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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is a renowned theorist of contemporary media, culture and society He has lectured at the Academia di Brera in Milan, and has been published and invited to speak widely across the US and Europe This respectable status is the result of a hard fought journey, his political and philosophical trajectory beginning in the radical social movements of 1970s Italy, in struggles that were central to his formation as a writer, thinker and activist   The year 1977 bore witness to an explosion of youth creativity and revolt inside the European complex As the towns, cities and suburbs of the UK would see the emergence of Punk rock and its ‘diffused assault’ on the cultural values of preceding generations, Italy would be rocked by youth-led rebellions, spectacular in their intensity, creativity and violence While the values, aesthetics and innovations associated with Punk rock would eventually diffuse into British society, the creative rebellion occurring in Italy known as ‘Autonomia’ would be met by a wave of state repression aimed squarely at halting its expansion While the origins of these two expressions share many common co-ordinates, the history of Italian Autonomia remains relatively obscure in the Anglo-speaking world Emerging in an encounter between a severely weakened Workerism (a social movement that had sprung up from Italy’s factory floors during the late 1960s) and the new youth movements that were beginning to coalesce in 1972, Autonomia was a broad and heterogeneous social movement aimed at nothing less than the radical overthrow of society Central to all of its expressions lay the idea of ‘worker’s autonomy’, understood as the potential autonomy of labour from capitalism The ideas, analyses and practices associated with these movements have since been grouped together and described as the product of an ‘autonomist Marxism’ This school of thought has provided a key theoretical lynch-pin for many in the anti-statist