Marxist Geography

Marxist Geography Andrew Cumbers and Neil Gray, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Glossary of Terms Capitalism A particular mode of production, dominant since the 18th Century, based around the private ownership of the means of production (MP) and its operation for exchange value, and the related need for people to sell their own labor power (LP) to make a living. Dialectics and class struggle From a Marxist dialectical perspective, society is personified by two fundamentally opposed classes (capitalist and proletariat). As an outcome of class struggle, society can be transformed through time, from one hegemonic mode of production to another (e.g., feudalism to capitalism, capitalism to communism) as the oppressed class (e.g., workers) seeks to overthrow and liberate itself from the oppressor (e.g., the capitalist class). Surplus value Surplus value is value created by the unpaid labor of wage workers, over and above the value of their LP (necessary labor time), and appropriated without compensation by the capitalist. For Marxists, the production and appropriation of surplus value is a fundamental aim of capitalism. Commodity fetishism The term used critically by Marxists to describe mainstream economists’ failure to acknowledge, and attempts to mystify, the social relations (and exploitation) that underlie the production of commodities. Uneven development The tendency under capitalism for some places to develop very rapidly while other places experience decline. The Marxist theory contends that the two countervailing tendenciesdof growth and declinedare fundamentally related and intrinsic to capitalist forms of production. Spatial fix The stabilization of capitalist production through geographical extension and reconfiguration via particular organizational place-based forms and locational arrangements for the purpose of expanded capital accumulation. The adoption of Marxism as a theoretical perspective and a political project in the 1970s was the single most important development in the evolution of a critical human geography. Its introduction into the discipline was closely associated with David Harvey, who hitherto had been a leading figure in the development of a more scientific approach to geography in the 1960s. Marxism (and a radical political economy perspective) dominated critical geographic thought during the 1970s and 1980s because of the insights it provided into the way social and spatial inequalities are underpinned by class contradictions and economic relations. Following the writings of Karl Marx (1818–83), a Marxist perspective perceives capitalist society to be dependent on the production of value via LP and the rule of private property, particularly in the relation between the owners of the mode of production (capitalists) and those who have nothing but their own labor to sell (proletarians). Marx’s ironic category of “free labor” distinguishes capitalism from earlier societies (e.g., feudalism) where the mass of workers was largely dominated by legal and military systems. “Free” in a double sense: “that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale” (Marx, 1990, p. 272). Capitalism has often been deemed by Marxists to be more progressive than earlier societies, given its role in shattering feudal bonds, developing the forces of production and providing new means of global communication and exchange. At the same time, Marx recognized that capitalist development is “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire,” premised on previous and ongoing rounds of violent “primitive accumulation,” which forcibly divorce the producer from her MP and subsistence so that exploitative social relations between capital and (“free”) labor can be enacted. Marxism has sometimes been criticized for its alleged economic reductionism, determinism, and neglect of other dimensions of social relations (e.g., gender, ethnicity, cultural, and national identity). Such critique has sometimes been fair and sometimes notdat times the critique verges on caricature. What is important to recognize at this point is that “Marxism” is not homogenous, and that there are, in fact, multiple Marxism’s with varied interpretations and points of focus and concern, including Black Marxism’s, Feminist Marxism’s, and Queer Marxism’s that retain a concept of class and a critique of political economy. Marxism’s influence on geographers has arguably declined along with the postmodern distrust of “grand narratives” and the emergence of poststructural discourses that ostensibly seem more in keeping with geography’s traditional interest in spatial diversity and difference. Such narratives have been challenged by Marxists such as Vivek Chibber, who challenge the refutation and reification of abstract categories such as capitalism, democracy, rationality, universality, and class within subaltern studies and postcolonial studies, questioning whether such studies do not themselves fall prey to particularism, orientalism, and essentialism. While the mainstream of human geography may have shifted away from Marxism, for those committed to alternative systemic perspectives that challenge the hegemony of capitalism, unequal power relations, and dominant market-based narratives, Marxism remains a crucial point of departure. International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, Volume 8 https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10671-7 413 414 Marxist Geography Marxism has been particularly influential in geography because it offers a detailed theoretical perspective on the tendency for the economy to produce patterns of geographically uneven development. This is in direct opposition to neoclassical economics (NCE), which became a key influence in human geography, particularly in the development of economic geography and regional science, in the 1950s and 1960s. NCE assumes that spatial inequalities are eradicated by the operation of market forces, if left to operate freely without regulation or interference, ensuring the optimum distribution of economic wealth. Adam Smith, the founder of modern economic theory, referred to these forces as the “invisible hand” and subsequently, mainstream economics has held the view that the economy is governed by self-regulating markets where the forces of demand and supply work to eradicate spatial inequalities over time. In opposition to this, Marx and other non–mainstream economic thinkers (such as Joseph Schumpeter and John Maynard Keynes) developed a very different conception of the economy as being fundamentally unstable and prone to periodic crises due to its own contradictions. As reaffirmed in the 2007–08 global financial crises, market forces do not naturally adjust to imbalances between demand and supply but often allow these to persist and worsen in time without some form of intervention or regulation. Critically for human geographers, the spatial logic is one of unfolding processes of uneven development and patterns of inequality rather than the equalization of difference in the long run. Fundamentals of a Marxist Approach For Marx, capitalist accumulation is underpinned by the tension between capital (employers) and labor (employees) in the production process. Marx recognized and systematically examined the centrality of the “labor process,” to the operation of capitalism. He recognized that human labor is fundamentally different from other commodities as the source of surplus value or profit, which in turn drives the process of economic development (referred to as capital accumulation) under capitalism. Surplus value is created by living labor whose costs for the capitalist in the production process Marx refers to as “variable capital.” “Variable” because living labor’s value varies within the production process, as the worker can produce value over and above what they need to live (“socially necessary labor time”), which is paid in wages. Other factors of production (e.g., land, machines, and raw materials) are all described as “constant capital,” in the sense that, once added to the production process, they do not add any further value to products without variable capital. The capitalist pays a price for labor (wages) but can then extract more effort from labor in the course of producing commodities than what has been paid. This gives rise to surplus value, which operates either through the capitalist making labor work for longer hours and more intensely (absolute surplus value) or by making labor more productive, usually through the reorganization of production via technical innovation (relative surplus value). Hence, surplus value is not “just” the return to entrepreneurs for risk taking, as mainstream economics insists but is instead the result of a fundamentally unequal exchange in the labor market. How does this exploitation come about? In a brilliant uncovering of the “hidden abode” of the production process under capitalism, Marx elaborates his theory in the pages of Capital. We will shortly sum up the main points, but first a brief digression into Marx’s historical and dialectical thought. Marxism and Dialectical Reasoning Marx’s approach is first and foremost a historical materialist one. Marxist geography’s innovation is to ground this perspective in place, insisting on the necessarily spatial dimensions of