Cox, K. (2021) Marxism and Human Geography

Advanced Introduction to Marxism and Human Geography
Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful intro-

ductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly
written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rig-
orous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy
issues associated with discrete subject areas.
The aims of the series are two-fold: to pinpoint essential principles of
a particular field, and to offer insights that stimulate critical thinking. By
distilling the vast and often technical corpus of information on the subject
into a concise and meaningful form, the books serve as accessible intro-
ductions for undergraduate and graduate students coming to the subject
for the first time. Importantly, they also develop well-informed, nuanced
critiques of the field that will challenge and extend the understanding of
advanced students, scholars and policy-makers.
For a full list of titles in the series please see the back of the book. Recent
titles in the series include:
Cities Sustainable Competitive
Peter J. Taylor Advantage in Sales
Lawrence B. Chonko
Law and Entrepreneurship
Shubha Ghosh Law and Development
Second Edition
Mobilities Mariana Mota Prado and Michael
Mimi Sheller J. Trebilcock
Technology Policy Law and Renewable Energy
Albert N. Link and James Joel B. Eisen
Cunningham
Experience Economy
Urban Transport Planning Jon Sundbo
Kevin J. Krizek and David A. King
Marxism and Human Geography
Legal Reasoning Kevin R. Cox
Larry Alexander and Emily
Sherwin
Advanced Introduction to
Marxism and
Human Geography
KEVIN R. COX
Emeritus Distinguished University Professor, Department of
Geography, The Ohio State University, USA
Elgar Advanced Introductions
Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Kevin R. Cox 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission of the publisher.
Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
The Lypiatts
15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK
Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

William Pratt House
9 Dewey Court
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA
A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938663
ISBN 978 1 78990 946 3 (cased)

ISBN 978 1 78990 948 7 (paperback)
ISBN 978 1 78990 947 0 (eBook)
02
Contents
Prefaceviii
PART I FOUNDATIONS
1 From historical materialism to historical

geographical materialism 2
Historical and materialist 3
Historical and geographical materialism 9
2 Marx and capital: an overview 12

The commodity 12
Values14
Surplus value 15
Accumulation18
3 Marx’s theory of value 21

Introduction21
Mainstream concepts of value 21
Marx’s concept of value introduced 22
The tendential nature of the law of value 25
4 Surplus value 28
The origin of surplus value 28
Absolute surplus value 30
Relative surplus value 30
The distribution of surplus value 33
The value of labor power 34
v
vi ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO MARXISM AND HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
5 The capital accumulation process 39

Capital accumulation as expanded reproduction 39
Accumulation and social reproduction 40
The changing historical forms of accumulation 42
Accumulation fund, consumption fund and the
industrial reserve army of labor 43
The overaccumulation of capital 44
6 Capital’s development 47
Capital’s functional division of labor 49
The socialization of production 50
The increase in the ratio of fixed to circulating capital 52
The ‘three-sector’ model 53
New technologies and new products 55
7 ‘The factor(s) of cohesion’: ideology and state

under capitalism 58
Context58
Capitalist ideology 59
The capitalist state 64
PART II GEOGRAPHY AND MARXISM
8 The urbanization of capital and struggles around

the capitalist city 73
Urbanization and the socialization of production 73
The urban question? Or a class question? 74
Class contradiction in the living place 75
Transformations78
Ideological responses 81
The state 83
9 Marxism, nature and human geography 85

Context85
The fetishization of nature 86
Ecological Marxism 90
CONTENTS vii
10 Capitalist geography and difference 94

Context94
‘Difference’ in a capitalist society 95
Geographies of emancipation 99
‘Difference’ for ever? 102
11 Geographies of uneven development 104

Introduction104
Spatial divisions of labor 105
Two forms of uneven development 110
Countries114
Globalization117
12 The geopolitics of capitalism 121

Context121
The geopolitics of capital as a territorial politics 122
From a geopolitics of class to a geopolitics of territory 130
Afterword135
Bibliography137
Index144
Preface
This book is, as the series title says, an advanced introduction.

‘Introductory,’ in the sense that it can be read by anyone without prior
knowledge of Marx; ‘advanced,’ in that it requires a willingness to think
through concepts and their interrelations. The hope is that as a result of
reading this book, the reader will have a good sense, not just of the fun-
damental principles of Marxism, at least in its classical form, but also of
how human geography can be read from that standpoint, and some of the
crucial issues around which future research can pivot. It is the unintended
fruit of years of teaching the material to graduate classes in geography,
but ones that attracted students from other of the social sciences and from
history. My understandings have been sharpened by bringing Marx into
a relation with critical realism, and also the spatial-quantitative geography
that in part provoked the subsequent interest in geography in Marxism,
though that background will not be obvious.
As an introduction it necessarily falls far short of the comprehensive treat-

ment that David Harvey gave to Marx and geography in his magisterial
Limits to Capital. But, like Harvey, I have found it necessary to divide
the book into two parts. Human geography requires social theory. That
means that before bringing human geography into the picture, it is vital to
have a more abstract sense of the social logics in question. This has been
the purpose of the first seven chapters, and they have a continuity to them.
The second half, which takes up central themes in Marxist geography,
consists of chapters that are more stand-alone in character, though links
will obviously become apparent.
In any discussion of Marx and geography, one name looms large. David
Harvey’s contribution has been sine qua non. He is not only a geographer;
he is presently and widely regarded as the most celebrated Marxist theo-
viii
PREFACE ix
rist in the world. His influence will be clear throughout this book. Words
cannot express my gratitude for his pathbreaking work and insights.
There are others whose work has been important. Dick Peet, alongside
his own contributions to the literature, has been tireless in making sure
that Marxist geography had a publication outlet, first in Antipode, and
then more recently in Human Geography. I should also like to give special
recognition to the work of Ray Hudson, Erik Swyngedouw, Dick Walker,
Michael Watts and Michael Webber. Their work has been of inestimable
value to my own thinking.
PART I
Foundations
1 From historical
materialism to historical
geographical materialism
Marx is most celebrated for his work on capitalism and his theorizing of its
dynamics: most notably through the three volumes of Capital. This was,
though, part of a broader investigation which helps in making sense of that
master work: what is known as historical materialism. This is indeed ‘his-
torical’ in that it provides the tools for an interpretation of history. And it
is materialist. This latter, because Marx assigns causal primacy to people’s
relation with nature: a relation of production, involving the mobilization
of materials and forces that are natural in their origin, including the
ability of people to labor. Emphatically, though, it is a production that is
socially mediated, that occurs under definite social conditions. It is in this
context that, Marx urges us, we can, and should, understand the form of
the state, dominant forms of consciousness, family structures and other
aspects of social relations and not just the obvious direct social mediation
provided by various forms of property relation and the division of labor,
important as they are. It is this belief in the primacy of production, even
while socially mediated, that has led many critics to identify Marx as ‘an
economic determinist’ though in so doing they reveal the inadequacies
of their own understanding of Marx. Marx was neither a determinist,
nor did he see the economic as having any universal relevance since only
under capitalism did people differentiate in their consciousness – and as
a result of the social relations characteristic of capitalism – between the
economic and the political.
These are not easy ideas to assimilate. Let it be said for the time being
that Marx understood social life in terms of a unity; a unity between
individuals and others (as in the division of labor), between the individual
and nature (as in the labor process), between power and production (as
in the need for leadership in any labor process, given its social character).
2
FROM HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 3
Production inevitably occurred through a division of labor and within

the context of certain, historically varying property relations. It mobilized
naturally occurring forces and conditions. It had to be regulated socially,
as in the norms governing who did what in the division of labor. And it
required beliefs handed down from one generation to the next.
Historical and materialist
‘Materialist’
Marx’s conception of the social world privileges the act of production.
Production is at the center of an understanding of society in all its aspects
and that means the labor process: the process through which people take
naturally occurring substances and mobilize naturally occurring forces,
like their own brain and muscle power or that of a running stream, to
convert them into things that are deemed useful. As he and Engels claim
in The German Ideology:
… life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, cloth-
ing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the
means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed
this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as
thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to
sustain human life. (1846/1978: 48)
There are two things that we should note right away here. First, produc-
tion is a relation to nature, both the nature around us and our own nature.
We appropriate naturally occurring substances to satisfy our needs for
food, shelter and the like. In that appropriation we draw on our own
naturally given capacities for developing an understanding of the world
around us, for our innate ability to develop modes of communication
with each other, and the articulation of mind and instrument of labor.
We intervene in our own nature, developing our skills; we develop. We
develop our physical capacities, our understanding of the world, and our
emotional responses, even while that development can be, and so far,
has been, one-sided and highly inegalitarian: an emphasis on our ability
to produce rather than on our social empathies, perhaps, and always in
4 ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO MARXISM AND HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
an uneven manner. You need money to travel and become aware of the
world in all its diversity.
Second, production is always social. We always produce through other

people, as in a division of labor, but also through knowledge and sets
of instruments of labor (machines, knives, etc.) handed on by previous
generations, as well as through a set of rules governing possession of the
essential physical conditions of production: objects of labor and instru-
ments of labor, and labor power. Note, parenthetically, that both of these
propositions open up prospects of converting historical materialism into
historical geographical materialism: the relation to nature is an obvious
one; likewise, every social relationship has a geographic expression, as in
spatial divisions of labor; and the relation to nature is also a spatial one,
as in the current idea of food-miles or simply the fact that space is more
accurately a matter of natural obstacles to be overcome or mitigated.
It is in the context of this socially mediated relation to nature that we

develop other aspects of our social life: our consciousness, our needs
(always social, as in diet or the automobile), our institutions, includ-
ing state forms, our technologies, modes of cooperation with others
(kinship? contract?) and, as we will see in more detail, our geography: the
geography of capitalist societies with their industrial towns and highly
specialized agricultural areas is a very different geography from that of
feudal England with its fortress towns, market centers and dominantly
subsistence agriculture.
In order to understand what is at stake in this materialist approach to the

world, some contrasts are useful:
1. Marx put production at the center of things, but he could instead

have emphasized the exchange of products or their consumption. It
is certainly possible to use these as the fundamental starting point of
our understanding. Mainstream economics uses exchange relations as
its foundational conception.1 One might emphasize consumption as
the starting point: how it is what people want that determines produc-
tion. Marx was aware of these possibilities, but he was emphatic that
everything started and returned to production. Production depended
on exchange, certainly, but it was the demands of production that
determined that exchange. If production required wage labor then,
indeed, there had to be a labor market. Likewise consumption should
be conceived more as fashioned by production than the converse;
otherwise there would be no advertising industry or even new, specu-

latively conceived, products.
2. Materialist and not idealist: ideas are undoubtedly crucial to produc-
tion. As Marx emphasized in Chapter 7 on the labor process in Capital
Volume 1:
We pre-suppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human char-
acteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of a weaver,
and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction
of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the
best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he con-
structs it in wax. At the end of every labour-process, a result emerges which
had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already
existed ideally. (1867/1976: 283–4)
Ideas, though, have to be figured out in their material relations. It is

not just the material character of the human brain that makes them
possible. What it applies itself to is a function of dilemmas that are
thrown up by relations to the material world, most notably through
production, as Marx explained in his discussion of the labor process
but also, we should emphasize, through the labor process seen large:
as something social, embracing the division of labor, supporting
institutions and existing discourses about it. Production not only
poses problems to be solved through the development of ideas; it also
facilitates those ideas, perhaps unintentionally. Here we might con-
sider the way in which the science of geology developed on the back
of the industrial revolution, through the observational possibilities
opened up by mining and quarrying or the simple railway cutting, as
well, of course, from the demand for a knowledge of what minerals
might be exploited and their geographic distribution. There is a genre
of popular writing that privileges the role of ideas, but they need to be
placed in a material context.
3. Production is social. As Marx points out in his Introduction to the
Grundrisse: “Individuals producing in Society—hence socially deter-
mined individual production—is, of course, the point of departure”
(1857/1973: 83). And: “Production by an isolated individual outside
society—a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized
person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is
cast by accident into the wilderness—is as much of an absurdity as
is the development of language without individuals living together
and talking to each other” (1857/1973: 84). The social character of
production is conceived by Marx in very broad terms. It includes the
division of labor both within workplaces and between them, the use of
shared means of production, like the assembly line, property relations,
the role of the state and other institutions, and the world of ideas.
Historically, before capitalism, kinship relations and those of social
hierarchy would have been crucial.2
‘Historical’
We are talking about historical materialism. Society has a trajectory over
time. More than simply changing, society and the people comprising
it ‘develop’: as alluded to earlier, they develop in their material and
mental capacities. This development is premised, first and foremost,
on the increasing ability, through working together, to take care of the
reproduction of people: their physical and mental capabilities. Once the
growth of production becomes a social imperative, it is predicated on
an increasing division of labor, and development acquires a one-sided
nature. A person is a good carpenter but not good at much else. Through
its demands for the expenditure of ever more labor, capitalism accentu-
ates this one-sidedness, though to the extent that workers win a shorter
workday, a five-day week, and holidays, this can be ameliorated. After
time spent recuperating from labor, there may be time left over for free
personal development.
Changes in social relations, therefore, and broadly speaking, have been

crucial to liberating the development of human capacities, eliminating
some of the obstacles to it, while at the same time imposing new ones.
How change in those social relations came about is surrounded by con-
troversy. Capitalism was decisive, but how did it happen? How did the
social forms preceding it, which limited development, give way?
One answer is that it was a matter of contingent circumstance. Capitalism

as a total way of social life, starting in production, and embracing all
other aspects of society, starts to emerge sometime in the fifteenth or
sixteenth century in Western Europe, most notably in England and in
the Low Countries. On the one hand, there was the dissolution of feudal
society. Hitherto, immediate producers had enjoyed access to the land.
Land was not something for sale. People’s access to means of producing
their subsistence was guaranteed. There was no market in land and nor
was there a market in labor: since one enjoyed access to land to produce
one’s own food, there was no need for a wage. From the fifteenth century
on, that would change. Feudal lords had had a right to a portion of the
peasant’s product but they now moved to overturn his hereditary rights
to access to land, to expel him, and convert his land into private property.
In short, a crucial condition for markets in land and labor power made
its appearance. In England, land would be rented out to the better-off
peasants who would then hire those who had been expelled from the land.
This separation is of major significance, as we will see, but there were
other, complementary, developments.
To the extent that peasants retained ownership of some land they might,
in an attempt to enhance their subsistence base, diversify into spinning
or weaving of wool. The raw materials would be delivered on credit by
someone who would later pay for the finished articles, allowing for credit
advanced, and then sell the finished product. To the extent that the small
household producer ran into difficulties and became indebted to the
merchant, then the spinning wheels and looms could be seized: another
stage in separating immediate producers from the means of production.
The machinery might then land up in one of the earlier factories, bringing
the dispossessed together, again courtesy of money wealth. Where that
money wealth was coming from was something else again. Merchants
and usurers had long existed but in Capital Volume 1, Marx argues that
the expansion of trading activity from the sixteenth century on was
also important: “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised
looting, enslavement and murder flowed back to the mother-country and
were turned into capital there” (1867/1976: 918). Briefly put, immediate
producers were separated from the means of production in a diversity of
ways – forcible expulsion, to pay a debt – and then brought together again
by those with the necessary money, including that looted from the emer-
gent colonies. In short, a diversity of conditions just happened to come
together in Western Europe at a particular time in a process that Marx
called ‘primitive accumulation.’
This is one explanation for the emergence of capital and the more con-
vincing one. The other derives from other tendencies in Marx’s thinking
of a more evolutionary sort. Instead of contingency, the focus is now on
the contradictions of the development process as it is has occurred over
the millennia. Most famously, in the Preface to A Contribution to the

Critique of Political Economy, he wrote:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite
relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production
appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of
production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the eco-
nomic structure of society … At a certain stage of development, the material
productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of
production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the
property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn
into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the
economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole
immense superstructure.
The emphasis is on what he called the productive forces: the skills of the
worker, the division of labor, the means of production available – all that
affects the ability of the worker to produce; and the relations of produc-
tion, defined here as property relations. The claim is that the relations of
production facilitate the development of the productive forces, but only
up to a point, after which they enter into contradiction with them and
become, in Marx’s famous words ‘a fetter on their further development.’
Note, though, the sense here of an impulse to development that is frus-
trated and which seeks out some alternative set of social relations that will
allow it to be realized. This is highly controversial and certainly much
harder to verify than the emphasis on contingent circumstance.3 Still,
contradiction remains a very important concept in the Marxist armory.
It is absolutely central to development under capitalism and it is important

to understand what Marx meant by it. Abstractly, a particular force, say,
the forces of production, is structured by or dependent on, a particular
condition; in this instance, the relations of production. But as that force
develops, so what conditions it comes to act as a brake or counter-force,
and limits it. For Marx, all societies hitherto, except those of hunters
and gatherers typically referred to as primitive communist societies,
are class societies, characterized by an exploiting and an exploited class.
Capital accumulates wealth on the basis of the exploitation of the working
class. The working class resists, which acts as a brake. A case to which
Marx gives particular attention is the resistance of workers to increases
in the length of the working day, which then led to the imposition by
the state, of limits. One result of those limits was a redoubled effort to
increase exploitation within them: so improved machinery allowing each

worker to produce more, but without any increase in the wage. This
might then lead to further resistance around a subsequent problem of
unemployment: perhaps a drive to extend the right to vote to all those in
the working class and the introduction of unemployment compensation
measures; but again capital would aim to suspend those limits once
more, perhaps by moving production to another country. But the point
is: under capitalism the class relation is of a fundamentally contradictory
sort. Capital can suspend the limits posed to it, but they will inevitably
reappear. Only when this class relation is abolished, Marx believed, would
those contradictions, by definition, disappear.
Historical and geographical materialism
Marx’s emphasis was on the historical and the way in which the social
process changed over time. Nevertheless, in expounding his analysis,
and significantly, he could not avoid reference to changing geographic
relations. In the last part of Capital Volume 1, on the coming into being
of capital through what he called ‘So-called primitive accumulation,’ he
shifts register from the more abstract materials preceding it, albeit ones
illustrated by empirical cases, to a more substantively historical account
where the geographic is clearly present. There is discussion of the devel-
opment of the home market as production in the countryside is revolu-
tionized, as domestic industry as an adjunct for some is destroyed, and
workers are regrouped in factories producing items for an increasingly
prosperous farming and landlord class. There is copious discussion of
the role of the colonies and the creation of wealth to be drawn on in the
home countries in bringing together the dispossessed with the means of
production; but also the problems of promoting capitalist development
in hitherto relatively empty countries like Australia, where there was an
immense amount of land that could be farmed for subsistence purposes,
and regardless of the plans of some to farm it along capitalist lines.
In other words, the geographic is an essential aspect of the social process

and Marx could not avoid taking it into account in his more substantive
discussions. In his more theoretical work this is lacking for the most
part and has been an important challenge for those who wanted to
transform historical materialism into historical geographical material-

ism: but not an insurmountable one, as we will see. The social process
is inevitably a spatial process. When people relate to one another, as in
communication, or assembling for some purpose, they do it over space:
they concentrate, they disperse, and concentrate somewhere else. Or
they communicate through some intermediary that in effect brings them
closer: email, parcel post and so on. Movement, concentration, dispersion
are unavoidable aspects of social life and concentration can assume major
proportions, as in urbanization. On the other hand, the apartness that is
a necessary feature of our social relations, also allows for difference in the
substantive character of the social process: so both interaction over space
and geographic differentiation.
Partly the latter is natural, albeit always modified by people and not in
predictable ways.4 To produce under certain conditions, irrigation is
necessary and this can necessitate a particular regime of water rights and
institutions to enforce them. Coal mining can only take place where there
is coal, but its exploitation depends not just on subterranean rights but
on technologies of geological assessment, pumping, the raising of consid-
erable sums of money to sink the pit, the construction of housing for the
miners in areas where there might be very little, and lots more.
One effect of capitalism has been to break down reliance on what is

available locally. At the most extreme way of imagining this, more locally
bound, subsistence societies have given way to more stretched out rela-
tions, to trade and greater specialization by area, all with implications
for the social process, how it varies across space and yet remains unified.
Thus Marx and Engels in Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto:
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bour-
geoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cos-
mopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … it
has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it
stood … In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,
we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
(1848/1998: 39)
More concretely, capitalist geographies are constantly changing and,

when compared with pre-capitalist ones, from what little one knows
about them, at an often dizzying speed. Capitalism revolutionizes social

relations, technology, the division of labor, the relation to nature, institu-
tions; and as it does so, so this is reflected in geography, while pre-existing
geography serves to structure in its turn, these other changes. Past geogra-
phies are not wiped out. To paraphrase William Faulkner, they are never
dead; they are not even past. How technologies change geography in the
USA reflects much about that country’s past, while the old pattern of
Roman roads, believe it or not, lives on in Britain’s capitalist geography.
However, before we can come to grips with the sorts of questions that
these relations raise, we need to address just what sort of a thing capital-
ism amounts to. We start with the following chapter.
Notes
1. This is a conception echoed in what Robert Brenner (1977) has termed
‘neo-Smithian Marxism.’
2. As, for example, in pre-capitalist forms of production in Southern Africa; see
Jeff Guy (1987).
3. For an interesting defense, see G Cohen (1978).
4. This was something Marx recognized. Thus in The German Ideology: “The
first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human
individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization
of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of
course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or
into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, hydro-
graphical, climatic and so on. The writing of history must always set out from
these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through
the action of men” (Marx and Engels 1846/1978: 42).
2 Marx and capital: an
overview
The commodity
For Marx, production is a vital human activity. This means that our
relation with nature is of central significance. Through production we
produce ourselves and others, as in the act of reproduction. But for Marx,
production is a social act: it is mediated by social relations. Only in and
through our relations with others do we relate to nature productively, and
appropriate from it the use values essential to our physiological reproduc-
tion. Some of these social relations are defined by the division of labor
and we will discuss these later. Others, however, are relations of property:
the relation of master to slave, the relation of the landlord to his/her land.
It is these relations that define particular modes of production like the
slave mode, feudalism and capitalism. We tend to think of property as
things: yours and mine. But to assert ownership is also to appeal to the
institutions, possibly expressed through the state as laws, through which
ownership is validated and enforced, and the powers/responsibilities that
go along with it, defined.
Under capitalism the essential property relation is the commodity which,

by definition, means private property. Commodities have values both in
exchange and in use. An article or service could not be an exchange value
if it was not also a use value for the person willing to pay for it. In capital-
ism, people relate to each other as guardians of their respective commodi-
ties, the use of which they can alienate to others through acts of exchange.
These may be such commodities as instruments of labor, objects of labor
(i.e., raw materials), or their own ability to labor: what Marx referred to
as labor power, which is, emphatically not the same as labor. Capitalism
12
MARX AND CAPITAL: AN OVERVIEW 13
is the production of commodities (use values for sale) with commodities

