From Labor Geography to Class Geography: Reasserting the Marxist Theory of Class

Abstract

Class analysis has never been hegemonic in Human Geography, or indeed, in any other social science, although it had some visibility in the 1960s and the 1970s. Recently the claim has been made for a resurgence of class analysis, as with in labor geography and new working class studies. I subject this claim to a brief critique. Although labor geography has shed some light on workers’ agency, its underlying view of class is very problematic. I then offer a map of an alternative view of class more rooted in the Marxist tradition. In mapping the class theory in the form of a dialectical synthesis, I briefly elaborate selected conceptual theses on class. These theses together aim at conceptualizing class as a social-material relation of exploitation that exists at multiple levels, and as (tendentially) connected to class unity, consciousness/ identity and struggle. The theses show class to be a spatial and multi-scalar process. The paper also discusses briefly and illustratively why class matters, in particular, as far as the analysis of social oppression based on race and gender, and (uneven) economic development is concerned. It is about time to move from the labor geography type approach, whose dominant and narrowly-defined agency-oriented concerns include social-democratic manipulation of landscapes of capitalism, to a dialectical-materialist class analysis of social-geographical issues, which has more radical ambitions and which will encompass a less voluntarist and more radical labor geography.