Logistical Borderscapes

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

“…Autonomism itself emerged through a focus on migration (Wright ), and there is a growing body of work exploring how migrants are involved with class de‐ and re‐composition by drastically altering technical and political compositions (e.g. Altenried et al ; Marks ; Pizzolato ). But the most important, exciting, and well‐known current to emerge from the intersections between autonomism and migration is AoM.…”

“…In particular AoM explores how an extension and proliferation of “border thinking” (Mezzadra and Neilson ) is central to technical compositions, creating and maintaining precarity through conditions of “deportability in everyday life” (De Genova ). Borders have thus become “borderscapes” (Altenried et al ), penetrating well within nation‐states to control labour.…”

“…To do this, the paper develops a theoretical framework that reintegrates two related, yet often disparate, areas of thought: autonomist Marxism and the “autonomy of migration” (AoM) approach. The former is an anti‐authoritarian Marxism that foregrounds disparate working‐class struggles as the engine of societal change (Tronti ; Wright ), while the latter takes migrants’ experiences and subjectivities as a starting point from which to analyse global border regimes (Altenried et al ) and the changing shape of contemporary capitalism (Mezzadra and Neilson ). There is a mutually beneficial relationship to this synthesis, with AoM forcing autonomist thinking to take non‐class structures more seriously (Casas‐Cortes et al ), and an autonomist imperative ensuring AoM avoids overplaying resistance (Leonardi ).…”

“…In particular, the paper combines the two currents’ signal contributions—class composition analysis (Wright ) and the multiplication of labour (Mezzadra and Neilson ), respectively—to develop a critical analysis of the workshop economy. This is crucial as, despite emerging from a wider autonomist milieu, AoM has tended to move away from compositional thinking (Altenried et al ). Thus far from separate currents, autonomist Marxism and AoM are intimately related, yet, surprisingly, the full force of their collective theoretical might remain underexplored.…”

“…While AoM can do just this, it has been criticised for fetishising resistance and for its propensity to generalise (Lan ). Understanding migration compositionally avoids this, developing a more grounded and militant praxis (Altenried et al ), while also forcing class composition analysis to engage more seriously with non‐class structures and social reproduction (Thorburn 2017). Second, despite their suitability for the task, explicitly autonomist analyses of the “informal” and “unfree” migrant labour found in garment workshops worldwide are rare (Campbell ); such an approach sharpens our understanding of labour conditions and resistance in these workshops while honing compositional analyses themselves.…”