Geographic dispersion of industry dissolved the physical base of class solidarity.

Evidence

The decline of this counter-power went hand in hand with socio-geographic changes in the structure of working life. As Vivek Chibber writes, “the physical layout of large industrial centers” pushed “workers together into crowded spaces” while “separating them from their employers.” When industry abandoned cities and working-class families relocated to newly built suburbs, the shift had far-reaching effects on class identity, laying the groundwork for what Marx had described as “potato sack politics.” As Hobsbawm himself recorded, “urban development, public and private, was destroying the very bases which had allowed the formation of the ‘urban villages’ on which so much of labour strength had rested.” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 250

Categorization

• XREF: Provides the material-geographic causal mechanism (suburbanization, industrial flight) that precisely grounds the reader’s hyperpolitics diagnosis — politicization without organization because the spaces that once forced organization are gone. — connects to: Market-centered finance dissolved the cohesive corporate elite class. — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 112; Home ownership dissolved spatial working-class solidarity and tethered workers to markets. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 518