Multiplying Labour, Multiplying Resistance: Class Composition in Buenos Aires’ Clandestine Textile Workshops

Abstract

Buenos Aires’ talleres clandestinos (clandestine textile workshops) are powerful sites of accumulation and resistance; a complex and communitarian migrant economy. The economy’s complexity is, however, masked by its spatiality, clandestinity, and the promotion of culturalist analyses that ignore intra‐collective class differentials. This paper considers the “autonomy of migration” approach through the lens of “class composition” to explore the talleres’ contours. Witnessed in the talleres is a clear “multiplication of labour”, yet approaching this multiplication compositionally highlights the multiple examples of resistance and refusal immanent to the workshop economy. But this dialectic of control and resistance transcends the workplace, with the talleres one node in a wider, socially reproductive borderscape. By developing a framework that neither condemns nor celebrates economic structures like the talleres, but instead unpacks their antagonistic nature, the paper highlights the benefits of (a) analysing the autonomy of migration approach compositionally, and (b) further geographical engagement with autonomist thinking.

Composing the social factory: An autonomist urban geography of Buenos Aires

“…But as Camfield (2004) notes, class identities and struggles are never only about class, with other structures/identities central to all political compositions, contributing variously to both de- and re- composition. Class composition analysis must therefore be intersectional (Clare, 2015). Expanded accordingly class composition analysis is a powerful tool.…”

“…Large numbers of people were thus forced into the conurbano and/or villas , the consequences of which are explored below. Dovetailing maliciously with this gentrification was the interrelated privatisation, securitisation, and whitening of the city (Clare, 2015). Changes to the urban fabric went hand in hand/glove with the eviction of poor, racialised, and migrant populations.…”

“…The gentrification forcing people into CABA’s villas has created a housing crisis within them, and with dangerous overcrowding, the pressure on housing means rents are often now higher than in ‘formal’ barrios (Clare, 2015). For those precariously and ‘informally’ employed, however, villas remain the only option given the lack of requirement for documentation, bank accounts, and deposits (Bastia and Montero Bressán, 2018).…”

“…These ethnic neighbourhoods…are entrenched in different areas of Buenos Aires.Migrants mentioned that although this creation of ‘ethnic neighbourhoods’ was often beyond their control – with the only possibilities for housing coming from within kinship networks – it was also a preference. Given the everyday racism and discrimination facing migrants (Clare, 2015) respite is invaluable, and the ‘positive elements’ Daniel describes come from ‘ghetto formation’. These ‘ethnic neighbourhoods’ are especially important for recent arrivals to Buenos Aires likely lacking in contacts and capital, and for whom cultural differences are starkest, for example one young, recent Bolivian migrant told me that the only time he felt comfortable and relaxed was within specifically Bolivian barrios .…”

Rethinking Italian Autonomist Marxism: Spatial Composition, Urban Contestation, and the Material Geographies of Social Reproduction

“…In doing so, the paper aims to show how a spatialised form of “compositionism” (see Berardi 2009:75) can inform contemporary urban theory and praxis, and simultaneously how an urban lens can help illuminate the implicit spatial politics of Italian autonomist Marxism. This will be accomplished by deepening my own work on the spatialities of Italian autonomy (Gray 2012, 2018a, 2018c, forthcoming) with the first extended elaboration of the concept of spatial composition (see, for nascent iterations, Brown 2019; Clare 2018, 2020; Gray 2018a, 2018c; Toscano 2004). This spatialised conception of Italian autonomist Marxism emphasises the underestimated political‐strategic importance of tendential urbanisation to the material geographies, or the where , of social reproduction and its subjects.…”