In this interview, Neil Gray contextualises his new book, Take Over The City: Spatial Composition in Italian Autonomy (Common Notions 2026), in relation to his own political background of urban research and organising in Glasgow, and reflects on how rebellious working class uprisings in Italy across the 1970s informs concepts of ‘spatial composition’ and ‘the tendency’.

DPYour book positions itself as emerging from the ‘operaist’ and ‘autonomist’ traditions of thought and struggle that emerged and resonated across Italy, Europe and North America from the 1960s. This lineage, a major inspiration for Notes from Below and other contemporary projects of inquiry, has been filtered through and translated into different local & national contexts over the decades, as contemporary militants have sought on historical reference points to make sense of their own struggles. How did you first come across this tradition? How did you begin to relate to it intellectually, and politically, within your context and interest in spatial politics?

NGMy background is that of a working class autodidact. I left school at sixteen with two standard grades and two suspensions (and near expulsion). In the next decade, I spent a lot of time on the dole and in shit jobs (labouring, fish factory work, cleaning and other casual or agency work) whilst indulging in ‘countercultural’ activities. After some night classes and a degree foundation course I went to university at the age of 28 to study film and photography and so thankfully missed being hoovered up by student leftist parties in my callow youth. I became involved in the Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh (ACE), where I was the kind of anti-state, anti-work Marxist deemed acceptable for most of the anarchists there. ACE had a good library of magazines, newsletters and pamphlets, and in retrospect reading Aufheben magazine was an influence. Aufheben, some of whose members would form the Endnotes project, had a strong ‘workerist’ tendency in their writings and I especially recall closely reading a joint review of Harry Cleaver’s Reading Capital Politically and Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven.

My experience of shit work––and dodging it––made me receptive to the ‘Never Work!’ position of the Situationist International, and their critique of social democracy and pretty much everyone on the left (including their own members) made me conscious of what kind of left organising I found alienating and redundant. The spatial element in their work––psychogeography, the dérive, creating ‘situations’––also resonated. At the same time, I was a working class guy with similarly poor friends, moving from bedsit to bedsit, shit job to shit job, in a political situation far removed from May ‘68. I increasingly felt the need to deal with that concrete conjuncture. In the mid-2000s, I got involved in the fight against ‘housing stock transfer’ in Edinburgh, documenting the campaign on video and taking part in media work and door-to-door organising. We won that campaign, saving 23,000 council homes from privatisation and transfer to a purpose-made Housing Association. A little earlier, as a ‘mature student’, I had finished my undergraduate dissertation project: a film essay on Edinburgh’s uneven social topographies shaped by Marxist urban theory. These were likely the concrete starting points for my long-term interest in ‘the politics of space’.

Finally reading Storming Heaven was pivotal. In the 2000s, with limited translation, only a fragmented view of Italian operaismo was available. But even if that book was comprehensive on the main figures, characters, theory and organisations of the milieu, I was conscious that the spatial dimensions of the movement(s) were largely absent. In 2011, I started a PhD in geography, and thinking through Storming Heaven and other books on operaismo from the perspective of urban theory was where the idea for Take Over the City came from. There is nowhere in Scotland a milieu comparable to Notes From Below or Angry Workers (or Big Flame in an earlier period), so my own interest in Italian operaismo has been driven in equal parts by intellectual curiosity, autonomist impulse, what I consider to be the limits of left organising around me, and a desire to understand and bring to light a hidden spatialised side of probably the most revolutionary European movement in the second half of the twentieth century.

DPOne of the most apparent dynamics you explore is how these very rich political frameworks in operaismo developed in dialogue with incredibly intense, fast-moving social struggles on the ground: the book’s title, referencing Lotta Continua’s ‘Take Over the City!’ campaign, is particularly apposite. Your own writing has itself been very embedded in tracing the transformation and ‘re-development’ of Glasgow, and resistance to it, over the last few decades. How has this writing & research experience shaped your excavation and engagement with Italian urban struggles of the post-war period?