(other use values which were purchased on markets).
Markets can and have existed without capitalism. Indeed, they coexisted
with feudalism in medieval Europe. But to the extent that labor power has
become a commodity bought and sold on markets and is the dominant
form assumed by the immediate producer, then, and only then, can pro-
duction be rightfully referred to as ‘capitalist.’ So in order for capitalism
to exist, labor power as a commodity must exist. This is an absolutely
essential precondition. In turn, the precondition for this is what Marx
referred to as the ‘double freedom of labor power.’
In order for people to seek wage work, two ‘freedoms’ must be satisfied:
1. The individual must have ownership of his/her labor power: it cannot

be owned by another, as in slavery; nor can others have claims on it
for some part of the time as in feudalism. Under the latter, the feudal
lord could call on ‘his’ serfs for compulsory labor, either on the land
that he possessed, or his demesne; for public works on roads, such as
they were, or bridges. The latter was known as corvée labor. But the
important point is, for capitalism to emerge, the worker must be ‘free’
to alienate it to another, but only for an agreed and limited period of
time; otherwise it shades over into slavery.
2. The individual must no longer enjoy rights of possession in the means
of production: in objects of labor like the land, or in instruments of
labor like draft animals, ploughs, seed corn, etc.; i.e., the worker must
be ‘free’ of the means of production – lucky her!
Only if this ‘double freedom’ of labor power exists is it possible for people
with accumulations of money to purchase the means of production –
since they have been separated from the workers – and to hire those thus
dispossessed or already deprived of them, to work with and on those
means of production. In other words, workers have been placed in a situ-
ation where they have no alternative but to go and work for the capitalist
for a wage. It is, in short, through the mediation of money1 that the imme-
diate producers are reunited with the means of production from the own-
ership of which they have been so thoughtfully separated. This view of the
origins of labor power as a commodity is in sharp contrast with the sense
of choice implied by mainstream views of labor supply: labor supply as the
outcome of a tradeoff between tastes for labor and tastes for leisure. For
Marx, ‘labor supply’ implied markets in labor power, and people sought
wage work because they had no other way of providing for their means
of subsistence. Moreover, wage labor was an historic category, unlike
the ‘tastes’ of mainstream economics: it appeared at a particular point
in history as a result of historic acts, most notably ones of dispossession.
The process through which workers become ‘free’ of the means of

production was called by Marx primitive accumulation. The history
of resistance on the part of immediate producers to this dispossession
testifies to its non-voluntary nature. But eventually the old struggles fade
from memory, and they even come to see their propertyless-ness as an
unexceptional, normal condition, but something that they might be able
to reverse through sheer dint of application: for most, a very lofty hope.
Values
Commodities always have values. The concept of value, though, is highly

disputed. Marx had a very clear idea of what the value of a commodity was
and how it was formed. In order to appreciate the distinctiveness of his
contribution we have to introduce two other concepts of value: use value
and exchange value.
Commodities always have values in use. These values are qualitative in

character, rather than quantitative, and derive from an object’s physical
properties. Bread has a value in use deriving from its chemical compo-
sition which, in turn, performs nutritive functions. Clothing is useful
because it helps to keep us warm, though it has other use values like
helping to make us attractive to the opposite sex. Every commodity that
is produced has to have a value in use since otherwise no one will want
to buy it, though, and importantly, the fact that it might be useful to
a customer may only become apparent once they are confronted with
the commodity in question; nobody thought of cell phones as something
missing in their lives since they had yet to be developed.
Commodities have values. These are proportional to what Marx called

socially necessary labor times. An obvious example: the value of an ounce
of gold is much higher than an ounce of coal since so much more (socially
necessary) labor time is embodied in the ounce of gold, as in the vast
amounts of earth that have to be moved and sifted in order to retrieve

the gold. The ‘socially necessary’ labor time is determined technolog-
ically. With technical revolutions in coal mining the amount of labor
time embodied in the average lump of coal goes down. Those producing
with outmoded technology and hence taking longer to produce it will
not, therefore, be producing coal that is more valuable: it will simply be
of the same value as coal produced using the latest technique: ask the
underground miners of West Virginia, whose coal has to compete with
the coal of Wyoming which is mined from large pits by huge mechanical
excavators.
Exchange values, on the other hand, are different. They are determined by
fluctuations in supply and demand. If the demand for coal goes up due,
perhaps, to a shortage of oil, then its exchange value will rise above its
value. This will encourage capitalists to invest in more coal mines so that
eventually supply will increase, exchange values will fall and so converge
once more on values: i.e., on socially necessary labor times. Exchange
values or prices as we conventionally call them oscillate around values.
The value of a commodity is like a center of gravity for its (temporally and
spatially) varying price. This center of gravity is then displaced by techno-
logical revolutions in the production of the commodity in question and
the spread of the technique to most of the producers so that it becomes
‘socially average.’
This approach is to be contrasted with what prevails in mainstream

economics. Although classical political economy, as in Adam Smith and
Ricardo, assumed some version of the labor theory of value, neo-classical
economics substituted for it a subjectivist notion: that the value of a com-
modity represented the evaluations of its consumers. We will return to
this notion shortly once we have discussed the idea of surplus value.
Surplus value
Under capitalism, labor power is a commodity. Like other commodities

it is produced by the expenditure of still other human labor time and so
has a value. According to Marx, the value of labor power is equivalent to
the values of the commodities – means of subsistence, shelter, clothing
– necessary to its production. We will have cause to discuss some amplifi-

cations of this basic idea later on, and some omissions, but for the present
purpose this will suffice.
So, and to repeat, labor power has a value: there is a socially necessary
labor time involved in its production. In the nineteenth century, the
socially necessary labor time for the production of bread went down as
the virgin lands of the New World were opened up. This was the back-
ground to the debate in Britain over abolishing the (protectionist) Corn
Laws. Manufacturers believed that the import of cheaper foreign grain
would allow the price of bread to be reduced and subsequently the wages
that they paid to their workers. But labor power is also a unique commod-
ity. Unlike the other commodities that enter into a product in the course
of its production (metal, machines) labor power can embody more value
in what it produces than it itself is worth: more value, that is, than the
capitalist paid for it, assuming that commodities, including labor power,
always exchange at their values. The capitalist can extend the workday
long after the worker has produced value equivalent to her own wage; so
the worker produces more value than what her own labor power is worth.
People also become more productive. As a result of harnessing the powers

of nature (falling water, the heating powers of coal, gravity as in the use
of chutes in factories, the specialized skills of the worker, the division
of labor) socially necessary labor times fall: a worker can produce more
in a given period of time than before. To the extent that this revolution
in productivity affects the value of those commodities entering into the
value of labor power, like food and clothing, then the value of labor power
will fall. It therefore takes a shorter and shorter workday for the worker
to produce value equivalent to the value of his/her own means of subsist-
ence. Significantly, though, the workday does not end there. Rather, it is
prolonged. A worker may produce value equivalent to the value of his/
her own labor power in just four hours but the length of the workday will
almost certainly be longer. There is in other words a surplus value. This
is the source of the capitalist’s profit. The magnitude of the surplus value
relative to the value of the worker’s labor power is a measure of how much
the worker is being exploited by the capitalist.
In short, the fact that a worker can produce more than the value of her
own labor power means that she can be exploited. Furthermore, given the
desire of the money owner to cover not only her layouts for labor, raw
materials and instruments of labor but also something on which she can
pay for her own living expenses, she will be exploited. However, there is
also an incentive to produce a surplus or a profit that covers more than
the capitalist’s own living costs, including any whims or fancies she may
have. This is that major part of profit that is used to expand production
as opposed to simply producing as much in the future as one produced
before. In order to understand this drive we have to introduce the idea of
competition.
Capitalists lay out values for production: money for labor power, for
objects of labor – what is being worked on in the form of raw materials,
and for instruments of production, like machinery and an assembly line.
The workers set the means of production in motion and commodities are
produced for eventual sale. In order to start all over again, the capitalist
must find a market for the products and so retrieve the values originally
laid out, plus a surplus for the capitalist’s own consumption. There is,
however, no guarantee of a market. Consumers may spend their money
on the products of other firms since they are cheaper and/or because those
other firms are producing goods that are more to their liking for various
reasons. There is a good possibility, therefore, that either the products will
not be sold so that the values laid out in their production will be lost; or
that their prices will have to be reduced below their values. If the latter,
then this may mean a loss of some profit, or even some loss of the values
originally laid out. On the other hand, if the price of the commodity can
be reduced, then the chance of making a sale increases. But in order to do
this and at the same time retrieve the values laid out plus a surplus, costs
have to be reduced. This means making workers produce more for the
same wage, or the same for a lower wage. In either case, the wage worker
is being squeezed. Capitalists decide what to produce without knowing
what other capitalists are doing and without knowing ahead of time the
precise magnitude of the market. In the context of this uncertainty, cap-
italists have to try to make sure that it is not their product which will fail
to make a sale.
There are diverse competitive strategies. In the early years of capital-

ism, Marx believed that capitalists had tried to reduce the risk of loss
by increasing the length of the workday so that surplus value would
be enhanced; if markets came up short then the capitalist had a large
cushion of surplus value to be forfeited before he would have to forego
the values originally laid out. Under mature capitalism, Marx empha-
sized competition through cheapening the product: through lowering

the labor time socially necessary in its production. This would be done
through technical innovation: equipping workers with faster machinery,
and more specialized tools for particular roles in the factory’s division of
labor, among other things. We should note, however, that capitalists also
compete through the development of better or new products: products
which, since nobody else is by definition producing them, may be able to
command an exchange value above their value.
So capitalism is technologically dynamic, and competition is part of the

answer. But only part. As a stimulus to innovation it only makes sense if
you have, as the shorthand puts it, ‘capitalist relations of production.’ This
means that everything entering the labor process or process of production
is bought on the market: labor power, raw materials and instruments of
labor. If they are not, then the sort of cost-minimizing, technologically
dynamic competition that we associated with capitalism may not occur.
If instead of wage labor, commodity producers draw on their own labor
power and that of their own family, then instead of technical innovation
to keep their heads above water, they can always self-exploit: working
longer hours, most notably. At the limit, and if a primary means of pro-
duction is agricultural land, then they might decide to quit commodity
production altogether and produce only for subsistence. So the sort of
cost competition at the center of the dynamic of capitalist production
presupposes the separation of immediate producers from the means of
production and their employment for a wage; without that, the disciplines
on the person producing for a market are reduced.
Accumulation
What happens to surplus value? Part of it goes to landlords (rent), part to

lenders (interest on loans), part to the state (taxes) and part is consumed
by the capitalist. But how is it to be consumed? Personal consumption,
while a temptation, is also a threat. In order to retain possession of the
means of production and the privileges that go with that, capitalists
have to remain effective in competition and guard against recessions in
demand. This generates an interest in the appropriation of values on
an increasing scale. This increased scale in turn can provide the basis
for a more effective cheapening of the product, so stealing a march on

competitors. It can also provide a cushion for hard times. But in order to
appropriate values on an increasing scale the surplus has to be laid out
for more and more machinery, more and more labor power, and more
and more raw materials: as opposed, that is, to devoting the surplus to
increased consumption. In other words, the surplus has to be consumed,
for the most part, productively. The subsequent increase in the values
under the control of individual capitalists is known as accumulation.
Capitalism is one of the modes of production identified by Marx. A mode

of production is an articulated combination of relations and forces of
production under the domination of the relations of production, as we
saw in Chapter 1 when discussing the famous quote from the Preface to
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Under capitalism the
relations of production are commodity relations. For production to occur
at all, the necessary preconditions must be purchased as commodities.
The forces of production are the skill of the worker, the instrument of
labor, the object of labor, and their configuration in the labor process
as a whole, including the division of labor with other workers. All other
things being equal, workers are more productive if they are more skilled
and if they work with machinery that more effectively mobilizes the laws
of nature, with raw materials that are more uniform in character, and in
the context of a more divided division of labor, including the specializa-
tion of the machines the workers labor with. It is the relations of produc-
tion under capitalism, the commodity relations into which the capitalist
must repeatedly enter, which continually press him/her in the direction of
developing: ever more productive configurations; ever more productive
machinery and skills; discovering and exploiting objects of labor that in
their form lend themselves more effectively to the action of the worker; or
whose processing requires less waste,2 and so revolutionizing the forces of
production.
This process of capitalist development, however, is an antagonistic one.

In its early phases, the ability of the capitalist to appropriate more and
more surplus value depends on a lengthening of the workday; something
in which the workers are unlikely to acquiesce easily. One of the major
political conflicts in the early history of capitalism is that over the length
of the workday. Once capitalists start revolutionizing the production
process then new sources of antagonism emerge. Transformation of the
labor process is in its immediate form a technical matter, which depends
on treating the worker as a replaceable object. Those with the old skills
must go or be moved to new tasks within the workplace. The process
of revolutionizing the labor process proceeds unevenly. Some firms are
forced out of business by more progressive firms, resulting in unemploy-
ment. Alternatively, wages may have to be reduced if the firm is to stay
in business.
The antagonistic nature of capitalism can be understood in part by con-

sidering what it means to treat labor power as a commodity and how it
differs from other commodities. Commodities like machinery and raw
materials can be separated from their previous owners and be placed
entirely at the disposal of the capitalist. Labor power is different. The
capitalist obtains the use of that labor power for a specified period of time
but it cannot be separated from its owner, the worker him/herself. When
a capitalist purchases a ton of coal she knows what she is getting. When
she purchases the right to use the labor power of a worker she does not.
Coal will not resist the extraction of its caloric value but workers will
resist the capitalist’s use of their labor power. Likewise, lumps of coal do
not object to being treated as substitutable objects, nor yet do they object
if they are unemployed. To treat a person as an object, which is necessary
if the person’s labor power is to be treated as a commodity, is to threaten
that person’s personhood. And the owners of labor power certainly object
if they are unemployed.3
Notes
1. Not yet ‘money capital’ since money only becomes capital once it has
increased in sum due to the extraction of surplus value that follows from the
separation of the immediate producers from the means of production.
2. For example: workers attending blast furnaces will produce more pig iron
per worker in a given period of time with iron ore that has higher iron
content than where it has less. A more macabre example of developing the
forces of production through attention to the form of the object of labor
comes from the interest of meat packing firms in genetic intervention so as
raise animals of a physiognomy that is as uniform as possible, which then
facilitates an homogenization of the slaughter process.
3. For a good discussion of the distinctive character of labor power as a com-
modity, see Offe (1985: Chapter 1).
3 Marx’s theory of value
Introduction
Marx’s theory of value is at the same time the most central, the most
controversial and, in its presentation, the part of his work that people typ-
ically find most difficult to navigate. It is, however, absolutely crucial to
an understanding of his arguments about class, accumulation and contra-
diction in capitalist societies. Some who claim the Marxist pedigree, like
Wallerstein, the originator of world systems theory, believe they can do
without it. Others, like Robert Brenner (1977) and his antagonist Jarius
Banaji (2011),1 do without it, without making their position clear and, as
a result, make themselves easy targets for critique.
Mainstream concepts of value
As a starting point, consider how the concept of value is treated in main-

stream versions of economics or even by many who consider themselves
to be working within what they call ‘a political economy framework.’
Value here is simply exchange value: the money that some commodity
exchanges for, or its price. It is no more, in other words, than what is on
the label.
Value in this sense has its determinants. In this regard, introductory

classes in economics preach the doctrine of relative scarcity. As the rela-
tive scarcity of something increases, so its value increases; as it declines,
so too does its value. Land becomes more valuable closer to the center of
21
the city because its supply is limited and the demand for it is increased.
The labor of a doctor is valued more highly in terms of what she gets paid
than that of a taxi cab driver since the supply of doctor skills relative to the
demand for them is more limited. And so on.
More than that, however, value in the sense of exchange value is what
regulates the economy. So-called price signals are the determinants of
resource allocations. As the demand for a commodity increases relative
to its supply, so resources will shift into its production and away from the
production of those where demand is decreasing relative to supply. Given
the enhanced profitability resulting from increasing prices, capital will
move in order to achieve a higher yield. Firms will also be willing to pay
workers more money in order to produce the products that can make that
increased yield to capital real. In short, exchange values are determined
by the intersections of supply and demand curves and as those curves
shift relative to one another, so exchange values will change precipitating
reallocations of resources and helping to return those intersections to
their previous positions. But the point is, the point that Marx raised: what
determines those ‘previous positions’?
Marx’s concept of value introduced
Instead of taking for granted the commodity form that follows from the
emphasis on exchange and exchange values, Marx interrogates it. Just
what is required, he asks, in order for items to be exchanged? To exchange
loaves of bread for pairs of shoes? Items entering into exchange have
some useful property for those who purchase them. Without that quality
of usefulness they could never be commodities. But in the exchange
of commodities, one use value is equated to another. In this process of
equating, one abstracts from their natural properties and compares them
according to something they have in common. What we think they have
in common is exchange value, which in turn is a product of relative scar-
city. But what determines the axis point around which exchange values
fluctuate; what is it that they have in common other than exchange value
and which, in turn, determines exchange values or, more accurately,
their centers of gravity? That ‘something’ is that they are both products
of labor. But not any kind of labor; rather, of what Marx called abstract
MARX’S THEORY OF VALUE 23
labor or value-producing labor. This is labor which abstracts from the

concrete characteristics of different labors (e.g., baking vs. shoe making)
and reduces them to what they have in common under capital: that they
are the products of labor using the average techniques available in society,
and hence of time-minimizing concrete labor. It is this abstraction which
makes commodities qualitatively comparable (they are all products of
abstract labor) and quantitatively comparable (socially necessary labor
times or values) and determines exchange values or prices (the money
form of values):
… in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations

between the products, the labor-time socially necessary to produce them
asserts itself as a regulative law of nature … The determination of the mag-
nitude of value by labor time is therefore a secret hidden under the apparent
movements in the relative values of commodities. (Marx 1867/1976: 168)
We now know the substance of value; it is labor; and the measure or mag-
nitude of value is socially necessary labor time. This applies to labor power
as well as to finished products and to the machinery and raw materials
employed in the labor process. Labor power is the commodity that the
capitalist purchases and its value is equal to the socially necessary labor
required to produce its means of subsistence,2 and this insight is basic
to Marx’s theory of exploitation under capital. Value, however, is not to
be confused with wealth. An increase in wealth is brought about by an
increase in the quantity of use values. But if concrete labor times are being
reduced, an increase in wealth can correspond to a simultaneous fall in
the magnitude of its value.
Value does not come into the world with its origin in abstract labor
stamped on it. One commodity is selected out so as to facilitate exchange:
a commodity that is portable and easily divisible. This is the money
commodity. Originally this would have been a precious metal, like gold
or silver, its value reflecting its own substance as the product of labor
working on a particular raw material and measured in terms of socially
necessary labor time. For most of capitalist history, most paper monies
were tied in some way to the availability of a precious metal into which
they could be converted if people lost confidence in paper. The problem
has been that supplies of precious metals are very limited and a failure to
keep up with the demand for sufficient money as capital developed, so as
to facilitate exchange of the growing torrent of commodities, was highly
restrictive. Currently, monies are free from that sort of connection.3
Socially necessary labor is an abstraction that works behind the backs

of those exchanging commodities. Take a particular commodity. Those
firms which can produce more with less labor time, either direct labor
time or the indirect labor time embodied in machines and raw materials,
can sell for less than those using more, since their costs of production
will be lower. Not only can they sell for less, competition means that they
will be impelled to (and competition is, of course, the reason they con-
tinually try to minimize concrete labor times, either direct or indirect).
To the extent that the new technique is adopted by others and becomes
the average technique, or innovating firms edge out the others, so the
price or value will fall. For sure, short-term changes in demand (due to
the weather perhaps, as in the demand for snow shovels) or in supply (as
in strikes) can shift prices around values, but as long as the average tech-
nique remains the same, so will the value. By the same token, commodi-
ties whose production using average techniques requires more labor time
will have higher values: cars have higher values than bicycles and a pound
of copper has a higher value than a pound of iron.
As techniques change, and assuming that social needs remain the same,
some labor – that which is not producing using average techniques – no
longer counts as socially necessary. Assuming the emergence of new
social needs, however, which is precisely how capitalist development
functions, it can become once again, in newly emerging branches of the
economy, socially necessary. In this way the sum of all labor time available
to a society is allocated in such a way that it remains socially necessary,
regardless of the particular branch of the economy in which it is deployed.
A moment’s reflection will show that there is nothing especially remark-

