The Dictionary of Human Geography

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who claim that the institutional preconditions

ofeconomic growth are the outcome of

(parametric or strategic) actions undertaken

by sovereign economic actors (see Carver

and Thomas, 1995), Brenner instead con-

tends that it is unwarranted ‘to take for

granted a society of free economic actors,

ratherthan one of economic actors subject

to non-economic constraints’ (Brenner, 1986,

p. 25). Second, rationally self-interested

action in such circumstances will, as a rule,

exhibit the goal of maintaining existingprop-

erty relations, thereby impeding economic

development; and, third, should economic

development occur, it must be viewed – in

light of the second premise – ‘as an unin-

tended consequence of. .. conflicts between

[antagonistic] classes’ (ibid., p. 26).

The distinctive contribution of geographers

to Marxist economics has been to show that

capitalist dynamics are intrinsicallygeopolit-

ical. Thus, radical geographers such as David

HarveyandDoreenMasseyhavedemonstrated,

in quite different ways, how class relations in-

volving the extraction of surplus labour are

stretched out spatially and profoundly impli-

cated in differing patterns ofuneven develop-

ment– whether locally, regionally or globally.

Whereas studies such as those of Massey exam-

ine howplace-specific contingencies – includ-

ing gender and race relations – mediate

economic outcomes within wider spatial

structuresof capitalism, others such as Harvey

have been more interested to elaborate how the

historical and geographical dynamics of capital-

ism might be charted as corrective responses to

recurring ‘overaccumulation’ crises that are

generated by limits immanent to it. There is

continuity here with the Marxist economics of

Henryk Grossman, Ernest Mandel and James

O’Connor who, in varying formulations, hitch

Marx’s theory of capitalistaccumulationto

the theory ofcrisis.(Seealsoandmarxist

geography;radical geography.) vg

Suggested reading

Harvey (1985b); Massey (1995).

Marxist geography The analysis of the geo-

graphical conditions, processes and outcomes

of socio-economic systems, primarilycapital-

ism, using the tools of Marxist theory. Marxist

geography is significant both for its role in the

evolution of the discipline and, more import-

antly, for its analytical claims about the world

in which we live.

Marxism first became an important theoret-

ical influence ingeographyin the late 1960s

and early 1970s. Motivated by the radical pol-

itics of that era, many younger geographers

grew dissatisfied with the then-dominant vis-

ion of geography as a technocratic,positivist

spatial science. They noted that: (i) a narrow

focus on spatial patterns often left unexamined

and unchallenged the socialprocessesthat

produced the inequalities evident in those

patterns; (ii) technically oriented, ostensibly

neutral geographical techniques and analyses

often served in practice to enable and perpetu-

ate various relations of domination; and (iii)

the ‘universal laws’ advanced by spatial ana-

lysts were often merely generalizations about

industrialized Western societies. Marxist the-

ory, by contrast, wasdialectical, overtly pol-

itical, focused on the analysis and remediation

of exploitation and inequality, and inter-

nationalist. It therefore seemed to many an

ideal theoretical foundation for acriticalgeog-

raphy aimed at understanding and combating

the production of unequal geographies. Rad-

ical geography framed in terms of Marxist the-

ory grew quickly in the discipline: its arrival

was signalled by the publication of the first

issue ofAntipodein 1969, and its theoretical

architecture and points of departure from

positivist spatial science were first laid out

clearly in David Harvey’sSocial justice and the

cityin 1973.

For much of the 1970s and 1980s, Marxist

approaches were the dominant ones incrit-

ical human geography. Scholars working in

this area developed increasingly comprehen-

sive and detailed accounts of the geographical

dynamics of capitalism, demonstrating

persuasively both that Marxist theories of cap-

italism were incomplete without attention to

spatial dynamics, and that identifiable capital-

ist processes and relations lay at the root of

many issues of concern in contemporary

human and environmental geography. Despite

the fact that much of this work emerged from a

critique of spatial science, some of it still bore

the stamp of that theoretical tradition, inas-

much as much early Marxist geography sought

to provide systematic, logical, deductive and

generalizable accounts of the spatial processes

and outcomes likely to result from endogenous

dynamics understood as inherent to capitalism.

David Harvey’s The limits to capital (1999

[1982]) remains the single most ambitious

and significant work in this vein. In this and

other works, Harvey sought to build upon

Marx’s basic framework (see Marx, 1967

[1987]) to analyse the ways in which capitalism

uses and produces space and particular geo-

graphical relationships. For instance, ongoing

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MARXIST GEOGRAPHY