Provided for non-commercial research and educational use only. Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use.

This article was originally published in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the authors benet and for the benet of the authors institution, for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specic colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your institutions administrator.

All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institutions website or repository, are prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elseviers permissions site at: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial Kirsch S. 2009. Historical-Geographical Materialism. In Kitchin R, Thrift N (eds) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Volume 5, pp. 163168. Oxford: Elsevier. ISBN: 978-0-08-044911-1 Copyright 2009 Elsevier Ltd.

Author's personal copy

Historical-Geographical Materialism
S. Kirsch, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA
& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary
Capital Value created and reinvested in the production of market commodities. Capital travels through different circuits in processes of production and exchange, and takes form as the ability to purchase or invest in labor power, machinery, and raw materials. Capitalism A specic mode of production, or economic organization, in which labor becomes a commodity and workers are separated from ownership of the means of production. Surplus value created by labor accrues not to the laborers but to the capitalist class. Dialectics/Dialectical A mode of thought or inquiry, characterized by mutually constitutive subject/object relationships, which takes contradiction as its starting point. Marxs dialectical materialism focuses on the social contradictions arising from material conditions. Divisions of Labor How tasks are divided among workers. Spatial divisions of labor describe the ways in which different forms of labor are divided across spaces and regions, creating, for example, a coal mining region or a region in which services predominate. The distribution of work by gender, in households as well as places of industry and commerce, denes the gendered division of labor. Social Reproduction The everyday maintenance of the formal and informal social institutions that make the material reproduction of a given society possible over time. Struggles over social reproduction serve to reproduce and also to transform the legal, political, social, and economic structures of societies. Totality A (complex) whole to which different parts (complexly) relate. In Marxist thought the mode of production constitutes a rich totality that is, for now, irreducibly capitalist.

explanatory approach which gives ontological priority to the material conditions of existence the immediate physical world over spiritual and metaphysical notions of causation. Grounded in the rejection of nonmaterial prime causes, materialism instead denes its own categories on the basis of demonstrable investigations. Materialist frameworks for engagement with the physical world, often arising in opposition to (or in tension with) spiritualism and theocratic domination, were revolutionary in this sense, and have had profound implications for the making and legitimation of knowledge in modern societies, and for the politics of that authority. From Galileos sunspots to Darwins nches to Marxs class formations to contemporary debates over global climate change and the genetic body, strains of materialist thought continue to animate public discourse and the unfolding of human relations with, and as part of, the material world. In popular usage, materialism (and materialist) have for centuries been mobilized as pejoratives, especially by spiritualists in the effort to disparage those possessing insufciently religious worldviews. In the humanities and social sciences, materialism has, since the late nineteenth century, been strongly associated with the historical materialism of Karl Marx and scholars working in the Marxist tradition. Historical materialism (as Marxs approach to analyzing historical change later came to be called) proposes that historical events and processes notably, historical transformations, such as that from feudalism to capitalism in Europe were, at least in principle, no less understandable in terms of demonstrable material causes than are those that constitute the solar system or evolutionary processes. In this analysis, the roots of social change were to be found in the material conditions of social existence, or being. As Marx described this approach in an oft-quoted passage from the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx, 1970: 2021)

Introduction
Historical-geographical materialism describes the intellectual project of creating a Marxist science of geography and, simultaneously, of infusing the broader currents of historical and dialectical materialism with explicitly geographical concepts and sensibilities. Though historical-geographical materialism did not emerge concretely in anglophone human geography until the 1970s and 1980s, the term taps into the deeper roots of materialism in Western intellectual history, an

Thus it is not the idea or spirit which produced the world, as Hegels dialectic had it, but the world which produced the idea, and Marx stressed in particular the relationship between the forces and requirements of the production process, on the one hand, and the social

