WE have seen how the making of class categories that shaped
the identities, motives, and actions of early working classes
proved far more contingent than Engels foresaw, ¹ and how the
ways in which class emerged as a coherent marker and guide
for working people may be understood in terms of how
working classes mapped the capitalist city. Taking this
approach, it is possible to make sense of why in some circum-
stances, but not all, class came to define the identities of
political and social actors beyond the workplace, in the resi-
dential community and the home. So, too, an urban-spatial
imagination can assist in addressing other significant puzzles
for Marxism with regard to class and class conflict. At no time
since the early nineteenth-century history of working-class
formation have working classes fulfilled their scripted role as
agents of fundamental social change in the theory's drama of
transition to socialism. In the late twentieth century, more-
over, as capitalism is manifestly being restructured on a global
scale, the relative significance of class categories themselves
is in question. An engagement of Marxism with the city can
shed some light on these problems by helping us to understand
why militancy in the full Marxist sense has existed only in
the realm of theory and by giving us a vantage-point from
which to consider current patterns of class and group
formation.

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