Last spring, I traveled to Padua, a medium-sized city in northern Italy, to visit autonomist feminist theorist Mariarosa Dalla Costa and look through her archive. I was searching for any primary documents that could help shed light on an exceptional militant tactic from 1970s Italy: autoriduzione. Autoreduction, or self-reduction, was when factory workers, housewives, squatters, and others “reduced” the price of public services, commodities, and housing by force — blocking buses and standing up to landlords and electric, telephone, and gas utilities.
I’d long been interested in the way that this practice — an unsung tactic of Autonomia, a wide-reaching social movement incorporating different strands of Italian Marxism that emphasized independence from formal political structures like the reformist Communist Party — tied cost-of-living struggles to the setting of wages, expanding the idea of who was a worker and how different types of people related to each other. Today, as workers the world over struggle with outrageous increases in the prices of groceries, essential goods, and housing, as well as the lack of autonomy in organizing social life, I wondered if there was anything for our moment to learn from this form of popular price-fixing.
Even though, to my knowledge, Dalla Costa never wrote about the tactic explicitly, I did find numerous documents in her papers demonstrating that activists in the feminist movement were taking note. I found cheeky slogans — “Tutto costa di meno! Sconti fino al 50%!” (Everything costs less! Sales as high as 50%!) — and a succinct summary of the theory behind the actions: “La nostra lotta è autoriduzione / la nostra forza è l’organizzazione” (Our fight is autoreduction / our power is organization). These were from a 12-page document including contributions from numerous groups that organized autoreduction actions in and around Padua — one of the centers of feminist struggle in Italy.
Though one could argue that autoreduction began with rent strikes across the country during the explosive 1970s, the tactic grew to national prominence when two private transport companies in Turin raised bus fares dramatically in 1974. In response, factory workers spontaneously and immediately blocked bus routes and then collaborated with transit unions to issue their own tickets at the old fare. As Bruno Ramirez noted in a 1975 essay, the novelty of the Turin events was “the way in which this practice … spread to other sectors of essential social consumption, such as public transport, electricity and home heating.” Setting prices, whether commodities or wages, was no longer solely under the purview of the bosses or union bureaucrats.
The following year in Bologna, the state-owned telephone company increased telephone rates; autonomous groups with names like the Proletarian Committee for Autoreduction distributed hundreds, if not thousands, of flyers demonstrating how to mark down one’s bills to a price determined by the committees. A short train ride away in Milan, the same year, striking Magneti Marelli electrical workers and their families organized “proletarian shopping” — i.e., mass looting — at the UPIM department store. Autonomous workers’ councils supporting the action passed around a flyer to passersby that pithily summarized the autonomist Marxist view that sites of consumption, domestic work, and non-factory work were not distinct from the production of surplus value. It read: “The goods that we have taken are ours, as is everything that exists because we have made it with our exploitation.” Far from isolated instances of proletarian revolt, autoreduction was practiced by groups large and small across the country, in certain instances taking on a mass character — especially in 1975, when autoreduction committees were set up throughout the country to reduce consumer telephone and electricity rates that were determined by state-owned corporations.
During my trip, I also met with a former militant I’ll call Marco, who had been part of the Tuscan segment of Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power), one of the most prominent 1970s extraparliamentary Marxist organizations. (I’m keeping his name out of print because he was also, back then, involved with looting weapons from army barracks and distributing them to local movements.) He told me that for Potere Operaio, autoreduction wasn’t just a method for temporarily lowering the prices of certain goods and services to immediately satisfy individual needs but the means for building revolutionary momentum and structures for collective decision-making for fulfilling collective needs. “And what about desires?” I asked. The jump from needs to desires, he said, was analogous to the jump “from socialism to communism.”
Striking electrical workers and their families organized “proletarian shopping” — i.e., mass looting.