NGWhen I moved to Glasgow in 2007, I had already written an article for Variant magazine on the urban neoliberalisation of the city. I soon got more involved with the magazine and wrote a few critical articles on urban/cultural regeneration that seemed to strike a chord at the time. I also wrote expansively on the Commonwealth Games 2014 and The Clyde Gateway regeneration programme, the largest of its kind in Scotland. At the same time, I was a co-founder of Glasgow Games Monitor 2014, was involved in various tenants’ movements and campaigns and (co)organised many events, talks, discussions, reading groups, film screenings, etc., mainly Marxist-orientated and of an ‘urban’ nature.

Glasgow is not Italy, but any reckoning with it must address the processes of deindustrialisation that have ravaged it: an exemplar ‘old industrial’ city. I agree with Steve Wright that the most important theoretical contribution of Italian operaismo is that of ‘class composition’. I also think there is a problematic tendency to make an axiom of Mario Tronti’s famous ‘Copernican Inversion’ of class perspectives, whereby the working class always drives capital forwards rather than the other way around. This inversion has the great merit of foregrounding working class self-activity, but again like Wright, I think any compositionist analysis must carefully address defeat and the complexities of decomposition (of capital and of labour) as much as political recomposition (the overcoming of divisions and the massification of class struggle).

In Glasgow, processes of technical and political decomposition are impossible to ignore. From rapid development in the late-nineteenth century, to depression and collapse in the inter-war period, to large-scale demolition and redevelopment in the post-war era, to the prodigious demolition of post-war high-rise housing and neoliberal ‘urban regeneration’ in recent decades. Lawrence J. Vale’s notion of ‘twice-cleared communities’ was written for Atlanta and Chicago, but it perfectly describes the experience of the peripheral working class in post-war Glasgow: first slum tenement clearance, then displacement after the mass demolition of the city’s high-rise urban modernist revolution. All this in tandem with the complete collapse of industry.

My research and activity in Glasgow make me acutely aware of how processes of development and deindustrialisation impinge on class (re)composition. Like many cities, a crane is never, or rarely, a signifier of factory construction in Glasgow, but of office space, student housing or build-to-rent housing. The largest expansion of any union in Scotland over the last decade has been Living Rent tenants’ union, and this is because exploitative housing conditions are ubiquitous for a huge swathe of the population. The union’s expansion indexes a real material fact, felt in common. Meanwhile, it has become more difficult to organise in a fragmented and casualised workplace, not least because of the symbolic splintering of ‘the left’ in the face of deindustrialisation.

Ultimately, these contemporary conditions are the tendential culmination of a broader dual process that was just beginning in early-1970s Italy (the main period I cover in Take Over the City): deindustrialisation and the urbanisation of capital. What’s fascinating to me is how quickly autonomist groups responded to this tendency with militant urban praxis in comparison to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and associated unions, who either lagged behind or aimed to destroy the autonomy of militant urban movements. These incipient struggles for recomposition on what Sergio Bologna called the terrain of working class ‘dishomogeneity’ closely resemble the conditions we face today––‘the future at our backs’––and I think they have a lot to teach us about how we address present conditions marked by austerity and the near obliteration of production and basic support for social reproduction.

DPThe central concept of your book, ‘spatial composition’, is a framework also developed to enrich ‘class composition theory’, in this case by investigating how urban space is produced, planned, managed and contested in the course of capitalist development and class struggle. How have you developed, and applied, spatial composition out of the context and intellectual world of the Italian 1960s/70s?

