It is a testament to the success of North American industrial propaganda that the automobile, with all the implications of car-dependent urban planning and the economic imperatives of car ownership, has been widely accepted as a symbol of freedom and individuality, when it is in fact the negation of both.

The true realization of personal freedom within the society of the automobile is impossible, for the car has emerged in the past century as one of the most effective tools of social control for the masters of society. For a mythologized “freedom of movement” the modern car owner must submit to the debt-bondage of car loan, insurance, maintenance, and fuel payments, and the need for a steady source of income to maintain this status ties them ever more firmly to their job, increasing their overall subservience. This in turn tethers them physically in lived space-time to the endless cycle of modern exploitation: work, commute, sleep, repeat. In many areas of the United States, car ownership is in fact a required condition of employment, with employers refusing to hire workers who do not own one, a phenomenon which in part stems from the inevitable logic of car-dependent infrastructure and suburban sprawl; for a key facet of the automobile as tool of exploitation has been the construction of lived space such that car-free movement is virtually impossible.

Thus any “freedom of movement” bestowed by car ownership can be seen as entirely superficial, since it requires as a precondition the sacrifice of one’s personal autonomy and submission to increased levels of exploitation. The truth is that a car provides less autonomy than a bike or train, while walking offers the greatest degree of personal freedom. Cars, it should also be noted, can be driven almost exclusively on roads built and maintained by the state, an increasingly expensive and inefficient infrastructure funded by wages garnished from workers in the form of taxes, and the policing of these roads is a primary pillar of the modern carceral system. North America was and continues to be ground zero for this system of control: there we find a landscape torn apart by highways; whole cities ground to a halt by traffic, lacking in other effective modes of transportation; neighborhoods in which walking from one’s residence to a market or cafe is a deadly, if not impossible, undertaking; sterile cloistered suburbs free of commerce and community, which can only be entered and escaped via the automobile. Apart from a few concentrated urban areas, the daily rhythm of life in the modern United States revolves almost completely around the car, without which society would cease to function.

With the advent of suburban sprawl, and the relegation of workers to so-called “middle class” neighborhoods far from the city-centers (a development which itself was made possible by the spread of the automobile), the system of modern capitalist alienation was totalized. Suburban home ownership thus becomes an extension of the control system inaugurated by the car. For it is in the suburb, with its rows of single-family homes, dedicated equally to the housing of cars and people, where the worker enters the perfect prison. The mortgage is added to the list of debts, the greatest of them all. Isolated in space from the vibrant life of the city, with shelter and movement attainable only through the submission to work and debt, the suburbanite inhabits a world where consumption is the only pastime, where culture is mediated by the spectacle, where social life is increasingly consumed rather than lived directly.

On the ideological level, car and home ownership play an important role in the maintenance of bourgeois hegemony, allowing workers to partake in the myth of property ownership and helping to obscure the existence of social classes and exploitation. Every year the car owner is pressured by the spectacle and the maintenance of social status to submit themselves to increased levels of exploitative debt in order to trade in their car for the latest model: this in turn is presented as an affirmation of the myth of upward mobility (a template which has been successfully transferred in recent years to the techno-gadget industry). This pressure is exerted through the fabrication of social identities which are realized via car ownership, an example being the trend in recent decades toward increasingly large trucks and SUVs. Ads for giant trucks roaming rugged mountainous terrain allow the spectacle to peddle the fulfillment of masculine identity, helping the male consumer to realize their gendered being. In reality most of these trucks rarely see the outside of a garage or the well-maintained asphalt of highways and suburbs.

Though this system reached its peak in the late-twentieth century, four decades of neoliberalism have rendered it nearly obsolete. Proof of this is the recent evidence that the bourgeoisie no longer cares about housing the proletariat and surplus population: the system of control has become so pervasive and inpenetrable that home ownership is no longer considered a necessary feature. Today the post-war suburban ideal is unattainable for a majority of workers; new housing is marketed primarily to capitalists, with the workers transformed into a class of tenants on a neo-feudal model. A correlary to this is the rise in homelessness, urban camping, and the transformation of the car into a form of housing for the surplus population.

Despite these developments new struggles against the society of the automobile continue to present themselves. New movements in urbanism, advocating an end to sprawl and the construction of dense, walkable cities have gained influence in recent years. But more is needed if the ecological collapse which the society of the automobile has inaugurated is to be prevented: the demolition of the suburbs and the reclamation of wild spaces, the transformation of cities into sanctuaries of unalienated space-time, the struggle against the cult of the electric car, the dismantling of the highways and the contruction of new systems of transportation; the entirety of the temporospacial landscape bequeathed by the 20th century must be reimagined. The struggle against the car and everything it represents is positioned at the forefront of this new praxis.