able about this. Regardless of the particular society we are talking about
– feudal, slave or other pre-capitalist forms, the allocation of labor time
so that all social needs are met is a central feature of their organization:
labor has to be socially necessary; it would be madness to devote labor
time to carving images and to neglect the production of food. But unlike
in capitalist societies, it does not go on behind the backs of the producers.
The peasant household plans its allocation of time in order to satisfy all
its needs.
The tendential nature of the law of value
The historical conditions under which the law of value can be said to
apply are stringent. The separation of immediate producers from the
means of production imposing a regime of cost competition on capitalists
is fundamental, but is only realized gradually with the progressive devel-
opment of capital as a social form. Consider this in more detail: the law
of value specifies that commodities exchange according to their abstract
labor times (i.e. socially necessary labor times). This means that there
must be some mechanism by which concrete labor times in a particular
line of production, times which could conceivably vary widely, converge
on/are reduced to the socially necessary (i.e., using average techniques).
That mechanism is competition, forcing capitalists to produce with what
is the socially average technique. Theoretically, this state of competition
should follow logically from the fact of the double freedom of labor
power. Cost competition depends on it:
a. First, the fact of wage labor means that capitalists can mobilize labor
power so as to invade those branches of production where capitalists
are not experiencing serious pressure on their costs simply because
there is a lack of competition. It is this invasion which forces conver-
gence on the socially average technique.
b. Second, the double freedom of labor power necessitates competition in
costs of production. The monetization of costs, the formation of labor
markets, means that producers face the same production cost horizon;
the only opportunity they have for lowering their production costs is
through technical change, but then everyone else has that opportunity
and incentive so that concrete labor times will converge on the socially
average.
This, though, is emphatically tendential. For a start, the separation of

immediate producers from their means of production is still far from
complete. The existence of the family farmer serves as a reminder of this.
This is important. If not all inputs into the labor process are monetized, if
(e.g.) the owner of the means of production draws on his/her own family
for labor power, including him- or herself, then costs are subjective and
not objective: the purpose of production becomes not the minimization
of production costs in order to valorize capital and where the prices of
inputs are determined socially (and therefore objectively), but simply the
reproduction of the family where costs are subjective rather than objec-
tive – the production unit could conceivably produce very inefficiently in
order to produce enough at current market prices in order to survive, and
the limit to this inefficiency would simply be their subjective tolerance of
self-exploitation.
There have been other barriers, though ones that have gradually been
lifted. If capitalists are to move into sectors of the economy experiencing
unusually high profit rates, with the result that competitive pressures will
increase there, finance has to be mobilized in some way. But the develop-
ment of stock and bond markets has taken time. Finance capital did not
appear in the wink of an eye. You also need a banking system and credit
histories.
Likewise, labor markets are more or less imperfect. Problems of labor

mobility, of the availability of skills, may make it difficult to mobilize the
workers necessary to invade a branch of production where monopolies
are being exerted, and so enforce the law of value. De-skilling of workers4
and the facilitation of the mobility of labor are clearly important here.
Likewise the imperfection of labor markets may mean that capitalists in
different labor markets face quite different production cost structures so
that, again, the reduction of concrete labor times to the socially necessary
is impeded.
The big problem, though, is that of monopoly: the impossibility of

invading sectors of the economy where monopoly power can be used to
drive out competitors. The so-called ‘platform’ economy where the key
to market power are network effects connecting clients to sellers, as in
Amazon or Uber, is exemplary. The way in which airlines protect their
so-called ‘hubs,’ where they dominate traffic, is another example. The
relatively high fares, for which hub airlines are notorious, are a constant
temptation for new start-up airlines. But, in virtue of their huge resources,
and in an attempt to protect their hub privileges, the hub airline will
match the low fares of the start-up and sometimes more, with a view to
driving it out.
There are two things we should note here. The first is that the drive to
monopoly is built into capital’s DNA. It is not just a matter of the market
power that relative size confers: the ability to negotiate lower prices with
suppliers and demand higher prices from consumers. It is also that size
can confer advantages of productivity: a more intense division of labor,

the advantages of large collective means of production like the massive
sorting apparatuses that one sees in photos of Amazon distribution
centers. In fact, this is a tradeoff always faced in attempts to regulate
monopoly: market power vs productivity advantages.
The second point is that the implications of market power and some
control over prices can be exaggerated. It does not necessarily destroy
competition in input markets: competition for finance or for highly skilled
labor that has transferable skills, like systems engineers. Moreover, no
monopoly is absolute, so that there are limits to market power. Amazon
deals in thousands of lines, but many of these are available through other
online distributors, if not all of them: there are things that you can buy
online from Target and Walmart that Amazon sells and many firms now
have their own online operations designed to avoid Amazon’s cut in the
selling price. But what is profit anyway? Where does it come from? It is to
that question that we turn next.
Notes
1. For a good review of Banaji’s objections, see Rioux (2013).
2. Though, as we will see, Marx recognized that the determination of the value
of labor power contained what he called ‘an historical and moral dimension.’
3. Though as a result of the way paper money licenses compound growth, it
has hugely deleterious implications for that natural storehouse on which
capital draws for its raw materials, its labor power, and as a place to deposit
its detritus. See Harvey (2020).
4. An ongoing process in capitalism: take the skill out of a task and it then
expands the number of people who can perform it, with the result that the
workers’ bargaining power with respect to the capitalist deteriorates and the
value of labor power can be negotiated downwards. See Braverman (1974).
4 Surplus value
The origin of surplus value
Profit is a central category in the social relations of capitalist society, and

through his concept of surplus value, Marx revolutionized our under-
standings of it. The problem, as Marx saw it, was fairly straightforward.
In putting together the conditions of production, the capitalist purchased
what he called ‘objects of labor’ and ‘instruments of labor’ along with
labor power. S/he would certainly want back all the money laid out plus
a profit. The value of the raw materials would have to be incorporated
into the final price that the capitalist asked for. Likewise the value of the
instruments of labor. This was more difficult but not insuperable. The
capitalist purchased, say, a machine, and had some expectation of how
long it might last before it had to be replaced, either because it was beyond
repair or because it was no longer competitive with the machines of other
capitalists. The cost could therefore be divided up across the different
units produced over that foreseeable period. Likewise, the value of the
worker’s labor power would be calculated into the price. But then where
did the surplus value represented by profit come from?
In pursuit of the answer, Marx considers conditions of labor, instruments

of labor and labor power in turn. There is no way in which the raw materi-
als and the machinery can convey more value to the finished product than
they contain. In consequence they are what Marx called ‘constant capital.’
Labor power is different: the secret of surplus value is that labor power
is a use value with a peculiar property: it can produce more value than
it itself embodies. This means that it is possible for the owner of money
capital to extract surplus value by making the worker produce more
value than his own labor power is worth. Accordingly, Marx defined it
28
SURPLUS VALUE 29
as ‘variable capital’: it could be made to increase. Competition with other

owners of money capital, moreover, means that the erstwhile capitalist
has to, is compelled to, make workers produce more value than their own
labor power is worth. This is the secret of profit and therefore capitalist
exploitation. But how, in fact, is this surplus extracted from the worker?
The question is closely bound up with time and the part it plays in Marx’s
theory of value. Value is ‘socially necessary labor time.’ So, in the labor
process, the process through which labor power is expended on objects
of labor using various tools, machines or ‘instruments of labor,’ there
has to be some time that is surplus to the time it takes to produce value
equivalent to the value of labor power. The labor process, in other words,
can be conceptualized as divided up into necessary labor time and surplus
labor time; or, stated in value terms, the time devoted to producing
value equivalent to the value of the worker’s power to labor and the time
devoted to producing value surplus to the value of the labor power which
the capitalist has hired.
The way I have stated this immediately suggests one way in which surplus
value can be extracted – prolong the workday beyond the point at which
the worker would have produced value equivalent to the value of his/her
own labor power. This is what Marx called surplus value in its absolute
form: in this case, holding necessary labor time constant, surplus labor
time is extended. Marx also defined surplus value in what he called its
relative form. In that case, holding the sum of necessary and surplus labor
time constant, necessary labor time is reduced relative to surplus labor
time. Although there are ways of extracting absolute surplus value addi-
tional to extensions in the length of the workday beyond surplus labor
time,1 workday length does allow one to easily illustrate what is at stake in
this contrast between absolute and relative surplus value. Thus, absolute
surplus value increases as the length of the workday increases. Relative
surplus value is appropriated when reducing necessary labor time relative
to surplus labor time, while holding the length of the workday constant.
Absolute surplus value
The longer the working day, therefore, and holding necessary labor time
constant, the more surplus value the capitalist can appropriate in its abso-
lute form. The working day is a fluid quantity but it has limits. Its lower
limit is defined by the fact that under capitalism it has to be more than
necessary labor time. Its upper limit is more difficult to define but Marx
identifies two determinations. The first is the fact of physical limits to the
expenditure of labor power: after a certain point one just cannot go on.
And the second are what he calls moral limits: the need for a certain part
of the 24 hours to be set aside for rest and recuperation.
The capitalist wants as long a workday as possible. The worker wants to

reduce it, consistent with the peculiar nature of the commodity he/she
is selling: a force that needs husbanding and protecting from irreparable
damage. Force decides between these equal rights, that of the capitalist
maintaining his right as a purchaser and that of the worker to conserve
his/her natural powers. This is the context for political struggles over the
length of the workday, struggles that have occurred in all the advanced
capitalist countries. Capitalists recognize the damage they are doing to
their (collective) workforce but competition one with another makes uni-
lateral limits on the workday difficult. Marx says, somewhat ambiguously:
Capital takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker,
unless society forces it to do so … But looking at these things as a whole, it
is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the
individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist
production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to
him. (1867/1976: 381)
Relative surplus value
When we turn to examine relative surplus value in more detail it is

important to distinguish between two ways in which it can be increased,
one permanent and the other temporary. The permanent way in which
surplus value is increased is through reductions in the value of workers’
SURPLUS VALUE 31
means of subsistence: the latter is an elastic concept, as we will see. The

result is that the value of labor power is reduced so that necessary labor
time falls relative to surplus labor time (Marx assumes that the length of
the workday is held constant).
It can also be that an increase in relative surplus value is temporary,

but no capitalist can know that ahead of time, not least because, as
pointed out above, the means of subsistence are something historically
determined. Assume, therefore, that some change in the labor process
– faster machinery, a change in the detail division of labor, though they
are both likely to go together – allows the time it takes to produce some
unit of whatever it is – a pair of shoes, a refrigerator – to go down. Let
us assume further, that it goes down by half. Assuming that the socially
necessary labor time remains what it was, our enterprising capitalist can
sell twice as many products at the same price as those she sold before the
innovation in the labor process. She will, of course, take care to make
sure that she prices hers just below that of her competitors, but that still
means that she is going to get a windfall profit. Since workers are now
producing twice as fast, but the price of the product remains virtually the
same, they can produce value equivalent to their wage in half the time as
before. Instead of a division of the workday into, say, five hours necessary
labor time and five hours surplus labor time, necessary labor now falls
to two-and-one-half hours, while, lucky capitalist, surplus labor time
increases by half. What Marx calls the individual value of the product
– that credited to the innovating capitalist – is now just half of what he
described as its social value; the value at which the product can be sold. No
wonder capitalists are keen to innovate.
If this is an innovation in a subsistence or wage goods industry, or in

one that produces capital goods for the same, then this is an increase in
surplus value that will endure since it means that the value of workers’
means of subsistence has gone down. If it is not, however, if it is a reduc-
tion in necessary labor time in a luxury goods industry, then the increase
in surplus value resulting from the innovation will be only temporary.
As soon as the innovation spreads and the socially necessary labor time
is halved, then we are back to where we were before: a division of the
working day into five hours necessary labor time and five hours surplus
labor time. Workers are now producing twice as fast as they were, but the
value of the product has been halved; so they still have to work for five
hours to produce value equivalent to the value of their labor power.
But to the extent that revolutions in productivity seize those branches

of production producing wage or subsistence goods, or those providing
them with means of production, then the reduction in necessary labor
time will be permanent and will affect all branches of production. What
drives forward the search for and application of more productive forces
of production is the same competition that drives the capitalist to try
and widen the difference between individual and social value, as per the
paragraph above: “Capital, therefore, has an immanent drive, and a con-
stant tendency, towards increasing the productivity of labor, in order to
cheapen commodities and, by cheapening commodities, to cheapen the
worker himself” (Marx 1867/1976: 437).
Finally, there is one qualification to this argument: extracting surplus

labor is all about the rate at which the means of production absorb the
labor of the worker. The more the worker produces in a given time,
whether through increasing his or her productivity, or through extend-
ing the length of the workday, the faster the capitalist’s money accrues
surplus value. In most sectors of the economy this happens day in, day
out. It is also an invitation to shift working since that, too, will increase the
absolute mass of surplus value extracted in a given time. In short, surplus
value can be increased for the capitalist to the extent that the velocity with
which capital circulates can be increased:
Constant capital, the means of production, only exist, considered from the
standpoint of the process of valorization, in order to absorb labor and, with
every drop of labor, a proportional quantity of surplus labor. In so far as the
means of production fail to do this, their mere existence forms a loss for the
capitalist, in a negative sense, for while they lie fallow they represent a useless
advance of capital. (Marx 1867/1976: 367)
But in some sectors of the economy, there are limits to speeding up the
rate at which capital circulates. The most obvious are those where one has
to rely on natural processes. Agriculture is the classic case. Most of the
capital there is immobilized as the wheat grows, the fruit tree goes through
its annual cycle or as the hogs put on weight. There are clear attempts to
speed that circulation up: faster maturing seeds; the poly-tunnels that give
extended seasons to the production of some fruit or vegetables; or the
confined animal feeding operations with their grotesque goal of speeding
up the animal’s growth by limiting the energy they consume in moving
around. But it remains a problem. This is one of the reasons given for the
SURPLUS VALUE 33
endurance, even while being slowly whittled away, of the family farmer
and goes back to our earlier discussion of the law of value.2
The distribution of surplus value
Once extracted by the capitalist, not all the surplus value remains her
property. Obviously, some of it has to go to pay the landlord from whom
the premises are rented, just as another portion must be used to amortize
loans that have been taken out to fund the business. Physical premises,
and money stored under the mattress, are, from industrial capital’s stand-
point, a waste of time, literally. Renting premises means that the money
retrieved from selling them can be put into production and the process
of soaking up more surplus value. Capital develops through the devel-
opment of the productive forces and that can mean newer machines that
allow workers to produce more value in a given time. In consequence, and
confronted by competition, storing the money under the bed until it has
reached a magnitude sufficient to pay for that machine, threatens loss of
business and possible bankruptcy. Borrowing money on the assumption
that it might even allow obtaining an advantage over the competitors
is clearly in the capitalist’s mind. She will have to fork over some of the
surplus value in the form of interest but the alternative could be dire.
Some of the surplus value has to go to the retailers. One can certainly
imagine a situation in which the retail function remains with the indus-
trial firm so that it maintains its own shops. This, though, means incor-
poration of a branch of the division of labor that is quite different in its
physical requirements, and so calling for different sorts of expertise, like
recruiting shop workers rather than those on the assembly line. It also
means a delay in the circulation of capital. As we have seen, the industrial
capitalist wants her money back as quickly as possible so as to lay it out
again for means of production and the hiring of labor power, and so
extract more surplus labor. The alternative is for the product to be stuck
on the shelf of a retailing outlet or in a showroom for at least some period
of time. Hence the ability of the retail sector to claim a portion of the
surplus as its own.3
Surplus value gets shared out, therefore, and industrial capital has its own
reasons for sharing out the loot. There are still other redistributions. In
the transactions among capitalists, relative size matters. To the extent
that there are numerous component suppliers, the big assemblers can
talk down prices. The same applies to other of capital’s division of labor.
The ability of major retailing chains, like Walmart or Marks & Spencer
(Rainnie 1984) to play one, typically small, supplier or sub-contractor off
against another is very, very considerable. It also works in the relation
between the big retail chains and the shopping center developers. So keen
are the latter to land a big department store chain, since it will attract
shoppers to the center as a whole, that they are willing to discount rent or
even give the retail chain a cut on the rents that they get from everyone
else. What is happening here, though, does not affect the principle of the
extraction of surplus value as a class relation. Rather, it is all about the
way that surplus value is divided up, just as more productive capitals will
appropriate a more than proportional share because of their ability to
undercut in terms of price, the less productive.
The value of labor power
Clearly, in talking about surplus value, the concept of the value of labor
power has central significance. Marx says that
The value of labor-power is determined, as in the case of every other com-

modity, by the labor-time necessary for the production, and consequently also
the reproduction, of this specific article. In so far as it has value, it represents
no more than a definite quantity of the average social labor objectified in it.
(1867/1976: 274)
But this is not nearly as simple as it sounds and requires elaboration.

There are several things we need to consider here. Marx certainly recog-
nized that ‘the necessary requirements’ of the worker, the commodities
required in order to reproduce his/her labor power, could vary tremen-
dously. As he wrote:
… The number and extent of his so-called necessary requirements, as also

the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history,
and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by
a country; in particular they depend on the conditions in which, and conse-
SURPLUS VALUE 35
quently on the habits and expectations with which, the class of free workers
has been formed. In contrast, therefore, with the case of other commodities,
the determination of the value of labor power contains a historical and moral
element. (1867/1976: 275)
But even this leaves too many dots to be joined up. There is a dynamic in
the determination of labor’s standard of living here that is not as empha-
sized as it might be, even though Marx talks about how “the determina-
tion of the value of labor power contains a historical … element.” Of what
does that dynamic consist? Obviously the organization of labor around
demands for increased wages is part of that, but what might provoke
those demands and how are they bound up with the logic of capitalist
development?
One window on this is opened up by thinking about the way in which

luxury goods become wage goods. Capitalist development is technically
innovative, not just in terms of how existing commodities are produced
but also in the production of new commodities. Many of these start out
as luxuries and so are not something that members of the working class
find necessary to reproducing themselves. But luxury goods have a habit
of being transformed into wage goods. They become necessities without
which it becomes difficult to be a wage worker. The slow growth in the
ownership and use of the automobile gradually transformed cities in
terms of their built form, slowly eroded alternative modes of transport as
options, and so made it almost absolutely essential as a means of getting to
work. Workers now need wages of sufficient magnitude to cover not just
the cost of an automobile but also the considerable expenses of maintain-
ing, insuring and using one.
Capital also plays an active role in converting luxury goods into wage
goods. It wants to realize its product, and expanding markets is an
obvious way of doing that; hence the power of the advertising industry,
but also pressure on government to make available the infrastructure that
complements the use of the new goods. You cannot persuade people to
buy vacuum cleaners and TV sets unless they are hooked up to the elec-
tricity grid: an important factor in the decision of apartheid governments
in South Africa to electrify the native townships, as they were called.
Without the pressure of the electrical goods industries, it would probably
have had to wait for the overthrow of apartheid.
The value of labor power also includes the cost of special training. Every
university student who has taken out a loan to pay for tuition expects to
get some job that will provide compensation. Marx certainly saw the cost
of training as being part of the value of labor power though obviously
much of that cost is absorbed by the welfare state through the universally
‘free’ public education system. So the way in which this gets represented
in what workers demand is indirect, and through the burden of taxes in
particular.
Talk about education also reveals what some might identify as Marx’s
sexist tendency to take the labor of women in the home for granted. Given
the standard gender division of labor at the time Marx was writing, and
still to a considerable degree today, the labor of women contributed to the
reproduction of labor power of wage workers in a very substantial way
indeed in the form of food preparation and laundering, as well as main-
taining the home. But this was not wage labor, so assigning a value to it in
the sense of value theory would have been fraught with difficulty. Even so,
the tendency has been for the value of labor power to represent to some
degree the need to reproduce those particular use values.
Migrant labor in South Africa represents a reverse situation in which the

mines organized their labor recruiting exactly so as to avoid paying for
the miner’s, otherwise, dependents (Wolpe 1980). In South Africa, the
mining industry has historically been a major employer of migrant labor.
Moreover, it was also a staunch opponent of the permanent urbanization
of the miner along with his family. The reasoning behind this was that
for a migrant worker, the worker’s family would stay behind in the native
reserve and support itself by cultivating a plot of land, and grazing some
cattle and goats. But, or so the argument went, bring wives and children
to the city and wages would have to expand to support their subsistence
needs, housing, and public services for them like schools.4
As Marx points out, the reproduction of labor power is a necessity in all

modes of production. The incentive structures under which it operates,
however, have varied in accordance with variations in production rela-
tions. As a class, the capitalist class has an interest in the reproduction
of the working class. It is upon a healthy working class, well-fed and
well-housed, educated to handle the tasks it is called upon to do, equipped
with the means of transportation to get to the workplace, that its profit-
ability depends. But for individual employers the logic of the situation
SURPLUS VALUE 37
is one in which they can ignore whether or not the labor power of their
workers is reproduced since they can employ others. This is in sharp
contrast to servile forms of labor (slavery, feudalism) where this is not the
case. In slavery, the slave is necessarily treated like other living means of
production, such as livestock, and the same concern over the health and
strength of the worker is expressed. If the slave drops dead from fatigue
or ill-health then another has to be purchased at a considerable price (i.e.,
not the weekly or monthly ‘rent’ that the capitalist pays for use of the
immediate producer’s labor power). The feudal lord, on the other hand,
loses the serf’s dues and labor services.
The same logic applies to investment in the skills of the wage worker, and
to the air and water pollution that threatens the health of the worker. So
the situation for the individual employer is a contradictory one. On the
one hand, a healthy, well-fed workforce is desirable, but paying a wage
to cover these exposes the employer to the competition of other capi-
talists. As a result, it is only through the state that the capitalist class can
act in a way that will facilitate the reproduction of labor power: e.g., the
passage of laws on health and safety in the workplace, the passage of laws
governing public water supplies and sewerage, the passage of minimum
wage laws, and laws governing the quality of housing, or the introduction
of unemployment compensation so that labor will stick around until the
next uptick in the economy.
Note also, however, that from the standpoint of the individual firm the
substitutability of the individual worker can be in question. This means
that, for some, the employer’s logic may be different. In order to hang on
to the worker, in order to ensure that he/she is healthy and able to deliver
once the firm has made an investment in their labor power, a higher wage
will be paid, along with, in the USA, healthcare insurance. So position in
the (technical) division of labor makes a difference, since people in some
positions are less substitutable than people in others.5
What we know for sure, though, is that capitalists can and will appropriate
surplus value. Just what happens to it after it has returned to the capitalist
who originally extracted it is discussed in the following chapter.
Notes
1. For example, speeding up the assembly line or restricting toilet visits.
2. The classic reference here is Mann and Dickinson (1978).
3. There are exceptions which prove the rule. One case is Burton’s, a British
firm that manufactured suits-to-order. You visited a Burton’s store close to
you – and there were very many of them – you chose your material, your
style, and measurements were taken. This information was then communi-
cated to the firm’s, appropriately massive, factory in Leeds. You would then
pick the suit up later at the store where you placed your order. The United
Colors of Benneton works on a similar principle, except that orders are com-
municated digitally, and aside from the design function, their manufacturing
is sub-contracted. In both instances, the problem of inventory hanging
around on shelves is avoided and the circulation of capital is not impeded.
Note also the way in which computerization of checkout processes in super-
markets allows monitoring of inventory; as something appears imminently
out of stock, the order goes through. Meanwhile, those items which sell more
slowly will be re-ordered far less frequently and in smaller amounts.
4. This is a more general logic. Burawoy (1976) described its significance in
discussing migrant workers in the USA.
5. This logic is the basis of (mainstream) dual-labor market theory (Doeringer
and Piore 1971). According to this, labor markets could be divided into
primary and secondary. Primary sector workers were the more skilled and
experienced, often unionized, and on a higher pay scale, with more benefits,
and also in line for internal promotion – what was called a firm’s internal
labor market. Secondary workers were the obverse: lower pay, more tran-
sient, fewer benefits if any.
5 The capital accumulation
process
Capital accumulation as expanded reproduction
The immediate goal of the capitalist is to appropriate value in its surplus