production, circulation, distribution, and consumption in capitalist relations. One way this approach is indexed is in the practice “historical geographical materialism,” as developed initially by David Harvey and Erik Swyngedouw. Marxist geographers view economic development in terms of changing forms of social and political organization in time and space, characterized by different forms of class struggle. Capitalism as a particular “mode of production” emerged out of a feudal society in Western Europe from the 15th Century onward, and over the past 200 years has spread inexorably to the point that we can now talk of a global capitalist economy. At the most basic level, a dialectical perspective emphasizes the importance of processes and relationships for interpreting the world, rather than fixed things or categories. Historical change is driven by the tensions between opposing forces, usually represented in the form thesis–antithesis–synthesis, where thesis represents the original position, the antithesis its negative relation, and the synthesis the resolution of the contradiction. Mapping this onto Marx’s understanding of social change, this is most obviously expressed in the Communist Manifesto, co-written with his long-time comrade and collaborator Friedrich Engels: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another . The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has simplified the class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones Marx and Engels (1967): 79, 80. Throughout history, social change has been driven by the battle between opposing classes, always the possibility of the subservient class eventually overpowering the ruling class to create new conditions of society. Many critics have accused Marx of teleological thinking in this respect, suggesting that his key dialectical insight is the inevitably of the working class or proletariat overpowering the bourgeoisie or capitalist class to create a utopian communist society. This is certainly true of The Communist Marxist Geography 415 Manifesto, whose aim, as a manifesto after all, was to inspire proletarian revolution. Yet, the contemporary reader of Marx may be struck by just how little prediction is manifest in his major theoretical works, where the concern was more to show the detrimental, alienating effects of capitalist relations, the violence that underpins them, the fallacy of their “common sense,” and the possibility (not inevitability) of their supersession. Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins and Massimiliano Tomba’s Marx’s Temporalities have added much-needed nuance to interpretations of Marx’s historical thinking. They, and others, have shown how his ideas of historical development shifted from the 1850s onward as new developments arose (cf. Marx’s affirmation of the nonindustrial Paris Commune revolt of 1871, his then unfashionable defense of the Irish Land Wars, and his position that a peasant communebased revolution in Russia was possible without passing through a capitalist stage of development). They have also shown how he increasingly conceived of multiple temporalities simultaneously rather than in a linear, teleological conception. Use Value and Exchange Value in Commodity Production In Capital Volume I, his most fully realized work, Marx starts off with a long discussion of the commodity form and what it represents. In capitalist societies, commodities are products of labor that are bought and sold. Out of this basic premise, Marx develops the concepts of “use value” and “exchange value” symbolizing the twofold character of all commodities. Use values signal the practical value of commoditiesda shoe can be worn, bread eaten, and so on. The exchange value in contrast reflects the value of a commodity in exchange for another commodity, that is, its market price. This twofold character of commodities becomes evident in what is known as the “circuit of capital,” where the exchange value of a commodity (C) is first realized in exchange for money (M). However, when that money is exchanged for another commodity (C), exchange value turns back into use value (Fig. 1). Where Marx differs in relation to classical political economist (CPE) such as Smith and Ricardo is in seeing this circuit as underpinned by social relations (and power). The key point here is that the production of commodities is underpinned by antagonistic social relations, which represent a class struggle between capital and labor. It is not the free and equal exchange associated with a mainstream economic perspective on markets. There is also an important contradiction at the heart of this relationship as capital’s incentive to reduce the cost of labor in the pursuit of surplus value can undermine its own sustainability. This will happen if wages fall below the socially necessary level or when decreases in the wage paid to labor affects demand for the products of capital. Marx is famously scathing of the CPEs or viewing exchange as a social relation between things rather than a definite social relation between people, something that has become known as “commodity fetishism.” He notes: Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value. Marx (1990): 173–74 From labor’s point of view, commodities represent the need to consume in order to achieve basic social reproduction (e.g., food, clothing, housing, and energy). For capitalists, their value is in terms of what they can be sold for to create profit, which can, in turn, be reinvested. When thought of in these terms, there is clearly an underlying tension between use value and exchange value. A concrete example of expressing this would be in the tensions between economic growth and environmental sustainability. Capital’s logic is to encourage greater and greater production, consumption and exploitation of resources in the pursuit of expanded surplus value, whereas the logic from the point of view of labor is to continue to reproduce the conditions for human survival. Production for surplus value is fundamentally at odds with creating sustainable conditions for human development. In deepening his analysis, Marx thinks of labor in two opposing senses as “concrete labor” (socially useful labor) and as “abstract labor.” Socially useful labor exists in all human societies throughout history, whatever the forms of social relations (e.g., slavery, feudalism, and so on). All societies as a necessary condition of human existence have to work: basic tasks have to be performed to ensure the reproduction of the species such as obtaining food, making clothes, constructing shelter, producing forms of useable energy, and so on. This, for Marx, is a “concrete universal” with enormous political implications. In even the most primitive human societies, simple efficiency savings give rise to a division of labor between different people, often on a gender basis, which becomes more complex and hierarchical as societies become more advanced. Specific to the capitalist mode of production, however, human labor becomes geared toward commodity production for exchange value or “abstract labor” within the wage–labor relation. Within capitalist social relations, all work becomes subservient to producing surplus value and “only has meaning and only appears as a social relation when it is embodied in a product that is exchanged” (Cleaver, 2000: 111). In the process, the individual worker becomes alienated from the product of his/her labor. While Marx primarily wrote about surplus value in the production process, Italian Marxist feminists in the 1970s extended Marxist conceptions of value by addressing how unpaid caring labor contributes to the reproduction of the paid labor force and thus to the production of surplus value. A key publication was The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community by Mariarosa C–M–C Figure 1 The circuit of capital. 416 Marxist Geography Dalla Costa and Selma James in 1972, whose arguments around the ‘hidden abode of reproduction’ were developed by Sylvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, published in 2004. Federici extended Marx’s work on primitive accumulation from a feminist viewpoint by showing how the historical development of capitalism through the enclosures was premised on a sexual division of labor that confined women to unwaged domestic reproductive work and men to waged exploitation in the production process. Dalla Costa, James, and Federici were central to the international “Wages for Housework” campaign founded in Italy in 1972, which was, in turn, key to the emergence of the domestic labor debate. Work drawn from these and similar debates has been developed in the literature on the geographies of social reproduction by Katz in 2004 and in edited collections by Mitchell, Katz, and Marston in 1993 and by Meehan and Strauss in 2015. The Labor Process: Discipline and Supervision As we have noted, for Marx, it is through the exploitation of labor in the production process that capital deepens and sustains surplus value in the circuit of capital (Fig. 2). Capital in its money form (M) is transformed into commodity form (C) by purchasing the MPdfactories, machines, materials, and so ondand LP. The MP and LP are then combined in the production process (P), under the supervision of the owners of capital or their managers and representatives, to produce a commodity