ABSTRACT
One of the peculiarities of Marxist analysis of urban rent is the method. Urban rent is seen as a component of a wider process in which masses of people act and struggle and where contradictions are becoming more and more explosive. This chapter suggests that the interconnections between urban rent theory and the political and social praxis of the workers' movement is an essential field of analysis. In exchange, the working-class movement required the guarantee of state intervention in wealth and income redistribution, in order to assure better life quality in towns, the spreading of collective services, access for low-income people to the housing market, jobs in the building sector. In Italy, the interpretation of rent has had an important political meaning because it was an axiom in the urban policy of the working-class movement until the end of the seventies, as a component of a wider strategy on housing and urban questions.
