The Social Ideology of the Motorcar

Posted on August 3, 2001, filed Under Housing & Urban Issues.

by André Gorz (from Le Sauvage September-October 1973)

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea:
luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which
in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner,
the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car,
like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t
have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury
good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone
can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it. On the contrary, everyone
diddles, cheats, and frustrates everyone else, and is diddled, cheated, and
frustrated in return.

This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico
has yet dared to claim that to democratize the right to vacation would mean
a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each
of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would
take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give
everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little
strips — or to squeeze the villas so tightly together — that their use value
would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short,
democratization of access to the beaches point to only one solution –
the collectivist one. And this solution is necessarily at war with the
luxury of the private beach, which is a privilege that a small minority
takes as their right at the expense of all.

Now, why is it that what is perfectly obvious in the case of the beaches is not
generally acknowledged to be the case for transportation? Like the beach house,
doesn’t a car occupy scarce space? Doesn’t it deprive the others who use the
roads (pedestrians, cyclists, streetcar and bus drivers)? Doesn’t it lose its
use value when everyone uses his or her own? And yet there are plenty of
politicians who insist that every family has the right to at least one car
and that it’s up to the “government” to make it possible for everyone to park
conveniently, drive easily in the city, and go on holiday at the same time as
everyone else, going 70 mph on the roads to vacation spots.

The monstrousness of this demagogic nonsense is immediately apparent, and
yet even the left doesn’t disdain resorting to it. Why is the car treated
like a sacred cow? Why, unlike other “privatize” goods, isn’t it recognized
as an antisocial luxury? The answer should be sought in the following two
aspects of driving:

  • Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the
    level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that
    each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone
    else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any
    moment is figuratively killing the “others,” who appear merely as physical
    obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive
    selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behavior,
    and has come into being since driving has become commonplace.
    (”You’ll never have socialism with that kind of people,” an East German
    friend told me, upset by the spectacle of Paris traffic).
  • The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been
    devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been
    followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit
    of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its
    superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily
    explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass
    transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way
    that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made
    necessary. An ideological (”cultural”) revolution would be needed to
    break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the
    ruling class (either right or left).

Let us look more closely now at these two points.

When the car was invented, it was to provide a few of the very rich with a
completely unprecedented privilege: that of traveling much faster than
everyone else. No one up to then had ever dreamt of it. The speed of all
coaches was essentially the same, whether you were rich or poor. The
carriages of the rich didn’t go any faster than the carts of the
peasants, and trains carried everyone at the same speed (they didn’t
begin to have different speeds until they began to compete with the
automobile and the aeroplane). Thus, until the turn of the century, the
elite did not travel at a different speed from the people. The motorcar was
going to change all that. For the first time class differences were to be
extended to speed and to the means of transportation.

This means of transportation at first seemed unattainable to the masses –
it was so different from ordinary means. There was no comparison between
the motorcar and the others: the cart, the train, the bicycle, or the
horse-car. Exceptional beings went out in self-propelled vehicles that
weighed at least a ton and whose extremely complicated mechanical organs
were as mysterious as they were hidden from view. For one important aspect
of the automobile myth is that for the first time people were riding in
private vehicles whose operating mechanisms were completely unknown to
them and whose maintenance and feeding they had to entrust to specialists.
Here is the paradox of the automobile: it appears to confer on its owners
limitless freedom, allowing them to travel when and where they choose at a
speed equal to or greater than that of the train. But actually, this seeming
independence has for its underside a radical dependency. Unlike the horse rider,
the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel
supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists
in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts.
Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship
to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and
master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and
use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be
provided by some third party. The apparent independence of the automobile
owner was only concealing the actual radical dependency.

The oil magnates were the first to perceive the prize that could be
extracted from the wide distribution of the motorcar. If people could
be induced to travel in cars, they could be sold the fuel necessary to
move them. For the first time in history, people would become dependent
for their locomotion on a commercial source of energy. There would be
as many customers for the oil industry as there were motorists –
and since there would be as many motorists as there were families,
the entire population would become the oil merchants’ customers. The
dream of every capitalist was about to come true. Everyone was going
to depend for their daily needs on a commodity that a single industry
held as a monopoly.