for sale (C0 ). This commodity is sold for the initial money outlay plus a profit, or surplus value. However, since capital is dependent on living labor for the production of value, then living labor has the potential to disrupt, appropriate, or overthrow the production process. In turn, capital must respond with increasingly complex forms of supervision to ensure the continued production of surplus value. Capital must not only purchase labor but must control it if it is to increase surplus value. Hence, the division of labor under capitalism is not geared primarily toward the efficient organization of work to improve the general wealth of society (although this may occur at certain points in time and space) but is intrinsically a function of the imperative to create the conditions to realize surplus value. Whereas mainstream economics largely ignores what happens in what Marx termed the “hidden abode of production,” for Marxists uncovering what happens in the labor process is critical to understanding the basic conflict between capital and labor. Because of the centrality of LP in extracting surplus value, capital will always be driven to increase labor productivity and extract more value from labor, which generates a fundamental conflict with labor’s needs to earn enough to make a decent living. There is therefore an imperative for the capitalist to take control over the labor process from the worker, introducing forms of management, which allows work to be organized on more capitalistic lines. Struggle for control over the labor process becomes a critical dimension of power relations and class struggle in the capitalist economy. For Marx and Engels, the emergence of the factory system in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the accumulation of workers under one roof and under managerial controldand away from the household where early industrial craft work was organized according to noncapitalist principlesdwas a critical moment in the transformation of the capitalist labor process. Grasped dialectically by Marx, this both increased the potential for capitalist productivity and simultaneously created the conditions for the massification and deepening organization of workers: “the gravediggers of capitalism.” A second critical transformation occurred later in the 19th Century when employers began to pursue a more scientific approach toward the organization of work, observing and closely supervising job tasks with the view to developing more productive systems. This led to an increased “technical division of labor” with the realization that productivity could be increased if work became increasingly fragmented into its component tasks, allowing workers to become more specialized and proficient. Scientific management or Taylorismdafter its most famous advocate, the engineer, FW Taylordalso encouraged greater experimentation with new techniques to increase productivity, the most famous being the introduction of the moving assembly line by Henry Ford at his automobile factory in Dearborn, Michigan in 1911. At the same time, this led to the increasing massification and integration of labor within the production process, opening up new possibilities of unionization and organized struggle within mass industry. Ultimately, with a Marxist analysis, the forms and scale of the wage–labor relation may shift, but the underlying contradictions between capital and labor remain. The Historical Development of Capitalism and Long Turn Tendencies Toward Crisis Alongside the exploitative nature of capital–labor relationships, the other key dynamic process driving the capitalist economy is competition between capitals (firms). In Marx’s view, competition between firms is fierce and over time weaker, and less competitive firms are driven out of the market or acquired by stronger rivals leading to an increasing concentration of economic power and the growth of larger and larger firms. Later Marxist theorists such as the US economists, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, writing in the mid20th Century and documenting the rise of the large modern corporation, coined the term Monopoly Capitalism, for an advanced stage of capitalism in which the economy becomes increasingly dominated by a small number of large firms that exercise enormous market power. For the system as a whole, intensified competition over the longer term can lead to overproduction and a fall in the rate of profit as markets become saturated. Overproduction can lead to economic crises as overcapacity results in firms cutting back on Figure 2 The process of production within the circuit of capital (simplified form). Marxist Geography 417 employment, which, in turn, generates unemployment and a collapse in demand for products for the simple reason that workers are also the main consumers of capitalism. This situation can very quickly turn into a vicious downward spiral as firms’ attempts to cut costs and decrease capacity further reduce the demand for their products. This combination of circumstances was exactly what happened in the 1930s in the Great Depression when a crisis of overproduction led to the Wall Street Crash in the United States. Because the United States had experienced a major boom in the 1920s, pulling in investment from Europe, in particular, the effects of the crash and the subsequent bankruptcy of thousands of firms led to a worldwide economic downturn and mass unemployment in many countries. Indeed, the Great Depression has been cited as a critical factor in the rise of Nazism in Germany, as the business classes sought refuge from the threat of Communism in Fascism. Only state intervention, taking different forms in different countries (e.g., Keynesianism in the United Kingdom and Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the United States) and increased spending on military production in the lead up to the Second World War injected sufficient demand back into the stagnating major economies to stimulate growth. The 2007–08 global financial crisis was the worst recession since the Great Depression. As Wolfgang Streek and others have observed, the crisis rested on a long-term crisis of production in the OECD countries following the immediate post war boom, evidenced in a steep decline of growth rates since the 1960s. From a geographical perspective, as Harvey observed in 2012 in Rebel Cities, the 2007–08 crisis was an outcome of a tendential shift from industrialization to urbanization since the 1970s, a shift that is itself a marker of the long-term crisis in capitalist production. Sparked off by the US subprime crisis and the proliferation of unsustainable toxic mortgage debt, Harvey contends that the 2007–08 crisis was just the latest in a series of urban crises globally since the early 1970s. Key Schisms in Marxist Thought and Practice Revolution vs Reformism In the century and a half since Marx was writing there has been considerable debate within and outside Marxism about the interpretation of his ideas and their continuing relevance. There is not the space here to do justice to all the various controversies so we will just highlight three of the most important. In doing so, it is important to emphasize the evolution of Marxist thought as political praxis, that is, in being reformulated in relation to broader social and political events. One of the earliest schisms within Marxism, which continues to have important political and ideological ramifications to this day, is between a broadly defined social democratic or reformist position and a more revolutionary perspective. The schism emerged in what was known as the “Second International” (of the international working-class movement, 1889–1916) at the end of the 19th Century and was related to the thorny issue of how socialism might come about as industrial capitalism gathered pace. These tensions were most evident within the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP), which was the largest and most powerful Marxist-inspired political party in the world in the period around the First World War (1914–18). The party was split between revolutionary theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht who argued for overt class struggle to overthrow the capitalist system and a range of more social democratic reformist positions, taken by intellectuals such as Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, who argued for struggle and social change within capitalism. Behind such political differences are different theoretical understandings of the relations between classes, the role of the state under capitalism, the party and the masses, crisis, imperialism, and the relationship between political practice and broader economic forces. When the SDP voted in favor of the imperial war in 1914, the revolutionary faction split off to form the Spartacus League, before changing its name to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1918. Outside Germany, the revolutionary position gained ascendancy in Russia, leading to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. What is at stake in the differing positions between reform and revolution is that leading revisionists such as Bernstein believed, contra Marx and Engels, that capitalism had found a way to stave of its crisis tendencies in the 20th Century and that socialism could be achieved peacefully