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Section I of this chapter discusses how, by not embarking on the journey linking city space, capitalist development, and class formation, Marxism denied itself a critical dimension in the material analysis both of the target it wished to confront and of the class it expected to be the agent of this successful engagement. Section II looks at how the separation between the social classes within the new social geography of the capitalist city in the nineteenth century helped assure the residential propinquity of members of the working class, as well as their isolation from other classes. However, with the elaboration of new networks made possible by the nationalization of labour markets, there was a growing sense that working classes shared a fate that transcended given localities, while advances in communications and transportation made the ties between class and space more complicated and tentative. Analyses are included of this break in working‐class history given in the work of Krishan Kumar and Craig Calhoun, and by Olivier Zunz and Richard Oestreicher in their studies of Detroit at the turn of the nineteenth century. Sections III–V show that the relationship of Marxism and the city and urban space now stands on unsure ground, since it is the politics and viability of class itself as the dominant form of collective identity that is currently under challenge; the discussion given here draws on the work of Mark Gottendiener and Eric Hobsbaum within the new urban Marxism.

The previous chapter showed that neither David Harvey nor Manuel Castells in the early 1980s tackled the limitations of Marxist urban studies persuasively, each in his own way abandoning the project of Marxist social theory, whose central questions concern the joining together of structure and agency in a single hand. This chapter presents an analysis of the route taken by Friedrich Engels in his early work on cities in The Condition of the Working Class in England; in his compressed discussion of Manchester and other early industrial revolution urban centres, Engels blazed a road that has not been travelled either by Marxism or by students of the city, and identified mechanisms that connect structure and agency. The provocative union of Marxism and the city proposed by Engels had nothing to say about the history, character, and activities of national states. His contribution, rather, lies in the way he raised fundamental questions in three dimensions that correspond to each of Marx's theoretical projects: (1) questions about the linkages between large‐scale processes, principally the development of capitalism, and the emergence of the modern capitalist city; (2) questions about the linkages between the city as a point in the accumulation process and its internal forms; and (3) questions about the linkages between these forms and the development of class and group consciousness. These are the tasks entailed in joining Marxism and the city, and these are the questions explored in the remaining chapters of the book.