form. If she does not, and merely recoups her expenses for wages, raw
materials and the like, how is she to live? Answer: by drawing on her
capital. But that means that the next time she throws values into the
market in order to valorize them, she will have less to throw in. Assuming
that again she fails to appropriate value in its surplus form, she will either
have to contract her expenses as a capitalist and so produce on a smaller
scale; or she continues with the same expenditures for labor power, raw
materials, etc., by obtaining credit from the banks. Further failure to
appropriate value in its surplus form means that she will then either have
to go to work herself as she gradually loses any money capital with which
she can hire others; or she fails to repay her loans and goes bankrupt,
which means the same thing. So, from her standpoint, appropriating
surplus value is a necessity. But once that value is appropriated, so, too,
is it necessary to put the larger part of it along with the money recouped
for the expenses of production back into production. This means that in
successive production cycles, our capitalist is appropriating progressively
more and more value in its surplus form and laying out more and more
money capital for premises, labor power, raw materials and the like. The
values under the control of our capitalist are expanding. This is what is
meant by the accumulation of capital.
Accumulation is a necessity. Capitalists must expand or face possible

extinction. Given the competition of other capitalists, the exigencies of
markets, the need to constantly have an eye to the introduction of new
39
technologies, it is only thus that they can maintain possession of respec-

tive capitals – money, raw materials, instruments of labor – necessary to
the extraction of surplus value. Having been appropriated, the larger part
of the surplus value must be reinvested along with those revenues that
represent the original values laid out for raw materials, machines and
labor power. In short, too much can never be enough. Value is preserved
by expanding it and competition acts as the coercive force that mandates
that logic.
But in order that this conversion of surplus value take place, the surplus
in the society as a whole must exist in the form of appropriate use values:
surplus means of production, and also means of subsistence with which
to reproduce new labor powers. Surplus value is nothing if it cannot
be converted into additional objects of labor, instruments of labor and,
depending on changes in the labor process,1 labor power. But it is exactly
in the material form of additional instruments and objects of labor that
the surplus exists. There must also be additional labor power, but Marx
says, “The mechanism of capitalist production has already provided for
this in advance by reproducing the working class dependent on wages,
a class whose ordinary wages suffice, not only to maintain itself but also to
increase its numbers” (1867/1976: 727). We will return later to this issue
of the expansion of social labor necessary to sustain the accumulation
process and what can happen when that happy conjunction of affairs
breaks down.
Accumulation and social reproduction
Accumulation is not just a process of material production, a matter of

capitalizing surplus value. It is a process of social reproduction and, in
particular, a reproduction of those class relations on which the reproduc-
tion of capital as a mode of production depends. Out of the production
process the worker obtains the value of her labor power and no more, so
that it is only with extreme difficulty that she can put the money together
to purchase the conditions of production, including the labor power of
others, and become a capitalist in her own right. On the other hand, the
capitalist gets back all the money he has thrown into production plus
a surplus which can then be used to command the labor of even more
THE CAPITAL ACCUMULATION PROCESS 41
workers. The worker is reproduced as a worker since she gets enough,

and no more, to renew her bodily powers for further wage labor; while
the capitalist is reproduced as a capitalist since he gets out of the process
all he threw into it plus a surplus which allows not only for his own con-
sumption but extending his ability to command the labor power of others.
The working class is reproduced, therefore, and so, too, is its dependence
on capital. The wage suffices to keep body and soul together and no more.
The separation of the immediate producer from the means of production
is therefore reproduced:
Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for the worker’s
maintenance and reproduction; on the other hand, by the constant annihila-
tion of the means of subsistence, it provides for their continued re-appearance
on the labor market. The Roman slave was held by chains; the wage laborer is
bound to his owner by invisible threads. The appearance of independence is
maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and
by the legal fiction of a contract. (Marx 1867/1976: 719)
This does not mean that the particular people filling these different class
roles may not change. Capitalists may go out of business and be consigned
to the rank of wage worker. Some members of the working class may,
by dint of unusual degrees of saving and perhaps overwork, or perhaps
through the rents from a progressive acquisition of rental property, accu-
mulate the money by which they can start their own business, hire the
labor power of others and perhaps valorize their values over a succession
of time periods so that the firm prospers. But the overall balance between
capital and the working class has to be reproduced if capital is to be
reproduced. If all members of the working class joined the capitalist class
then capitalism would cease to exist. This is because capital depends on
the production and appropriation of surplus value and without a working
class there would be no surplus value. But clearly there would be, and are,
adjustments long before that point is reached; for as the working class
decreased in size so there would be upward pressure on wages forcing
some capitalists out of business, and forcing still others into takeovers by
other capitalist firms and their elimination.
The changing historical forms of accumulation
Marx identifies primitive accumulation as a particular historical stage

of the accumulation process. Primitive accumulation is the historic act
of divorcing the immediate producers from the means of production: it
is the accumulation of the means of production in the hands of the few
through the overriding of legal rights, through violent appropriation, as
discussed in Chapter 2.
In talking about accumulation proper, that accumulation process we

have already considered which reproduces the separation of immediate
producers from the means of production, Marx finds it useful to make
a further distinction: this is between the formal subsumption of labor to
capital on the one hand, and what he called labor’s real subsumption or
the specifically capitalist mode of production. In formal subsumption,
Marx envisaged an early phase of capitalist development in which incip-
ient capitalists hire immediate producers to work within the framework
of existing labor processes. Technologies from pre-capitalist times would
be the norm and surplus value would be extracted in its absolute form,
in particular through extension of the length of the workday. In real
subsumption, and in contrast, the capitalist actively intervenes in the
labor process, reconfigures it, and equips the immediate producers with
machinery that enhances their productivity. Now surplus value is appro-
priated in its relative form: holding the length of the workday constant,
necessary labor is reduced relative to surplus labor, though as we saw in
the last chapter, only in an enduring manner if the increased productivity
occurs in sectors producing wage goods or capital goods for wage goods
sectors.
In considering these three ‘phases,’ it is important not to think of them

in simple sequential terms. In the most advanced of capitalist societies,
primitive accumulation is an ongoing process as small businesses go into
debt, their machinery is sold off and former owners have to seek employ-
ment as wage workers. Likewise, although we might regard real sub-
sumption as the norm in the advanced capitalist societies, there are still
areas where instead of altering the technology, the immediate producers
are subjected to long hours of overtime without extra pay, particularly in
those sectors employing large numbers of illegals who are unlikely to go
to the authorities to report breaches of labor law.
Accumulation fund, consumption fund and the

industrial reserve army of labor
Although in Chapters 23 and 24 of Capital Volume 1 Marx paints a picture

of a reproduction process that takes place in a systematic, uncomplicated
way, he did recognize that things might not be quite so smooth and that
some sort of adjustment process would be necessary in order to maintain
the proper balance between what he called capital’s accumulation fund
and labor’s consumption fund. Out of the production process labor got
wages in exchange for its labor power and the capitalist got back all her
expenses plus a surplus which would then be put into further rounds
of production. But what if labor’s consumption fund should increase
relative to capital’s accumulation fund so that some portion of what had
been surplus value had to be paid out as an addition to wages? This is the
problem Marx considers at the beginning of Chapter 25 and in answer to
which he formulates the idea of ‘the industrial reserve army of labor.’ His
solution not only explains the fact of unemployment; he shows how it and
its fluctuations are necessary to ensuring that labor’s consumption fund
does not encroach on capital’s fund for accumulation.
If wages rose as a result, say, of a shortage of labor, to the point at which

surplus value was eliminated, then indeed the basis of the capitalist system
would be threatened. But this will not happen. To the extent that that
labor supply is insufficient to valorize values and, accordingly, wages
rise, then a reorganization of the labor process and a subsequent increase
in the productivity of workers and the unemployment of some could
increase the labor supply and bring wages back down to a point satisfac-
tory from the standpoint of capital’s valorization requirements. Hence,
insofar as wages are determined by supply and demand, it is a supply and
demand that are both controlled by capital:
Capital acts on both sides at once. If its accumulation on the one hand increases
the demand for labor, it increases on the other the supply of workers by ‘setting
them free’ (i.e. by moving them from the active to the inactive), while at the
same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to
furnish more labor, and therefore makes the supply of labor to a certain extent
independent of the supply of workers. (Marx 1867/1976: 793)
The inactive part, the part that acts as a drag on the labor market and
which the active part regards as its potential replacements, is what Marx
called ‘the industrial reserve army of labor.’
The real subsumption of labor to capital, the active intervention of capital

into the transformation of the labor process, is clearly crucial to the
mechanics Marx describes: only thus can capital produce an industrial
reserve army of labor when wage increases threaten the rate of accumu-
lation. Marx’s discussion also suggests a reason why capitalists shift from
formal to real subsumption: a growing shortage of wage workers which
threatens accumulation can be turned into an excess of wage workers by
improving worker productivity. This is in addition to the reason he gave
in his discussion of the enactment of limits to the length of the workday:
the elimination of possibilities for increasing surplus value in its absolute
form. We should note here, though, that another way in which capitalists
historically mitigated a shortage of workers and increasing wages was by
an extension of the workday. Indeed, one of the points Marx makes else-
where in Capital Volume 1 is that at the dawn of capitalism the tendency
was to enforce, through government legislation, increasing workday
lengths, rather than shorten them as occurred in the nineteenth century.
The overaccumulation of capital
The accumulation of capital is not a smooth process; rather, it is crisis

ridden. Accumulation can reach a point where there is surplus capital
looking for an outlet, and also surplus labor power, over and above the
typical industrial reserve army. Exactly why this sort of overaccumulation
occurs has been hotly debated and both claims can find support in Marx’s
writings.
One argument locates crisis in the circulation of capital and a shortfall in

demand that necessarily follows on from capital’s logic.2 This was referred
to briefly in Chapter 2. In Marx’s own words:
Every capitalist knows this about his worker, that he does not relate to him as
producer to consumer, and [he therefore] wishes to restrict his consumption,
i.e. his ability to exchange, his wage, as much as possible. Of course he would
like the workers of other capitalists to be the greatest consumers possible
of his own commodity. But the relation of every capitalist to his own workers

is the relation as such of capital and labour, the essential relation. But this is
just how the illusion arises – true for the individual capitalist as distinct from
all the others – that apart from his workers the whole remaining working class
confronts him as consumer and participant in exchange, as money-spender,
and not as worker. It is forgotten that, as Malthus says, ‘the very existence of
a profit upon any commodity pre-supposes a demand exterior to that of the
labourer who has produced it’, and hence the demand of the labourer himself
can never be an adequate demand. (1857–58/1973: 420; original emphasis)
Given, therefore, the fact that workers receive in wages less than the
value that they produce, how is all the value produced to be realized?
One has to take into account here the consumption of the capitalist class.
The remainder is used to extend production, which necessarily means
demand for new means of production and hence for workers who will
then spend their wages on some portion of the value then produced. In
short, the problem of realizing value is pushed off into the future through
succeeding waves of money laid out to expand the production of capital
goods. This, though, can be interrupted. While more and more value is
produced, seeking an outlet, those outlets can dry up. The railroads of the
settler societies were completed, so what next for the iron and steel indus-
tries of North America and Western Europe? The household appliance
industries boomed in the 1950s and 1960s as households bought their first
refrigerator but after that, and allowing for some increase in population
and in replacements, what then? In other words, avoiding an overaccu-
mulation located in circulation has required the creation of new outlets
for capital: new products and new frontiers, and, for whatever reason,
they may not be there.
The other reason posited for an overaccumulation of capital is the ten-

dency for the rate of profit to fall or TRPF, for short. Marx’s argument
here was that the onward race, driven by cost competition, to have the
means of production absorb more surplus labor, means that labor power
is continually expelled from the labor process. Fewer and fewer workers
put an increasing mass of means of production – objects and instruments
of labor or in value terms, constant capital – in motion. This means,
though, that it is precisely that element that produces surplus value – what
Marx called variable capital, whose presence is being reduced. End result:
the TRPF. Obviously, this has not happened, and Marx pointed out the
fact of counter-tendencies. While the amount laid out for variable capital
may be diminishing, that laid out for constant capital may be diminishing
at an even faster rate: cheaper machinery, cheaper raw materials, for
whatever reason. Alternatively, the rate of exploitation of the workers

remaining may increase as a result of revolutions in the production of
means of subsistence or simply speeding up the labor process.
In any case, overaccumulation is a fact of life periodically visited on the

capitalist class, and most severely on the working class in the form of
unemployment. Factories and workers, both, are idle. Rates of return are
falling. Capital has nowhere to go. How, therefore, to get the show on the
road again? Some capitals will be struggling more than others. They are
going to go out of business and their (socially) obsolescent equipment
sold off for scrap, which means that the competitive pressures on the
remaining ones are diminished. Meanwhile, the labor power of workers is
revalued downwards and the rate of exploitation can increase, all of which
can lay the basis for a new boom in production, until, and inevitably,
overaccumulation occurs once again, but never as it was in the past, and
continually transforming itself. Capital ‘develops.’
Notes
1. Changes that might, for example, reduce the need for labor power.
2. See e.g., Simon Clarke (1990b).
6 Capital’s development
Over its history, and since its clear emergence some 400 years ago, capital
has changed immensely. In its external forms it is barely recognizable.
The most obvious signs of this are in its technologies and in what is
produced: from the age of the canal to that of the modern airliner; from
simple calculations in a ledger to the computer; from a time when the
term ‘tourism’ was unknown to the package holidays of today; the rise
of the automated assembly line, and lots more. The same applies to
its organizational features: from the family-owned store to the retail
chain; from the single-owner business to the joint-stock company. In its
concrete forms – modes of organization, technology, divisions of labor,
products, even property rights1 – capital is constantly changing, driven
forward by its contradictions; and to understand transformation, the
concept of contradiction is indispensable.
As outlined in Chapter 2, capital’s central contradiction that is the source

of all others is the class relation: the fact of the separation of immediate
producers from the means of production and their reunification through
the money wealth of those who are, or will be, the capitalists. Capital
accumulation depends upon the exploitation of the wage workers; but
that exploitation in turn, sets up resistance which threatens to undermine
the accumulation process. Workers are a problem and capital’s history
can be written in terms of how to solve that problem; mainly by getting
rid of them which, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, means periodic
bouts of overaccumulation.
Given the so-called ‘double freedom of labor power’ or, ‘the wage labor
relation,’ all the logics of capital – exploitation, the law of value, accumu-
lation, the creation of the industrial reserve army, etc. – become possible:
they are contained within it. What makes them real is the competition
conditional upon that same separation of immediate producers from
the means of production. Capitalists lay out money for labor power and
47
means of production; but then they want it back. That means trying to sell
what is produced, but with no assurance of a market. The drive to compete
successfully then means one has to accumulate through the extraction of
a surplus from the workers; and one has to accumulate so as to compete
through investment in those new instruments of labor that will enhance
the productivity of the worker, as well as creating the wherewithal to buy
out the competitors. So: downward pressure on wages and conditions of
work; the monotony entailed by an ever more efficient detail division of
labor, and so alienation from the work process; treatment as a replaceable
part; and the threat of unemployment as capital’s attempt to keep labor
costs down. The class relation entails exploitation, therefore, but also, in
response, resistance through the development of the labor movement:
a struggle to maintain wages, to improve the health and safety of workers,
to reduce unemployment through state action and to provide compensa-
tion for the unemployed.
This in turn incites capital to ever newer ways of getting round these laws
and driving accumulation forward: defining workers as self-employed
agents, as in Uber; outsourcing to low-wage countries with more lax
workplace laws; replacing workers with more vulnerable illegals; artificial
intelligence; and new rounds of automation with the intent of expelling
labor power from the labor process altogether. Certainly, in its fundamen-
tals, the production of commodities with commodities, the separation of
the immediate producers from the means of production, cost competi-
tion, capital is unchanging. But that means that its contradictions endure,
even while their concrete expression might – will! – change. In its detail,
in its timing, what has happened in the course of capitalist development
could have been foreseen only with difficulty. In hindsight, though, it is
utterly comprehensible. In this way, a number of – interrelated – empir-
ical regularities can be referred back to capital’s distinct logics and these
are the focus of this chapter.
CAPITAL’S DEVELOPMENT 49
Capital’s functional division of labor
Today, capital divides clearly into four distinct and complementary

divisions:
• Industrial capital, where objects of labor – raw materials,

semi-processed materials – are converted, courtesy of labor power,
working with various more or less sophisticated instruments of labor
into finished, or semi-finished products for onward sale. This includes
not only what is usually regarded as ‘industrial,’ or what goes on in
factories; but also agriculture, mining and forestry – i.e., anything
involving the elements of the labor process outlined above.
• Commercial capital, consisting for the most part of the retail and
wholesale sectors, which sell to the final consumer. Also included
would be the distribution centers of the big retail chains and of online
retailers.
• Finance capital, responsible for the financing of industrial and com-
mercial capital. Loans are taken out for purposes of investment in new
mines, factories and the like, and these come from a variety of sources:
most notably banks, but also individual investors who do nothing
but push money around in search of ‘deals.’ Money is also raised for
purposes of expansion by new stock issues on the stock exchange and
the sale of bonds. Commercial capital uses lines of credit to finance its
inventories.
• Property capital: All firms – industrial, commercial, financial – need
premises. This is the branch of capital that is relatively recent: not
much more so than the 1930s. A sphere dominated by ownership
of premises by industrialists, retailers and banks has been replaced
by developers who convert land into industrial estates, distribution
centers, shopping centers and housing, and then either hold it for rent
or sell it on to pension funds or insurance companies.
These all complement one another. Industry needs sales outlets, finance
and sites. Property capital finds a market in industrial and commercial
capitals, as well as housing for the employees of both. It needs finance.
It also needs commercial intermediaries, as in the form of real estate
brokers. And so on.
This is a division that has emerged over time. Industrial firms have shifted
in their financing models from one where they self-financed: money
was saved up until what was needed for expansion was available. This
model has by and large been replaced by one of borrowing from banks
or floating new stock and the sale of bonds. Likewise, a pattern of buying
and retaining ownership of one’s own premises – factories, shops, even
housing for the workers – has been replaced by one of reliance on a spe-
cialized sector of developers.
Partly this separation is a result of an increasingly fine division of labor:

the development of respective expertises. Industrial capitals may hold
large sums of money capital without any clear idea of what to do with
them – something very apparent at the moment of writing. They could
invest it themselves but they do not have that sort of specialized knowl-
edge: better from the standpoint of increasing the value of their cash
reserves, to delegate the function to a stock advisor or a bank. Likewise
a retail chain thinking of expanding into a new city: where to locate? Real
estate developers have the knowledge and will be happy to help.
What ultimately pushes this separation forward has been the drive to
speed up the circulation of capital, discussed earlier. From the standpoint
of industrial capital, money tied up in real estate or sitting in the firm’s
safe, is money that is not being used for production and the extraction of
surplus value: better to rent the premises and use the money to expand
production; or deposit it in a bank and get a share of the surplus value of
those to whom the bank is lending and receiving interest (which is a claim
on surplus value). Meanwhile, the problem of idle capital gets transferred,
which helps to explain the eagerness with which new ideas are explored:
new forms of real estate development to attract the customers; new finan-
cial products, like zero deposit mortgages.
The socialization of production
From the earliest time, production has been cooperative, most notably
through the division of labor: people performing different but comple-
mentary roles. This is something that developed in pre-capitalist times
but slowly and as a result of changes of a quite random sort. Under cap-
italism this social character of production advances at a prodigious rate

and in several related ways.
First, the conversion of means of production and of labor power into

commodities makes them, from the standpoint of capitalists, a shared
resource. No longer are the immediate producers tied to a particular
slave owner or feudal lord; and no longer is the land held in perpetuity,
handed down through generations and not available for sale. Immediate
producers, the land, are now something to be shared by all those who have
the money wealth to hire or, in the case of real property, purchase. The
same will happen with money itself. Stored as savings in banks, it is there
for anyone with the necessary security to borrow and put into production.
The development of other ways of accessing money capital like the stock
market, are a refinement of this process.
Second, at the level of the labor process, there is a deliberate seeking out
of new forms of collaboration. On the one hand there is the development
of the division of labor. Within the firm, the breaking down of the labor
process into different stages, as in the assembly of an automobile, allows
the use of more specialized tools which can facilitate production by
shortening the time necessary for a particular aspect of the shared labor
process: different sorts of hammer or screwdriver. This also means an
economy of time in another direction; if a worker is occupied with just
one tool rather than having to put one down and pick up another to
advance the product to a subsequent stage of its transformation, then
that saves time otherwise wasted: a form of extracting labor in its absolute
form by filling in what Marx referred to as the ‘pores of the workday.’ This
intensification of the division of labor within the firm has another advan-
tage: the demands on the skill of the worker go down, the labor process is
simplified, the job is de-skilled, which means in turn that labor power of
lower value can be hired.
The division of labor also occurs between firms: different products, obvi-
ously, but also firms producing components or semi-finished parts for
others, as in the classic assembly industries, and also in something like
chemicals. There again, there are firms specializing in so-called capital
goods which are used in producing the products eventually purchased
by final consumers: the machine tool industry, most notably. Each has its
own technical expertise which helps account in part for the specialization:
making steel is different from making automobiles. This is a technical
expertise which extends beyond the labor process to include an under-