within capitalism and through the parliamentary process. Revolutionaries such as Luxemburg, on the other hand, believed that reform only strengthened capitalism by integrating workers within its reproduction, and that it must therefore be superseded tout court. Overall, the debate perhaps hinges on whether Marxism is viewed as a fundamental critique of political economy, which views capitalism as ultimately destructive, or whether it is itself a form of Marxist political economy, which considers that capitalism can be mediated in a progressive manner. It should also be noted that a revolutionary position does not preclude adopting reformist measures. Structure vs Agency Another key divide in Marxist thinking relates to the relationship between structure and agency, between those who emphasize the primacy of underlying structures and those who emphasize the autonomy of human action. Again, these are complex debates and, in the interests of brevity, we will try to summarize the key differences. At one end of the spectrum are those such as the French theorist, Louis Althusser, who, writing in the 1960s in reaction to the more humanist Marxism of Sartre on the one hand, and to the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union and its crude version of Marxism on the other, tried to reformulate Marxism to deal with issues of ideology and culture (see, for instance, Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar’s 1968 text, Reading Capital). The role of ideology is critical for Althusser in shaping human behavior so that, while individuals may feel that they are acting of their own free will, the institutions of capitalism ultimately constrain individual agency to the system’s requirements through processes of interpellation. Althusser’s base-superstructure distinction is important here where 418 Marxist Geography the base relates to the forces of production (underlying economic relations) and the superstructure relates to political and legal institutions (typically reproduced through the state) and ideological institutions, such as religion, the family, and the media). Althusser stresses the violence of superstructural state institutions in his analysis, but in the last instance, he argues, the base has causal power. In opposition to this structuralist perspective, critics such as E.P. Thompson make the point that the Althusserians ultimately strip the working class of any agency to resist and overthrow capitalism because everyone is purportedly subjugated by powerful underlying forces. Moreover, Althusser’s attempt to create theoretically sophisticated, yet highly abstract Marxist concepts served the purpose of reifying philosophy over politics while also separating out theory from concrete empirical events. Thompson castigated the Althusserians in his famous 1978 polemic The Poverty of Theory, arguing forcefully for a Marxism that remains rooted in the everyday consciousness of existing social relations. In a key passage, he notes that: Experience arises spontaneously within social being, but it does not arise without thought; it arises because men and women are rational, and they think about what is happening to them and their world . What we mean is that changes taking place within social being, would give rise to changed experience; and this experience is determining, in the sense that it exerts pressure upon social consciousness, proposes new questions, and affords much of the material which the more elaborate intellectual exercises are about. Thompson (1978): 200 In other words, working-class people become active subjects in their own right. Moreover, class-based agency springs directly from material and cultural experiences and is always contingent upon the particular circumstances within which it is located. This means that class itself (and by implication class struggle) does not take on a fixed, ahistorical form but should be understood in more dynamic and fluid terms, reflecting the historical (and spatial) context of capitalism. An important point to make here is that many of the subsequent critiques of Marxist work in geography and elsewhere address a particular structuralist or Althusserian reading of Marx, notably James Duncan and David Ley writing in 1982, whereas Marxism can also be interpreted very differently as a more agency-centered perspective with implications for how we think about space and place. Indeed, there is a danger here that such polemics create unnecessary separations between more abstract analysis of structures and constraints and more agency-oriented approaches, when it might be better to note how different interpretations lean to one or the other side and how some accounts manage to combine both (perhaps the ideal scenario). Henri Lefebvredwho has been highly influential for key Marxist geographers such as David Harvey, Ed Soja, and Neil Smithdprovides only one model of Marxist thought based on equal attention to subject and object and to what he called “abstract” and “differential” space: capital’s homogenous rationalization of space, on the one hand, and on the other, the production of difference and the space of counter cultures or counter spaces. In this respect, it should be borne in mind that Marx’s purpose in his most fully realized work, Capital, is not only a theoretical critique of capitalism and its violent abstractions, but an alternative political perspective, a weapon to put into the hands of the working class. Culture vs Economy A related debate has long raged between more orthodox Marxists and newer schools of thought over the relationships between the role of discourse or culture and the material or economic in the shaping of human and class consciousness. A dissatisfaction with the tradition handed down from Engels onwarddof reading off class consciousness and identity simplistically from economic subject positionsdled to a new wave of Marxist work from the 1920s onward that was concerned with the interrelationships between culture, class consciousness, and political strategy. A range of diverse theorists, from Lukacs to Gramsci to the Frankfurt School of Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, and latterly Habermas, grappled with the importance of culture, propaganda, and a range of other nonmaterial social strategies and practices to the operation of power and control in capitalist societies. Such accounts led to more sophisticated perspectives on the role of the state, the media, and civil society institutions (such as the church, trade unions, and so on) in the maintenance of social order. The Italian theorist, Antonio Gramsci, for instance, working from a Marxist perspective from the late 1910s to 1930s, sought to understand how it was that mass revolutionary movements in Western Europe failed to follow the path of Communism and, in the case of Germany, Italy, and later Spain and France, resulted in the emergence of Fascist dictatorships. Gramsci’s key contribution was the recognition that ruling classes exercise control over the mass of the population through subtle forms of consent, whereby culture and ideology are used to persuade rather than coerce people into believing that the state, or elite groups, are acting in their best interests. Successful capitalist states are thus able to achieve hegemony through coopting different classes into an alliance for long periods of time. Popular culture, newspapers, television, and so on are important weapons for elite actors to propagate certain “common sense” views that are important in maintaining power, such as market values and a dubious linkage between democracy, freedom, and capitalism. Yet, for thinkers such as Gramsci, counter-hegemony can take the form of a “war of maneuver,” physically overwhelming the apparatus of the state, or a “war of position,” the creation of alternative socialist institutions in the discursive and cultural realms as well as the material and the economic. Marxist Geography 419 Fault-lines Within Geography These debates have attracted variable attention from geographers, reflecting the different concerns that have exercised the discipline. There has been little written explicitly by geographers about the schism between revolution and reform, although there have been some lively debates between those who have argued for policy intervention within the capitalist system or those who seek alternative or diverse forms of economics, such as J. K. Gibson-Graham in A Postcapitalist Politics in 2006 and those who have argued for a more revolutionary geography. Debates concerning structure-agency relations have been more extensive and profound for the development of the discipline. A recurring set of themes surrounds the implications of a Marxist view of society, predicated on underlying social structures in shaping human agency, for geographers’ traditional concerns with areal differentiation and regional cultures. While the latter would imply a sensitivity to the uniqueness of place and a more open-ended, multifaceted sense of agency, a more structuralist account would resonate more with the spatial science tradition of developing a more generalist understanding of processes that constrain human behavior. The 1980s was a period of particularly intensive theorizing and discussion over the relations between society and space, culture and economy, class and social identity, signified