In Florence in 1975, their collective dedicated much time to helping people autoreduce electricity bills, and then defending workers’ homes from the state-owned electricity company when they came to shut off power for underpayment. The slogan went “13 lire paga il padrone, noi la paghiamo con autoriduzione” (the boss pays 13 lire [per kilowatt]; we’ll pay the same through autoreduction). Potere Operaio set up a kiosk where neighbors could bring their bills. Together, they calculated what workers would owe if they were charged the lower rates given to corporations. Then, they would send in checks with the reduced bills. Rather than isolating wage-setting struggles (i.e., strikes, lobbying for labor reforms) and consumption struggles (shoplifting, demands for expanded welfare programs), by practicing autoreduction, they confronted the state directly while also building contro-potere (counter-power), per Marco, to contend with reformist left-wing institutions that considered any action outside of sanctioned political channels a threat.
As Ramirez marveled at the time: “The political significance of this wave of [autoreduction] struggles lies in the territorial link up it is providing between factories and neighborhoods.”
And women (whether waged or unwaged workers) were present and active in performing autoreduction and making the case for its centrality to an autonomist political program. The 1974 cost-of-living increase was evident to workers as capital’s counterinsurgent response to rising wages, which had been secured through factory struggles from the late 1960s onwards. But this class war was not limited to the industrial sector. “If there is one item of productive consumption which falls squarely within the work of housewives,” Ramirez continued, “it is electricity. The increase in electricity rates amounts in effect either to a speed-up imposed by the State on housewives, as it forces them to perform the same amount of housework … in a shorter time, or to extending their working day by forcing them to do more work by hand.”
“The goods that we have taken are ours, as is everything that exists because we have made it with our exploitation.”
Even though the most radical political organizations of the era had been hostile to the feminist movement — which is what pushed women to form their own internationalist organizations — feminist theory had meticulously made the case for how sites outside of the factory — the home in particular — are crucial to capitalist valorization. So-called women’s work, like doing the shopping, paying the bills, and negotiating rent, were recognized as key functions of social reproduction and production, making them precise coordinates for confronting the postwar capitalist order, especially as it buckled under the weight of a nascent neoliberalism, the entry of women into the “workforce,” and the legalization of divorce. “Precisely because every sphere of capitalist organization presupposes the home,” Dalla Costa wrote in the 1970s, “every place of struggle outside the home offers a chance for attack by women.”
After some time with her papers, I visited Dalla Costa at her home, feeling spatially connected to the history of struggle as I walked to the same address to which letters in her archive from Silvia Federici, Selma James, and other comrades from International Wages for Housework were sent. Sitting on her terrace on a beautiful sunny day, I asked why autoreduction didn’t seem to be on the table today to confront the current crises of “affordability.” She remarked how difficult it would be to collectively determine rates for services and goods when everything from medical bills to student loan statements is managed by online platforms, paid with credit cards, and consolidated by tech companies.
To that, I’d add that the tactics waged by capital to discipline, isolate, and hamper workers’ struggles have developed dramatically through technologies of surveillance, incarceration, and control of social and traditional media. Think of the NYPD’s exceedingly violent policing of individuals and groups autoreducing public transit fares (hopping the turnstile), or how armed mercenaries were hired to defend shops in SoHo during the George Floyd rebellions. Perhaps most significant is the relative difficulty of building strong community bonds on the neighborhood level — though the reemergence of autonomous tenants’ unions across the U.S. provides a much-needed corrective to the long-term effects of precarity, suburbanization, and the immiseration of public space.
As Marco said, meeting individual needs is just the beginning. Seemingly resurgent progressive and even avowedly democratic socialist municipal politics are nothing to be scoffed at — we do want free buses and to freeze the rents. But to actually build toward social autonomy, we’ll have to figure out how to collectively decide what we “value,” and how. In New York, the MTA wants to increase bus and subway fares to three dollars — time to start hopping turnstiles. They can’t catch us all.
Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and editor living in New York. His work has appeared in Social Text, Antipode, the New Inquiry, AJ+ Subtext, and e-flux journal, where he is the associate editor. He is a PhD candidate researching tenants’ movements and urban struggles.
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