Marxist geography

Cumbers, A. and Gray, N. (2020) Marxist geography. In: Kobayashi, A. (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier: Amsterdam, Netherlands ; Cambridge, MA, pp. 413-424. ISBN 9780081022962 (doi: 10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10671-7)

Abstract

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: 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.

• Item Type: Book Sections (Encyclopaedia entry)
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Cumbers, Professor Andrew and Gray, Mr Neil
• Authors: Cumbers, A., and Gray, N.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Management
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISBN: 9780081022962
• Published Online: 04 December 2019