163

Author's personal copy

164 Historical-Geographical Materialism

relations of production, on the other, including the legal and political arrangements of civil society which make the mode of production possible. Turning Hegel on his head, in this sense, had important political as well as philosophical implications. Freedom from the oppressive conditions of modern life, Marx argued, would require not only a transformation of consciousness, but also revolutionary changes in the material conditions of social existence. For Marx, these conditions were to be understood as historical, not universal or timeless. Historical materialism thus presents itself, in part, as a general theory of historical development, through which large-scale historical transformations could be understood, in dialectical terms, to have arisen from contradictions embedded materially in a mode of production, or in successive modes of production. While capitalism was itself revolutionary, remarkably so, in its mechanisms for continually revolutionizing the forces of production, it also produced new contradictions, always setting the stage for future historical transformations: capitalism produced wage labor and pauperization, but it also produced conditions that made plausible the formation of the working class. Marxs construction of the working class as a scientic category, imagined community, and new historical subject illustrates the complexity, and rhetorical power, of the dialectic of human agency in historical materialism, that people make history but not under conditions of their own choosing. We confront a world that is already constituted, structured by powerful forces beyond the control of any individual or social group, but it is a world still actively constituted; we enter history as its participants. Of course, the manner and degree to which the social, political, and intellectual are shaped in the last instance by the requirements of production, in a world wherein, as Louis Althusser remarked, the lonely hour of the last instance never comes, continues to be a matter of research and debate (1969: 113). The mode of production itself, for example, can be read in narrow economic terms and also much more openly in its dialectical relations with social, political, and cultural forms and processes. For Marx, working out the implications of materialism was a means of challenging, on the one hand, the idealism of Hegelian political philosophy and, on the other, the presumed truths of political economy. Political economy, as Marxs critique illustrated, provided scientic justication for treating the capitalist system, and the specic forms of inequality that it produced, as natural. Marxs trenchant analysis of political economy and its logics in the rst volume of Capital, which included close attention to then contemporary debates over abstract theories of market equilibrium, as well as struggles over the regulation of child labor and the working day, strongly reects this materialist approach. The most radical lessons of

historical materialism, however, concerned the future, not the past. For if historical transitions between modes of production could be rationally understood, their causes identied, then perhaps so too, as Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, could the transition to a more just, equitable, and rational society be envisaged for and realized in the future. Historical materialism, with its priority of matter over mind, thus presented a host of new epistemological, political, and moralethical problems; no longer, Marx insisted, could science itself be seen as an enterprise detached from the earthly world of its investigations. The implications of these developments for geographical thought and practice are explored in the next sections.

Historical Materialism and Geography

Geographers share a long history of engagement with materialism as a practical philosophy. For the navigators, natural philosophers, cartographers, engineers, explorers, cosmographers, surveyors, social scientists, social theorists, and other historic and contemporary authors of geographical knowledge, the work of observing, recording, mapping, and analyzing the immediate physical world has been a fundamental concern. It is hardly surprising that the geographical language of discovery, for example, would diffuse so widely into the physical and mathematical sciences, for the ongoing reconguration of relations among observation, experience, authority, and truth was indeed evocatively framed in terms of the new planetary geographical knowledge produced amid Europes colonial and imperial ventures. From a materialist perspective, the centrality and value of geographical knowledge in the work of empire building, natural resource exploitation, and the expansion of legal, economic, and territorial systems, raises questions about the material basis of geographical knowledge itself, that is, the conditions that make it possible. We can look back, in this sense, to the emergence and institutionalization of modern scientic geography in imperial Western states (and to some extent, Japan) during the late nineteenth century and discern the strong role of imperial states in the formation of geographical knowledge and the modern discipline of geography. While geography was in some ways a materialist Enlightenment science par excellence, its development, in this milieu, was thus tied closely to expansion of territorial power and global commerce, and the justication of such processes as natural; the new discipline of geography, far from picking up on the radical implications of Marxs materialist philosophy, was largely a conservative one. But to emphasize that geographical knowledge cannot be understood independently of its material conditions is not to reduce scientic thought to the horizons of its

