A Review of Take Over The City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy
by Arthur Delot-Vilain
Here we are in the frictionless, placeless world. A direct drip of fantasy instead of politics, an avatar instead of a body, consumer goods appearing out of thin air directly on your doorstep instead of emerging from some kind of logistical process. This is what life is like at the top. It extends even to the so-called creative sphere. The relationship to Art is generic: there is no need to like specific artists or to struggle with, through, and against them. There is no need to understand their point of view. Point of view as a whole is moot. Art is Good, and it is Good to appreciate Art—thus taste was already dead. The corpse of taste was being Weekend at Bernie’s-ed before the AI slop epoch arose.
Obviously, this is only the case if it does not matter where you are from, how you live, or what kind of work you do. If you are, say, one of the forty million who qualifies as a “low-wage worker” (making less than $17/hr), you likely don’t experience life as increasingly frictionless. You’re more likely to be spending hours delivering food to people’s doorsteps than having dinner magically dropped at yours.
And yet, this much-discussed “frictionlessness” seems to be capital’s relentless drive. Why? Though he never uses the term himself, Neil Gray’s new book, Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy, points the way.
Take Over the City is an academic study that merges the theoretical work of the Italian operaisti (“workerists” or autonomous Marxists) and urbanist Marxism of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre. Gray goes through the paces of Italian operaismo, outlining its break with mainstream communism as represented by the PCI (the Italian Communist Party) and
introducing Mario Tronti, Raniero Panzieri, Sergio Bologna, and Romano Alquati as its group of core theorists. This book, primarily an academic monograph, is not a primer on the subject, though the plentiful footnotes are a helpful guide to the perplexed.
Operaismo, for Gray, is defined by these theoretical contributions: “Copernican inversion, refusal of work, workers’ inquiry, class composition, the tendency, social factory.” Operaismo’s Copernican inversion is the assertion that the workers’ struggle is the driving principle of the history of capitalism—rather than laws of capitalist development that will naturally precipitate crises and collapse. Workers force crises. Out of this anti-teleological position comes the “autonomism” of Italian autonomous Marxism—that is, autonomous from even supposedly Marxist and pro-working class organizations like labor unions and the Italian Communist Party. The concept of the social factory has several uses in operaist theorizing. I will return to this later, but it should be sufficient for now to think of the social factory as a modification of commodity fetishism in which the factory logic begins to replace and organize social relations.
Class composition, the core concept that Gray modifies, is an analytic tool to think about the political possibilities of a working class. Borrowing from Marx’s organic and technical compositions of capital, the operaisti proposed that class could have a technical composition (imposed distinctions like skilled and unskilled labor, for example or different “locations” on the chain of production) as well as a political composition (what forms the power of the working class is organized). Conceiving the working class in this way theoretically allowed the operaisti to get a better grasp of the material conditions and use them more aggressively than the state-based, orthodox Marxist Italian Communist Party could.
The framework of class composition also brings the working class to life. It means the working class is formed (composed and re-composed) through class struggle. Its composition, crucially, can change with historical developments, expanding and contracting. To take a broad example, Fordism changed the technical composition of the working class by reducing the importance of the skilled worker. But it also changed the political composition of the working class by bringing more workers doing the same kind of work together onto the factory floor. In short, class composition is a “materialist” or “autonomist” response to the supposedly idealist notion of class consciousness, in which the worker has an idea of themselves as a member of the working class.
Combining Marxist urban theory with the idea of class composition, Gray proposes a “spatial composition” of the working class. This turns out to be a highly fruitful idea when paired with the larger process of deindustrialization. He nicely traces how urban investment, production of space, rentierism, real estate speculation, etc. have become the dominant engines of capital’s valorization since the end of the manufacturing period in the global north. His deployment of the spatial composition concept with the arrival of Southern migrants to Northern Italian cities and the attendant creation of slums, emptying of cities, and urban struggles is fascinating.
New York knows this as well as any other city. After World War II, a slowly hollowing industrial base (and a fleeing taxpayer base) left the city dependent on a few loan givers. It was, in part, their refusal to continue to buy bonds to pay off the city’s debt that led to the crises of the 1970s and the consolidation of FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sectors as the drivers of the city’s economy. The crisis allowed capitalists to gain an upper hand in the terrain of the city, using de-industrialization to disperse workers and buy up the actual space of the city in one fell swoop.
