numerous understandings of what Marxist think-
Marxist geography
Bernd Belina
Goethe University, Germany
Marxism – a global phenomenon
with its own geography
Marxist geography, like Marxism, is named after
one individual, the German thinker Karl Marx
(1818–1883). This may sound like some kind of
personality cult, but nothing could be more con-
trary to Marx’s own thinking, which focuses on
how society as a whole functions and develops,
and how capitalist societies are characterized by a
mode of production based on exploitation. Aca-
demics and activists working within the Marxist
tradition have become especially cautious when
it comes to personality cults. Throughout the
twentieth century, Marx’s name and ideas were
exploited as a state ideology in the Soviet Union,
Eastern Europe, and China, for example, in
order to legitimize political regimes of highly
problematic and sometimes outright dictatorial
character that had very little in common with
Marx’s own ideas.
During his lifetime, Marx’s work was adopted
by thinkers and activists in many places all over
the world to understand and to criticize both
grievances caused by capitalism and capitalism
itself. In the twentieth century, Marxism has
become a global phenomenon, reflecting the
spread of capitalist social relations and the struggle
against their many different forms. Depending on
historical epoch, national and language context,
and strand within the discussion, there are
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0917
ing entails. While many of these understandings
are closely related, there are cases where different
strands of Marxism have little in common. Espe-
cially in the second half of the twentieth century,
“Western” Marxists struggled to come to terms
with Marxism–Leninism or Maoism, both of
which drew on Marx but tended to portray his
thinking as rather mechanical, as opposed to
relational. Today, cleavages and disagreements
within the Marxist tradition remain, but clearly
take a back seat to the common goal: the com-
prehensive analysis of the functioning and steady
development of capitalist society and the work
toward alternatives. It was the latter that Marx
famously called for when he wrote in the “Theses
on Feuerbach” in 1845: “The philosophers have
only interpreted the world, in various ways; the
point is to change it.” On the most general level,
the contribution of Marxist geographers to these
endeavors lies in bringing to the fore the rele-
vance of spatial differences in the analysis of cap-
italism and its alternatives, using concepts such as
uneven development, geopolitics, urbanization,
territory, place, region, landscape, and scale.
Marxist geographers are not particularly inter-
ested in defining a certain version of the academic
discipline of geography. The division of academic
labor into disciplines is mainly the result of
struggles and exclusions within academia (with
geography often having a hard time justifying its
specificity vis-à-vis other disciplines) and, to a
much lesser degree, a reasonable division of labor
between academics. Just as Marx’s own work
cannot be assigned to one academic discipline,
the work of Marxist geographers is closely linked
and sometimes indistinguishable from that of
Marxists working in other disciplines.
MARXIST GEOGRAPHY
Nature and metabolism
In volume 1 of his major work, Das Kapital
(published in 1867 and revised in 1890), Marx
makes reference to the “original sources of all
wealth – the soil and the labourer” (Marx 1996,
508). Note that “the soil” is the translation for
“die Erde,” which is more accurately translated
as “the earth,” referring to nature in general. For
Marx, as for geographers in the nineteenth cen-
tury, nature forms the basis for all social processes.
But, unlike the environmental determinism of
nineteenth-century geography, he is very clear
that the natural world – soil, air, water, minerals,
plants, animals, and so on – does not determine
culture but that human societies live in a com-
plex relationship with nature which he terms
metabolism, and which makes it difficult to even
distinguish the border between the two spheres.
It is through labor, understood as the “process in
which both man and Nature participate” (Marx
1996, 187; note that Marx originally used the
term “Mensch,” which is more accurately trans-
lated as “human being”), that this metabolism
works. On the most general level, “arms and
legs, head and hands” are themselves “natural
forces” of the body, and through their use the
human being “at the same time changes his [or
her] own nature” (Marx 1996, 187). Marxist
geographers have further developed this line
of thinking by arguing that nature is actually
produced in and through the metabolism with
human societies, and that the production of
nature under capitalism follows the imperatives
of capital (Smith 1990). In another strand of the
discussion in Marxist geography and in common
with feminist literature, the human body, which
was traditionally thought of as something merely
natural, is discussed as produced in and through
labor processes (Callard 1998).
2
Commodity production, value,
and uneven development
The capitalist way to organize the metabolism
between nature and society, and therefore the
labor process, is marked by commodity production.
In Das Kapital, commodities are the point of
departure for Marx’s discussion of the capitalist
mode of production. Commodities (including
services) are useful things that are produced
solely because they can be sold to others for a
profit. The usefulness of things – the qualities
that make up their use value – is reduced to a
means to an end: it is only their quantitative
exchange value that the capitalists who produce
them are interested in. The exchange value is
the amount of money that can be exchanged
for the commodity because somebody else finds
it useful and is willing and able to pay for it.
