Spatial Composition

In “The Tribe of Moles,” the Italian operaist Sergio Bologna wrote that the Italian urban proletariat of the 1970s began from the idea of “city planning as a space of intervention in class dynamics.”1 But as Neil Gray describes, a theorization of capital’s spatialization has been overlooked in much of the literature on the movements of Italian autonomy. In his new book Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy, he rectifies this by attending to key theoretical concepts (the social factory, class composition, the tendency) and by historicizing numerous expressions of urban militancy from the period (rent strikes, occupations, feminist organizing, autoreduction). Among many generative offerings, Gray puts forward “spatial composition” as a method for understanding urbanization as a “central nexus of contemporary accumulation strategies.” This tendential conception, Gray argues, can also serve as a critical tool for understanding present-day struggles that take the home and urban space as sites of contestation against a mode of accumulation that has firmly taken hold of land and the built environment. This conversation was conducted over email and has been edited for clarity. 

—Andreas Petrossiants

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Andreas Petrossiants (AP): As you describe in the introduction to your book, several recent titles and translations into English have served as “antibodies for bad faith interpretations” of Italian “operaismo” (workerism), and Italian autonomist Marxism. Among them is Gigi Roggero’s Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method, which suggests that operaismo can also serve as a methodology for theory and militancy in the present. Your excellent book does both. Can you discuss your reading of class composition (and “the tendency”) and “how a spatialized form of class composition theory can both help illuminate the implicit spatial politics of Italian autonomist Marxism and inform contemporary urban theory and praxis”?2 

Neil Gray (NG): The concept of spatial composition is developed from the operaist conceptions of class composition and the tendency, as well as from Marxist urban theory, particularly the notion of the tendential urbanization of capital. These ideas are described in depth in the first half of the book, providing a theoretical framework for the more historical work in the latter half. Since class composition analysis has not been broadly surveyed in English-language publications, I aimed to provide a relatively comprehensive summary, believing, like Steve Wright, that it is the most important of all the concepts developed within Italian operaismo.3

There are many definitions within operaist currents, but all hold fast to an immanent protean relationship between technical composition and political composition. Technical composition pertains to organized capitalist production, including the division of labor, technological development, planning, supervision, and discipline, while political composition indexes the degree to which waged and unwaged subjects make collective social force, the overcoming of imposed divisions, and the extension of unified organization a basis for counterpower. Following Alberto Battaggia, class composition refers to “the bond between bodies and instruments of labor, between workers’ outlooks and behaviours and the form of production. Between subjectivity and objectivity.”4

The method of the tendency is somewhat buried in Antonio Negri’s 1970s movement writings and his notes on Marx’s Grundrisse. It also forms part of Sergio Bologna’s militant historiography, though less explicitly so. Roggero has done most to engage with the method more recently.5 The tendency is an anticipatory method of materialist thinking seeking to identify latent trends and potentialities in the changing technical composition of capital. It is neither teleology nor horoscope, but a process of class analysis and struggle that seeks to ascertain a line of capitalist development in order to interrupt it, negate it, or turn it in a different direction. 

Students from the Movimento del ’77 marching through the streets with cardboard boxes over their heads, 1977.

As one example, Bologna would provide a model of thinking through the tendency when he described the supersession of the professional industrial craft worker (including self-managed workers’ councils) by the onset of Fordism and mass industry. With an immanent dialectical conception of class decomposition and recomposition, he understood the development of Fordism, which laid waste to the skilled professional worker of the 1920s, as representative of a shifting hegemonic tendency in the changing structures of capitalist development—a tendency that would ultimately generalize the potential for revolt within and against developing cycles of capital accumulation through the social subject of the “mass worker.”6 But one cannot simply read political recomposition off material conditions. As Negri summarizes in one of his more lucid passages on the tendency:

The tendency is in no sense a necessary and inevitable law governing reality. The tendency is a general schema that takes as its starting point an analysis of the elements that make up a given historical situation. On the basis of that analysis, it defines a method, an orientation, a direction for mass political action.7 

But what are the elements that make up a given historical situation? What, now, is the relationship between the mode of production and the mode of rebellion? How do we read this as tendency? A central argument in my book is derived from Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “capital switching” from the so-called “primary” sector of industry and manufacturing to the “secondary” circuit of land, real estate, and the built environment during productivity crises for capital—a process later described by David Harvey as the “urbanization of capital.” Lefebvre’s thesis was speculative at the time, but we can now see it as at once a realized and developing tendency (albeit geographically nuanced), evidenced by the centrality of real estate in most national economies. Indeed, we can ask now in many cases if “switching” is even necessary after decades of industrial decline: The “secondary circuit” has become ever more central. 