Author's personal copy

Historical-Geographical Materialism 165

social origins. The commingling of geography with anarchism and values of mutual aid and respect in the work lise e Reclu of Pyotr Kropotkin and E s, amidst the ourishing of imperial geography in European capitals, suggested the possibility of a more radical, and politically engaged, geographical materialism. Geographers record of engagement with historical materialism has been brief but transformative, both inside and outside the discipline. In anglophone human geography, the rise of radical geography in the late 1960s and 1970s has been strongly associated with the rise of anti(Vietnam) war, anti-imperialist, feminist, antiracist and other social movements. Geographers took notice of socially and spatially uneven distributions of poverty, wealth and power, at local, regional, and global scales, and vigorously critiqued their disciplines seeming inability to meaningfully address them, even in the worlds wealthiest countries. While the efforts to turn geography into a rigorous (and especially, quantitative) science during the decades following World War II had been animated partly by liberal and progressive impulses, some geographers, best known among them, the once leading theoretician of quantitative geography, David Harvey, would turn to historical materialism as a means of rethinking geography and political economy so as to better understand and address social conditions. For Harvey, materialism was fundamental to geographical science, or at least it had the potential to be. Geographical knowledge, as Harvey dened it in a 1984 historical materialist manifesto:
records, analyzes and stores information about the spatial distribution and organization of those conditions (both naturally occurring and humanly created) that provide the material basis for the reproduction of social life. At the same time it promotes conscious awareness of how such conditions are subject to continuous transformation through human action. (Harvey, 1984: 1)

Harveys brief manifesto, published in a forum of the Association of American Geographers, thus sought to orient geography around process and dialectics. He also sought to liberate geography from a rising positivism in the eld which, for Harvey, undermined its own virtues of objective materialism by spurious claims to neutrality. In a world unjustly structured by capitalism and its imperialist and geopolitical logics, Harvey argued, Geographers cannot remain neutral. But they can strive towards scientic rigor, integrity, and honesty. The difference between the two commitments must be understood (Harvey, 1984: 7). The challenge of articulating historical materialism with geography and in some ways the premise of the project was that Marx, among a long line of social theorists, was inadequately geographical: Marxian theory

had yet to overcome its emphasis on time and transformation, deal with the spatiality of the processes it analyzed, develop an adequately spatial vocabulary. Although Marx had closely investigated what we might call local contexts, and a range of locally and nationally specic social conditions, their signicance, and the problem of geographical variation more generally, had not been systematically integrated into his theoretical formulations. Geography may have been implicit to Marxs critique of political economy, in other words, but in a world profoundly structured by patterns of uneven geographical development, it had to be made explicit. While the work of Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg on imperialism had expanded knowledge of capitalisms spatial dynamics, there was clearly far more to be learned. By the early to mid-1980s, building on institutional resources created in the previous decade, including the radical geography journal Antipode, geographers had begun to seriously rework elements of Marxist theory through explicitly spatial frames. Key works included Harveys Limits to Capital, Doreen Masseys Spatial Divisions of Labor, Neil Smiths Uneven Development, and Social Relations and Spatial Structures, a multidisciplinary edited volume, among others. Carried out alongside (and as part of) a more general spatial turn in social theory, geographers, drawing on diverse inuences, brought historical materialism into contact with a range of disciplinary concerns and subelds, from urban studies of ghetto formation, suburbanization, and gentrication to agriculture and ecology to international development, industrial and economic geography, political geography and geopolitics. Terrain as diverse as landscape and culture, political movements and public space, labor, migration, commodication and consumption, technology, and the body have been investigated using historicalgeographical materialist frameworks. The next section proceeds by sketching the still emerging contours of historical-geographical materialism, but stresses that, in the present, highly eclectic domain of human geography, theoretical frameworks do not tend to be seen as dogmatic or as requiring a singular conceptual agenda. Rather, and betting a broadly materialist approach to science, different forms of materialism (and Marxism) persist, and they are often integrated with other theoretical resources.