It is only in the marketplace, in competition
with other producers, that capitalists find out
if they can realize an exchange value, and this
is why it seems as if the value of a commodity
is determined by what is going on in the mar-
ketplace: that is, supply and demand. But Marx
argues that the exchange value is only the form
in which the value of the commodity appears
in exchange. Value, he argues, is inherent in the
commodity prior to its entering the marketplace
where it is realized. Following what is called the
labor theory of value, he argues that the value
of a commodity is determined by the average
amount of socially necessary labor time that goes
into its production. New value is produced in
the labor process, not in exchange. Capitalists
buy the commodity labor power: that is, the mere
ability to work, in an exchange of equivalents for
a certain price (the wage), and organize the labor
process in a way that labor time is spent producing
more value than is covered by the wage. This is
how surplus value is produced and how capitalist

exploitation works: through the specific form in
which the labor process is organized.
Marxist geographers have emphasized that cap-
italist production necessarily results in uneven
geographic development (Harvey 1982; Smith
1990), since capitalists strategically use spatial
differentiations to minimize costs (of means of
production and/or labor power), to profit from
the proximity to markets or to other capitalists
such as suppliers, to create a spatial monopoly,
or to use location as a competitive advantage
(Harvey 1982). Spatial (re)location and organi-
zation thus play an integral role in the way in
which production and exploitation develop, and
result in a “spatial division of labor” (Massey
1984). In capitalism, uneven development is
sometimes organized though spatial scales like
the global scale of the world market, the national
scale of the state, and the local scale, where pro-
duction sites and labor power are concentrated
(Smith 1990). Within labor geography, Marxist
geographers look into the spatial strategies of
laborers, such as how they mobilize their struggle
for better working conditions and wages using
spatial strategies, for example by organizing on a
larger geographical scale (Herod 2001).
Classes, the state, and reproductive labor
The capitalist mode of production as described
so far presupposes two classes: capitalists, as
private proprietors of the means of produc-
tion, and laborers, who have nothing to sell
but their labor power. The existence of these
two classes is the result of an (ongoing) history
of “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder,
briefly, force” (Marx 1996, 705). Class struggle,
enclosures, urbanization, colonialism, imperial-
ism, geopolitics, coups d’état, police power, and
wars were necessary, and are still used, to produce
and reproduce these two classes. In Das Kapital,
MARXIST GEOGRAPHY
Marx emphasizes how wealth is produced and
circulates in capitalism as a result of the dis-
tinction of these two classes with antagonistic
interests. He further identified several more
classes with particular interests, as well as other
groups and institutions playing fundamental roles
in the capitalist mode of production.
In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Napoleon,” first published in 1852, for example,
Marx identifies the “small-holding peasantry”
(Marx 1979, 187; emphasis original) as the class
that would-be French ruler Louis Napoleon
represented in his coup d’état in 1851. These
small farmers were, as a result of the French
Revolution, free from direct rule by their former
overlords, but as they were not able to live off
their land they ran up debts that made them
unfree in a new respect. This economic position
formed the basis of their particular interests
that Louis Napoleon was able to represent.
The proprietors of the banks to which they
owned money, the “urban usurers” (Marx 1979,
190) as Marx calls them, are an example of
yet another class: financial capitalists who lend
money to other capitalists, laborers, and states.
Their main concern is to secure the return of
their credit with interest, for which reason they
support the profit-making industrial capitalists
and tax-collecting states while at the same time
struggling with the former over the share of
social wealth and the latter over the burden of
taxation, banking regulations, and so on.
In the same work, Marx also mentions “the
rivalry between capital and landed property”
(Marx 1979, 128). Landowners who receive
ground rent from capitalists or others for the
permission to use a piece of land for a certain
time constitute a class of their own, with interests
that conflict with those of the renters. As landed
property was discussed as a relevant source of
wealth in the realm of agriculture in Marx’s time,
he identifies the aforementioned rivalry with
3
MARXIST GEOGRAPHY
“the old contrast between town and country”
(Marx 1979, 128). Marxist geographers have
contributed to an understanding of the role of
private property over land, with a focus on the
urbanization process that has shaped the world
so fundamentally since Marx’s time. In order
to understand the spatial structure of cities,
the housing question, and gentrification, they
emphasize “the co-ordinating functions that
[ground rent] performs in allocating land to uses
and shaping geographical organization in ways
reflective of compensation and amendable to
accumulation” (Harvey 1982, 333).
