Class Meets Land

Class Meets Land reveals something seemingly counterintuitive: that nineteenth-century class struggles over land are deeply implicated in twenty-first-century financial capitalism. Narrating the closely knit stories of Milan’s working class, industrial elites, and industrial land, Maria Kaika and Luca Ruggiero foreground the tenacious role of class struggle over land in choreographing capitalist transitions.

They assert that land assetization and financialization are not recent phenomena but rather historical practices sculpted into the present configuration through long-term rituals and struggles, rooted in the everyday lives and histories of both capital and labor. Exploring land assetization from the outset of capitalism’s early history, Kaika and Ruggiero offer a novel understanding of land financialization as a "lived" process: the outcome of a relentless and socially embodied historical unfolding, within which land performs a multiplicity of ever-changing symbolic and material roles for both capital and labor as it becomes enrolled simultaneously in local class struggle cycles and the circuits of global (financial) capital.