standing of markets and sources of raw materials.
Consider, secondly, how the socialization of production has advanced

through the development of new instruments of labor; most notably those
that require the cooperation of ever larger numbers of workers. Partly
this is a matter of exploiting economies of scale: up to a certain point, it
is cheaper to produce a ton of pig iron in a larger blast furnace than in
a smaller one. In other instances, the use of shared means of production
advances in conjunction with the division of labor. The assembly line
connects the different specialized workers one with another; meanwhile,
speeding it up encourages more intense labor – another way of filling up
‘the pores of the workday.’ Some instruments of labor are on a truly heroic
scale: consider the modern railroad network and its ability to cut the time
getting raw materials and semi-finished products from one factory to
another: a sort of assembly line writ very large indeed. The production of
electricity in power plants shared by all users was a major advance on the
steam engine confined to one workplace.
The increase in the ratio of fixed to circulating capital
The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of
development of wealth generally, or of capital. The aim of production oriented
directly towards use value, as well as of that directly oriented towards exchange
value, is the product itself, destined for consumption. The part of production
which is oriented towards the production of fixed capital does not produce
direct objects of individual gratification, nor direct exchange values; at least
not directly realizable exchange values. Hence, only when a certain degree of
productivity has already been reached – so that a part of production time is
sufficient for immediate production – can an increasingly large part be applied
to the production of the means of production. (Marx 1867/1973: 707; original
emphasis)
The tendency of capital, inherent in its contradictory nature, is to replace

living labor with what Marx called ‘dead’ labor. Factories, highways,
bridges, railroads, machines, represent past labor and in that sense it is
‘dead.’ Living labor is what sets the machines in motion, including the
trucks, the railway engines, the signaling devices. Otherwise put, the frac-
tion of capital that is fixed tends to increase relative to that fraction that is
circulating: that fraction that is laid out for labor power and raw materials
and that is recuperated virtually immediately subsequent to the sale of the
product. Meanwhile, the cost of the machines is only defrayed slowly and
this can be a problem.
Machines, the machine tools used in a factory, the huge diggers used in
open-pit mining, the various sorts of crane or excavator used in construc-
tion, are themselves the products of capitalist firms in stiff competition
with one another. That means that innovation is just as important to
them as it is to the other capitalists who will buy them. They know that
capital in general wants machinery that will allow the worker to produce
more and are bent on developing and selling it. But for those (purchasing)
capitals, it is a poisoned chalice. This is because they may be in possession
of an earlier generation of machinery whose cost to them has yet to be
defrayed. If they do not buy the new machine and their competitors do,
then they are at a disadvantage. This is a question not of physical, but of
social obsolescence. It is a dilemma that every industrial capital confronts.
This helps to explain the zeal with which some equipment gets used. It is
not just that when it is idle, the money locked up in it is not being released
and circulated so as to soak up more surplus labor; it is also that there is
a risk of social obsolescence. This helps explain certain common capitalist
labor practices, the most notable of which is shift work around the clock.
Amortize that machinery as rapidly as possible so as to not get caught
holding something that all of a sudden has become much less valuable
than it was.
The ‘three-sector’ model
A fourth empirical regularity concerns the division of labor, not so much

in terms of its functions – industrial, commercial, capital, etc. – as in
terms of its material content and how it develops over time. This is the
division between so-called primary, secondary and tertiary sectors – it
has been widely noted outside Marxism and defined there as the ‘three
sector model.’ Marx did not use these categories but he would surely have
recognized their relevance. Definitions vary but ‘primary’ typically refers
to extractive industries that work directly with that nature external to
human nature, like agriculture, mining and forestry; the secondary sector
is equally ‘industrial’ but it takes the iron ore, coal, timber, raw milk from
the primary sector and converts it into iron and steel, machinery of all
sorts, furniture, cheese and obviously lots, lots more. The tertiary sector,
meanwhile, is highly variegated but typically includes commerce, finance,
insurance, transport and lots of things that the state civil service does:
social workers and teachers, for example. It is such a motley group of
activities as to be barely coherent. Transport should probably be included
under primary and secondary since it is an essential aspect of production:
things are moved between mine and factory, between one factory and
another, just as they are moved around inside the factory. The same
applies to finance and insurance: they mediate primary and secondary
production. Taking these categories at face value, there are clear ten-
dencies in terms of employment for their relative significance to change
over time. With the initiation of capitalist development, the primary
sector tends to predominate, then giving way to the secondary sector;
meanwhile, services start from a very small percentage of the labor force,
but eventually overtake the secondary sector to employ a majority of the
workforce. How, therefore, to make sense of this development?
The growth of the secondary sector relative to the primary has long been
recognized. Revolutionizing the productive forces with the unleashing of
capitalism, particularly in agriculture, is clearly preliminary to the devel-
opment of industry. On the one hand, it releases labor power for employ-
ment there; on the other, by vastly increasing the amount of food created
by each agricultural worker, it creates the necessary subsistence base
for industrial workers. There have been other, more concrete changes.
The most notable of these has been the replacement of coal – typically
labor-intensive where underground mining is the norm – by oil, which in
its extraction requires very little labor power.
What holds services together as part of a particular sense of capitalism’s

division of labor, at least, is the way, in the first place, that they perform
auxiliary roles (Walker 1985). Most notably, they act to facilitate the
circulation of capital: think financial services, the retail trade, advertising.
Second, there are those services focusing on the reproduction of labor
power: education, health, services for the retired, commuter transport, all
of crucial interest to capital, if in different ways. In some cases they renew
the physical and mental powers of the worker or in others, like further
education, improve them. In still further cases, like retirement homes
and schools, they release labor power from households for wage work.
Just as the rise of the secondary sector depended on revolutions in the

productivity of workers in the primary sector, so it is the vastly increased
capacity of workers in the secondary sector that has allowed services
to flourish. Other services are more truly part of industrial capital. The
various hospitality industries are exemplary: hotels, the catering trades.
Much of transport is another case, transferring materials from one firm to
another and then to wholesalers or distribution centers.
One way of making sense of this division is to put the secondary sector
in the center. It rises on the back of the primary sector and then, through
its products, like artificial fertilizers, agricultural machinery, irrigation
equipment, new seed types, more mechanized means of extracting min-
erals, furthers the productivity of workers there. Meanwhile, a continuing
transformation of the labor process allows the growth of services that
mediate the circulation of capital and facilitate the reproduction of labor
power. At the same time, it provides the equipment put to work in the
service sector: the medical equipment, information technology, electric
cookers, school buses and obviously, lots more.
New technologies and new products
Marx’s emphasis was always on cost competition: most notably, though

not exclusively, on the acquisition of ever newer instruments of labor
which could soak up the labor of the worker more quickly. He says
nothing about the development of new products, except to the extent that
it is implicit in the development of new machines: i.e., the competition of
firms in the capital goods sector to improve their products and to develop
newer ones attractive to firms in the consumption goods sector keen to
steal a competitive advantage over one another. Clearly, though, it is not
only through the development of new technologies that firms compete,
but also in the development of new and improved final products.
Regardless, all the bigger firms have research and development depart-
ments with an explicit focus on product innovation. With respect to
technologies, on the other hand, it is not true that they are all developed in
order to be sold. Some are ones which would be hard to sell: technologies
of production that firms develop, which cannot be patented, and which
spread by imitation. The spatial divisions of labor of firms as a particular

sort of production technology are a case in point. There are advantages
to splitting off the less technically demanding aspects of the labor process
to separate plants at a distance (Clark 1981): most notably a reduced like-
lihood of demands for increased wages. More recently something called
‘just-in-time,’ initiated by Toyota (Sayer 1986), has spread rapidly as
a way of reducing the costs of inventory and improving product control.
Yet while the logic of product development, innovation and acquisition

is clear enough, and has been realized in a veritable torrent of both new
process technologies, and new products, their concrete form has been
far less predictable. Who in the age of steam could have predicted either
the electric motor or the internal combustion engine? Who could have
foreseen the radio or the television amongst a dazzling array of consumer
goods, one after another, in the history of things? The succession of prod-
ucts is not completely incomprehensible. They have tended to be built
on the innovations of predecessors. Airplanes used internal combustion
engines and the rubber tires for their landing wheels were pioneered in
the automobile industry. Earlier, the automobile industry had got the idea
of the rubber tire from the bicycle industry. Early models of the car used,
like the bicycle, the chain principle to convey power to the back wheels;
and the assumption that the vehicle should be powered from the rear was
another legacy of the humble bicycle.
In other instances, a technology has been used in industry prior to its

transformation into a household consumption good. The refrigerator is
a case in point. The home computer is a direct descendant of the huge
machines once the monopoly of the army, big corporations and uni-
versities. In still others, the evolution required a clear eureka moment:
McLean’s invention of the truly revolutionary container on the basis of
the American (tractor)-trailer is classic. There again, there are limits to
what can be proposed: the limits imposed by the natural sciences and the
laws of mechanics. So the concrete development of capitalism in terms of
its technologies and products has not been entirely unpredictable, but the
degrees of freedom have necessarily remained quite substantial.
* * *
In short and in conclusion, capital is hugely dynamic. We might not

be able to predict how it will change but it will certainly change. This
dynamic is owing to its fundamentally contradictory character. It depends

on a fraught class relation that it constantly tries to suspend only for it to
reappear once more. This raises an important question: given the unequal
relationship which is capital’s necessary condition, how is it that any
social process with capitalism at its center can possibly cohere? How does
it manage to hold? We turn to that question in the concluding chapter of
the first part of this book.
Note
1. As in recent claims for ‘intellectual property rights’ which takes the idea
beyond the older one of the patent, to include things like branding and trade
secrets.
7 ‘The factor(s) of cohesion’:
ideology and state under
capitalism
Context
The class tensions of capitalist societies are one of their dominating fea-
tures. Every capitalist country has a labor movement aimed at pushing for
legislation enhancing the condition of the working class, and every one
has a capitalist class whose goal is to resist and make it easier for them
to exploit the working class. Nevertheless, and remarkably, things do not
develop to the point of serious revolutionary challenge. Capitalist socie-
ties manage to cohere. Working classes everywhere accede to their own
exploitation. How is it, therefore, that the revolutionary ardor apparent
one hundred years ago, has long been tempered and has given way to
a reformism that simply allows capital’s contradictions to reappear in
new forms? Poulantazas thought that the state was the factor of cohesion
(Poulantzas and Miliband 1972). It was the state that provided a sense of
shared dilemmas that could override class divisions. Ideology, though,
the characteristic beliefs of a capitalist society, also contributes both in
its own right and indirectly through the structure of the capitalist state
and the way it then, in turn, contributes to a solidifying of characteristic
ideological forms.
58
‘THE FACTOR(S) OF COHESION’ 59
Capitalist ideology
The subtitle of Capital is A Critique of Political Economy and, to be sure,

a strong critical element is clear when reading it. Marx’s focus is classical
political economy: people like Adam Smith and Malthus, along with
more vulgar expositors of its principles. A major concern was to expose
the ideological character of interpretations of, and beliefs about, capitalist
society: ideological in the sense of illusory but effective from the stand-
point of reproducing the (production relations) status quo and that ruling
class which benefits from it. In other words, ideologies reproduce the
system by shielding it from political challenge. And they do this as a result
of the way the oppressed buy into them in virtue of their participation in
those production relations.
Two points at the outset. First, for Marx, ideas are conditioned by material
practice, forged in the sphere of production. We develop our ideas in
the context of engaging practically with the world so as to facilitate our
ability to intervene in it. As we intervene, and starting from the most
rudimentary of conceptions, so we modify our views in accordance with
what seems to work. Production, though, always occurs through certain
social relations and they make all the difference to the understandings of
that material practice that we arrive at.1
Second, in Capital, Marx is not always in an explicitly critical mode. But

when he is, we find him resorting to contrasts between what he calls form
and content, phenomenal form and essence, or otherwise put, appearance
and inner connection, illusion and reality. This has to do with his critique
of political economy in the sense that under capital people are deceived by
the appearance of things; there is a systematic inversion between content
and form, capital’s essence or inner connection and its mode of appear-
ance. Alternatively put, there is a rupture in capitalist society between our
experiences of its social relations and their underlying reality.
The realm of illusion, of appearance, is the sphere of circulation while that

of production is where the deceptions are peeled away: the content. This
point is most famously illustrated by something said at the end of Chapter
6 as the worker has just entered into a contract with Mr Moneybags; it

merits a lengthy quote:
This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and
purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of
man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom,
because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are
constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the
agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression
to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the
other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent
for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And
Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings
them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness,
the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no
one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in
accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices
of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the
common weal and in the interest of all.
On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities,
which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with
the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think
we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He,
who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the posses-
sor of labour-power follows as his laborer. The one with an air of importance,
smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who
is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but—a hiding.
(Marx 1867/1976: 280)
In short, equality is going to turn into inequality, since the capitalist is

going to get far more out of the bargain than the owner of labor power.
The worker is indeed, in the form of the wage, getting equivalent to the
value of her labor power. But the capitalist, by so employing the owner of
labor power is seeking to valorize her own money by extracting a value
that is surplus to that value. The illusion is cemented by the form in which
the worker is paid, or what Marx called ‘the wage form’: the fact that the
exchange value the worker receives for her labor power is in the form of
a statement documenting how much work was done in terms of time or
objects produced.2 This implies that what the worker sells is something
quantitative – labor expended – rather than command over a qualitative
feature of people: their labor power with all that that implies for the
possibility of exploitation. It is in these terms that we can understand the
misleading nature of demands like ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.’
In a similar sort of way, the freedom promised by the wage bargain is

going to turn into unfreedom. For while she can take her labor power else-
where she has to take it somewhere. The double-freedom of labor power is
indeed ‘double.’ There is the nice, reassuring bit about the freedom of the
worker to dispose of his labor power as he sees fit. There is also the second
freedom which is the ironic ‘freedom’ from the means of production: so
while one can indeed choose one’s employer, one cannot not choose an
employer. In short, the worker confronts a monopoly of the means of
production by the few, and hence a bargaining relation of a very unequal
sort: one that will inevitably result in forking over surplus value, however
much the worker is unaware of it and his consciousness continues to
remain at the level of exchange. This, though, is to touch on only one
aspect of capital’s deceptions.
For, according to Marx, our relations with others under capital are then
experienced as relations between things. For the capitalist the worker
exists only as labor power, for the worker the capitalist exists only as
representative of money capital. Our social relations assume a thing-like
character because of their objectivity and impersonality, as in ‘the effects
of the market’ on our well-being or ‘lack of capital.’ Capitalism separates
but the effect is deceptive. It seemingly fragments social life into so many
different parts that then interact as a matter of what he described as
‘external necessity’:
Only in the eighteenth century, in ‘civil society’, do the various forms of social
connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private
purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint,
that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most devel-
oped social (from this standpoint, general) relations. (Marx 1857–58: 84)
We live in a world of binaries: labor/capital; agent/structure; ideal/

material; political/economic; and, as Marx points out above, individual/
society. This is in contrast to pre-capitalist forms of society. Dependence
there was personal, as in the dependence of the serf on the feudal lord;
now it is objective in the shape of the market. Our relations to others were
experienced as internal, as defining who we were; now they are external
as we seemingly make choices among possible employers. So while we
cannot not sell our labor power, to whom we sell it is a contingent matter.
If there is an original sin in this matter, a foundational separation, it is

that of primitive accumulation where the immediate producer is sepa-
rated from the means of production, but in the process, as we saw in the
double-freedom of labor power, endowed with rights in her own labor
power, and so separated from feudal lord or slave owner. It is on that basis
that capital develops through the socialization of production, deepening
the separation as it goes: not just individual vs society, as in the quote, but,
with the development of the division of labor, ideal vs material and, as we
will see when we come to discuss the state below, political vs economic.
This sense of separation is extraordinarily important. It is not just capital
and labor, and individual and society that become self-sufficient, inter-
acting in atomistic fashion. Rather, it is all aspects of the social process:
discourse, institutions, the division of labor, technology and, yes, geog-
raphy. Think likewise of some of the other binaries that have tormented
social thought, like nature/society, culture/economy and, to bring it closer
to home, place/space.
These separations cannot endure. Social life is a totality of parts which

are dialectically related to one another, a process of mutual definition,
empowerment and constraint. The division of labor as we experience
it under capitalism is irreducibly capitalist. The same goes for the state
and the ideological forms that we are currently discussing, along with
geography, institutional forms, accepted forms of discourse, social hierar-
chies and technologies. In turn, the accumulation process is conditional
on these parts and the way that they function. Alternatively, take any
particular part and understand it in terms of the others: not difficult.
Accordingly, any centrifugal force triggers off processes that bring it back
into line: states may act in a way that a capitalist class finds uncongenial,
and as Mitterand famously discovered when he tried radical reforms
during his first presidency in France, they will learn their lesson.
Nevertheless, the sense of separation, of a fundamental fragmentation of

the social process is extraordinarily powerful: deeply embedded in the
material conditions of a capitalist society. The idea that we can under-
stand the world in terms of a set of independent forces interacting with
each other, like ‘independent’ variables in a multiple regression equation,
is very, very common indeed – almost universal. It permeates not just
everyday understandings but bourgeois social science. For neo-classical
economists, public policy is just one more independent factor. Equally
common are those treatments of social life which privilege one particular
moment of the social process, ignoring all others, whether it be ecology,
as in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel (1997); technology, as in
Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (1995); or discourse, as in Robert

Downs’s Books that Changed the World (1956).
As Marx made clear in his discussion of Luddism or machine-breaking,

the use to which machines are put, the meaning that they have in the
social process in toto, depends on the particular social relations of
production then dominant.3 Likewise, in his discussion of Wakefield’s
theory of colonization and the unfortunate Mr Peel, means of production
can only function as capital where the double freedom of labor power
applies.4 Nevertheless, this does not stop people from arguing that the
development problem in sub-Saharan Africa is ‘lack of capital’ or the
inadequacies of the state.5
In short, there are just so many mystifications standing in the way of

penetrating capital’s secret. There is more to come. These particular
objectifications entailed by the way capitalism is experienced also tend
to get naturalized and dehistoricized; treated as universals that, in their
turn, also deceive. We should remember that only under capitalism is the
urge to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ generalized as everyone, of necessity,
is drawn into relations of commodity exchange. But for Adam Smith
the propensity was universal, dating back to the dawn of history. The
danger of naturalization is patently political. Even while unintended, it
makes what is historic into something eternal and therefore unalterable.
Capitalism becomes not a social order but a natural one, and as a result it
is pointless to try to do away with it. Struggle against capital as a mode of
production makes no sense; it is here to stay and always has been. As Marx
argues in the Appendix to Capital Volume 1:
… it is evident even now that this is a very convenient method by which to

demonstrate the eternal validity of the capitalist mode of production and
to regard capital as an immutable natural element in human existence. The
process of labor is nothing but work itself, viewed at the moment of its creative
activity. Hence the universal features of the labor process are independent of
every specific social development. The materials and means of labor, a pro-
portion of which consists of the products of previous work, play their part in
every labor process in every age and in all circumstances. If, therefore, I label
them ‘capital’ … then I have proved that the existence of capital is an eternal
law of nature of human production and that the Kirghiz who cuts down rushes
with a knife he has stolen from a Russian so as to weave them together to make
a canoe is just as true a capitalist as Herr von Rothschild. (1867/1976: 998–9)
The capitalist state
Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the state
has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing
more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt
both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their
property and interests. (Marx and Engels 1846/1978: 79–80)
In contrast to previous class societies, an important feature of capitalism

is the way which the extraction of surplus value relies purely upon forces
of an economic nature: what Marx called “the silent compulsion of eco-
nomic relations” (1867/1976: 899). Both the slave societies of antiquity
and of feudalism relied on direct force or what has come to be called
‘extra-economic coercion’: slaves would be whipped, as indeed might
be serfs who failed to provide feudal dues.6 But in capitalism there is
an interesting separation: extra-economic coercion is expelled from the
labor process and located in an institution separate from the economic,
the state. Owners of money capital have the power to organize the labor
process and to extract a surplus but that power is underpinned by law
and the enforcement of that law by the state: the law of absolute private
property and of contractual relations. The coercive power of the state then
remains important in the process of primitive accumulation: the expro-
priation of land from indigenous populations, the slow withering away of
peasant ownership through taxation, the law of bankruptcy.7
The state, therefore, underpins that double freedom of labor power that is
the necessary condition for the capitalist mode of production. But as such
it also has to take on responsibilities that private property and the compe-
tition of capitals one with another foreclose. Production depends on the
creation of certain common conditions that go beyond the enforcement
of private property rights. These include facilitating the creation of trans-
portation links, and the shared infrastructure of cities like water supply
and sewerage, through the law of eminent domain. Without that law,
exclusively private rights in property would give the owner the right to
hold out for an extortionate rent in exchange for a right of way, and thus
frustrate the creation of that shared physical infrastructure necessary to
the socialization of production.
In the case of the necessary social infrastructure – the supply of money,

the various forms of relief for the industrial reserve army (unemployment
compensation, the workhouse), the protection of labor power from the