All that was left was to get the population to drive cars. Little
persuasion would be needed. It would be enough to get the price of
a car down by using mass production and the assembly line. People
would fall all over themselves to buy it. They fell over themselves
all right, without noticing they were being led by the nose. What, in
fact, did the automobile industry offer them? Just this: “From now on,
like the nobility and the bourgeoisie, you too will have the privilege
of driving faster than everybody else. In a motorcar society the
privilege of the elite is made available to you.”

People rushed to buy cars until, as the working class began to buy
them as well, defrauded motorists realized they had been had. They
had been promised a bourgeois privilege, they had gone into debt
to acquire it, and now they saw that everyone else could also get one.
What good is a privilege if everyone can have it? It’s a fool’s game.
Worse, it pits everyone against everyone else. General paralysis is
brought on by a general clash. For when everyone claims the right
to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie, everything
comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets — in Boston
as in Paris, Rome, or London — to below that of the horsecar; at
rush hours the average speed on the open road falls below the speed
of a bicyclist.

Nothing helps. All the solutions have been tried. They all end up
making things worse. No matter if they increase the number of city
expressways, beltways, elevated crossways, 16-lane highways, and
toll roads, the result is always the same. The more roads there are
in service, the more cars clog them, and city traffic becomes more
paralyzing congested. As long as there are cities, the problem will
remain unsolved. No matter how wide and fast a superhighway is, the
speed at which vehicles can come off it to enter the city cannot be
greater than the average speed on the city streets. As long as the
average speed in Paris is 10 to 20 kmh, depending on the time of
day, no one will be able to get off the beltways and autoroutes
around and into the capital at more than 10 to 20 kmh.

The same is true for all cities. It is impossible to drive at more
than an average of 20 kmh in the tangled network of streets, avenues,
and boulevards that characterize the traditional cities. The
introduction of faster vehicles inevitably disrupts city traffic,
causing bottlenecks-and finally complete paralysis.

If the car is to prevail, there’s still one solution: get rid of
the cities. That is, string them out for hundreds of miles along enormous
roads, making them into highway suburbs. That’s what’s been done in the
United States. Ivan Illich sums up the effect in these startling figures:
“The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which
is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or
her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in
motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for
gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this
American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three
and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not
have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on
foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and
aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”

It is true, Illich points out, that in non-industrialised countries
travel uses only 3 to 8% of people’s free time (which comes to about
two to six hours a week). Thus a person on foot covers as many miles
in an hour devoted to travel as a person in a car, but devotes 5 to
10 times less time in travel. Moral: The more widespread fast
vehicles are within a society, the more time — beyond a certain point –
people will spend and lose on travel. It’s a mathematical fact.

The reason? We’ve just seen it: The cities and towns have been broken up
into endless highway suburbs, for that was the only way to avoid traffic
congestion in residential centres. But the underside of this solution is
obvious: ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are
far away from everything. To make room for the cars, distances have
increased. People live far from their work, far from school, far from
the supermarket — which then requires a second car so the shopping can
be done and the children driven to school. Outings? Out of the question.
Friends? There are the neighbors.. .and that’s it. In the final analysis,
the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it
overcomes. Of course, you can get yourself to work doing 60 mph, but
that’s because you live 30 miles from your job and are willing to give
half an hour to the last 6 miles. To sum it all up: “A good part of each
day’s work goes to pay for the travel necessary to get to work.” (Ivan Illich).

Maybe you are saying, “But at least in this way you can escape the hell
of the city once the workday is over.” There we are, now we know: “the city,”
the great city which for generations was considered a marvel, the
only place worth living, is now considered to be a “hell.” Everyone
wants to escape from it, to live in the country. Why this reversal?
For only one reason. The car has made the big city uninhabitable. It
has made it stinking, noisy, suffocating, dusty, so congested that
nobody wants to go out in the evening anymore. Thus, since cars have
killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to
suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular
argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction
caused by cars.