Current discussions about displacement, gentrification, and economic precarity in cities like New York index the degree to which urban space is the battleground of capital’s valorization. Capital’s eternal problem is the search for an outside to valorize. Gray’s deployment of the spatial composition thesis alongside Marxist urban theory clarifies that the seemingly fixed urban environment can always be remade.
You might notice, if you are an American of a certain age, that “the city,” as recently as the 1990s, was an undesirable place to live in a broad cultural sense—a notion soaked in racism, of course. But consider now how capital’s progressive face has embraced the city: walkability and affordability are seen as good interventions in the city. And this might be true, but they are a sign that capital is now focused on the question of how to get people to live in the city. Gray does a good job bringing these concepts together, and of tracing the way that urban life has been reshaped toward extraction since the de-industrialization. Now remembering the “social factory” from earlier, we can ask: what is to be done in the face of the de-industrialization of the social factory?
There is a contradiction lurking under capital’s valorization of the city. This is where I’d like to return to the idea of the “frictionless” world. There is a double movement afoot, one in which capital seeks to compensate for the industrial decline through real estate speculation, and one in which capital pushes to make all of its workers as fungible as possible. Thus, while the city is more desirable than ever, it is less relevant than ever: the confluence of exploding rents and the post-pandemic proliferation of remote work in white collar spaces is just one stark example of this contradiction.
The parallel movement to de-industrialization in the social sphere has been one well-chronicled, if perhaps overblown, in the United States. There’s Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the rise of incels and the panic around “anti-social” and “online” behavior, even the incessant discourse about the “need for third spaces.” All index a rearrangement of the urban sphere toward more formal (i.e. extractive) economies and away from informal (i.e. communitarian) economies, as well as the fact that austerity-as-crisis-management in the neoliberal era has likely actually reduced what people think they have in common.
As Gray writes, “the concept of spatial composition can help expand how we conceive the range of protagonists in the base movements.” I don’t know if we can say that the protagonists of an anti-capitalist movement currently live in the global north, but insofar as we can talk about organizing struggle in the imperial core, the set of questions opened by the operaisti via Gray’s intervention are central.
So what do we do as left-wing city dwellers? The idea of spatial composition suggests that the solution is to struggle to recompose the city. We could imagine a world in which tenant unionization creates an alternative geography of the city, one that is defined by the connections between unionized buildings, and makes possible something like a city-wide rent strike against the landlord class. But is this a desirable or feasible outcome? Can the “working class” be re-composed to include renters, who, in an era of real-estate-as-value generation, become a kind of “worker” qua renting?
The problem is that we all still work. Only now we are faced with the need to resist on two fronts, one as workers and one as urbanites. The ill-gotten gains of our employers, returning to us under the wage-form, now go directly to be valorized again as rent, which allows landlords to re-invest in new properties, or do construction on their existing ones and draw out even more rent. There are definite labor chokepoints to focus on (construction being one), but Take Over the City challenges us to think of spatial composition of the working class as a starting point for generating the friction capital so desperately wants to eliminate.
The most interesting chapter of Take Over the City concerns the practice of “autoreduction,” in which urban residents simply paid less for the subpar services they were receiving, e.g. when 1200 families in the Magliana suburb of Rome began paying 75% of their rent in order to match what families in social housing were paying. This seems outlandish to the American context, but it was made possible by labor organization (which became social organization, hence a subversive application of the social factory thesis).
In the de-industrialized social factory, how can we begin to replicate this? Is it by organizing urban residents on the basis of their relationship to property? I do not pretend to have solutions, but it seems incumbent on us to resist the desire for “frictionlessness,” and to engage in struggles that can re-compose the class and expand the notion of what is possible. This may be too small, too little, too late. After all, we may be moving past the era of urban valorization by now, and into, for example, the infinitely more malleable and re-terroritorializable realm of “data.”
But for now, everyone has to live somewhere. As long as capitalists are extracting value at the level of the city, let us take over the city.
Arthur Delot-Vilain is a writer in Brooklyn trying to make sense of what an American Left is or should be.
Photo Credit: Common Notions Press
Take Over the City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy (2026) by Neil Gray is available for purchase from Common Notions Press.
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