What makes the 1960s and ’70s in Italy so fascinating to me is that the twin tendencies of deindustrialization (accompanied by economic crisis, austerity, and rampant inflation) and the urbanization of capital were met ferociously by new forms of militant urban struggle (autoreduction, rent strikes, mass occupations) and new forms of political recomposition (uniting workers, migrants, housewives, students, and the unwaged).8 These forms of struggle within the new spatial composition of capital can be understood, with Alberto Toscano, as a radical political topology emerging from the antagonistic relation between “subjective forms of political action and the shifting configurations of space.”9 Class composition, the tendency, the urbanization of capital: spatial composition. This determinate orientation towards urban phenomena and urban struggle not only sheds new light on the spatial politics of operaismo but, I would argue, is even more relevant for a contemporary conjuncture which has rudely usurped nineteenth-century expectations that industry would subordinate and supersede landed and rentier relations for its own interests. 

AP: This approach also helps to avoid reproducing the slippage of the social factory thesis into false totalization (the total subsumption of all social relations to capital). You argue that we need a spatialized understanding of subsumption to do so. I’m also particularly curious for you to explain how you bring in David Harvey’s notion of “socially necessary turnover time” to bring circulation into the operaisti’s sometimes production-restrictive remit of analysis. 

NG: The “social factory thesis” is an intuitively appealing phrase but has rarely been analyzed with rigor, even if it is referenced regularly.10 Anthony Iles and Mattin invited me to write about the spatialities of subsumption for their recent edited collection, which gave me the opportunity to explore the thesis more thoroughly.11 My central contention is that the social factory is a “phantom thesis,” not only because it is often cited but rarely explored in depth, but also because Mario Tronti’s assertion in the early 1960s that the capitalist form of production had become “the master of all the other spheres of society, invading the entire web of social relations” was overstated, geographically delimited, and temporally dependent. If, in Negri’s hands, the question of real subsumption would slide into an empirically lite proposition of “total subsumption,” my own route was to try to think through the 1960s and ’70s in terms of Marxist urban theory, the production of space, and what Vincent Chanson and Frédéric Monferrand have called “differentiated subsumption.”12 A differentiated, non-totalizing conception of subsumption helps ground it within the extended spatial configurations involved in the production of space, bringing attention to urbanization, transport, communications, and infrastructure as direct and indirect nodes of productive capital accumulation. This reading takes the notion of the social factory outside the factory walls without rendering it meaningless by assuming that all social relations are productive for capital, and real subsumption holds sway over everything.

Prendiamoci la Città, Canzoniere del Proletariato, 7'' vinyl, 1971.

Harvey’s notion of “socially necessary turnover time” plays with Marx’s conception of “socially necessary labor time.” He follows Marx’s injunction in the Grundrisse that capital is “value in motion,” noting that the process of valorization is initiated in the production process, but insisting that the product must be brought to the market for realization to occur. As Harvey observes, capital flow presupposes tight temporal and spatial coordination: The geographical aspects of production are not just reflections of capital’s circulation “but function as real determinants of capitalism’s dynamic.”13 Harvey has sometimes been accused of “underconsumptionism” and Keynesianism, but for me he is merely highly attentive to the spatialities of Marx and the relation between fixed and circulating capital outlined in Capital volume two. What this spatial perspective brings to the concept of the social factory, I think, is a more expanded and nuanced understanding of productive labor, circulation, and real subsumption outside the factory proper. 

AP: Like you, I see a more theoretically rigorous appraisal of the role of work outside the factory, and greater contestation of this work, in autonomist feminism.14 As Mariarosa Dalla Costa wrote, “Every place of struggle outside the home, precisely because every sphere of capitalist organization presupposes the home, offers a chance for attack by women.”15 How does autonomist feminism offer a spatial rearticulation of the social factory? 

NG: Curiously, the term “social factory” was never used by Mario Tronti in his early 1960s articles for the Quaderni Rossi journal that generated the concept. Notably, one of the earliest uses appears in Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s Women and the Subversion of Community, first published in 1971, where the line you reference was published. The autonomist-feminist viewpoint that the home is a central “unit of production” was an essential theorization that brought attention to the unwaged reproductive labor that produces and reproduces labor power, previously only recognized as the “work of love,” as they phrased it. We can understand this as a necessary shift of attention from the hidden abode of production to the hidden abode of reproduction. As Silvia Federici would state: “We saw that the house is a particular type of factory. In the home, women produce the producers.”16 

With this discovery, autonomist feminists began to understand the whole of society as an assembly line that runs from the factory to the community and back again, opening a radically new sense of political recomposition. As Selma James summarized: “Once we see the community as a productive centre and thus a centre of subversion, the whole perspective for generalised struggle and revolutionary organisation is re-opened.”17 Whether considered as the direct or indirect production of value in the reproduction of labor power (in my view it is the latter in a formal sense), those who carried out feminized unwaged reproductive labor could now be understood as “socialized proletarian subjects with the power to struggle as a sector of the exploited class.”18

But if they understood the home as a central unit of production, the home itself remained under-theorized in its wider relation to land and the urban environment. In the book I argue that the home is not just a container for unwaged reproductive labor but is itself both a commodified product and a “unit of consumption,” or in other words, not merely a unit where consumption takes place but a unit of consumption in itself, bought and sold in the housing market. So, my own theorization of autonomist feminism aims to bring more attention to the “house” part of “housework” and what role its production plays in the general conditions and preconditions of both production and reproduction. As I describe in the book, this concern was attended to with radical praxis by many women in Italy during the 1960s and ’70s in a series of occupations, rent strikes, and autoreduction campaigns. 