in the setting up of the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space in 1983. A landmark text of the time was the edited collection Social Relations and Spatial Structures (Gregory and Urry, 1985), which included many protagonists from both geography (Harvey, Massey, Allan Pred, and Richard Walker) and influential sociologists such as Anthony Giddens, Ray Pahl, John Urry, and Peter Saunders who were beginning to write about the role of space in shaping social and economic life. Structure-agency tensions within geography led many researchers to depart from more orthodox Marxist perspectives toward more middle-ground positions through the embrace of critical realism (the work of Andrew Sayer in particular), structuration theory (e.g., the work of Allan Pred), and the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. The Construction of a Marxist Geography The Relevance of Marxism in Human Geography Marxist ideas had little influence in human geography until the 1960s when a younger generation of geographers became increasingly frustrated at the inability of contemporary geographical theory to contribute to the pressing social problems of the day. Key issues such as racial tension in US cities, the environment, the Vietnam War (symbolizing the imperialism of US foreign policy), gender inequalities, and inner-city poverty were largely absent from geographical research, leading David Harvey to call for a revolution in geographic thought: The quantitative revolution has run its course, and diminishing marginal returns are apparently setting in . There is an ecological problem, an urban problem, an international trade problem, and yet we seem incapable of saying anything of depth or profundity about any of them. Harvey (1973): 128–29. In response to these pressing social issues, a group of young geographers at Clark University in Massachusetts in the United States, led by Richard Peet, launched Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography in 1969. This radical new geography turned increasingly to political economy and Marxism for its intellectual foundations because it gave a coherent and appealingly holistic analysis about social relations, class, and the economy that could be applied to a range of different settings. Notably, such classical Marxist themes were inextricably bound up with the question of race from the journal’s beginnings. Marx’s writing, as Soja observed in 1989, is more associated with time than space and the geography of capitalism. Yet, the Marxist philosopher and urban theorist, Henri Lefebvre, showed in the 1970s that the question of space was central to the circulation and reproduction schemas of Marx’s work. Since then, Marxist geographers, notably Harvey, have developed a distinctively Marxist analysis of geographical change. In The Limits to Capital, 1982, Harvey extended not only geographical thinking but Marxist thought and the social sciences more generally by synthesizing Volumes I, II and III of Capital, as well as the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value, showing how capital accumulation is inexorably intertwined with the production of space and constant movement between the separate, but related, phases of the accumulation process. This led him to define capital, after Marx, as “value in motion” (Harvey, 2006: 194), a distinctively processual and geographical conception with profound implications for crisis theory. From this perspective, the landscape is seen as an “active moment” in the conflict–laden relationship between capital and labor, providing a deeper, more political, and more geographically grounded explanation for spatial variation than spatial science. Uneven Geographical Development and the Spatial Fix A key geographical insight from Marxism is the way that capitalism produces uneven development across space. Marx recognized uneven development to be a basic feature of capitalism, with certain places prospering and attracting investment at the expense of others. Uneven development can be seen at a variety of different scales: from the globaldin the relations between North and South 420 Marxist Geography and the tendency for capital to flow to particular hotspots at the expense of other places (e.g., South East Asia during the 1980s)dto the very local, in the way that cities become divided between rich suburbs and poor ghettoes or favellas. At the same time, however, capitalist relations of production are extremely dynamic so that a core region during one phase of growth may fall into decline in the next phase. Theory is unable to predict which regions will suffer this fate as outcomes are not predetermined but are ultimately the result of the interaction between resources, technological changes and changing class relations both within individual places and across space. However, explaining such processes critically is essential to forming new modes of social relations that are more even and equitable. Harvey made an important contribution to understanding the geographical dimensions of the capitalist economy in his seminal 1982 text, The Limits to Capital. As Trevor Barnes has put it: “Harvey’s contribution is in showing that one of the limits to capital, one of the obstacles to the generation of surplus value, is geography. Space and place are part of the furniture of the crises of capitalism” (Barnes, 2004: 409). Drawing from the extended treatment of fixed and circulating capital in Capital Volume II and the important, if scattered, spatial reflections in the Grundrisse, Harvey showed that capital, in its abstract form as a process for creating surplus value, is characterized by two opposing tendencies: the need for mobility, on the one hand, to seek out more profitable locations than existing centers of production, and the need to fix investment in one place, on the other hand, for a sustained period. The latter he refers to as the “spatial fix,” characterized by capitalism’s insatiable drive to secure surplus value and resolve its inner crisis tendencies by geographical expansion and restructuring. If capital is “value-in-motion” as Harvey contends, there is a geographical dimension to the dialectical tensions running through capital. Thus, capital is never completely mobile but has to put down roots in particular places to realize the conditions for continued accumulation. At the same time, some types of capital (e.g., multinational corporations and currency speculation) are clearly more mobile than others since they are more tied by social and cultural relations to particular places (e.g., family-owned small firms compared with the branch plants of multinational corporations). Capital (in the abstract sense) retains a spatial advantage over labor, which is more place-bound by virtue of its need to secure the reproduction of itself through family and community ties, yet the very necessity of perpetual movement between phases of the accumulation process also leaves capital vulnerable to interruption, blockage, and sabotage as recent work on the logistics industry by geographers such as Deborah Cowen in 2014 has shown. Another major contribution has been the geographically nuanced theory of uneven development put forward in 1984 by Neil Smith in Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Processes of uneven development, according to Smith, are the result of a dialectic of spatial differentiation and equalization that is central to the logic of capitalism, transforming the complex mosaic of landscapes inherited from precapitalist systems. Capital moves to areas that offer higher profits for investors, resulting in the economic development of these areas. The geographical concentration of production in such locations results in differentiation as they experience rapid development, while other regions are left behind. At the same time, the tendency toward equalization reflects the importance of expanding the market for commodities, implying a need to develop newly incorporated colonies and territories so as to generate the income to underpin consumption. The process of economic development in a particular region tends to undermine its own foundations, leading to higher wages, rising land prices, lower unemployment, and the development of trade unions, reducing profit rates. In other regions, underdevelopment leads to low wages, high unemployment, and the absence of trade unions, creating a potential basis for profit that may attract new capital investment. Over time, capital performs a “locational see-saw” from developed to underdeveloped areas, jumping between locations in its efforts to maintain profit levels. It is this movement of capital that creates patterns of uneven development. The dynamic nature of uneven development is perhaps most pronounced at the urban scale at which capital is most mobile, resulting in, for example, the rapid gentrification (upgrading through the attraction of investment and new middle-class residents) of previously declining inner city areas, and, on the other hand, the decline of previously prosperous neighborhoods through such processes as deindustrialization and disinvestment. Conversely, patterns of uneven development exhibit most stability at the global scale where the divide between developed and developing countries remains as wide as ever, although East Asia has risen to the core