Tenant Composition: Class Struggle from the Point of View of the Home

Abstract

Following from Neil Gray's notion of “spatial composition”, in this article I argue that “tenant composition” names a view of the organic composition of workers through the prism of housing and “tenant recomposition”, the process by which divergent subjects recompose through the self-identification and recoding of existing subject-positions codified by housing agreements. I first introduce “tenant composition” as a methodology. Next, I sketch two case studies with this method: one of the largest rent strikes in New York City history that took place at Co-op City in the Bronx from 1975 to 1976, and the undertaking of “auto reduction” (the collective price-setting of consumer goods and services) in Italy during the same period. I argue that because rent is structurally related to the wage-form, thinking about class struggle from the perspective of tenancy evinces modalities for interrupting the reproduction of neoliberal urban subjectivity, acting to abolish the relations that produce those categories in the first place.