self-destructive impulses of capitalist competition – it is the competition
between capitals that gets in the way. Private banks can be the ultimate
providers of money, but competition with other banks can tempt them
into undisciplined lending and result in inflation of their currency’s value
and a loss of business confidence. As for laws to protect labor, to provide
income supplements in case of unemployment, and healthcare, given the
competition between capitals none of these will be provided unilaterally;
and this because to do so risks subsidizing other capitals and giving them
a relative advantage. The coercive power of the state with respect to all
capitals allows the suspension of these contradictions; though that does
not mean to say that they will not be posed in other forms, at other geo-
graphical scales, perhaps, as states find their powers compromised by the
ability of firms to move beyond their jurisdictional boundaries.
From the standpoint of the reproduction of capitalist social relations

through the promotion of the accumulation process, however, this
particularization of the capitalist state, its formal separation from the
economy, can also be problematic. For if the state is formally independent
of capitals, how can there be a guarantee that it will in fact underpin that
process? How and why is the capitalist state ‘capitalist’? One answer to
this is in terms of the direct involvement of capitals with the state:8 the
pressures of business on the state through its various lobbying activities;
the ability of capitalists to fund election campaigns; a congruence in
social background and ideological formation between capital and those
who hold elected and non-elected office in the state; the formation of
understandings between state officials, elected or otherwise on regulatory
boards and the businesses so regulated; and the power that businesses
have in that relationship through the information and expertise at their
disposal.
A second approach asserts that whoever gets to hold a position in the state
is immaterial; legislators do not have to share their concrete ideological
formation in schools and university with the captains of industry for them
to work in a way congruent with their wishes. Equally irrelevant are, say,
the rules governing the funding of election campaigns (obviously very
variable between one capitalist state and another). Rather, what is central
to making the capitalist state ‘capitalist’ are the structural constraints to
which the state is subject and the fact that it has its own reasons for ensur-
ing that capital accumulation continues to occur. These reasons have to
do with the sources of the state’s own revenues. The last thing a capitalist
state wants is a slowdown in economic growth since it will erode growth
in its own revenues and therefore its ability to put together policies that
can create winning coalitions at the next election. Likewise, a run on the
currency as a result of a loss of business confidence can increase its burden
of debts as it takes on foreign loans in order to bridge temporary shortfalls
in revenue; or alternatively the rate of interest that foreign banks charge
for funding loans for, say, state investments in public infrastructure, can
increase. And to the extent that there is a crisis of business confidence and
the economy contracts so more people are out of work, fewer find their
standards of living improving, and there is demand for a change at the
next election.
While certainly relevant, what these explanations ignore is the impor-

tance of capitalist ideology in the most abstract sense. The state is capi-
talist to the extent that it reflects and acts in accordance with the ruling
ideology; and the necessary involvement of all in the material workings
of a capitalist society virtually ensures that that will be the case. But ‘vir-
tually’ because in order for the state to so reflect that ideology, it has to
mimic it, express its fundamental rules, and not least, those of ‘equality’
and ‘freedom.’ ‘Equality’ now, not in the sense of the exchange relation
and how everyone’s money is as good as anyone else’s, but now equality
before the law, where each has a vote, and can be elected to parliament,
though clearly, as with equality in exchange, a deceptive one.9 Likewise, in
the advanced capitalist states, one is ‘free’: but now free to express one’s
opinions, form a political party, choose between them, even while the
choices available are all bourgeois, and with no interest in overthrowing
capitalist rule.
Historically, those freedoms and equalities had to be fought for and they
were fought for in the – now apparent – mistaken belief that it would make
a difference. In all of the advanced capitalist countries, there is a history of
exclusion from the suffrage that only gives way slowly to inclusion of the
adult population as a whole. In Western Europe, a property franchise was
common; a person had to own so much in property before being allowed
to vote. Men were granted the franchise before women. In the USA, and
in the former settler colonies, the indigenous population and people of
color were long excluded from a state that clearly existed only for the
(white) settlers. The great fear, of course, was that if the working class, the
dispossessed, obtained the right to vote, then their class privileges would
be at an end. Clearly this did not occur. Democracy has proven perfectly
compatible with the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production.
Therborn sheds some light on this:
One of the main reasons why nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberals
could deny the compatibility of democracy with private property was their
dread that popular legislatures and municipal bodies would greatly increase
taxation. However, they were disregarding the elasticity and expansive capac-
ity of capitalism. … Rises in productivity make possible a simultaneous
increase of both rates of exploitation and real incomes of the exploited masses.
(1977: 30)
Concern about granting the franchise was not just about the possibility
of punitive taxation of high incomes. It was also that an enfranchised
working class would legislate reforms in labor law that would greatly
enhance their bargaining power with capital and so threaten profitabil-
ity. Therborn points out that these concerns disregarded ‘the elasticity
and expansive capacity of capitalism.’ The reason they ‘disregarded it,’
however, was that those expansive capacities were not yet in evidence.
‘Freedom’ and ‘equality,’ thus achieved, have turned out to be a dubious

prize. On the one hand, the labor movement was seduced into the
parliamentary route that would inevitably result in its assimilation into
the logics of the welfare state, as Przeworski (1980) described. It would
commit it, through its party political representatives, to a competition for
the vote of a (stratified) working class, and with the ‘middle classes’ more
inclined to ally with the propertied and their anxieties about taxation and
subsidizing those they regarded as the feckless. Leadership would assume
new significance and those with the social as well as political skills would
take over. The necessity for secrecy in securing deals would then seal the
alienation of the voters from the leadership, as indeed Bachrach (1967)
claimed it would in his concept of democratic elitism.10 They would have
to be satisfied with modest distributional gains, of which the welfare state
was the major achievement, and structural transformation would be
impossible.
Reformism is fine from capital’s standpoint. It means business as usual,

even while the push to innovate and stay ahead of the demands of the
taxman was intensified. In fact, it would be intensified in the form of
the proliferation of new consumer goods. This was the affluent society
defined by J K Galbraith in a widely praised book of 1958.11 Now the ide-
ological screws could be turned up a notch. The idea of ‘freedom’ could

be given a new meaning: it became not so much a question of freedom to
choose who to work for, always assuming that you could find somebody
willing to employ you, as freedom to choose from the cornucopia of cars,
washing machines, houses, lawn mowers and lots more. As Alan Wolfe
(1982) argued, this would be the occasion for governments of all stripes to
embrace the virtues of ‘growth’ and to compete in terms of mildly varying
programs through which it could be accomplished. Henceforth, growth
would become a crucial part of the state’s ideological armory: a means
of securing mass support without challenging the prerogatives of capital.
A new vocabulary would emerge around ideas of ‘trickle down’ and

‘raising all boats,’ and the danger of ‘killing the golden goose’ through
redistributional policies that, on close examination, were far from radical.
Rather, instead of equality of outcomes, the goal should be enhancing
equality of opportunity (Parkin 1971: Chapter 4); though carefully avoid-
ing mention of a contradiction that makes the latter unattainable in the
absence of the former.
Notes
1. “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly
interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men,
the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of
men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The
same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics,
laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers
of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned
by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse
corresponding to these …” (Marx and Engels 1848/1998: 47).
2. As in piece-wages, multiplied by the ‘rate’ per object produced.
3. “It took both time and experience before the workers learnt to distinguish
between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer
their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of
society which utilizes those instruments” (Marx 1867/1976: 554–5).
4. “First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money,
means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not
as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative – the
wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own
free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation
between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he
moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means
of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had

the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class,
men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, ‘Mr. Peel was
left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’
Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English
modes of production to Swan River!” (Marx 1867/1976: 932–3).
5. Cox and Negi (2010).
6. It is important to note that the contrasting ideas of economic and
non-economic coercion only make sense under capitalism, because only then
does there seem to be an ‘economic’ moment that is separate from a ‘political’
one. It seems unlikely that such a distinction would have been drawn in this
way under feudalism.
7. Taxation forces immediate producers to produce in part for the market,
which then opens them up to some competition with others, the possibility
of indebtedness, and then dispossession.
8. See the debate between Poulantzas and Miliband (Poulantzas and Miliband
1972).
9. Equality before the law has to be seriously qualified by the very fact of
a market in the ‘best’ lawyers and the class prejudices of the judicial branch
more generally.
10. See also Hindess (1971).
11. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.
PART II
Geography and marxism
As we embark on the second part of this short book, it is useful to situate

the question of why indeed there should be a Marxist geography. This
breaks down into two questions: why geography needs Marxism; also
why Marxism needs geography. To start with the first: any social science,
including human geography, needs a social theory. Human geography
lacks one intrinsic to itself. This is in contrast to anthropology, economics
and sociology, though all have very different sorts of takes, at least in their
mainstream versions. Political science, on the other hand, is more like
human geography: a borrower of the social theories of others.
Human geography’s needs are distinct. It deals with a highly heterogene-

ous set of social relations. Economics can and does confine itself to the
economic, but a particular definition of it in which exchange relations
dominate: how, that is, markets, are the most efficient way of allocating
scarce resources to desired ends. Anthropology, in accordance with its
long-term focus on pre-capitalist social forms, has tended to emphasize
kinship relations. Sociology is a bit broader, though with a dominant
focus that goes back to its origin in the social dislocations of the nine-
teenth century: i.e., a focus on the normative and on social integration.
Human geography’s needs are less channeled. The different systematic
fields of economic, cultural, and political geography are suggestive.
Adding to this complexity is the fact that historically it is a field that has
dealt both with social relations over space, as in most work in economic
geography; and how our relations with nature are socially mediated, as in
political ecology.
GEOGRAPHY AND MARXISM 71
In these regards, Marxist theory has much to recommend it. It embraces

social life in its entirety; its fundamental materialist assumption is about
the relation of people to nature, including nota bene, their own nature.
Further advantages are that it can cope with change both social and
ecological, that other sorts of social theory, like Weberian, classical and
neo-classical economics, have difficulties with. This is because of its
emphasis on contradiction and how change is an attempt to suspend it.
Its major rival in human geography has been critical human geography,
the products of which are now commonplace in the field.1 It has radical
pretensions but is ultimately pluralistic in its approach. Explanation tends
to be in terms of the interaction of diverse, more or less independent,
self-sustaining conditions or forces. The contrast is with Marxism, which
privileges the sphere of production and how it permeates, and is sup-
ported, by other facets of social life, including institutions, discourse and,
of course, geography. Critical human geography also has trouble with
transformation and this is because it lacks the concept of contradiction
so central to Marxist understanding. In short, there are good reasons
why Marxism should be the human geographer’s choice when it comes
to social theory.
But if geography needs Marxism, so does the reverse apply; Marxism

can usefully expand its understanding of the world by incorporating
the insights of human geography. Capitalism, or more accurately, the
capitalist form of production, is the ultimate driving force of the contem-
porary social process: it shapes and makes use of, transforming as it goes,
everything that it requires and controlling everything that might resist
its onward march, though not always successfully. It needs supportive
institutions, including a state; discourses that reinforce its social relations
rather than undermine them; a division of labor; a relation to nature;
and a particular geography or what Harvey referred to as a spatial fix.
All these aspects are internally related to one another: they cannot act
independently without being checked or facilitated by the others as their
own necessary conditions. Things have to be located, and in a way that
enhances the accumulation process. Geography internalizes all other
parts of the totality of social relations just as they internalize geography:
not just divisions of labor, therefore but spatial divisions of labor which
can then be mobilized by capital as a wedge to undermine the resistance
of the working class (Clark 1981); not just a capitalist state structure but
a structure that reflects geographic difference while reinforcing ideas of
territory; and a new discourse that reflects how capitalist development

encounters geographic difference – one of ‘location,’ ‘world cities,’ ‘com-
muting’ and the various ‘belts’ – axial belts, rustbelts, wheat belts, and so
on. Marxism cannot ignore geography, therefore. It is an essential aspect
of capitalist development. On the other hand, mainstream social theory
can and does ignore geography; another reason why human geography
needs Marxism.
The remainder of the book is to be read with these claims in mind. Five
chapters follow and each can be taken in a stand-alone way. While there
are connections between some of them, they are not highlighted. Each,
however, represents a continuing and major theme in Marxist writings
about human geography.
Note
1. For a critical review, see Cox (2016).
8 The urbanization of capital
and struggles around the
capitalist city
Urbanization and the socialization of production
Capitalist development has led to immense change in the geographic

distribution of the world’s population. This has included a dramatic shift
from the countryside to the towns and cities, not to mention the emer-
gence of entirely new cities. Most of the people in the capitalist world
now live in dense concentrations of population, largely divorced from
immediate connections with the surrounding countryside. The crucial
question is: why?
Simply put, it is a matter of the emergence of industrial production on

a much, much larger scale than the humble handicrafts that had charac-
terized the medieval town. The drive to accumulate that is a distinguishing
feature of capitalism, is one that encourages the exploitation of any and
all possibilities of producing on a larger scale. This is because it promises
a more intense technical division of labor, more massive instruments of
labor used by people working together, all yielding reductions in concrete
labor times. Concentrations of workers then mean concentrations of
people around the place of work. This is by no means all, of course; big
factories attract their suppliers, and then the suppliers of the suppliers.
A set of firms performing auxiliary roles in the emerging social division
of labor of the town inevitably comes about: repair services, transport ser-
vices, construction, not to mention all the retailing necessary to support
a large residential population and the various public services. Size begets
size, as in the classic case of economies of agglomeration.
73
The urban question? Or a class question?
The capitalist city was and is a thoroughly contradictory place. On the

one hand, it is necessary to the socialization of production and hence the
accumulation process. On the other, it is conducive to resistance to cap-
italist rule: workers organize against it, and form political parties to curb
its pretensions. Early on, the urban became a cauldron of class tension:
at work, a capitalist class that pushed the working class to the wall,
transformed old ways of doing things, old norms that worked counter to
the logic of a pre-capitalist economy (Thompson 1971); and in the living
place, a landlord class that added to the pressures. How would expression
be given to discontent and alienation? The collective nature of work, the
fact of working with others facing the same conditions, served to promote
the development of a working class aware of its very different interests,
social stakes that were in opposition, and continue to be in opposition, to
those of employers and landlords. It would be in the factories and in the
mines that the labor movement would be born: spontaneously breaking
the machines that seemed to threaten unemployment, and then forming
labor unions to contest wages, and health and safety, and ultimately to
press for the right to vote; cooperative movements to sidestep the high
prices of the grocery stores; and then Labour Parties, Social Democratic
Parties and other parties of the left with the goal of legislating on behalf of
the interests of the working class.
Early on, people talked about an urban question. But it was, and remains,
more fundamentally, a class question. The urban simply intensified
tensions that had their origin at the point of production and in the living
place. This was partly because of the way in which the concentration of
workers allowed a sense of shared interests to emerge. A distinct feature
of the age was the occupational community where people worked in the
same industry, possibly for the same employer, living together, intermar-
rying in a way that promoted a convergence of opinion. In addition, to
the tensions of the workplace were added those of living place anxieties
around rent and eviction.
The discontent, manifest in so many ways, struck at least concern in

the capitalist class: how would resistance to their rule be defused so as
to allow accumulation to continue? There were a number of different
strategies. The fact that the joint stock firm was in its infancy, meant that
THE URBANIZATION OF CAPITAL 75
most firms were owner-operated. This opened up the way for a more
personal approach to counter the impersonality of the workplace. Owners
got to know ‘their’ workers by name and generally treated them as part
of an extended family (Joyce 1980; Huberman 1987). The goal was to
create a degree of personal loyalty to the firm and to negate the hostility
that might surround the wage and conditions of work. A development of
this would then be the model community: a mix of paternalism and the
company town.1 The employer provided sanitary housing, communal
facilities like a library and baths, perhaps outdoor recreational facilities,
but excluded taverns. Libraries were seen as ‘improving’: if educated, the
worker would understand his position and accept it. The tavern or public
house was anathema: for the employer, it meant that the worker was
wasting his money on drink, missing Monday’s work through a hangover
and then demanding an increase in wages to make up the difference.
In short, geography was defined as the problem. Rearrange the working

population and the facilities available to them, and social peace would
return. In other instances, national policy stepped in with a different
spatial fix: push the working class out of the city with its high rents and
dissolve the occupational communities so conducive to dissent and revolt.
Through granting the right of eminent domain to the railroad companies,
allowing them to purchase property along a right of way and then to clear
housing to make way for stations, national governments facilitated the
arrival of the railway into the heart of the city. People were certainly dis-
placed, but the railway opened up the urban periphery to suburban devel-
opment and promised some mitigation of the pressure on rents in the
center of the city. Government mandates for so-called ‘workmen’s fares’
in exchange for the privileges granted the railroad would then give added
impetus to getting workers on the train and lowering rents (Kellett 1969).
Class contradiction in the living place
Capitalism had profound effects on everyday life, not least on its geog-
raphy. In the cities and towns, it radically separated what had once been
more spatially coincidental: instead of getting up in the morning, going
out and checking on the cattle, perhaps milking them in a barn next to the
house, now people ‘went to work’ and ‘came home’ at night. Workplace
and living place were henceforth radically separate. This was a separation
that would then be deepened by ideas about free time and leisure. Before
capitalism, play and work were more intermingled in their timing. Work
had to be done, but one could schedule breaks as felt. Now, work was pro-
longed and disciplined and only after that were you free to dispose of your
time as you wished: so ‘work time’ vs ‘free time.’ In addition there was
something new that would only slowly acquire a name: ‘the commute.’
And parenthetically we should note here how our categories are rooted
in material practice and the idea of ‘free time’ is a very gendered one.
Capitalism drew on old ideas about gendered divisions of labor, and this
is something to be addressed.
The living place would be the site of a set of seemingly different conflicts,
heightening the mystification of separation. The necessary condition for
them, though, went back to the same source as conflicts in the living place
around conditions of work and wages. Capital’s distributional implica-
tions would feed into living-place conflicts. The most fraught surrounded
the question of housing. Early on, housing was often provided by the
employer. But to the extent that provision could be externalized to a sep-
arate branch of the division of labor – something that in the beginning
would take the form of a landlord class – then the industrial capitalist
preferred to put her money into production. This meant that rent would
be a separate object of conflict as landlords tried to extract as much as
the market would bear, while tenants, squeezed by limits to their wage,
resisted. Housing, its conditions and the rents charged, would become
a major issue for the labor movement, as in demands for rent control and
for the public provision of housing. There would be some amelioration
but it is an issue that refuses to go away: intimately tied up with the con-
tradictions of capitalism, it needs to have its workers housed, but then,
through the activities of those charged in the division of labor with said
provision, it fails. For the tenant, one of the responses to the question of
rent has been to double-up, which has always been a major contributor
to the spread of infection. Early on, the question of public health also
embraced the lack of pure water and sanitary sewers, along with insani-
tary housing. Again, physical well-being as an issue continues but in new
forms, most notably in air pollution; but only ‘most notably.’
There is also the question of social mix. The socialization of production,

and hence the development of the technical division of labor, means that
people with quite different levels of income have to live relatively cheek
by jowl. This has then made social mix a fraught matter, but one with
a long and complex history. The desire for residential separation, realized
in the form of chronic segregation, has morphed over time. In addition
to widespread suspicions of the underclass on the part of the better off,
have been added concerns about schools and the desire to keep those
from poorer home backgrounds out. To some degree, money and its
implications for competitive bidding in the housing market, work to help
the bourgeoisie along with their hangers-on from the better paid strata in
the technical division of labor, to keep ‘them’ at bay. But ‘they’ also want
the neighborhood advantages of the better off: the better schools, distance
from the drug peddlers, the petty thieves who are just as much a problem
for them as for the better off. Social mix is therefore a political issue. Its
fundamental condition, though, is not just material. It is intensified by
the contradiction between social mix and capital’s value system. Capital
accords status and respect to those with money; and if you have it, you
have to display it through appropriate consumption. Accordingly ‘top’
people want to live in ‘top’ neighborhoods, unpolluted by the démunis:
an important stimulus to exclusion, even while the excluders talk loftily
about how apartments and high density homes do not pay their way in
support of local schools; or, better still, how the areas planned in their
midst for public housing are a bad idea because there is no bus provision.
They want exclusion but they are ashamed to admit it: so progress of
a sort.
Ultimately, however, we should not lose sight of the intimate connection,

the internal relation, between contradictions around production and
those around the living place. As we have seen, urbanization is a hugely
important aspect of the socialization of production but also highly con-
tradictory. As the city becomes more attractive to firms in virtue of the
depth of its labor market, the variety of its suppliers and business clients,
its airport and its numerous connections, so there are congestion effects.
Rising real estate values cut into profits. Air pollution can make it less
attractive to the additional workers required by incoming firms. The
journey to work becomes slower and more elongated as workers seek to
avoid higher rents by moving further afield.
These contradictions can be suspended by the densification of housing, by

the construction of new freeways, and by increased suburbanization, but
these attempts can founder on another contradiction: that between work
place and living place. As we have seen, the capitalist mode of production
separates the two in a radical way and then constructs the living place
as a retreat from the point of production: a retreat where one can get
‘closer to nature,’ free from the noise and fumes of traffic. Any attempt to
densify or construct on the last available pieces of land will therefore be
confronted by opposition.2
Silicon Valley is a poster child for all of these effects (Cox 2016b: 20–25):
a rapid expansion of the local economy followed by housing shortages
and rising land prices sensed as a crisis by the IT industry and something
it has tried to mitigate as potential recruits to the labor force struggle to
find housing; and when they do, they push for higher wages to cover the
rents. Meanwhile, some of the smaller local governments have pursued
exclusionary policies: keen to snag the new investments in production
that promise enhanced tax bases, but not so keen on the new housing for
the workers. All is not completely lost. A number of the manufacturers
have reduced their need for labor in Silicon Valley itself by moving the
less demanding aspects of the labor process to smaller towns scattered
throughout the West.3
Bottom line: Contradiction is the key to understanding the transfor-