of the world economy since the 1960s. The Spatial Divisions of Labor Approach Another geographer who has been at the forefront of developing Marxist ideas in human geography is Doreen Massey. Massey’s landmark text Spatial Divisions of Labor was one of the first attempts by an economic geographer to interpret the changing location of industry in a particular empirical context (Great Britain from the industrial revolution through to the 1970s) in terms of a Marxist political economy approach. Her main contribution was to link insights about geographical uneven development to the changing organizational structure of capitalism in the 20th Century, grounded in an understanding of the Marxist labor process. With the decline of traditional heavy industry and the increasing dominance of large corporations in most sectors of the economy, Massey argued, the economic geography of Britain in the 20th Century was less characterized by sectoral differences between places (e.g., shipbuilding in Clydeside and Tyneside, coal mining in South Wales, and financial services in London) and more by occupational differences, reflecting how different places are linked together in a spatial division of labor. Though there is no predetermined outcome, and corporate strategies will vary according to aspects such as the technical requirements of different industries and the ownership structure of firms, Massey noted a growing tendency for corporations to separate out geographically the higher level jobs in areas like senior management and research and development from the lower level and more routine jobs such as the processing or final assembly of products. Through the emergence of multiplant corporations, this division Marxist Geography 421 of labor takes on an explicitly spatial form, with companies locating the higher order functions in cities and regions where there are large pools of highly educated and well-qualified workers (London and the South East), with lower order functions locating increasingly in those regions and places where costs (especially wage rates) are lowest (e.g., Northern England and Scotland). For Massey, this uneven development is an expression of the underlying social relations of capitalism: class relations within capitalism take on a competitive interregional form. Massey’s approach is not onesided. Places and regions are not merely passive recipients of corporate location decisions but over time and, reflecting the outcome of past waves or “layers” of economic restructuring processes, develop particular regional cultures that bear the imprint of past political and economic struggles between different groups. Thus a region such as South Wales developed a strong and militant culture in the early part of the 20th Century as a result of the development of a powerful labor movement associated with the mining industry. This in turn can have broader geographical consequences. The emergence of strong labor movements and trade unions in Britain’s industrial regions (such as South Wales, the North East of England, and the Central Belt of Scotland) were key to the rise of the Labor Party at a national level during the 20th Century and the social reforms (notably the setting up of a National Health Service) passed by the Labor Government at the end of the Second World War. Massey’s reminder that places are the active site of class struggle also resonates with the work of social geographers who have been influenced by the insights of Marxism on class formation for understanding how social relations are shaped outside the workplace in the broader community. Thus, there is a body of work that explores how class relations interact with other forms of social relations (e.g., gender, race, and ethnicity) to produce and reproduce social divisions and inequalities (e.g., over land, housing, public services, and education) in particular places (e.g., Nigel Thrift and Peter Williams, 1987; Mitchell et al., 1993; Coulthard, 2014). The emergence of regions with strong trade unions that are able to bargain for higher wages and improved working conditions can also have repercussions for the future location decisions of corporations, encouraging them to identify places where labor is less well organized. In the United States, this trend became particularly evident between late 1960s and early 1990s with manufacturing companies closing down plants in the more unionized older industrial heartlands of the north and east (the “rustbelt”) and setting up new plants in the south and west of the country (the “sunbelt”), where the absence of an organized labor movement has allowed them to pay lower wage rates and reorganize working practices to the advantage of management. An associated trend has been an increase in the relocation of production overseas to lower wage locations in third world countries. This development, ongoing since the 1960s in lower technology sectors such as clothing and textiles, but now spreading to more advanced manufacturing and even some service sectors, is sometimes termed a new international division of labor. While the geographical expansion of capitalism continues, the mobility of individual firms is often overplayed. In some cases firms use the threat of relocation to extract concessions over labor at existing locations, whilst in many other situations, cost is not the most important location factor, and other factors such as the availability of skilled labor, sunk costs through past investment, locally specific industrial knowledge are as likely to encourage firms to remain in situ. Debates About the Relations Between Marxism, Social Relations, and Space Massey’s emphasis upon the uniqueness and politics of place alongside broader spatial processes helped stimulate what became known as the “localities” debate in the 1980s. A central theme in the localities debate was the degree to which particular places are the site of complex social relations that are not easily read off from broader spatial and social processes, as Phil Cooke argued in 1986. This was a direct challenge to earlier Marxist accounts, but accused by some, such as Neil Smith in 1987, of leading away from a critical spatial theory and back to an earlier generation of empiricism. Another approach that sought to give equal weighting to social and spatial relations was the body of work concerned with what came to be known as “spatial dialectics,” concerned with how social relations interact with space to create particular concrete and territorialized forms of capitalism. The work of Ed Soja and his “sociospatial dialectic,” initially outlined in 1980, was particularly influential in this regard in calling for “an extensive and flexible rethinking of both theory and practice, a reconstruction which will continue to draw upon the achievements of Marx but which must also be more directly attuned to the specificity of contemporary capitalist (and socialist) spatiality and temporality” (Soja, 1985: 91). Developing the pioneering work of Lefebvre, Soja insisted on the need for Marxists and critical social theorists more fully to integrate space into their analysis of capitalism from the outset, rather than as an additional component that could be added when confronting the more concrete outcomes of capitalist restructuring. Space in Soja’s dialectical schema has three dimensions, which overlap and interrelate: physical, mental, and social. Most obviously, the space of nature (physical) is made social through accumulation processes. Similarly, interpretation, cognition, and understanding are inherently spatial and are themselves produced out of spatialized social relations. Thus, it follows that “Spatiality and temporality, human geography and human history, intersect in a complex social process which creates a constantly evolving historical sequence of spatialities, a spatio-temporal structuration of social life which gives form not only to the grand moments of societal development but also to the recursive practices of dayto-day activity” (Soja, 1985: 94). The Backlash Against Marxist Ideas in Critical Human Geography By the late 1980s, Marxist geography was coming under attack from new forms of social theorizing, primarily poststructuralism, postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism. The main focus of these critiques was Marxism’s claims for a set of universal truths 422 Marxist Geography and concepts (e.g., capital, class) with which to understand economy and society. Grand theories or “meta-narratives” (big stories) claiming to uncover the changing organization of society are rejected as a product of the privileged position and authority of the observer rather than being accepted as objective representations of the realities that they purport to explain. Instead of functioning as a set of universal truths, knowledge should be regarded as partial and situated in particular places and times. This argument is currently being reproduced in relation to debates over “planetary urbanization” concept, where on the one side urban theorists such as Neil Brenner in his edited collection of 2014 Implosions/Explosions: Toward a Study of Planetary Urbanization, extend Lefebvre’s thinking on urbanization as a process that goes beyond cities to encompass and subsume rural life, and on the other, critics who argue that the term’s usage flattens out difference and