AP: Lately, I’ve been trying to think through the social factory thesis alongside Alberto Magnaghi’s writing on the “territory,” which has not gotten much attention in English yet. It has always struck me how often autonomist, workerist, and like-minded theorists and militants of the period refer to this thought-object to unify struggles inside and outside of the factory. Another thinker who hasn’t received all that much attention in English (though much more than Magnaghi!) is Manfredo Tafuri. You turn to his writing in Contropiano, where he argues that radical formal experimentation in architecture inevitably takes on a reformist character. I’m reminded here of Samuel Stein’s argument that all urban planning, progressive or not, is stuck within the logics of capitalist planning—perhaps even partially subsumed, we might say.  

NG: It would be great to see more English-language writing on Alberto Magnaghi! The intersection of his work around urban planning, ecology, and autonomist praxis is highly pertinent in the contemporary conjuncture. Tafuri’s links to operaismo through the Contropiano journal make him an interesting interlocuter of urban development and the social factory in the period under discussion. In Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, he addressed the role of architecture as a prefiguration and naturalization of modern urban production processes within capitalist relations. He also foregrounded the radical disjuncture between capital’s need for urban growth and purportedly progressive architectural practice: The more architectural practice and criticism advanced radical formal experimentation, the more, he argued, it contributed to new cycles of capitalist urban development or took on the role of reformer in the guise of “form as regressive utopia,” thus integrating socialism with capitalism in industrial planning. When the ideology of productive work is part of the production and organization of a comprehensive urban plan, he argued, the city becomes objectively structured like a “capitalistic-industrial utopia,” or a social factory we could say. 

Tafuri has sometimes been accused of reproducing a totalizing vision from which there is no escape, but Gail Day argues that we should see his work in the light of “critical solidarity,” pointing to his nuanced, critical investigations of the social democratic mass housing projects of Amsterdam, Red Vienna, and Weimar Germany from the late 1910s to the early 1930s; the Italian center-left’s planning programs of the 1950s and ’60s; and the Italian Communist Party showpiece “Red Bologna.”19 For Tafuri, the problem with Red Bologna was not so much that “nothing is possible” under totalizing capital relations (as his interlocutors, including Frederic Jameson, would claim he argued) but that political power is not economic power, and that the former (realized in terms of architecture and mass housing projects) would inevitably be subject to the latter when reduced to a utopian enclave. In a context where any practice even remotely progressive is eagerly latched onto by the left, this remains a crucial corrective. 

Importantly, Tafuri also confronted the limitations of experts—the planner, the architect, the avant-garde, or the leftist governmental authority—when circumscribed by isolation from base movements and the critique of political economy. If the political-economic situation has changed significantly since the 1970s, Tafuri’s famous injunction remains apposite: “Just as there cannot exist a class political economy, but only a class criticism of political economy, so too there cannot be founded a class aesthetic, art, or architecture, but only a class criticism of the aesthetic, of art, of architecture, of the city itself.”20

AP: Regarding the fetish for expertise, I’m reminded of how Magnaghi invited evicted squatters to participate in a seminar on urban planning at an occupied university in Milan.21 Along these lines, Sergio Bologna writes, “A considerable part of the political behavior of the young proletariat during the recent struggles should be understood starting from city planning as a space of intervention in class dynamics.”22 This viewpoint is especially evident in many of the urban struggles you track in the second part of the book, especially Lotta Continua’s movement program Prendiamoci la città (Take Over the City).  

NG: “The Tribe of Moles” offers a brilliant condensation of expanded class recomposition in a period of fundamental socioeconomic restructuring during the mid-1970s, with crisis, inflation, and austerity providing the dominant context. But the explicit spatial themes throughout this text, to my knowledge, have not previously been discussed in depth and I wanted to correct this. 

