The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

236 The experience of space and timedifferent social relations, into a common cause, but it also began, inthe 1860s , to transfer funds and material aid from one space of class.struggle to another. If the bourgeoisie could command space for Itsown class purposes, then the workers' movement could do the same.And to the degree that the First International appeared to commandgenuine power, the bourgeoisie had every reason to fear it (as ineedthey did) in exactly the same way that they had feared the ysten usroamings of Captain Swing decades before. The capacIt y to lmkworkers in united action across space has always been an Importantvariable in class struggle. To some degree Marx seemed to believethat the massing of workers in the factories and the cities of industrialcapitalism would by itself provide a sufficient g opolitical P ? werbase for class action. But the whole thrust of FIrst InternatIOnalgeopolitics was to broaden that base in as systematic a way aspossible..It is rare indeed for class action not to have to face up to Itsspecific geographical constraints. In the prolon ed mners' strike .inBritain in 1984, for example, the so-called 'flymg pIckets' movmgquickly from one pit-head to another posed an acut probl : m f?r thestate powers, which had to devise eq ally m .obde .tactIcs m ! e­sponse. Legislation to outlaw secondary mdustnal actIOn and flymgpickets was designed to curb working-cla s power ove sp ce and toweaken the potential for coherent class action by confillln It to pla e.The crushing of the Paris Commune, and the 1877 raIlroad stnkein the United States, demonstrated early on, however, that superiorcommand over space would usually lie with the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the workers' movement persisted in its internationalist vison(though with weak actual organization) up until the eve of the FIrStWorld War, when the Second International split essentially on thequestion of loyalty to nation (space) versus loyalty to class (historical)interests. The victory of the former current not only had workersfighting on both sides of what most recognized as a war .betwencapitalists, but initiated a phase of workers' movement hIstory mwhich proletarian interests always ended up, no matter what therhetoric, serving at the feet of national interests.Working-class movements are, in fact, generally better .at organizingin and dominating place than they are at commandmg space.The various revolutions that broke out in Paris in the nineteenthcentury foundered on the inability to consolidate nati?nal powerthrough a spatial strategy that would command the natIOnal space.Movements such as the Seattle general strike of 1918 (when workerseffectively took control of the city for nearly a week), the St Petersburguprising of 1905, coupled with a long and detailed history ofTime and space as sources of social power 237municipal socialism, community organization around strik .action(such as the Flint strike of 1933), through to the urban upnsmgs ofthe United States of the 1960s, all illustrate the point. On the otherhand, simultaneity of revolutionary upsurges in differe?t locations,as in 1848 or 1968, strikes fear into any ruling class preCIsely becauseits superior command over space is threatened. It is exactly in such .situations that international capitalism raises the spectre of an mternationalconspiracy, deeply offensive to national interests, and ofteninvokes the power of the latter to preserve its ability to commandspace..What is even more interesting is the political response to thISlatent power of revolutionary and worker mobilization in place. Oneof the principal tasks of the capitalist state is to locate power in thespaces which the bourgeoisie controls, and disempowe tose spaceswhich oppositional movements have the greatest potentIalIty to command.This was the principle that led France to deny self-governmentto Paris until the total embourgeoisement of the city allowed it tobecome the fiefdom of Chirac's right-wing politics. This was thesame strategy that lay behind Thatcher's abolition of metropolitangovernments like the Greater London Council (contr lled by a .Marxist left during the period 1981-85). It was also malllfest m theslow erosion of municipal and urban powers in the United Statesduring the 'progressive era' when municipal socialism appeared as areal possibility, thus making a federalization of state powers moreacceptable to the large-scale capitalists. It is i such a contex th tclass struggle also assumes its global role. Henn Lefebvre puts It thISway:Today, more than ever, the class struggle is inscribed in space.Indeed, it is that struggle alone which prevents abstract spacefrom taking over the whole planet and papering over all differences.Only the class struggle has the capacity to differentiate,to generate differences which are not intrinsic to economicgrowth ... that is to say, differences which are not eitherinduced by or acceptable to that growth.The whole history of territorial organization (see Sack, 1987), colonizationand imperialism, of uneven geographical devẹopment, .ofurban and rural contradictions, as well as of geopolItical conflIcttestifies to the importance of such struggles within the history ofcapitalism.If space is indeed to be thought of as a system of 'containers' ofsocial power (to use the imagery of Foucault), then it follows thatfl