. Granted, such a longitudinal approach is not necessarily new – E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1966) takes a similarly long period to study a similar topic, for example. But there’s nonetheless something novel about the authors’ approach of land financialization as a long-term process, considered from the perspective of a very specific section of Italy’s working class: Pirelli workers living in Bicocca.
Today, Bicocca is mostly known for its university of the same name. But for most of the twentieth century, it was an industrial area in north-east Milan, owned by the tire manufacturer Pirelli, featuring factories and workers’ towns. Starting with Pirelli’s establishment in 1871, the book traces how the neighbourhood undergoes various transformations up until the present. This attention to development over time is also reflected in the book’s structure: it is chronologically organized around four parts consisting of two chapters, with each chapter covering between five and forty years. This is not only a stylistically logical choice; by highlighting how financialization occurs within a larger chain of successive events, it also supports the authors’ central arguments.
For those interested in working class history specifically, the book’s first two parts are the most interesting. In their analysis of what drove the initial construction of Bicocca, Kaika and Ruggiero bring together a wide array of archival material, ranging from a Futurist painting by Umberto Boccioni, to private letters exchanged in between Pirelli family members. Most importantly, however, they contest the idea that workers’ towns like those in Bicocca had a corrupting effect on class consciousness – an idea especially prevalent in late twentieth-century Marxist literature. They affirm that Bicocca’s many social services and working class symbolism often had a paternalist undertone, with disciplinary ends in mind. A notable example of this is how Pirelli would often refer to its workforce as an ‘extended family’. Yet, the authors convincingly show that because of its large concentration of working class families and strong working class identity, Bicocca also offered many grounds from which to organize and articulate class struggle. Instead of corrupting, then, workers’ towns like Bicocca were like what Kaika and Ruggiero call a ‘catalyst’ for forging future class consciousness.
The reasoning implied here – that people are more-or-less autonomous in how they react to power – may sound familiar: it is characteristic of Operaismo, an intellectual movement that originated in Italy during the 1960s, most famously represented by the work of Silvia Federici and Antonio Negri. This is not the only way in which Operaismo appears in the book. Its literal relation to Bicocca is discussed in the book’s fourth chapter, as the neighbourhood became an important meeting place for left-wing intellectuals and activists in the 1960s. During this same period, Bicocca’s workers gained far-reaching control over the production process, bypassing both company management and the ‘official’ trade unions – again echoing Operaismo’s theoretical emphasis on autonomy. However, as Kaika and Ruggiero also suggest, these echoes do not by themselves indicate radical theory materializing into practice. Instead, what the book offers – even if unintentionally – is an insight into the struggles and actions that inspired Italian Marxists at the time.
Financialization proper only comes to the fore in the third and fourth part of the book, but not before the authors introduce the concept of ‘land revanchism’. With the latter, they stress that the reorganization of industrial land – in the case of Bicocca, the closure of neighbourhood factories and relocating production throughout Italy – were driven not only by economic imperatives; they were just as much an act of revenge against the working class on capital’s behalf. Furthermore, and this is central to the larger arguments made in the book, Kaika and Ruggiero hold that land revanchism, and with that the displacement of Bicocca’s working class, was an indispensable step to the later financialization of the neighbourhood.
However, why exactly ‘land revanchism’ necessarily precedes financialization in a theoretical sense is not entirely clear. Is it because of how ‘empty’ land is valorised relative to an area ‘in use’? Or is it because after this revanchism there was no organized community left to resist the company’s decisions? And does this regard a general argument about how financialization tends to unfold, or is it specific to formerly industrial regions, or even exclusive to the history of Bicocca? These questions point to a larger difficulty with the book: it’s not always clear if it’s ‘just’ retracing the history of financialization of Bicocca – which it does in a formidable manner – or if it takes Bicocca as a case study from which to develop a larger theory on financialization. If the latter, the book certainly offers openings for how to think of financialization, by considering the various livelihoods affected when land is reorganized and financialized. Yet, for them to set out a more general theory of how financialization works, the single case of Bicocca is at times too narrow.
In line with its ‘timeful’ approach, the book starts working towards its end once we arrive at financialization in the form to which we are accustomed. By this point, Bicocca is almost completely stripped of its old working-class identity. Though the authors do not write in a melodramatic tone here, it’s sad to see that, after a century of struggle, the area is now known as a ‘no-man’s-land’. It was not always planned like this; in the 1980s, Pirelli’s plan was to turn Bicocca into a leading centre of high-tech industrial development named ‘Technocity’. But already by the 1990s, company management realized that basing the neighbourhood’s development entirely on real-estate speculation was much more profitable. In stark contrast, then, with the supposedly ‘dynamic’ financial markets determining the rhythm of its development, Bicocca is now best described by the authors as ‘decaffeinated urbanity’.
In that sense, Class Meets Land reminds more of the financial markets it takes issue with than of present-day Bicocca: it’s a fast-paced book, in the best sense of the word, and nowhere do the authors trip into excessive theoretical reflection. Yet, its biggest strength lies in Kaika and Ruggiero’s methodological insistence: the struggle between class and capital is never lost sight of, and each historical event is neatly related to what preceded and followed it. As such, they make a convincing case for approaching financialization in its specific historical context and from the perspective of local class struggles.
Reviewed by Victor Stout