Contours of Historical-Geographical Materialism

In his historical materialist manifesto, Harvey promoted the emergence of a new agenda for geographers which could be organized around the study of the active construction and transformation of material environments (both physical and social) together with critical

Author's personal copy

166 Historical-Geographical Materialism

reection on the production and use of geographical knowledge within the context of that activity (1984: 6). The rst part of this agenda matches closely with the Marxist dialectic of labor and nature through which the human species-being can be understood as both (1) acting on nature (i.e., the material world), chiey through variegated forms of labor, to produce the conditions of its own survival and reproduction; and (2) at the same time, is itself a part of nature, and subject to natural forces (such as hunger). Transforming nature through work, then, the nature of the species being itself is transformed, and human societies have been made and remade. A clearer understanding of the spatial relations and processes through which capitalist societies, as historically specic modes of production, have been constituted, and a richer knowledge of the geography of capitals circuitry, and capitalisms requisite demands for human (and machine) labor, could thus be achieved through the development of more adequate geographical concepts, and through empirically engaged historical-geographical studies. Rethinking the dynamics of capitalism as they articulate with local, regional, and planetary transformations has been, thus far, the most active area of research with an intellectual basis in historicalgeographical materialism. Following the work of the French Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre, geographers have, along related lines, sought to understand how the production and appropriation of nature, space, and landscapes have made possible the reproduction of capitalist societies over time. The second part of Harveys agenda with its emphasis on the production and use of geographical knowledge, broadly conceived similarly underscores the materialist philosophical basis of the project. For if knowledge, even that which is authorized as scientic, is always shaped in terms of the perspectives and contexts in which it is developed, then surely there are many different kinds of geographical knowledges, for example, those produced by military strategists, multinational industrial site selection analysts, real estate agents, metropolitan police, and so forth, for specic practical purposes, or, along other lines, in the atlases and gazetteers produced for consumption by schoolchildren in different national and regional contexts. Prioritizing matter over mind, again, requires acknowledging that the conditions of material existence shape even our ability to understand and explain these conditions to ourselves. Grasping this positionality can also help to clarify the dialectical relations between the production and use of geographical knowledges and the reshaping of social and physical environments. Harvey grants little in the way of disciplinary privilege to geographers in the making of geographical knowledges, but he does envision a special role for historical-geographical materialists precisely because they are conscious of the problematic

of the positioned or situated nature of geographical knowledge in making sense of the complex, dialectical relations among the worlds we know, the worlds we inhabit, and the ones that we build or hope to build. Critical to Marxist dialectical methodology is the emphasis on process: an object (e.g., a nail, a book, or an ear of corn) is constituted relationally, and thus cannot be understood separately from the processes and relations through which it is produced. Historical-geographical materialism, in this sense, turns all geography into a historical geography y not just of the past but also of the present and future. For Erik Swyngedouw:
Historical-geographical materialism starts from the premise that things exist, but these things are the embodiment of (they interiorise) relationships; things become the outcome of processes that have themselves ontological priority. In other words, everything ows; the ow or the process constitutes the things. (Swyngedouw, 2001: 94)

In both physical and cultural geography, the method of working backwards from the object to the processes which produced it has for long been a favored method in morphological approaches. The dialectical approach of historical-geographical materialism was not the rst which sought to understand geography the occupied earth, at least as a product of human activity, but it did open new vistas. Although, unlike a nail or an ear of corn, the production of geographical environments is never complete, per se, but rather an open and contested process, historical-geographical materialism nevertheless requires an approach that begins with specic material geographies, past or present, and seeks to understand how they were produced, and under what conditions. By insisting that any geographical arrangement be seen as both a reection and a constitutive element of an ongoing process (and interrelated, complex, and conicting sets of processes), we sharpen our understandings of historicalgeographical change, and open knowledge of these dynamics to alternative possibilities. Seeing geographical forms for example, the spatial variation of land rent values and housing markets, the location of technological innovation, or the landscape of a migrant labor camp as part of a process, existing in relation to all manner of other processes and structured by what can be described as a capitalist totality, has signicantly renewed and complicated Marxist thought by introducing a range of geographical concerns. These concerns have been pursued in a number of different ways, from Harveys efforts to spatialize Marxs theory to work developed more explicitly around structuralist, structurationist, regulation theory, and post-structuralist Marxist traditions. Geographers, in other words, have adopted a multiplicity of Marxisms and, so not surprisingly, debates persist over