Also in the same work, Marx makes important
contributions to an understanding of the state in
the capitalist mode of production. On the one
hand, he shows how the multitude of interests
of various classes is represented within the state
in an indirect manner, through parties, their
campaigning, and propaganda, and through
elections. On the other hand, he qualifies the
state bureaucracy as “an artificial caste” (Marx
1979, 192) that is necessary to organize all
other classes and that develops an interest of its
own: the “maintenance of [the] regime” (Marx
1979, 192). Marxist geographers, often in close
collaboration with Marxists from other disci-
plines, have made important contributions to
our understanding of the state under capitalism
and the way in which indirect rule, mainly in the
interest of some classes over the vast majority of
the population, is organized through coercion,
but more importantly through hegemony, power
relations, and the selectivities of state appara-
tuses. Geographers have tackled the following
issues, among others: the way in which political
coalitions of (parts of) different classes with
competing interests form in places of different
scale (cities, regions, nation-states), putting their
common interest in the protection of value
embedded in the land and the capitalist activities
in these places on a similar level as their particular
4
interests (Harvey 1982); how and why capitalist
states are organized spatially in territories and
scales, and how groups and classes try to strategi-
cally influence the scalar organization of states in
their own interest (Smith 1990); and how states
use their powers of policing, punishment, and
incarceration to order spaces and populations in
socially selective manners, such as along racial
lines (Wilson Gilmore 2007).
Large groups and many activities seem to stand
outside of the economic and political relations
discussed so far, especially reproductive work and
housework, which are mainly done by women.
While Marx never explicitly engaged in a dis-
cussion of women’s role in capitalism, feminists
in the Marxist tradition have highlighted the
role of women in the biological reproduction of
laborers (i.e., giving birth) and the social repro-
duction of capitalist social relations in general
by guaranteeing the reproduction of the (often)
male “breadwinner’s” labor power. Marxist
geographers have contributed to these discus-
sions by, for example, deciphering the way in
which reproductive labor is hidden from sight in
urban spaces and by showing how reproduction
differs between places (Katz 2004).
Pathways of Marxist geographies
Marxist geographies, while based on the work
of Marx, differ in time and space, reflecting
different economic and political situations and
emancipatory struggles in which Marxists in
general, and Marxist geographers in particu-
lar, were engaged. In the anglophone world,
Marxist geography was central to the theoretical
development of geography in the 1970s and
1980s, before being challenged on a variety of
levels by phenomenology, structuration theory,
and especially poststructural and feminist theo-
ries that constituted a “critical geography” that

wanted to overcome the perceived shortcomings
of Marxist radical geography. Building on the
work of authors such as Michel Foucault, Judith
Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
many contributions of anglophone critical geog-
raphy in the 1990s seemed to place a wedge
between their endeavor and the Marxist tradi-
tion (sometimes ignoring the close relation of
poststructuralist authors to the Marxist tradi-
tion). This development is rather specific to the
anglophone context, though. It reflects, among
other things, the political upheaval at universities
in the late 1960s, the sometimes problematic
relationship of Marxist political organizations to
feminist movements and movements of people
of color, and the specific “publish or perish”
environment at British and American univer-
sities since the 1990s which gave an incentive
to authors to focus on the novelty of their
contribution. By contrast, in Latin America the
work of Brazilian geographer Milton Santos
(1926–2001), who included the category of race
in his Marxist work, remains a central point of
reference. Following his example, and as a result
of the close relationship of Marxist geographers
to social movements and their existential strug-
gles, a far more open exchange between different
kinds of critical theories has evolved. In France,
important geographers such as Pierre George
(1909–2006) were members of the Communist
Party (a relevant political force between the
1950s and 1980s), but little Marxist theory is
reflected in their work. In Japanese economic
geography, Marxism was present from the 1920s
and especially strong in the 1970s, following
the country’s rapid industrialization after World
War II and its negative impacts on Japan’s
social and natural environments. In the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe, Marxism–Leninism
functioned as a state ideology, but it also made
possible an early and radical critique of traditional
geography as well as interesting attempts to build
MARXIST GEOGRAPHY
an applied Marxist geography with a strong focus
on territorial planning in the service of “real
existing socialism.” In the current conjuncture,
with English being the lingua franca of global
academia and very few translations from other
languages into English, and with excellent Marx-
ist work being produced in English-language
geography, anglophone Marxist geography has
become hegemonic within Marxist geography
(as reflected in the references of this entry).
The relational thinking of Marxism allows us
to understand these different pathways as appro-
priations of Marx’s basic contributions to the
understanding of capitalism and its alternatives in
different economic and political contexts. In this
sense, the development of Marxist geography
illustrates one of Marx’s strongest phrases, which
also captures nicely the inherently political
nature of Marxist thinking: “Men [originally
‘Die Menschen,’ i.e., ‘human beings’] make their
own history, but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances
chosen by themselves; but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from
the past” (Marx 1979, 103). Building on the
insights of Marx and the tradition he founded
allows us to understand the ways in which human
beings make their own geographies in varying
circumstances and to contribute to progressive
attempts to change them.
SEE ALSO: Critical geography; Labor
geography; Radical geography; Social
geography; Social justice; Social movements;
State, the
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5
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