From being a luxury item and a sign of privilege, the car has thus
become a vital necessity. You have to have one so as to escape from
the urban hell of the cars. Capitalist industry has thus won the game:
the superfluous has become necessary. There’s no longer any need to
persuade people that they want a car; it’s necessity is a fact of life.
It is true that one may have one’s doubts when watching the motorised
escape along the exodus roads. Between 8 and 9:30 a.m., between
5:30 and 7 p.m., and on weekends for five and six hours the escape
routes stretch out into bumper-to-bumper processions going (at best)
the speed of a bicyclist and in a dense cloud of gasoline fumes.
What remains of the car’s advantages? What is left when, inevitably,
the top speed on the roads is limited to exactly the speed of the
slowest car?

Fair enough. After killing the city, the car is killing the car.
Having promised everyone they would be able to go faster, the
automobile industry ends up with the unrelentingly predictable
result that everyone has to go as slowly as the very slowest,
at a speed determined by the simple laws of fluid dynamics. Worse:
having been invented to allow its owner to go where he or she
wishes, at the time and speed he or she wishes, the car becomes,
of all vehicles, the most slavish, risky, undependable and uncomfortable.
Even if you leave yourself an extravagant amount of time, you never know
when the bottlenecks will let you get there. You are bound to the road
as inexorably as the train to its rails. No more than the railway
traveller can you stop on impulse, and like the train you must go
at a speed decided by someone else. Summing up, the car has none
of the advantages of the train and all of its disadvantages, plus
some of its own: vibration, cramped space, the danger of accidents,
the effort necessary to drive it.

And yet, you may say, people don’t take the train. Of course! How
could they? Have you ever tried to go from Boston to New York by
train? Or from Ivry to Treport? Or from Garches to Fountainebleau?
Or Colombes to l’Isle-Adam? Have you tried on a summer Saturday or
Sunday? Well, then, try it and good luck to you! You’ll observe that
automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car
is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear,
thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state
allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding
countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them. The
only ones that have been spared are the high-speed intercity
connections that compete with the airlines for a bourgeois
clientele. There’s progress for you!

The truth is, no one really has any choice. You aren’t free to have
a car or not because the suburban world is designed to be a
function of the car-and, more and more, so is the city world.
That is why the ideal revolutionary solution, which is to do away
with the car in favour of the bicycle, the streetcar, the bus, and
the driverless taxi, is not even applicable any longer in the big
commuter cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Trappes, or even
Brussels, which are built by and for the automobile. These splintered
cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical
developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These
streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to
home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At
the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone
found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of
plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the
streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

So, the jig is up? No, but the alternative to the car will have to be
comprehensive. For in order for people to be able to give up their cars,
it won’t be enough to offer them more comfortable mass transportation.
They will have to be able to do without transportation altogether because
they’ll feel at home in their neighbourhoods, their community. their
human-sized cities, and they will take pleasure in walking from work
to home-on foot, or if need be by bicycle. No means of fast transportation
and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an
uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of
only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and
sleep.

“People,” writes Illich, “will break the chains of overpowering
transportation when they come once again to love as their own territory
their own particular beat, and to dread getting too far away from it.”
But in order to love “one’s territory” it must first of all be made
liveable, and not trafficable. The neighbourhood or community must
once again become a microcosm shaped by and for all human activities,
where people can work, live, relax, learn, communicate, and knock about,
and which they manage together as the place of their life in common.
When someone asked him how people would spend their time after the
revolution, when capitalist wastefulness had been done away with,
Marcuse answered, “We will tear down the big cities and build new
ones. That will keep us busy for a while.”

These new cities might be federations of communities (or neighbourhoods)
surrounded by green belts whose citizens-and especially the
schoolchildren-will spend several hours a week growing the fresh produce
they need. To get around everyday they would be able to use all kinds of
transportation adapted to a medium-sized town: municipal bicycles, trolleys
or trolley-buses, electric taxis without drivers. For longer trips into the
country, as well as for guests, a pool of communal automobiles would be
available in neighbourhood garages. The car would no longer be a necessity.
Everything will have changed: the world, life, people. And this will not
have come about all by itself.

Meanwhile, what is to be done to get there? Above all, never make
transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem
of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this
compartmentalises the many dimensions of life. One place for work,
another for “living,” a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a
fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the
disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in
the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our
life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive
consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs
to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction
of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same
thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the
community.

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