NGYou’re right to say that spatial composition is a (necessary) extension of class composition analysis and not a replacement for it. But, apart from Negri, operaismo has suffered from remarkable neglect in terms of translation, and writings on class composition in the English language are scattered and fragmented. Storming Heaven is a book that has class composition at its core but this is embedded in the methodology rather than explicitly elucidated. So, one of my main aims was to provide an in-depth survey of class composition to establish a clear frame of reference for the concept in its historical, political and technical dimensions. Ultimately, my reading of class composition itself is quite classical, bearing on the ever-shifting relationship between ‘technical’ and ‘political composition’. Technical composition pertains to organised capitalist production, including the division of labor, technological development, planning, supervision, and discipline. Political composition refers to how waged and unwaged subjects, develop collective social force, overcome divisions in-and-between wage workers and non-wage workers, and extend unified organisation as a basis for counterpower. This reading stresses the close connection between forms of struggle and forms of production, or as Albert Battaggia would say the material bond between “the mode of production and the mode of rebellion,” and centres the worker, not the institutions who claim to represent the worker, as the central driver of political recomposition.

A brief comparison with the uses of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony might be useful. For Sergio Bologna, within the militant historiography of operaismo, the theory of class composition replaced the debased concept of hegemony developed in the post-Gramscian school of history, by way of the “wishywashiness of the orphans of Togliatti”. This was achieved, he would recall, by a recombination of politics and economics previously understood as separate domains, a return to the ‘hidden abode of production’, and class composition analysis rooted in the determinate relationship between worker and machine (between variable and constant capital). If post-Gramscian historiography in Italy was a history of the institutions of the workers’ movement, separating the political from the economic and subjugating the much-vaunted ‘organic intellectuals’ to the party-machine, operaist historiography prioritised a partisan insistence on the workers’ viewpoint and the unity of theory and practice, most acutely expressed in Tronti’s Copernican inversion of class perspectives and close analyses of the historically determinate relationship between forms of struggle and forms of production.

Already by the 1970s, however, the ‘historically determinate relationship’ between forms of struggle and forms of production was shifting away from the factory base, the home of the operaist ‘mass worker’ (not without an immense series of struggles). This shift was met by a massive upsurge in struggles on the terrain of social reproduction in Italy, such as rent strikes, occupations and forms of ‘autoreduction’ (the collective refusal to comply with price increases of essential and sometimes non-essential services). Take Over the City attempts to synthesise these struggles, which have previously only been dealt with in fragmented form, and show their continuum with the urban struggles of the present. Henri Lefebvre once argued that until Marx the growth of industrialism could only be seen as chaos, fragmentation and unrelated facts. There was no way to account for the facts, to act on them. In The Urban Revolution, 1970, he argued that something similar was happening with respect to urban phenomena and urban society, and that we didn’t yet know how to comprehend them. Borrowing insights and concepts from Lefebvre and David Harvey––such as capital switching, surplus dumping, the production of space, the urbanisation of capital and the spatial fix––the notion of ‘spatial composition’ is designed to centre urban political struggle and recomposition within studies of the determinate conditions faced in the past and present, conditions which have become increasingly subject to the urbanisation of capital.

DPYou usefully outline how ‘class composition’ is both a noun and a verb: it elucidates both the objective class structures that the working class finds itself in, and the living process that sees workers re-organise themselves into new forms to contest capitalist power. The latter idea is equally vital to your account of tendential analysis, or as you put it, a concept bearing on ‘agile anticipation within existing development’. Could you articulate this notion of ‘the tendency’ and how it helps us hold a partisan relationship capitalist development?

NG‘The tendency’ is a somewhat under-exposed term within operaismo, mainly buried in some of Negri’s earlier writings (see Books for Burning and Marx Beyond Marx). Gigi Roggero’s recent work, Italian Operaismo, provides the most helpful contemporary guide. ‘The tendency’ bears comparison with historical materialism but only if we understand, with Massimiliano Tomba in Marx’s Temporalities, that Marx never used that term itself. Stripped of the teleology and universalism that characterises some readings of historical materialism, Marx was a ‘practical materialist’ or ‘communist materialist’ intervening into history, opening up new terrains of possibility and providing different representations of capitalist modernity. In the vein of Walter Benjamin, practical materialism seeks to set off the explosive charge of the past in the present. It seeks out hitherto underacknowledged continuums of revolt (see Marx’s ‘hidden abode of production’).

