Minor Apocalypses: Italian Autonomia, Utopia, and Women

Abstract

The essay discusses the tactics of the Italian Autonomia movement during the 1960s and 1970s as a form of realized utopia. The Autonomists rejected the reformism of the Left political parties and unions in the name of the refusal of work—work as it had been structured by capital—in order to reappropriate time to experiment with new forms of everyday existence. Women could not do the same. Therefore, when studied together with Autonomist feminism of the time, male Autonomism loses some of its radical edge. The women’s demand for wages for housework makes clear that the idea of utopia that male autonomists pursued could not be experienced in the same way by women, who continue to bear the burden of reproductive labor in the home, and whose autonomy is limited by the demands of patriarchal society.