“I have focused on suburbanisation in the United States for the same reasons Marx focused on Britain in Capital: this dramatic shift in the working up of space by capital is nowhere else so clear and complete, but the conditions which generate sprawl and suburbanisation are of course not limited to the US — they represent a general enough global tendency in this period to be taken as characterising the broader dynamics of the class relation as such. This does not mean, however, that we can simply read the American case off the operation of capital’s “logic”. The latter is itself highly shaped by the peculiarities of the UScontext, meaning that the story of suburbanisation must be unfolded with an attention to particular cases and the contingencies which shape them. The tendency towards de-concentration is constituted by, and in turn helps to constitute, the reorganisation of the phenomenal forms of the capital–labour relation — a reorganisation driven by the crisis of 1917–45, in which the working class as an estate met its historic defeat in a counter-revolution that arose in part from within the workers’ movement itself. Such a defeat is not only political, however. Defeat always entails the reorganisation of the labour process and the very conditions of accumulation. While the working class was decisively defeated by fascism on one side and Keynesianism on the other — through their mutual immersion in war and genocide — accumulation was renewed on a world scale. This occurred under conditions which reversed the three above-mentioned assumptions of capitalism’s radical critics: transforming labour and production processes to surpass the dominance of mechanical industry; relatively overcoming the working class’s material impoverishment in the wealthiest countries; introducing a greater degree of inclusion and representation of wage-labourers, as individuals, within the political and legal system. The latter was not merely a matter of votes, or of the integration of unions or workers’ parties into the state: with it came more general improvements in the guaranteed quality of life, through access to healthcare, funded retirement, paid vacation, free public education, and so on. This gradually ate away at the independent organisations and institutions of the class that had existed outside, and often against, the state and bourgeois property law, and in many cases effectively destroyed them.
The recognition of these changes has been glacially slow among those claiming a “revolutionary” outlook — that is, one in which the overcoming of capitalism as the work of capital, itself entails the overcoming of capitalism by those compelled to wage labour. Where they have been recognised, and where the abolition of capital has not been given up altogether, this has often entailed the claim that the capital–labour relation no longer holds, that the working class no longer exists, and that the overcoming of capital will either come only from a class outside of the capital relation, or will be the work of capital’s own rational self-overcoming. Both cases share a common source of error: an association of the phenomenal, historically particular conditions of mechanical industry and material impoverishment with the categories of capital as such and the abstract nature of its forms of domination, and the conflation of a class relation with the condition of being an estate. To put it another way, both have acted as if capitalist society was a direct form of domination of one group by another, as in slavery or feudalism, when in fact it involves an indirect form of domination through abstract social forms. Of course, in its initial development capitalism arose amidst such direct, concrete forms of domination and they do not simply disappear of themselves, but only under a protracted development, which is itself determined by continual crises and the potential overthrow of capitalism.”