Class composition is always conjunctural, subject to transformation. For those in the operaist milieu ‘the tendency’ is an anticipatory method of materialist thinking that seeks to identify latent trends and potentialities of revolt in the changing composition of capital. Within operaismo, the concept was closely related to Marx’s theory of crisis, but it is no horoscope or mechanistic theory of catastrophe. Instead, it’s a method 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. The line you quote, “agile anticipation within existing development”, means something quite different to a simple procedure of rationalising what has already come to pass. In his later writings, Negri would tend to ossify ‘the tendency’ and project supposed revolutionary subject categories forward (see the ‘socialised worker’, the ‘immaterial labourer’ and ‘the multitude’) without rigorous compositionist analysis, but earlier he wrote some lucid passages on the concept, providing a sense of how it captures at once a non-teleological conjunctural analysis of technical composition and an insistence on autonomist praxis within determinate conditions.

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.

For the purpose of the argument in Take Over the City, the method of ‘the tendency’ helped me think about the tendential process of capitalist urbanisation since the 1970s, providing a different representation of capitalist modernity––and class struggle––beyond industrial development. Sergio Bologna once asked, “where are the new Mirafioris?”, with regard to the massive industrial complex which was the major base for working class massification and political recomposition (the ‘mass worker’) at the zenith of the Italian ‘Hot Autumn’ in 1969. I think this question of grasping the determinate conditions that produce the best opportunities for generalisation and massification––political recomposition––remains vital. If the concept of class composition means anything it means a mode of rebellion rooted in determinate socio-economic conditions. The concept of ‘spatial composition’ which utilises the concept of ‘the tendency’ with urban theory and class composition analysis, is my way of trying to answer that question in relation to the tendential urbanisation of capital. The many contemporary urban struggles we see presently index these determinations as real, but returning to Lefebvre, how do we understand them?

DPTo flesh out the concepts of spatial composition and tendential analysis, you turn toward two different sources. First, theorists of urban and class geography, Henri Lefevbre and David Harvey, but then, additionally, to the films and media of the era. How do these different sources help us view and relate to shifting spatial compositions?

NGIf the first three chapters of the book summarise and develop three main theoretical concepts derived from operaismo––class composition, spatial composition and the social factory––Chapter 4 provides a bridge to the more empirical work on the movements seeking to ‘Take Over the City’ discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. This chapter is rooted in spatialised readings of history and sociology with the intention of illuminating the catastrophic forms of urbanisation that much of Italy underwent in the post-war era––and how this conditioned militant collective urban praxis. Cinema is always part of my research process so it made sense to revisit classical Italian neorealism and the modernist works that followed. In contrast to the writings in the operaist milieu, the presence of urban transformation is highly visible in these films, representing, in popular form, the findings of critical urban history and urban sociology covering this period.

De Sica’s ‘Miracle in Milan’ (1951) and ‘The Roof’ (1956) focus on slum housing conditions in Milan and Rome respectively, the former with a mythopoetic magical-realist aesthetic, the latter in the mode of realism, with both insisting on the capacity of the working class to fight for better housing conditions. Antonioni’s ‘The Night’ (1961), ‘The Eclipse’ (1962) and ‘The Red Desert’ (1964) chart urban modernity and alienation in Milan, Rome and the Northern industrial landscapes of Emilia-Romagna. Pasolini’s Roman trilogy, ‘Accattone’ (1961), ‘Mamma Roma’ (1962) and ‘Hawks and Sparrows’ (1966) feature successively the slum outskirts after city centre clearances, the peripheral INA-casa public housing projects of the fifties, and the Autostrada del Sole, the longest motorway in Italy, which was crucial to the redefinition of national territorial space. Francesco Rosi’s ‘Hands over the City’ (1963) condenses many of the themes in Take Over the City, including unfettered building speculation, political corruption in the land and housing markets, and the tendential switch of investment from manufacturing to the built environment.