Drawing on the US situation, Bologna argued that property had become “the first refuge for the security of the savings of the ‘petty bourgeoisie’—but also for the investment of petro-dollars, the basis of the empire of real-estate investment trusts, insurance companies, pension funds etc., including the most adventurous kinds of speculative activity.” In Italy, he argued, capital was diverted from the industrial economy into the property sector, with the construction cycle functioning “as a pump to drain away income from workers and redistribute it to the middle classes on the one hand, and to the ‘construction interest’ on the other.” He also observed that specific financial structures were created to make capital more fungible so that metropolitan centers which had previously operated as zones for the “petrification of capital” (in the form of fixed capital) were now subject to special speculative institutions which “have increased the rhythm of transfer of property deeds and have given a considerable impulse to the velocity of circulation of money, without it passing through a process of production.”23

Bologna insisted on the continuing validity of factory struggle but also recognized that industrial decomposition was the “key point of departure” for the new social subjects of the 1970s. At the level of political recomposition, he saw the emergence of struggles around the “reconquest of the city centres” as a reaction to the marginalizing strategies of the unholy alliance between the construction lobby and the “party system” and its perverse relations with specific sectors of speculative capital such as the property market.24 In short, Bologna provides a spatialized class composition analysis that is not only descriptive of the new technical composition of capital, but in true operaist form, is hyper-attentive to the new lines of political recomposition emerging within and against the new conditions of the time. 

AP: I first discovered your work reading your article “Beyond the Right to the City: Territorial Autogestion and the Take Over the City Movement in 1970s Italy,” which you developed further for this book.25 You describe the way Lefebvre’s “right to the city” framework has been “eclipsed by reformist institutional measures” and compare it to the urban militancy of “Laboratory Italy.” Can you talk about this distinction, and how it reverberates in the present? 

NG: My main concern in the book is the movement of the workers in their tendential development, which I take from Bologna’s critique of Italian historiography for its overemphasis on the institutions of the left at the expense of the lived experience of workers. As much as Lotta Continua’s Take Over the City program was important in itself, it resonates for me because it is emblematic of a much broader wave of urban revolt and “social force” in Italy at the time. The phrase itself epitomizes a series of urban practices of appropriation in a specific time frame that resound with similar practices in the present. As such, they mark an early and important development in the continuum of what I’ve called spatial composition. 

As a slogan, “take over the city” also offers a polemic contrast to the “right to the city,” placing appropriation on the immediate horizon without asking for favors from the very institutions who actively deny basic rights in the first place. What is curious to me is that Lefebvre, who developed the phrase in 1968, and David Harvey, who helped popularize it in the 2000s, were both highly critical of rights discourse, and as such the slogan seems to fall behind their own critical premises while simultaneously propagating an empty signifier. This is not to say that rights are irrelevant in providing a bulwark against violence and pervasive attacks on living conditions, but rather to recognize the limits of reformist institutional measures and pseudo-participatory mechanisms of state mediation without requisite social force. As Marx insisted: “Between equal rights force decides.”26 The ongoing genocide in Gaza is only the most obvious case in point presently.  

AP: You quote Alberto Battaggia as saying that “the best way to defend workerism today is to supersede it.”27 With that said, contemporary movements can certainly take inspiration from the urban struggles you detail in the book, especially since it is now impossible to miss capital’s urbanization. What do you think contemporary movements should attend to in the present to produce social space, or actualize something like what Kristin Ross calls the “commune form”?28 I’m thinking especially of autonomous tenants’ unions, which have become key actors in numerous struggles unfolding today. 

NG: In the conclusion, I refrained from listing a series of movements and struggles that might be evoked as immediate contemporary parallels or inheritors of the urban militancy described in the book. There are many reference points on the broader terrain of social reproduction, but I prefer that readers make those connections themselves. Each situation is different, each has variegated “path dependencies” (in the argot of academic critical geography), and each requires different organizational solutions. Ultimately, the book is not so much about strategy, beyond an operaist insistence on following the struggles themselves and a recognition that there is no necessary correspondence between the organizations that represent the working class and working-class self-activity itself. Rather, it proposes a necessary and corrective orientation towards the urban as a central site of political-economic conflict within the determinate abstractions of tendential capitalist development. 

To paraphrase Lefebvre, the thinkers of the nineteenth century, until Marx, could only see the growth of industrialism as chaos, atomization, fragmentation, and unrelated facts. As such, there was no way to account for the facts, to act on them. Writing in 1970, he argued that the same was true with respect to urban phenomena and urban society, and that we didn’t know how to approach them. In Take Over the City, I argue that this issue remains and that despite inroads, time still tends to dominate space within Marxist theory. In a broader sense then I hope the book contributes to an understanding of urban phenomena as both an increasingly central locus of accumulation and as a pivotal site of immanent struggle. Once we understand the tendential urbanization of capital as a determinate social and economic framework, we can also understand scattered modes and practices of urban antagonism as part of a broader immanent politics of space. This requires a broader urban consciousness, as Lefebvre had it, of a real material tendency. The urban struggles I have described in Italy provide an important and prescient prefiguration of how that consciousness might be developed in the present.