Author's personal copy

Historical-Geographical Materialism 167

the explanatory power granted to capitalism and specic capitalist institutional structures as agents of change in relation to the agency of individuals, social groups, and nature itself. For Harvey, theorizing the geography of capitalist accumulation most explicitly in The Limits to Capital meant focusing, in particular, on the tensions between capitals need for spatial xity, on the one hand (e.g., in production facilities, technological investment, state social expenditures to ensure social reproduction of labor), and its demand for spatial mobility and new spatial xes, on the other, that is, the geographical movement of production processes as a strategy for lowering labor and land costs, in the context of unending competition over relative surplus value. In enunciating a historicalgeographical materialist theory of crisis, Harvey also develops a materialist spatial ontology rooted in multiple and intervening spatialities: geographical space is mediated abstractly, atomized by markets and policed by state regulation; it is dialectical, a product of social and political contest; and, as articulated in subsequent works like The Urbanisation of Consciousness (1985) and The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), it is experienced and refracted culturally in complex ways. Limits to Capital, is not only still being widely read, it is still being written, published in its third revised edition in 2006. But it may be in Harveys cultivation of a broad sensibility of space as relative to material processes, as compared to the precise lines of philosophical and economic argumentation worked through in Limits to Capital, that he continues to shape the historical-geographical materialist imagination most actively. Harveys more recent works (including Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, Spaces of Hope; The New Imperialism; and A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism) have expanded the scope of his historical-geographical materialism by drawing connections among a range of cultural, political and geopolitical, natural and environmental dynamics. While Harveys concepts of the spatial x, creative destruction, the annihilation of space through time, and accumulation by dispossession, among others, have gained considerable traction both inside and outside disciplinary geography, different strains of historicalgeographical materialism have also contributed substantially to Marxist thought and practice and to the spatial turn in social theory more broadly. Among the most inuential have been Doreen Masseys formulations of spatial and gendered divisions of labor which, along with her work on relational conceptions of place, scale, and space-time, have drawn signicantly on structural Marxism, while also serving to bring geographical thought into closer contact with interdisciplinary cultural studies. Structural Marxism has too often been caricatured as a structural determinism, and interpreted through crude readings of the base superstructure relation between the economy and civil

society. It is better understood, following the work of theorists such as Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and, in the context of British cultural studies, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, as a means of assessing the signicance of culture, politics, ideology, and the state all related to, but not necessarily determined by, capital in the reproduction of capitalist societies over time. The work of Massey and her colleagues on spatial divisions of labor, which explores the sedimentation or layering of local social patterns in relation to the changing historical geographies of production in Britain, thus added considerable social and geographical nuance to the historical-geographical materialist analysis of capitalism and its modes of production and reproduction, while also raising questions about that which may lie beyond capitals logics. Another strain of historical materialism enters geographic thought from landscape studies. Denis Cosgroves reworking of the landscape tradition in cultural geography in Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, for example, imported a more contextualized sense of historical materialism, in particular from the art histories of John Barrell, John Berger, and others, one in which it is the relations between landscape as material and culturalsymbolic form, that are given ontological priority. Picking up on the implications of this representational turn for situated studies of social struggle, Don Mitchells research on the landscapes of migrant agricultural labor in California, and on the spaces of homelessness and free speech across US cities, has thus worked partly by holding material form in tension with representation, allowing for the creation of nuanced critiques of capitalist ideologies in spatial representations and the built environment. For Mitchell, though, it is the question posed, in different ways, by Harvey, Neil Smith, and Henri Lefebvre, about how the production of nature, space, and landscapes contributes to the survival of capitalism over time that continues to frame much of the analysis. To answer these questions, however, as with Cosgroves immersion in the history of landscape painting and perspective, required a deep engagement with labor history, housing studies, legal studies, and other discourses located at specic contextual conjunctures. In this sense, the historical-geographical materialist imagination remains a vibrant one in contemporary geographic writing and research more broadly, its analytical resources widely employed, because its critical engagement remains as it must an ongoing process. Recent work on urban nature and the metabolism of cities, though not always Marxist in stricto sensu, stands out as one active node of research wherein the interplay of materialism with ecology and urban studies, and also with science studies, feminist theory, art and architecture, to name just a few key areas, has helped to reinvigorate questions around the urbanization of nature and the problems of reication and

