In Italy, the general strike puts rent and the supermarket trolley on the same placard

According to Le Monde, a general strike took place in Italy on Friday 30 October, called by the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), a grassroots trade union, with the cost of living and housing problems as its main demands. The paper describes a day of very well-attended demonstrations and speaks of a "convergence of struggles". The dispatch we have is thin: we do not know the participation figures, which sectors mobilised most, or how the government responded. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established finding.

Let us begin with what strikes us: people usually strike against an employer. Here, they also strike against a landlord, a supermarket, an energy bill. In other words, against everything that happens after payday. Rent is not negotiated on the shop floor, but it appears on the same payslip: when it swallows half of income, real wages melt away without anyone having touched the pay slip.

This is where the notion of social reproduction becomes useful. Capitalism needs workers who are fed, housed, cared for, rested, and children raised to take over. That labour, cooking, minding, caring, making a budget stretch, is largely unpaid or poorly paid, and it is carried overwhelmingly by women. When housing and basic goods cost more, the bill does not vanish: it is absorbed by households, that is, by those who lengthen the working day, skip a meal, put off a treatment, juggle two jobs. The price of life is also time and exhaustion, which appear in no statistic.

This is why these demands converge. The private-sector employee, the nurse, the student looking for a room, the retiree whose pension no longer keeps up: all pay at the same counter. A union that puts housing in its list of demands widens the strike beyond the factory, towards the kitchen and the stairwell.

There is a limit, one that Marxists know well. Fighting over the price of labour and of life is necessary: a strike teaches solidarity and trust. But this struggle treats the effects, not the system of wage labour and rent that produces them. As for the state, it is not a neutral arbiter: budgets, taxation and housing policy are choices, and they are rarely made against property.

The question this day raises is therefore simple and domestic: who, at the end of the month, closes the gap between rent and wage? If it is always the same people, and often the same women, then the strike of 30 October is not about side issues. It is about the heart of the economy.