After working through the categories of operaismo to establish the concept of spatial composition, it was necessary to underline the chronic urban conditions that workers, especially migrants, faced in the post-war era. The intention was to illustrate more explicitly how the concept of spatial composition applied to the concretely determined reality of post-war Italy. Without this material grounding, past or present, the concept would be meaningless. Since this perspective was largely absent from operaist writings it was necessary to find a more empirical register from studies in urban history, migration, housing, urban sociology and Marxist geography. I’m a huge fan of walking through cities to get to know them in a more present, embodied register. In lieu of that possibility, filmic representation was the next best means to grasp how the cities under discussion looked in reality and how they functioned in Italy’s post-war uneven development.

Take Over the City is not Cities of Quartz by Mike Davis, but I’ve been influenced by how that book informs us about urban LA through readings of film noir and film-work such as Thom Anderson’ ‘LA Plays Itself’ (2003) and Kent Mackenzie’s ‘The Exiles’ (1961). We can think of filmic representation as a form of ‘cognitive mapping’ here. In contrast to operaismo, the cinematic tendency of Italian neorealism and beyond indicates how critical questions around urbanisation were part of the broader Italian culture from the late-forties onwards. For instance, a film like Visconti’s ‘Rocco and his Brothers’ (1960), which follows the fate of Southern migrant family as they navigate the dire housing situation in Milan, was a huge hit in Italy, being representative of the enormous wave of migration from South to North in the post-war era. All of the films I’ve cited above in different ways show working class protagonists navigating the perilous conditions of Italian urban modernity. In this they were representative of a profoundly transformative reality for the Italian working class, whose lives were far from confined to the workplace.

DPWe’re in a moment where the political and social struggle over space is particularly heightened and is taking on a number of radical forms. I’m thinking of a number of community occupations, against council-led redevelopment or in contestation of capital’s hollowing out of neighborhoods, and local campaigns fighting against the imposition of data centres into their area during severe housing crises. These are unfolding at the same time that we are also seeing something like a resurgence of a municipal socialism within the left’s political imagination. How does turning back to the ‘Take Over the City!’ movement help clarify what’s at stake in these different currents of activity?

NGOften, the type of struggles you mention have been taken in isolation and seen as secondary to the real business of organising in the workplace. But what theory can do is help us understand the general conditions that continue to produce such movements and action and locate them in a more central role (without diminishing the continuing importance of workplace struggle). It’s one thing to itemise or document these struggles in isolation, it’s another thing to grasp their formation within a new spatial composition of capital, borne from the tendential urbanisation of capital. What’s at stake here I think is the generalisation and massification of urban revolt understood within the determinate abstractions of capitalist accumulation, which has taken on an increasingly urban form. This understanding at once helps clarify the importance of these seemingly disparate struggles, foregrounds them as central and necessary components of anti-capitalist struggle, and allows us to conceive of them in their historical continuum. The concept of spatial composition is one way of helping us think through this relation between capitalist development, tendential urbanisation and urban revolt.

The ‘Take Over the City’ movement in 1970s Italy was relatively short-lived but it was deeply prescient and emblematic of what was a generalised movement responding to the beginning of the twin processes of deindustrialisation and tendential urbanisation which we’ve inherited in Western Europe, North America and elsewhere. What was understood, if not explicated in terms of spatial composition at the time, was the necessity of fighting on the terrain of social reproduction when faced by workplace fragmentation, austerity and inflationary hikes in the domestic sphere. In this sense, the movement seems to speak very directly to the conditions many of us face at the present: precarious work when we can get it, two decades of austerity presenting as neoliberalism-as-usual, and massive inflationary hikes in the cost of basic necessities (the ‘cost-of-living’ crisis). Inflationary consumption costs were devestating in 1970s Italy and one persistent theme in the writings I studied was that there was no point fighting to retain or raise wages if these gains were simply taken away at the point of social reproduction (rent, utility bills, transport costs, food). That meant fighting on the terrain of social reproduction as well as production was a necessity. It’s not hard to see how relevant this understanding remains today.