mation of the capitalist city, as indeed of any capitalist geography. This
means tracing it back to the fundamental contradiction which is that of
class. In the city, workers press for higher wages as congestion effects
click in; workers resisting encroachment of new housing, new freeways or
whatever into what had been sold to them as a retreat from the world of
production. Meanwhile, as production has globalized, this has meant, on
the one hand, increasing pressures in favor of urban growth: the big cities
continue to grow; but, on the other, new opportunities for decentralizing
production to points where the value of labor power is lower.
Transformations
The capitalist city has clearly changed, both in its form and how it
filters and expresses capital’s contradictions. The technical changes,
most notably in mobility, and utterly transformative of urban life, could
hardly have been foreseen, despite capital’s continual push to reduce
its turnover time and the desire of workers for shorter commute times
so as to access the cheaper housing possible in the distant suburbs. The

relations of production, broadly understood, have also changed, to some
degree more predictably. The same applies to state policy. In addressing
these changes, it is important to stress the degree to which they have been
gradual. It is hard to periodize. Cities are dominated by the automobile
and by a built form that both accommodated and stimulated its adoption.
But it certainly did not happen within a decade, or even two. In fact, it is
still happening as families become two-car, and then three-car or more as
adult children get their licenses.
Regardless, the Second World War is often taken as something of

a watershed, but it is only after, say, 1955, that people start talk about the
post-industrial city: a city dominated not by industry, as in the past, but
by corporate headquarters and those services catering to their needs like
corporate investment, corporate law, marketing services, consultants of
all stripes; and then by the big research hospitals and universities.4 Clearly,
a number of things came together for this to happen. Corporations split
off their headquarters functions from their production, which has often
gone to smaller towns; something to be discussed in Chapter 12 on
uneven development. The growth of the research hospitals and universi-
ties is partly on the back of an expansion of the welfare state, particularly
in Western Europe, and on the move to a labor market prioritizing formal
qualifications. But, fundamentally, the post-industrial city is a product
of capital’s changing division of labor and how that has been expressed
spatially; something driven on by capital’s contradictions and the goal of
speeding up the circulation of capital, as we saw in Chapter 6.
The other big change has been the rise, alongside industrial, commercial
and financial capital, of property capital, remarked on, again, in Chapter
6. It takes more concrete shape in the form of the so-called ‘development
industry,’ hugely complex in its structure, some firms more vertically
integrated than others, but characterized by an underlying logic of prac-
tice which can be summed up in two ways. First, a shift in the balance
between custom building and speculative building where construction
takes place ahead of demand. Custom work has not been eliminated, but
it is now, more often than not, orchestrated by the developers who, among
other things, create and sell lots. But the big office buildings, the shopping
centers, the tract housing developments go ahead, by and large, without
purchase or rental agreements ahead of time. And second, the speculative
element then means that property capital is hugely competitive; not so
much in terms of cost as in product. It is an industry characterized by

a succession of ever newer real estate products: the strip shopping center;
the shopping mall open to the sky; and then, the enclosed shopping mall.
The speculative character of property capital sets in motion a process

redolent of that producing the reserve army of labor, but now producing
a reserve army of housing, which has to be somehow eliminated if it
is not to act as a drag on rents. Property capital controls both demand
and supply. On the one hand, there is supply in the form of the allure
of the new product: the up-to-date housing with two, now perhaps
three, garages. This, though, diminishes demand for the ‘out-of-date’
‘old-fashioned’ housing, perhaps with smaller rooms and no garages, so
a housing surplus is created in older parts of the city. And even if you
want to live there, the banks, through their control of mortgage credit,
will make sure that you set your eyes on the suburbs instead. This is the
notorious ‘redlining,’ where banks demur granting loans for the purchase
of real estate that, in virtue of competition from the new stuff out in the
suburbs, is probably going to lose value and therefore be a quite risky sort
of collateral.
In an analogous process, the rise of the suburban shopping center catering

to suburbanizing populations, emptied out retail space in city centers
and, in general, lowered property values there. This would be the context
for attempts to revive the central city, or, more accurately, the fortunes
of those holding real estate there for profit. These took formal shape in
what was known as ‘urban renewal’ – an interesting piece of ideological
double-speak, given that the people pushing it would not have cared less
if their property had been located somewhere else, but suffering similar
falls in value.5 How this played out varied between Western Europe and
the USA. In the former, the decline of the central city was delayed by
the strong opposition of the center city retailers, and particularly the
small, local, owner-operated stores to the creation of what were known
in Britain, at least, as ‘out-of-town’ shopping centers. Capital is mobile,
but it also has to be fixed, generating conflicts to be reviewed in the final
chapter.
Ideological responses
There have been two dominant understandings informing policy. One

has been more revealing of the underlying tensions of capitalist society
than the other, without actually identifying their root cause. This is to
understand them as a function of unequal incomes: a matter of the more
affluent vs the less so, and the ability of the former to create a city that
works for them but not for the poorer. In part this has worked without
much in the way of direct state intervention. Gentrification is a classic
instance, the wealthy displacing the poorer simply in virtue of the com-
petitive bidding process. The distribution of physicians tends to track
closely the income geography of the city. There are the food deserts that
recall an earlier literature on how ‘the poor pay more’ (Caplovitz 1967);
lacking the easy mobility of the more affluent, their ability to shop around
is limited and they are often confined to small mom and pop stores with
extortionate prices.
Territorial struggles have then kicked in. An exclusive suburb comes

with ‘good’ schools, open space and views of distant countryside. But to
enforce that exclusivity and the advantages it provides, since lots more
cherish it, you need the help of the state, either in the form of exclusionary
land use of a formal sort, which is the American case; or of an informal
sort: British Greenbelts were never intended as an exclusionary weapon
but that is how they are now used, with knock-on effects for gentrification
of villages as housing in nearby cities becomes more scarce. These privi-
leges of money – since you need it not just to live in an exclusive suburb
but in a small greenbelt village – have then become politically fraught.
It does not take much imagination to see that one solution would be a dra-
matic redistribution of income. This, though, is to bring us full face with
the contradictory nature of capital: while there can be some redistribution
of income, and some countries are more equal than others, it can only
be within very stringent limits. Not least, it could, through the saving it
would encourage among the less affluent, reduce inequality in wealth and
investments in the stock market and enhanced pensions for all. But that is
to encroach on the separation of immediate producers from the means of
production: what you do not want is a working class that through its stock
market gains or early retirement provisions is less interested in working
on capital’s terms – what it is willing to pay as a wage and its conditions
of work. Policies that promise redistribution of income cannot deliver

beyond a certain, quite limited point. Parenthetically, this is an excellent
example of what happens when some aspect of capitalist society is taken
in its all too obvious apartness and treated as the key to reform: the capi-
talist totality of which it is, in fact, an internally related part, will bite back.
The other response in the way people have thought about the city has been
through what one might call ‘the urban ideology’: a dysfunctional geogra-
phy that can be handled by deploying a technical expertise – the planners,
the municipal engineers, the public health officials. This ideology made its
appearance very early on, and led to a romanticization of the countryside
and what had been lost: an anti-urbanism that threads through the think-
ing about model communities at one extreme to fascist ideology at the
other (Cox 2016b: 68–72). Abolishing the big city was never on the cards:
the gains it provided for the socialization of production, capitalist style,
were too much to risk losing. Instead, the effort has been to plan urban
geography by keeping noxious uses away from residential areas; making
sure that people live in sanitary housing by the application of building
and housing codes; by the work of municipal engineers in ensuring
potable water and the evacuation of sewage; and through the oversight
of public health officials. In short, a bureaucratic response that can gain
public approbation because the state is seen, falsely, as a neutral agent
attending to society’s problems and with reference to a supposedly objec-
tive, bias-free knowledge. But, of course, none of this comes remotely
close to the (class) truth, and the property industry has been quick to
mobilize these powers of local government to its purpose: a planning
that complements their own; the extension of water and sewer lines to
their particular developments; pressure to upgrade housing codes and
so enhance demand for their – naturally – upgraded housing; opposing
changes in land use plans that will affect demand for their developments;
and claiming how their shopping center developments will generate
employment without reference to the employment elsewhere that will, as
a result, be reduced.
The state
The difference that urbanization makes to the way capital’s contradictions

take on an enhanced intensity has long been recognized by the way in
which states have organized themselves territorially. For the most part,
cities have been treated as separate units of local government, cementing
further the urban ideology. The distinctiveness of so-called ‘urban prob-
lems’ has then been further recognized in what is sometimes called ‘urban
policy.’6 Nevertheless, in all capitalist countries, stronger in some like
the United Kingdom, weaker in others like the United States, there has
been a steady change in the topography of power from which the central
branches of the state have emerged as the big winners. Countries have
become integrated spaces of accumulation, to the extent that it makes
sense to talk about ‘the national economy.’ The subsequent mobility of
capital and of workers has meant a sharpening of the class struggle at the
national level: a national organization of the labor movement in order
to counter the wage-cost competition of capital, while capital has sought
the help of the national government in countering labor’s pretensions.
As government expanded, so, in virtue of the possibilities of capital and
the wealthy playing one local government off against another by moving
around in search of lower taxes, more central branches had advantages
in raising the money. Accordingly, local governments are limited in what
they can do by national regulations. Money is made available but on the
terms of the central government.
In a context of the uneven development that is typical of capitalist soci-

eties, this is a source of tensions of a territorial sort: claims that some
cities are getting more from the central government than their fair share,
whatever that is; and accusations of territorial exploitation where some
cities receive less from the central government in expenditures than
they provide in the form of revenues, often a dubious argument and one
which, in any case, serves to underline the way in which territory trumps
class in common understandings. The other argument is that of the spec-
ificity of cities: how central government fails to appreciate local contexts
in, say, its planning policies or its ‘one-size fits all’ education or housing
policies.7 This has occurred once more against the background of appeals
to the territorial: to the national, to the city, to city government, which has
enhanced the power of those ideological responses that work to counter,
whether intendedly or not, those of class.
* * *
The territorial character of the city and of struggles around it will be

picked up again, and put in a wider context in the final chapter. For now
we should note that aside from a discussion of health and sanitation
in the city, ecological issues have been by and large bracketed. Yet, any
and every socialization of production, whether a city or a country, is an
ecological project. Capital inevitably engages with nature, whether it is
the natural powers of workers in the form of labor power, or the nature
that is appropriated as raw materials, fashioned into instruments of labor
or employed to speed up the labor process. It is to the questions raised by
this ecological relationship that we turn next.
Notes
1. Examples include Saltaire and Bournville in England and Pullman on what at
the time was the edge of Chicago.
2. The so-called ‘garden grabbing’ case in England is classic. See Cox (2016b:
266–70).
3. Historically, capitalist firms wanted to concentrate workers geographically
whether in the form of a large workplace employing thousands or because of
the advantages of proximity to other firms. This concentration facilitated, in
many ways, the formation of strong labor movements keen to curb capitalist
pretensions. In Flanders, this led to policies of housing and rail subsidies
aimed at keeping the workers in the countryside (De Decker 2008). It is
a contradiction, however, that endures and one that has led to attempts to
move production away from larger concentrations (Clark 1981).
4. For a good discussion, see Mollenkopf (1983: 20–36).
5. For an excellent discussion of the (class) politics of urban renewal, see Marc
Weiss (1980).
6. Intriguingly, cities are not units typically recognized in electoral systems. The
need for approximate equality of populations across voting districts means
that smaller cities are part of larger districts, while big cities are divided up.
7. This, ironically, is an advantage of highly centralized states like France.
Education and police are national responsibilities, but the so-called field
services know that they will get nowhere if they do not cooperate with urban
government and achieve some mutual understanding.
9 Marxism, nature and
human geography
Context
Human geography has had a long history of involvement with questions

of nature, at least with that nature that is external to people, or what was
known as the ‘natural environment.’ Up until the 1960s, it is fair to say
that it occupied the center ground of the discipline. Human geographers
studied the relation between people and their natural environment, their
strategies of adaptation, how environmental conditions affected the geog-
raphy of settlement, land-use, and lines of movement. This focus under-
went significant retreat during the 1960s, as ‘space relations’ became the
touchstone of thinking and research. This suggested that space was some-
thing independent of nature, as in talk about the ‘friction of distance’; but
on closer inspection the ‘friction’ turned out to be that of the underlying
natural material (Sayer 1985): going was slower over mountains, and
often easier along rivers than over land. This exclusion of space from
questions of nature continues in human geography, and is limiting.
Meanwhile, and outside the field, there were other changes in a wider
public consciousness that would affect its future development. From the
1960s on, the relation to nature as defined thus, started to receive wider
critical attention, as in milestone contributions like Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring (1962), the Ehrlichs’ The Population Bomb (1968), and
Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons (1968). Anxieties about
air and water pollution became widespread and then an explicit focus of
concern of the US federal government with the formation in 1970 of the
Environmental Protection Agency. In human geography’s radical wing,
which began to take shape in the early 1970s, these concerns would be
85
echoed in something called political ecology: the very title emphasized

that power had now entered into discussion of human geography’s
interest in nature. This is a field that still retains a strong radical core, but
Marxism, while overlapping, provides somewhat different emphases.
The relation to nature is absolutely fundamental to Marx’s understanding

of people in their social relations. The most obvious expression of this is
the relation that is external to the human being: the object of our labor in
order to secure means of subsistence. It is also, though, a matter of how
people relate to their own nature and their ability to intervene in it, some-
thing that is naturally given as Marx explained in his famous description
of the labor process:
Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which
man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism
between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of
nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his
arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in
a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon exter-
nal nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own
nature. He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects
the play of its forces to his own sovereign power. (1867/1976: 283)
This purposeful intervention then continues outside the labor process

narrowly conceived. People eat and drink. They take care to protect
themselves from infection. They intervene in their own reproductive
behavior. They build shelters to keep themselves warm, and then heat
those shelters.
The fetishization of nature
In the section of the Grundrisse on pre-capitalist social formations, Marx

takes a different but complementary take on the labor process. In the
quote above, he is referring to the labor process outside of any particular
social conditions. Here he changes tack, comparing how the individual
relates to the natural conditions of his labor under pre-capitalist forms
with how it is under capitalism. In the former, he has “an objective mode
of existence in his ownership of the land, an existence presupposed to his
activity, and not merely as a result of it; a presupposition of his activity
MARXISM, NATURE AND HUMAN GEOGRAPHY 87
just like his skin, his sense organs, which, of course he also reproduces
and develops etc. in the life process, but which are nevertheless presup-
positions of this process of his reproduction …” (1857–58/1973: 485;
emphasis in the original). The advent of capitalism requires the sundering
of this unity. Immediate producers are now separated from the land as
their possession; land as the necessary precondition for their activity
which then mixes with the land to transform that unity without losing
its organic character. Henceforth they confront those natural conditions
as the possession of someone else: as something external to them and to
which they relate contingently depending on, for example, the state of the
labor market and state rules regarding the length of the workday and age
of retirement. Nature becomes a thing, to be confronted on the coal face,
to be manipulated, or to be experienced as the picturesque by a trip into
the countryside. It has become isolated as a force in itself, devoid of those
social relations that make these meanings possible; another of capital’s
separations, therefore, and something ahistoric, as if those who lived in
the Middle Ages enjoyed the English countryside. This has several effects
of an exquisitely ideological character.
‘Natural’ disasters
This was an early focus of political ecology, in part a reaction to common
perceptions, but also to how those understandings were endorsed by
academic research, as in work on the ‘perception of natural hazards’:1 how
did people understand events like floods or storm surges and how did
those understandings affect how they reacted? The repertoire of ‘natural’
disasters was quite limited here but not in the public mind where floods
joined with famines, wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis and, more recently
of course, new infectious diseases, all widely understood as ‘natural disas-
ters’ or, in the parlance of the insurance industry, ‘acts of God.’
The critique of this idea took early shape in a discussion of the idea of
famines as natural disasters. A series of famines in the West African Sahel
had been so designated, but Michael Watts (1983a: 245–57; 1983b) set
out to show how these were not just a matter of periods of low rainfall
and therefore ‘natural.’ Historically, the social relations of production had
been such as to insure against serious food shortage. French colonialism,
with its taxes indifferent to year-on-year variation in weather conditions,
its insistence on the production of cash crops for sale, and the collapse of
the grain stores put in place by pre-colonial rulers, then exposed peasants
to food shortage. In other words, famine was far from natural. It was
very closely bound up with production relations and, in this instance, the
attempt to impose the rules of commodity production on peasants.
More generally, there seem to be two major arguments against the natu-
ralness of ‘natural’ disasters. The first is the one that Watts highlighted:
particular social relations of production can make people more or less
vulnerable to climatic shifts, wildfires or floods. The second is that natural
forces are not as natural as one might assume. Once one incorporates
people into our understanding of nature and of environmental change,
then things look different. Deforestation upstream obviously enhances
the likelihood of flooding and of soil erosion. Climate change is increasing
the intensity of hurricanes and of the damage that they cause, but people
are far from innocent with respect to that change, and capitalism and its
embrace of fossil fuels is a major culprit.
Malthusianism
A common line of reasoning when talking about capital’s contradictions
has been what is known as ‘malthusianist.’ One might claim that Thomas
Malthus is at the origin of that, but that is to give him a little too much
credit. In a world where nature in the imagination is sprung loose from its
social relations, it is an almost obvious response to issues of shortage and
scarcity in the world.2 Malthus’s argument was that the rate at which pop-
ulation grows exceeds that at which food resources increase. This relation
would be checked by purposeful intervention into reproduction, as, for
example, through abstinence; or by the effects of famine, war and pesti-
lence. The fact that he recognized the role of purposeful behavior suggests
that his view of the world was not crudely biological. Nevertheless, the
idea of some balance between people and resources has continued to
weigh heavily in understandings of economic history and development.
Esther Boserup’s (1965) theory of agricultural intensification is taken

as a refutation of Marx since she saw population growth as something
that would stimulate increased food production, but the underlying
assumptions of a fundamentally biological relation controlling human
life remained in place. The role that production relations historically
played in raising agricultural yields went unremarked. Highly ambitious
was Wilkinson’s (1973) ecological theory of the industrial revolution
as enunciated in Poverty and Progress, with the intriguing subtitle An
Ecological Model of Economic Development. Wilkinson assumed some

state of ecological equilibrium in which population was held in balance
by rates of environmental exploitation. Like Malthus, he saw reproductive
behavior as important to maintaining this balance. The initial question
then becomes: what upsets this equilibrium so that the exploitation of
nature can be intensified and population can increase? He has no good
answer to this, but his subsequent logic is clear. As population pressure
increased, the industrial revolution in Western Europe was initially
a substitution of mineral resources for land-based ones: e.g., coal for
firewood, and steam trains for horses, which allowed land to be switched
from producing hay to producing food crops. Such substitutions neces-
sitated increased capital equipment and tools and an increased workload
which in turn necessitated the need for more technical substitutions. The
competition for scarce resources then led to a breakdown of communal
land arrangements of the sort prevalent under feudalism, the privatization
of land and the emergence of a class society. In other words, who needs
capitalism to get the industrial revolution going when natural processes
can take care of it?
‘Nature’ as a consumption good

