Suburbanization and industry flight destroyed the spatial bases of worker cohesion.

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.” “The effect of all this on labour movements,” he wrote in the late 1980s, “has been to deprive them of their former cohesion.” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 250

Categorization

• XREF: This is the materialist complement to Putnam’s social-capital narrative and to earlier chapters on hollowed-out mass institutions — physical proximity is the precondition of organization that hyperpolitics has lost.
• DEFINE: Introduces Marx’s ‘potato sack politics’ as the term for atomized masses lacking collective organization.