Author's personal copy

168 Historical-Geographical Materialism

agency in humannaturetechnology relations (see Gandy, 2002; Heynen et al., 2006; Kaika, 2005; Kirsch and Mitchell, 2004; Loftus, 2006; Swyngedouw, 2004), and contributed to a more general rethinking of materiality in environmental and resource geography (Bakker and Bridge, 2006). Meanwhile, and for a start, asked Williams (1980: 121) a generation ago, how is Materialism? The answer, increasingly, is geographical; no longer can the spatiality of modes of production and social reproduction be taken for granted as neutral settings where historical processes occur. Historical-geographical materialism is not a subeld or province of geography but really a set of ontological commitments that have been conjoined with political and scholarly traditions, the uses of which have been anything but uniform. Nor will they be. Although there are dangers, in the eclectic theoretical atmosphere of the contemporary humanities and social sciences, that historical-geographical materialism may serve, at times, as a kind of shorthand for providing an economic bottom line, it remains, at its best, an ambitiously open intellectual tradition. For as Williams argued,
The special character of materialism, and that which alone gives it value, is its rigorous openness to physical evidence. We cannot know in advance, as a test of delity, the changing materialist content of materialism. (Williams, 1980: 122)

As part of an ongoing, dialectical interchange between ideas and the material world, historical-geographical materialism is indeed still evolving. A Marxist science of geography, and geographical Marxism, could not aspire to less.
See also: Capitalism and Division of Labor; Critical Geography; Geography, History of; Harvey, D.; Marxism/ Marxist Geography I; Marxism/Marxist Geography II; Radical Geography; Radical Political Economy; Regulation; Spatial Division of Labor; Uneven Development.

Further Reading
Althusser, L. (1969). For Marx. Brewster, B. (trans.). Middlesex: Penguin Books. Bakker, K. and Bridge, G. (2006). Material worlds? Resource geographies and the matter of nature. Progress in Human Geography 30, 5--27. rube , M. (2005). Materialism. In Grossberg, L., Morris, M. & Bennett, Be T. (eds.) New Keywords (revised edn.), pp 209--211. Oxford: Blackwell. Castree, N. and Gregory, D. (eds.) (2006). David Harvey. Oxford: Blackwell.

Castree, N., Essletzbichler, J. and Brenner, N. (eds.) (2004). Symposium: David Harveys The Limits to Capital: Two decades on. Antipode 36(3), 357--554. Cosgrove, D. (1998). Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (2nd edn.). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Gandy, M. (2002). Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gregory, D. and Urry, J. (eds.) (1985). Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan. Harvey, D. (1984). On the history and present condition of geography: An historical materialist manifesto. The Professional Geographer 36, 1--11. Harvey, D. (1985). The Urbanization of Consciousness. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of Hope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Harvey, D. (2003). The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2006). Limits to Capital (3rd revised edn.). London: Verso. Henderson, G. (1999). California and the Fictions of Capital. New York: Oxford University Press. Heynen, N., Kaika, M. and Swyngedouw, E. (eds.) (2006). In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Metabolism. London: Routledge. Kaika, M. (2005). City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City. London: Routledge. Kirsch, S. and Mitchell, D. (2004). The nature of things: Dead labor, nonhuman actors, and the persistence of Marxism. Antipode 36, 687--705. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Nicholson-Smith, D. (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Loftus, A. (2006). Reication and the dictatorship of the water meter. Antipode 38, 1023--1045. Marx, K. (1970). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: International Publishers. Marx, K. (1992). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, Fowkes, B. (trans.). New York: Penguin. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1967). Communist Manifesto. New York: Penguin. Massey, D. (1984). Spatial Divisions of Labour. London: Macmillan. Mitchell, D. (1996). The Lie of the Land. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, D. (2000). Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Mitchell, D. (2003). The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guilford. Peet, R. (1998). Modern Geographical Thought. Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, N. (1990). Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (2nd edn.). Oxford: Blackwell. Swyngedouw, E. (2001). Marxism and historical-geographical materialism: A spectre is haunting geography. Scottish Geographical Journal 115, 91--102. Swyngedouw, E. (2004). Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (1980). Culture and Materialism. London: Verso.

Relevant Websites
http://www.marxists.org/ Marxists Internet Archive. http://davidharvey.org/ Reading Marxs Capital with David Harvey.