In this work I investigate the concept of biopolitics as it emerges in the particular historical setting of twentieth and twenty-first Century Italy. Framing biopolitics as the foregrounding of labor-power, i.e. of the potential to produce, I define three historical moments in which this notion is articulated and gives rise to new social practices in Italy: the 1920 Factory Councils Movement and the philosophy of praxis of Antonio Gramsci, the student Movement of 1968 in its dialogue with Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Marxist neo-feminist discourse on reproduction carried out by Lotta Femminista, and finally the thought of Antonio Negri and its notion of the multitude in the context of the Anti-Globalization Movement. Each of these turning points stages a biopolitical struggle of a determinate subjectivity against the mode of production in power: the workers of the Factory Councils faced the introduction of Fordism; 1968 and Marxist neo-feminism that of Fordism in its advanced phase of automation of production; the multitude of the Anti-Globalization Movement that of post-Fordism with its emphasis on immaterial production. If the biopolitical is today the substratum of our mode of production, from the perspective of Italian political thought, my genealogical reconstruction aims at clarifying the degree of oppression and the contradictions of the biopolitical at a global level.