This is particularly evident today in Japan-for example, in those immense revolutionary battles that come down to simple collision, to the provocation of a clash with the urban police, in which the mass of overtrained militants is armed with audio visual machines: movie cameras, tape recorders, etc. Aware of the kinetic nature of their actions, it's the instantaneousness of their presence (in the next second they have vanished from the street that they film and record); they, the passers-by for whom the ban on loitering goes hand in hand with the ban on gathering. In the same way they evaded the very revelatory slogan of the 1848 insurgents: "Desperate masses," writes Engels, "who demand bread and work, or death."
In fact, the watchword of these "workers' battalions" (as those who would be deported by force to the provinces or drafted into the army were called) was "we're stayin"' . . . we're not moving from here! The socialist utopia of the nineteenth century, like the democratic utopia of the ancient agora, was literally buried under the vast scaffolding of urban construction, obscuring the fundamental anthropological side of revolution, of proletarianization: the migratory phenomenon.
On September 21 , 1 788, Arthur Young notes in his famous journal: " .. . the great commercial city of Nantes! . . . Arrive-go to the theatre, new built of fine white stone. It was Sunday, and therefore full. Mon Dieu! cried I to myself, do all the wastes, the deserts, the heath, ling, furz, broom, and bog, that I have passed for 300 miles, lead to this spectacle? . . . There are no gentle transitions from ease to comfort, from comfort to wealth: you pass at once from beggary to profusion,-from misery in mud cabins to splendid spectacles at 5 00 liv. a night. "
The new city with its riches, its unheard-of technical facilities, its universities and museums, its stores and permanent holidays, its comforts, its knowledge and its security, seemed an ideal spot for the tiring journey to end, the ultimate landing dock for the mass's migrations and hopes after a perilous crossing-so much so that until recently we confused urban and urbane for a place of social and cultural exchanges what was only a highway or railway exchanger. We took the crossroad for the path of socialism.
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I Speed and Politics