In the face of this grave peril, which jeopardized its exploitation, the bourgeoisie altered its strategy. It abandoned its old practice of building ‘workers’ estates’ around the factory, gave up all the advantages that it had reaped from this, and took a different tack.

More and more workers were needed. To recruit them, there was no depending on the kind of ‘urban planning’ that provided accommodation in workers’ estates, miners’ cottage settlements, and the like. It was necessary to be able to recruit any worker anywhere at will, even if he lived at some distance or even very far away; and it was also necessary to be able to ‘play’ on market fluctuations so as to augment or diminish the workforce in a particular branch of production or shift it from one branch of production to another. Workforce ‘mobility’ became a sine qua non for the development of imperialist capitalism, for its ‘play’ on capital investments and transfers of those investments. Capital had finally to be completely liberated from the old fetters represented by investments of fixed capital in workers’ estates located around the factory. The mobility of capital, subject to the search for maximal profit (on the basis of the average rate of profit), necessitated the mobility of the workforce. Concretely, this meant that the workforce was freed of the obligation to live in a particular habitat tied to proximity to the factory. It became obvious that – a reason inseparable from the first reason (for, when the bourgeoisie sets out to reap the greatest possible profit from exploitation, which is class struggle, it must simultaneously ensure the greatest possible social and political security for that exploitation) – it became obvious that, in order to counter the workers’ struggle that was emerging as a result of this double concentration, workers had to be scattered as widely as possible. It was already more than enough that they were brought together in the concentration of the labour process. They should not, to make things worse, also be brought together around the factory in a workers’ estate!

These are not imaginary variations, but facts, and I am by no means arbitrarily imputing motives to the bourgeoisie. We have a great many texts, declarations and studies written by its own specialists that prove that it was perfectly conscious of the class character of its ‘turnabout’ on the political matter of workers’ housing – that it was conscious of the dangers this ‘turnabout’ was meant to stave off and of the effects it expected from this turnabout. Naturally, this ‘turnabout’ on the matter of the workers’ habitat, which left the choice of their accommodations entirely up to them (go live wherever you like, I don’t care to know anything about it), simultaneously exposed workers to the logic of a whole series of complex, seemingly aleatory processes in which urban ground rent played the leading role, alongside the most cynical politics (Haussmann demolishing workers’ neighbourhoods in the centre of Paris in order to open up broad avenues in which post-1848 rifles and artillery could ‘work wonders’). This contributed to driving the mass of workers into the suburbs, which had gradually gained ground at the expense of cultivated fields. Finance capital, urban ground rent, and politics thus succeeded in transforming the class characteristics of the neighbourhoods of capitalism’s new urban planning. Pushed into distant suburbs, the workers found what accommodations they could. When the bourgeoisie realized that, concentrated as they were in production, they were still too dangerous, it set out to ‘change their attitude’; that is, put baldly, to invite them to desert the class struggle by interesting them in proprietorship – by allowing them to buy their little houses and gardens in the suburbs. The result was the politics of the detached house, explicitly conceived of as, and, without the least dissimulation, openly declared to be, essential to the depoliticization of the working class. The result was the working-class property owner, with all the hours given over to do-it-yourself chores in house and garden, far from any ‘café’ and, what is more, stuck with long-term loans and stuck in his little family. What better guarantee for capitalism could anyone dream of?

This is where we come back to the automobile. In the grand transformation of the bourgeois politics of labour-power, the automobile was clearly and consciously conceived of by Ford, who pioneered mass production of it, as a product for the masses, hence for the workers. It was conceived of as an indispensable means of enabling workers – living wherever they happened to find lodging and therefore, usually, far from the factory, and even farther than from the factory nearest them, perhaps, if their first lay-off, and so forth – to transport themselves from their homes to the factory gates and present themselves there about as fresh as they would have been if they had lived in the immediate vicinity. It is of no importance that there exist factories for the rich (Lancia, Ferrari) and factories such as Alfa Romeo, somewhat more specialized in cars that are, as a rule, beyond ordinary workers’ [ouvriers] means (and even that no longer holds since the Alfasud). Cars render the same services to other workers [travailleurs] – white-collar workers, supervisory personnel, and so on – who also live far from the company where they work. What is important is that Ferrari, Lancia and even Alfa Romeo exist on the basis constituted by Fiat and its analogues (General Motors, Ford, Citroën, Welter-Meunier, and so on), that is to say, a gigantic imperialist enterprise, implanted throughout the world, whose automotive sector is all but exclusively devoted to turning out mass-produced cars for mass consumption: in other words, popular cars which workers can usually afford.