particularity in its sweeping claims. Similar debates were ignited with the publication of Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working Class in 2006, which many postcolonial scholars challenged for flattening out the markedly different characteristics of slums throughout the planet. Three main criticisms have been leveled at Marxist geography. In the first place, it has been accused of neglecting agency in favor of being overly deterministic in its explanation. Secondly, those Marxist geographers who did take agency seriously were accused of reducing agency to class position rather than recognizing its multidimensional nature. In this regard, some of the most trenchant criticisms came from those dissatisfied with Marxist geographers’ neglect of other social categories like gender and race in shaping human agency. Harvey, in particular, was the subject of sustained critique by feminist geographers in the early 1990s. Massey, who worked out of the Marxist milieu herself at different periods in her career, described Harvey’s approach as a “steamroller of an analysis which insists that capital and labor . are all there is to it . It is absolutely stated that everything must be subsumed to a question of class . one’s identity and the struggles we are engaged in are more multi-faceted than Harvey’s position is capable of conceiving” (Massey, 1991: 54–55). A third criticism related to the Marxist emphasis upon the determining role of economic forces and relations over culture and discourse, which was criticized for offering andat bestdpartial understanding of social relations. These are important criticisms that hit the mark in many cases. However, the critique often tends to be rather sweeping itself, and it is debatable whether Marxist geography in its totality really has been as economically determinist as its critics allege. To take the most celebrated theorist, Harvey has responded in a number of works that seek to engage with his critics, notably with sophisticated contributions to debates around culture and nature in 1989, 1996, 2002; and more recently in his book Rebel Cities, which surveys a wide range of situated urban struggles around the globe through a historical-geographical materialist lens. The critique of Marxist geography has been productive in the sense that there is now more sensitivity to the particularities of race, gender, and sexuality in geographical analysis, but there is a danger that polarized debate becomes a “dialogue of the deaf” rather than a more productive engagement that recognizes Marxism’s merits as a critical political economic framework that extends beyond single localities, and more nuanced, actor-centered, heterodox and politicized forms of Marxism. Moreover, far from dominating geography, it is notable that class analysis has in fact been heavily marginalized in more recent discussions within the discipline. In this respect, rethinking class formation, with a more nuanced appreciation of race and gender, offers a crucial research direction for contemporary Marxist geographers. Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, which problematizes Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation via indigenous land theory and practice, provides only one sterling example. The work of Sylvia Federici, and other Marxist feminists, another. Richard Walker makes a good point with his sympathetic critique of Harvey for trying to “‘oversell’ the logic of capital [as] the driving force behind almost everything” (Walker, 2004: 439). However, when capitalist relations have subsumed so much of everyday life across the globe, albeit to varying degrees and with varying methods, the rejection of Marxist analysis risks losing perhaps the most powerful tool available to examine current socioeconomic conditions. Marxist Geography in the 1990s Marxist geography has shifted considerably from the early 1990s onward, retreating for good or ill from the more abstract philosophical works of Harvey and Smith to more grounded empirical research, particularly through work on the state, labor, and the environment. An important body of work on the role of the state has been inspired by the French regulation school, typified by the work of Aglietta, and developed in the more recent work of the political sociologist Bob Jessop. The Regulation Approach grew out of the 1970s productivity crisis that emerged in Western Europe and North America after two decades of economic growth centered upon the spread of mass production techniques (Fordism). Faced with a growing economic downturn, unemployment and inflation, a group of economists at the Center for Mathematical Economic Forecasting Studies Applied to Planning (CEPREMAP) became frustrated at the paucity of both mainstream and Marxist approaches in explaining the crisis, and instead began to explore the way the economy is “socially regulated.” Focus turned to the way particular social customs, norms, and practices play an important part in shaping economic life to create stable forms over the longer term. Wider processes of regulation find expression in specific institutional arrangements which mediate and manage the underlying contradictions of the capitalist system, expressed in the form of periodic crises, enabling renewed growth to occur. This occurs through the coming together and consolidation of specific modes of regulation, referring to the institutions and conventions which shape the process of capitalist development. Regulation is focused on five key aspects of capitalism in particular: labor and the wage relation, forms of competition and business organization, the monetary system, and the state and the international regime. When these act in concert, a period of stable growth, known as a “regime of accumulation,” ensues. Although Marxist geographers began to draw upon regulationist thinking in the 1980sdparticularly in studies of industrial restructuring (e.g., the Mick Dunford and Dianne Perrons text of 1982 or the Allan Scott and Michael Storper collection of 1986)dit was not until the 1990s that more spatially sophisticated regulationist accounts began to appear (e.g., the contributions Marxist Geography 423 by Mick Dunford in 1990 and Ash Amin in 1994), initially concerned with critically assessing the uneven geography of state regulation in response to processes of economic and political restructuring. The work of Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, notably in 1994, has been particularly useful here in identifying the gaps in regulationist thought, especially the tendencies to underplay subnational variations in modes of regulation, both historically and through contemporary changes brought by neoliberal restructuring and the shift from Fordism to more flexible forms of employment. More recently, there has been a focus upon the geographical unevenness of neoliberalism itself as a mode of social regulation, as in Brenner and Theodore’s now classic edited comparative collection, Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Europe, published in 2002. Another body of Marxist work has been that of labor geography cultivated in varying ways by Andrew Herod, Don Mitchell, Jane Wills, and others, which has attempted to correct for the capital-centric Marxism of the 1980s by exploring how workers also shape capitalist landscapes. As one of the most prominent of these new labor geographers puts it: . the production of the geography of capitalism is not the sole prerogative of capital. Understanding only how capital is structured and operates is not sufficient to understand the making of the geography of capitalism. For sure, this does not mean that labor is free to construct landscapes as it pleases, for its agency is restricted just as is capital’s – by history, geography, by structures that it cannot control, and by the actions of its opponents. But it does mean that a more active conception of workers’ geographical agency must be incorporated into explanations of how economic landscapes come to look and function the way they do Herod (2001), 34. Whilst there is a long-established tradition within Marxist geography of studies that explore how workers seek to “defend place” against the threat of plant closure and industrial restructuring, Herod and others have been pursuing research that highlights the more proactive role of trade unions in creating their own “spatial fixes.” Three themes have been particularly evident in labor geography: attempts by trade unions to internationalize their operations to come to grips with global capital; the way workers and unions develop their own strategies to respond to economic restructuring; and finally, new attempts to organize workers at the local scale in service-sector activities. Finally, there has been some productive work on Marxist understandings of nature and environment by the likes of Noel Castree, writing in 1995 and 2002, attempting to go beyond earlier conceptions in which nature was perceived as passively transformed by capitalist processes, without any sense of its own agency to a reconciliation of political economy with the very real ontological existence of other actors or “actants,” both human and nonhuman (as insisted upon by Actor-Network theory). One of the most important contributions has been Richard Peet and Michael Watts’s 1996 edited collection Liberation