Geographic Thought by Cresswell Tim

Author:Cresswell, Tim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

It has been impossible to do justice to the broad impact of Marxism on geography. This has been the merest outline of what interpretations of Marx, both direct and indirect, have offered geography in the past four decades. They have made consistent pleas for geography to help understand and transform a capitalist world. Geography in the late 1960s was an odd subject with little to say about very important issues facing the world. Marxists help to rectify that to some degree. At the theoretical level Marxists were and are at the forefront of prompting us to take the central geographical themes of “space” and “nature” seriously – a process that has gone on in other theoretical traditions since then. In the realm of economic geography there have been important insights and interventions into the processes of global development showing how developing countries have been tied to the fortunes of exploitative developed nations (Santos 1975; Slater 1977; Peet 1991). Similarly, there have been innovations in our understanding of the way that labor and industry work spatially at urban and regional scales (Massey 1974, 1984; Storper and Walker 1989).

Marxism continues to be an important influence in geography. The years since 1968 have seen it come under attack, first by the spatial scientists whom Harvey and others so thoroughly critiqued and then by humanists who saw it as a denial of human free will. More recently, it has been attacked by feminists (because of its blindness to gender) and poststructuralists (for its faith in metanarratives). Despite all this, however, Marxism remains one of the most powerful sets of theoretical approaches to the world we live in. There are still ghettos in cities. Countries in the global south are still dependent on the global north. We are still subject to waves of crises. The global economic chaos of the past few years has seen renewed interest in Marxism as a diagnostic of the workings of capitalism. David Harvey’s most recent books are subjects of debate well beyond geography as his analysis of the limits of capital is seen to say important truths about the times we are living in (Harvey 2010). As Harvey put it in 1973, there is an ecological problem, an urban problem, an international trade problem. …

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