The slogan itself tells us a lot about Lotta Continua’s programme. It was built on the notion of appropriation––with occupation as its central pillar rather than rights––and it emphasised the autonomy of the working class to reshape their own conditions rather than wait for enlightened professionals and reformist politicians to (not) take care of things. This was in distinction to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and its unions, whose ‘respectable’ and legalistic battles on the housing front typically achieved only the most minimal of reforms, if any. If the struggles of appropriation by the autonomist groups didn’t obtain all that they aimed for, their militant practice still achieved more concrete gains and progressive reforms for the working class than the PCI strategy of compromise and appeasement did while making a genuine contribution to class recomposition at the base. I think this holds important lessons for struggles on the terrain of social reproduction today. Without the social force of base movements, history shows us, even the most cursory of reforms will remain out of reach.

DPYou stress that we cannot simply reproduce the shape of these previous urban struggles. To think they could be simply imported into the present would be a clear failure to understand the core of class compositional analysis––the historical specificity of class relations in any given conjuncture and context. You’ve previously suggested the practice of territorial inquiry as a necessary means of praxis to address the urbanisation of capital. How does territorial inquiry sit and relate, quite practically, alongside the methods of analysis your book introduces?

NGYes, class composition analysis at its most cogent is necessarily conjunctural, but there is another more abstract side of class composition analysis: praxis operating within and against determinate conditions. The consistent material factor here being an antagonistic relationship between the mode of the production and the mode of rebellion, the less consistent factor being tendential or ruptural transformations in the organic composition of capital. It’s true that we can’t reproduce the exact conditions of previous historical periods but I think compositionist analysis can help us see certain material tendencies and continuums that have only gained import. The operaist concept of ‘the tendency’ helps identify what some of the more significant shifts are, and I’ve tried to mobilise it in Take Over the City to show that the tendential urbanisation which reshaped the topography and social relations of Italy in the post-war period, is a tendency we’ve inherited in the present (at least in Western Europe and North America). This tendency is at the same time ‘realised’ and ‘in development’ (see the consolidation and expansion of land assetisation, the rentier economy, urban financialisation, etc). No-one can doubt the increased centrality of land and property to national economies globally, and beyond AI, real estate seems set to remain the only game in town for many investors. This is the material ground for the massification and generalisation of struggle, as indexed in the contemporary urban struggles we’ve already discussed.

Take Over the City is an historical study via spatial composition analysis in the vein of operaismo’s militant historiography, so workers’ inquiry was only briefly alluded to––though I recognise its centrality to operaismo and importance for the present. My previous attempts to help develop territorial inquiry as a collective practice in Glasgow have been derailed by serious health issues, but the account of such an inquiry in Great Yarmouth in Issue 27 of Notes from Below gives one good indication of what can be done. For me class composition analysis and inquiry methods sit together, and we can say that the purpose of inquiry is at once working class knowledge and working class organisation and recomposition. Territorial inquiry, beginning as a critical collective walking and researching practice, can be seen as an immanent methodological response to the urbanisation of capitalism. Central to this notion is an acknowledgment that urban social conditions cannot be understood a priori, and that any urban political project requires continual, iterative processes of investigation. The process of territorial inquiry offers the possibility of a more collective response to urbanisation with the goal being nothing less than an active contribution to political recomposition in any given area of research/organisation. I’ve already written about this in Notes from Below for those interested in what territorial inquiry might look like in practice.

As a method, territorial inquiry has the capacity to be extremely effective as an organising tool for several reasons. The decomposition of the working class and the waning of the industrial union as a vehicle for collective struggle may mean that a collective political identity is more readily found in the neighbourhood, in the form of the ‘tenant’ for instance. Territorial inquiry directly targets the arena of social reproduction, opening up the potential to broaden and unify the composition of those in political struggle. Poverty in the ‘capitalist city’ is tangible for increasingly large sectors of the population and the need for a genuinely affordable roof over one’s head is universal, and thus potentially productive of organisation in common. These factors, and more, taken together, mean that territorial inquiry might provide a bridge between subjectivity and material conditions to provide an immanent response to the new spatial composition of capital.