Ecologies, which sought to integrate certain poststructuralist concernsdsuch as the importance of discourse, alternative understandings and knowledges and the specificities of placedwithin a continuing political economy perspective on the uneven and environmentally destructive tendencies of capitalism. Critically, by locating their collection largely within environmental and indigenous peoples’ struggles in the global south, they are able to show the continuing importance both theoretically and politically of a Marxist critique of capitalism, yet at the same time one that embraces the plurality of actually existing class struggles. More recently, Jason W. Moore’s 2015 influential book, Capitalism in the Web of Life, employed sophisticated dialectical Marxist geographical analysis to show how the ecological crisis is not, as many scholars of the Anthropocene suggest, the outcome of humanity as an abstract homogenous unit, but one of particular historically determinate forms of society defined by distinct regimes of property relations: a capitalocene in which economic exchange value trumps nature’s use value as a sustainable habitat. The Continuing Relevance of a Marxist Perspective to the Geographical Imagination There has been something of a return to Marx and political economy in the 21st Century, not least because of the growing evidence of the destructive and uneven consequences of unregulated global capitalism. The global financial crisis of 2007–08 only underscored the ongoing relevance of Marx’s thought for contemporary times. As we’ve noted previously, the crisis highlighted in particular the preeminence of urban issues in the formation of crisis and the perspicacity of Marxist urban theory for comprehending crisis. Ultimately, Marxism is still relevant because of its value as a framework for understanding the evolution of the global capitalist system, a point appreciated by many contemporary geographers examining the financialization of cities, real estate and housing, including Rachel Weber, Kevin Fox Gotham, Brett Christophers, Manuel Aalbers, and Desiree Fields, among many others. Such accounts, informed by Marxist analysis, but not bound by it, provide a vital link between the complex contemporary abstractions of capital and the concrete actuality of lived urban experience, including the interpenetration of race and class as noted by Rachel Weber and Kevin Fox Gotham respectively in 2002 and in many subsequent publications. Going beyond a narrow focus on Capital Volume I (production), to gain insights from Volume II (circulation) and Volume III (finance, credit) offers ongoing potential for geographers working in the nexus of finance, debt, and crisis. At the same time, Marxist geography, arguably under the excessive influence of structural Marxism and regulation school theory, as assessed by Charnock in 2010, continues to have its limitations and weaknesses. There remains a need to provide a stronger sense of agency, rather than merely showing how capitalism reproduces itself (though this is no small task in itself), integrating cultural, discursive, and institutional insights within a broader materialist understanding of contemporary capitalism and its historical development. In short, what is required is a Marxism that is receptive to insights from other perspectives and which evolves in line with 424 Marxist Geography capitalism as its object of analysis. One area of productive engagement might be over the current composition of resistance and class struggle at the level of social reproduction, perhaps as signposted by Cindi Katz in her 2004 monograph. If Marxism, is often criticized for its lack of attention to the questions of race and gender, geographers would do well to remember, and work through, the historical contributions of Marxist thinkers such as CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Sylvia Federici, Selma James, Bell Hooks, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and many others. For instance, Cedric Robinson’s notion of racial capitalism, developed in Black Marxism in 1980, has shown how capitalism has always been dependent on slavery, racism, imperialism, and violence and has been taken up by recent Black insurgent movements in the United States and by geographers such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Laura Pulido. We have already discussed the contributions of Glen Coulthard, who draws on Marx, Fanon and indigenous thought to provide a critical analysis of liberalism, land and property in Canada, and the Italian Marxist feminists who opened up the arena of social reproduction as a vital site of political contestation and indirect value production. Such contributions weave race, class and gender throughout their analyses without relinquishing a critique of how capitalist relations and the question of class intersect with all subject positions, albeit in particular ways and in particular places. Indeed, given the current paucity of studies on class in geography, there is an urgent need to reconsider class formation in all its complexity in a period marked by capitalism’s decades-long productivity crisis and attendant forms of deindustrialization, precarity, informality, and surplus labor. Vijay Gidwani’s work on waste and waste work, the obscene underside of value production provides another exemplary inspiration here. Understanding capitalism from both the perspective of labor and the different forms of reproductive resistance that emerge to global capital in particular places and how the local is woven into broader global networks in myriad, complex, and contested ways, suggests a fertile agenda for Marxist and other critical geographers. Such a perspective might retain some of the still strong influences of structuralist and regulationist Marxism but would recapture more of the everyday experiences of and resistances to capitalism and would understand concepts such as capital and class, not in reified terms, but as more fluid categories that change and evolve in time and space. Critically, following the tradition of “Open Marxism,” the key to understanding capitalism is to see it, not just in terms of the exploitative relationship between labor and capital through which surplus value is created, but also in terms of the alienation and the dehumanization that accompanies commodification: the increasing subjugation of everything (people, animals, plants, and the entire earth) to commodity production. Resistance to capital is therefore a resistance to this subjugation and an attempt always to recover humanity and dignity. This is an important point because it means that we could take a broader view of labor and work, which are not just confined to an idealized industrialized proletariat and reified class positions but extended to all forms of human activity (integrating production, social reproduction, and consumption) and incorporating all the diverse ways in which economic and social life are increasingly subservient to commodity production. As Holloway puts it: “the theory of value proclaims the subjugation of doing, the fact that human, creative doing is reduced in capitalism to the dehumanising process of abstract labor, of value production” (Holloway, 2005: 186). This essential Marxist insight remains as relevant today as it was in Marx’s day. See Also: Actor–Network Theory; Capital and Space; Capitalism; Dialectical Reasoning and Dialectical Materialism; Economic Geography; Gentrification; Labor Geography; Locality Debates; Neoliberalism; Racism and Antiracism; Radical Geography; Regulation; Spatial Division of Labor; Structural Marxism; Uneven Development. Further Reading Althusser, L., Balibar, E., 1968. Reading Capital. New Left Books, London. Boyer, R., 1990. The Regulation School: A Critical Introduction. Columbia University Press, New York. Brenner, N. (Ed.), 2014. Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Jovis, Berlin. Brenner, N., Theodore, N. (Eds.), 2002. Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. Cleaver, H., 2000. Reading Capital Politically. Second Edition. AK Press, Edinburgh. Coulthard, G.S., 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota. Federici, S., 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, Brooklyn, NY. Gregory, D., Urry, J. (Eds.), 1985. Social Relations and Spatial Structures. Macmillan, Basingstoke. Harvey, D., 1982. The Limits to Capital. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Herod, A., 2001. Labour Geographies: Workers and the Landscape of Capitalism. Guilford Press, New York. Lefebvre, H., 2003. The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Marx, K., Engels, F., 1967. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin, London. Marx, K., 1990. Capital. Volume One. Penguin, London. Massey, D., 1984. Spatial Divisions of Labour: Social Structures and Geography of Production. Methuen, New York. Mitchell, K., Katz, C., Marston, S.A. (Eds.), 1993. Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction. Wiley & Blackwell, London. Moore, J.W., 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, London. Smith, N., 1990. Uneven Development: Nature, Capitalism and the Production of Space, second ed. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Soja, E., 1980. The socio-spatial dialectic. Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr. 70, 207–225.