An early reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the growth of cities was
what is now known as the Romantic movement, apparent in literature,
music, art and intellectual life as a whole. What is interesting about it
for our purposes here, is its exaltation of a world that was largely past;
most notably, the supposedly unspoiled aesthetic virtues of the rural.
Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey is classic:3 the contrast of a sylvan scene
far from the turmoil of the city. This is a particular version of nature: as
something to be sensually experienced, explored and enjoyed as a leisure
time pursuit. This remains an extraordinarily common feature of life
under capitalism; of its discourse and of its practice. Without it, it is hard
to make sense of organizations like the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society,
or the Ramblers’ Associations and the Cyclists’ Tourist Clubs so common
in Great Britain at the turn of the century, nor practices like the second
home in the country. Again, it is something that capital has sought to
commodify, adding new elements to the landscape like the seaside resort,
the spa town, the Sunbelt retirement community or the (leafy) suburb.
It is not simply a selective externalization of nature as a thing in itself that

is important: a contrast to the nature that is equally external but experi-
enced as the sweat, toil and dust of a construction site or the horrors of
a slaughterhouse. In its material expressions and practices it is also some-
thing enabled by the very specific disciplines of capital as a mode of pro-
duction. What ensues with the rise of the capitalist workplace is a rigorous
separation between work time and what will become known as ‘leisure’
time: the day versus the evening; the work week versus the weekend. State
provision for holiday time and retirement age would then broaden out
this demarcation between work time and time outside of work. This has
then allowed for new forms of the commodification of nature.
Ecological Marxism
Since the early 1990s, a new literature has emerged; this in the context,
initially at least, of growing anxieties about the exhaustion of fossil fuels,
most notably oil; and latterly, the very real prospect of global warming.
The emphases vary, some more or less confining themselves to the deple-
tion of ‘resources’ (Altvater 2007; Moore 2012, 2014); and others which
are more all-embracing.4 The essential take-off point is that they focus on
a contradiction between accumulation and nature as we know it; some-
thing already apparent in Marx but which he did not emphasize except
when addressing labor power as a natural force.5
That there is a contradiction worth attending to is clear. Yet insofar as it

is a question of increasing costs of minerals, foodstuffs and labor power,
it is a challenge that capital has shown itself capable of suspending time
and time again. Nature has its own metabolisms, its own growth cycles,
its own conditions: seeds are planted, germinate and then take their own
sweet way in maturing to the point at which they can be harvested; people
need to be fed and have some period of rest, at the very least; trees can take
years before they can be harvested as lumber; there are climates in which
plant growth is possible year round, but only if water can be made avail-
able; elsewhere, there might be sufficient light but insufficient warmth.
Coal takes millennia to form and requires very particular climatic con-
ditions; its formation is on such a different timescale as to be irrelevant.
Carbon dioxide eventually gets assimilated through processes of photo-
synthesis, chemical weathering and absorption by the oceans, but at a rate
vastly slower than that at which it is being ejected into the atmosphere.
Capital, on the other hand, has its own logics, and these require that
nature be bent to its ways; it is something to be mastered, controlled
and diverted to the production of surplus value. The biotic processes on
which agriculture depends have been a particular frustration since they
tie capital up for a lengthy period of time; whereas capital’s goal is to
maximize the rate at which it circulates through its different phases so
as to mop up more and more surplus labor. The labor power of people
is equally a natural force with its own logics. Unlike a machine, people
are intelligent, sentient beings and these attributes are not left outside
when they enter the place of work. When the capitalist starts replacing
them with machines they will react; unlike, that is, the machines that were
replaced by the new ones.
In short, nature is a problem for capital. It has to conform to capital’s

logics but how to do it? It is something to be mastered and is. The animal
reproductive cycle from birth to the ominous ‘market weight’ can be and
is shortened through so-called ‘confined animal feeding operations’ or
CAFOs. The logic: hinder that movement of animals which simply wastes
the energy that they convert from their feed, and that, along with growth
hormones, will allow them to put weight on faster. Capital can then cir-
culate more quickly, and so absorb more surplus labor. As for field crops,
genetics has done, and continues to do, wonders in speeding up growth
to maturity. The supposed triumphs of capital over nature are legion: e.g.,
irrigation, fish farming, poly-tunnels, monoculture. And when the rate
at which a resource is used exceeds its natural rate of replacement, find
substitutes. If the West runs out of water through excessive drawdown of
aquifers and use of the Colorado River, there are always the Great Lakes
and desalination plants. And so on.
Sustainability can even be something that works to capital’s advantage:

e.g., recycling scrap iron, copper and aluminum yields a much cheaper
product than when starting with the original ore.6 When profitability is
threatened by other industries higher up the polluting scale, then that is
also an occasion to get involved. The push to limit the polluting activities
of CAFOs has found ready support in the tourism industry anxious about
lakes closed to swimming and boating or beaches fouled by green algae.
Legislating to control acid rain was helped by the fact that the low sulphur
coal producers of the West were keen to edge out their high sulphur rivals
in the Midwest and Appalachia (Cox 2016b: 47–9).
Global warming, on the other hand, is certainly quantitatively different,

and possibly qualitatively so, too. Quantitatively, it is a matter of time.
Intervening in the life cycles of animals in order to speed up their matu-
rity, using poly-tunnels to extend the growing season, or even recycling
iron and steel, copper and aluminum, can bring rewards relatively
quickly.7 Global warming, though, is something that has been building
up since the steam age. It shows strong runaway tendencies as positive
feedbacks kick in; as, that is, the reflective properties of snow and ice dis-
appear along with it, and as methane gases are released with the melting
of the permafrost.
There are technologies that could mitigate it, most notably the various
‘green’ energies available through harnessing wind, sun, tides and geo-
thermal. There is also talk of carbon sequestration, and not just through
photosynthesis. But adopting them brings us to the qualitatively different
character of this particular contradiction. First, there is the resistance
of the fossil fuel industry and those downstream users, like the power
companies and the automobile industry. This resistance is owing to the
quite massive fixed investments that have been made and which stand
to be devalued to the extent that more climate-friendly energy technol-
ogies take over: not just the extraction installations, therefore, but the
power stations, the pipelines, factories dedicated to producing internal
combustion engines, and even the myriad gas stations. The sprawling,
energy-intensive city has long posed an obstacle to moving to more sus-
tainable urban forms (Walker and Large 1975).
Second, this is a global problem that requires coordination on an appro-

priately global scale. Historically, contradictions have been more localized
and subject to state intervention. As an essential part of capital’s division
of labor, states have played an important role in mitigating ecological
crises and facilitating suspension of the contradictions. Some outstanding
examples include the 1930s initiatives of the Roosevelt administration to
curb soil erosion: the Soil Conservation Act of 1935, including programs
of tree planting to impede wind erosion, and the construction of ponds
to limit runoff and hence soil erosion, is regarded as a very considerable
success. The disastrous London smog of 1952, widely claimed to have
resulted in 12,000 deaths, was the trigger for the Clean Air Act of 1956.
In a context where coal was the fuel of choice for domestic heating and
was used extensively in industry, the Act allowed for the establishment of
smokeless zones and subsidies to households to convert to cleaner fuels.
American fuel economy legislation is another, if a more controversial

and contested, case. But this time round there are no serious means of
coercion on a global scale. So it might indeed be pertinent to ask: is global
warming the ultimate ‘natural disaster’?
Notes
1. For an incisive critique of this work, see Watts (1983a: 239–42).
2. Compare Harvey: “There is … nothing more ideologically powerful for
capitalist interests to have at hand than unconstrained technological opti-
mism and doctrines of progress ineluctably coupled to a doom-saying
Malthusianism that can conveniently be blamed when, as they invariably do,
things go wrong” (Harvey 1996: 149). For discussion of a more brutal resort
to ‘the laws of nature,’ see Mike Davis (2002) on Late Victorian Holocausts
and the Malthusian reaction of British officials to famine in India.
3. More precisely: Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.
4. An important contributor has been James O’Connor (1991) and his ‘second
contradiction of capitalism.’ See also Panitch and Leys (2007).
5. Among other quotes, this: “Capitalist production collects the population
together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an
ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it con-
centrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs
the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the
return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form
of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural
condition for the lasting fertility of the soil … But by destroying the circum-
stances surrounding that metabolism … it compels its systematic restoration
as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full
development of the human race … All progress in capitalist agriculture is
a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil;
all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress
toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility … Capitalist
production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of com-
bination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining
the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker (Marx 1867/1976:
637–8).
6. Eighty-six percent of all the steel in the world is recycled; copper is about 30
percent and the recycling rate for aluminum in the USA is 65 percent.
7. Though the latter depends on the rates of physical obsolescence which
consign products including those metals in their composition to the scrap
heap.
10 Capitalist geography and
difference
Context
From the 1960s on, there was the beginning of a sea change in how people
in advanced capitalist societies saw themselves and their interests. At
the center of this were a revived women’s movement and the non-racial
movement, spearheaded by people of color. Both targeted what they
believed to be a denial of those rights of equality celebrated first, by cap-
italism through the labor market, and secondly through the state and its
claims to be democratic.
This generated interest among social scientists, including human geogra-

phers, but initially of a quite empirical nature: documenting the various
forms of inequality and how they were expressed in, say, the geography
of labor markets. But by the 1980s this was morphing into claims about
the fragmentation of experience and a celebration of difference that
would go under the heading of ‘the posts.’1 To differences of gender
and race were added those of Europe and the Rest in concerns about
Eurocentricity. Yet in considering this literature, we should be aware of
just how much discussions of difference have settled into a fairly conven-
tional, even uncritical, set of substantive foci: predominantly gender, race,
Eurocentricity, and sometimes the native/immigrant distinction. For on
closer inspection, this particular umbrella is much more expansive as in
nation, religion – a hugely important divide still in Northern Ireland and
a major issue in France around the Muslim presence – and, to bring the
discussion closer to conventional understandings of capitalism, stratum,
as in the various gradations from upper to lower ‘class.’
94
CAPITALIST GEOGRAPHY AND DIFFERENCE 95
‘Difference,’ rather, should be understood as anything that can be con-

ceivably aligned with, and mobilized for, purposes of material and
symbolic advantage in the struggle for class privilege. And one has to be
impressed by the way in which ever new ‘differences’ get produced, to the
general surprise of everyone. One of the most recent is that distinguishing
between the ‘left behind’ and, presumably, those ahead of the curve.
These differences then get reflected in capitalist geographies. To a very

significant degree, women and men still live out their lives in a segre-
gated way: not just the living place/workplace distinction, but women’s
workplaces vs those of men. In earlier days the separation was even more
radical: life for most men revolved around the bar or the pub and ‘going
to the game,’ something from which, by and large, women were excluded
(McDowell and Massey 1984: 199).2 Control of immigration is standard
around the world, helping generate that global apartheid of which Titus
Alexander (1996) complained.
The significance of difference for a Marxist understanding of the world,

is the way it often cross-cuts class and poses obstacles to labor organizing.
It can divide the working class in damaging ways. The city of Liverpool in
England had six parliamentary constituencies before the Second World
War, but in a context of strong sectarian divides, it had to wait until
1945 to elect its first Labour Party MP.3 In the Netherlands, the so-called
‘pillarization’ of society, principally along religious lines, long impeded
the development of class politics. This dampening effect is not necessarily
the case. Difference can simply reinforce existing class divisions: histor-
ically Quebec tended to divide very roughly between a French-speaking
working class and an English-speaking capitalist one. In other words:
‘difference’ is an important issue for Marxist geography.
‘Difference’ in a capitalist society
The dominant left-leaning claim has been to accept the implicit pluralism
of the posts: that class, patriarchy and race are all independent forces
that interact one with another. This has come in a number of different
forms. Those of a critical realist persuasion have argued for patriarchy as
a separate structure of social relations (Foord and Gregson 1986). A more
common argument has been what is called ‘intersectionality’ and about

which there is now a quite massive literature. This accepts Marxist views
of class as a major cleavage, but one that exists alongside and interacts
with others, notably those of gender and race.
These arguments stand in an awkward relation to Marx’s totalizing

approach in which all aspects of the social process internalize one
another, but in which the accumulation process and its contradictions is
the motor of change through which those internal relations get reworked.
In short, race and gender are particular, possibly transient ways in which
the contradictions of capitalism play themselves out. This is clearly a very
broad brush. So how should we proceed?
An important starting point is to recognize that capitalists as a class are

structurally indifferent to differences of race and gender and, one can add,
differences of religion or nationality. As Ellen Meiksins-Wood claimed,
“The first point about capitalism is that it is uniquely indifferent to the
social identities of the people it exploits” (1988: 5). In light of how things
have worked out in practice, this might seem a quite outrageous claim.
But how can capital afford not to be indifferent? Cost competition and
the thirst for surplus labor means that capitalists have to, in conventional
parlance, hire the best person for the job regardless. This does not mean
that capital will not exploit conceptions of difference to the extent that
they facilitate cost competition. Meiksins-Wood again: “On the other
hand, capitalism is very flexible in its ability to make use of, as well as to
discard, particular social oppressions … (and) is likely to co-opt whatever
extra-economic oppressions are historically and culturally available in
a given setting” (1988: 6). Gold mining in South Africa could never have
taken off without the ability to super-exploit Africans: the gold ore was
simply of too inferior a quality for it to have been otherwise; ultra-cheap
labor was a necessity (Callinicos 1981; Jeeves and Crush 1995). The
exclusion of Africans from the suffrage, in turn predicated on their sup-
posed racial inferiority, would make all the difference to the imposition
of a low-wage regime. Equally, small clothing workshops in London take
advantage of patriarchal relations to drive costs down: women work as
much because they see themselves as subordinate to male relatives as
for the wage (Mitter 1986). This does not mean that the long-term logic
of capital is not to do away with these sorts of discriminations, and the
record shows that this is in fact happening, if slowly and unevenly.
However, and importantly, what Meiksins-Wood says about capital also

applies to labor. As a class it has an interest in indifference to ‘difference’;
only then can it prevent capital taking advantage as it did in South Africa
and in the small clothing workshops of London. As it is, it often seems as
if the drawing of lines between men and women, black and white, Roman
Catholic and Protestant, originates in the working class and then gets
taken advantage of by capital. Just why the working class is so vulnerable
is an important question. We broach it by asking, given the obvious
advantages of working class unity, why have things been so slow? Why,
despite all the progress, are white males still seemingly dominant among
the vast mass of working-class people?
An exemplary case is, again, that of the South African gold mining indus-
try.4 At the start, from the development of commercial gold mining in the
country at the beginning of the twentieth century, there had been a racial
division of labor in which whites were the supervisors, controlling the
blasting of rock, and the ones involved in more intricate mine face oper-
ations. Africans occupied the more menial positions of clearing the rock
away and putting it in the wagons to be taken to the surface. Learning by
watching and the invention of a mechanical drill would later mean that
Africans could be substituted into the better paying positions, albeit at
a lower wage, which, of course, was the motivation. This met with violent
resistance from the white labor unions.5 Their revolt was put down, even
more violently, by the government; but the white mining unions then
helped vote in a different one that would legislate job discrimination in
the mines. In short, class compromises have been an obstacle to imple-
menting race and gender discrimination.6
It is also the case that white males have managed to turn an initial job
market advantage into a more enduring one. Higher wages have trans-
lated into advantages for children: the ability to expose children to valued
cultural experiences, the ability to buy into housing in areas with better
schools, even the ability to pay private school fees. These are advantages
denied to the vast majority of black children. A dominant position in
some workplaces then makes it hard for women and blacks to get a foot-
hold as the informality of some job markets can privilege existing workers
in the recruitment process.
What is at stake here? Is it fundamentally about a racial or gender identity?

Or is this simply an appearance, something taken advantage of in pursuit
of something else? I want to suggest that it is the latter and that racial and
patriarchal constructions, not to say denigrations, are a mere means to
something quite different. Rather, what is being pursued are those things
most valued in a capitalist society: wage labor vs non-wage, employment
vs unemployment, salaries vs wages, and the bigger the better, and control
of how money will be spent. These are an object of struggle. Old concep-
tions of difference are drawn on, some of long standing, like gender, some
more recent as in ones about race that arrived with empire; or new ones
are constructed, in order to structure labor markets to the advantage of
white native men, like citizen vs immigrant status. The goal is to monop-
olize wage labor, earnings and employment: a struggle that tips over into
the living place and attempts to ensure that privilege gets reproduced
as in the advantages enjoyed by the children from better-off homes,
most obviously in the case of race; but also through the way in which
discourses about gender and race become ‘common sense’ and inflect the
differentiated behavior of teachers towards their pupils and the content of
children’s books.7 In short, the subordination of working-class people to
capitalist ideology is fundamental to understanding the production and
reproduction of difference. And once it is in place, capitalists will take
advantage of it in pursuit of surplus value.
This is not a complete answer, since once the mechanisms and concep-
tions of difference are in place, forces of a cumulative nature enter in, but
it is the most fundamental piece of the puzzle. The struggle for status on
capitalist terms divides people, and the parts assume, literally, ‘lives of
their own’ and an uneasy compromise papered over by a sub-culture of
resistance. The gender divisions of England prior to the 1960s, referred
to earlier, were a way of life, reflected in media representations and
gendered hierarchies.8 More recently the significance of a masculinist
culture, based on gender stereotypes, has become evident: there have
been notorious instances of this in American police and fire service
stations. The same applies to racial segregation; the same hierarchies,
representations and, on the side of African Americans, one has to assume,
a dull resistance expressed in a humor in which whites serve as targets,
and a counter-culture that says ‘to hell with you people.’ These arguments
become particularly powerful when one steps away from the standard
fare of difference discourse. National difference, sometimes cemented by
notions of hierarchy as a relic of empire, is a case in point. The ‘foreigners’
are a threat because they intrude on a way life with one that can be radi-
cally different; a situation very similar to that of the police and the firemen
who want to protect a masculinist culture that they find comforting.
Social stratification is another and hugely important site of differen-

tiation, as Pierre Bourdieu outlined in his book Distinction. There is,
though, something singular about this case. In principle, gender and
racial, religious and national difference can be flattened. What this would
mean is that class relations would show no correlation with these par-
ticular sources of difference: if African Americans comprise 20 percent
of the population, then one can certainly anticipate a (capitalist) world
in which they are 20 percent of all the lawyers, the university professors
and, indeed, of the janitors – likewise for gender and national/immigrant
distinctions. This explains the emphasis of the women’s movement and
the non-racial movement on affirmative action. But differences in class
relations, most significantly here, in social stratification cannot, by defi-
nition, be eliminated. Working-class people can be upwardly mobile and
those in the more affluent strata, downwardly so; but to abolish social
stratification is to abolish capitalism. There have to be poorer people,
including the unemployed, to act as a discipline on the wage demands of
those immediately above them in the stratification system. There have to
be the so-called improvident, the wasters, and the idlers if there is to be
any meaning to the struggle to escape that world and be accepted into the
values of the capitalist one: values of money, steady work, a home in the
suburbs, one’s own car, foreign vacations and even second homes.
Geographies of emancipation
To return to those differences – gender, race, religion, nationality – to

which capital, driven by its logics of cost competition and the extraction
of surplus value is structurally indifferent, we also have to confront the
question of what it takes for this indifference to be realized in practice.
White men, at least those in the working class, particularly in its lower
levels, have a record of opposing women and African Americans in better
paying positions and have marshalled respective discourses in defense
of their claims. Nevertheless, the empirics do suggest that over time the
indifference of capital to these sorts of distinctions can be brought to
fruition. There is still a long way to go, but arguably women and blacks in
both the USA and in Western Europe are, on average, in a much better
position both materially and in acceptance as equals, than say, 50 years
ago. So what has to happen? The good news is that once it happens, there
is no going back. The bad news is that contingent conditions are highly
significant. I draw on the case of gender to illustrate these points.
As a starting point, it is useful to think about just what the working-class,

patriarchal family amounted to in the industrial cities of the nineteenth
century. Brenner and Ramas (1984) have argued that the gender division
of labor then practiced – the male breadwinner and the female home-
maker – had a rationale. The goal was children who would, from an early
age, go out to work to swell the household budget; children who would
then delay marriage and continue to live at home into their early twenties,
all the while bringing in money. Whatever the reasoning, the large family
and the ‘little worker’ were features of the time. What would eventually
discourage this was the introduction of mass schooling and a minimum
school leaving age: something opposed by the mass of the population
while vigorously pushed by middle-class reformers (Zelizer 1994). Birth
rates went down, and the ‘little worker’ would henceforth become, in
Viviana Zelizer’s words, the ‘priceless child’: an object of parental con-
sumption and something to be cultivated to realize, vicariously, their own
frustrated ambitions. But most crucially for the emancipation of women,
the domestic workload declined. This would then be deepened through
the mechanization of the household, most notably through various elec-
trical appliances.
Women’s labor time, in other words, was increasingly available waiting

to be exploited, but in a highly patriarchal society, there were limits
to it; most notably women were, it was argued, physically incapable of
the sort of work that men did. What would then make the difference
would be the massive expansion of service employment in the postwar
period, beginning with the welfare state and continuing through to the
bureaucratization of the corporation. These were decidedly not jobs that
were inappropriate for women. Rather, their stereotypical attributes of
attention to detail, empathy and patience with clients now came to be
emphasized.
The result has been a quite massive growth in female wage employment as
a fraction of the total. The passage of money into female hands has then
revolutionized domestic relations: a degree of economic independence
has given them an independence of men; so later marriage, if at all, and

higher divorce rates. This has then increased the impetus to break down
remaining barriers to female employment: what has been called ‘the glass
ceiling.’
But was there a logic to capitalist development, at least in hindsight, that

could explain the emergence of these conditions? Empirically, among
the advanced capitalist societies, they were universal, but does that say
anything about necessary tendencies in capitalist development? Mass
education was inevitable, and for diverse reasons that had nothing to do
with the anxieties of middle-class women about the young being exposed
to the diverse hazards of the workplace from an early age. Rather, there
were civic reasons stemming from the desire of the state to impart a sense
of national belonging; but also the school as training ground for a life of
obedience and punctuality in the capitalist workplace. And once electric-
ity became a source of energy, it was only a matter of time before there
would be an electrical goods industry that would then mechanize the
kitchen and the household more generally.
Likewise the expansion of services: how else to understand the expanding

office sector except in terms of capital’s deepening division of labor, the
bureaucracy needed to hold the corporation’s various bits together, the
splitting off of various functions like logistics, marketing and product
design? The expansion of the state in response to the contradictions of
capital would then provide an additional source of demand for female
workers.
There is, though, something about this discussion that is misleading – the
emancipation of women from whom? Presumably the dominance of
men and their accession to Marx’s happy hunting ground (for capital)
of ‘Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ (1867/1976: 280). It is an
indifference to ‘difference’ on capital’s terms and not that of the working
class taken in its entirety. Men as a whole do not celebrate this sort of
female emancipation since it deprives them of some of their privileges.
The working class remains divided, still unable to realize its interest as
a class exploited by capital as a whole, and an exploitation that will con-
tinue, including by the exploitation of difference, until it is overthrown.
‘Difference’ for ever?
From this limited point of view, the case just discussed might seem to
suggest that capital’s structural logic of indifference to gender, race and so
on can work, even while it might be slow. Likewise, there is no disputing
that the position of African Americans, while still leaving a great deal to
be desired, has improved relative to whites since the middle of the twen-
tieth century. We should, nevertheless, be careful in drawing conclusions
from this about the possibility of a difference-less world. It is not just
that social stratification is not going to go away since capital’s own logics
demand it. It is also that even while some differences can be flattened,
new ones are going to appear. The structural position of the working
class, the dominance of capitalist values, and the diversification of the
working class in terms of the technical division of labor require it. Some
have to be subordinated, discriminated against, so that others can retain
a modest position in the capitalist pecking order or even improve on it.
In England, before the Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians arrived in
the 1950s, it was the Irish who were the outcasts. And before that, manual
laborers were regarded as a race apart, possibly inheriting their supposed
improvidence, drunkenness and ignorance over generations. In apartheid
South Africa, the more urbanized African held their rural counterpart in
contempt; something overlooked by more conventional understandings
of that regime. Post-apartheid, it is refugees from the rest of Africa who
are the threat.
One has to be impressed by the way in which old differences can sud-
denly acquire an enhanced significance. Capitalist urbanization has been
a particular site for this sort of formation. The way in which later arrivals
in the city are superposed on earlier ones has been reproduced many
times, often producing a sharp politics of difference that has then been the
foundation for changes in state form. There are some quite remarkable
parallels between the nationalisms of the Quebecois and the Afrikaners
of South Africa (Cox 2002: 195–203): an anglophone urban population
in the major cities, notably Montreal and Johannesburg; a backward
countryside of French-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking peoples who had
been there long before; and then an urban migration which puts them at
the bottom of the ladder, confronting an occupational structure in which
the linguistically alien are predominant. Organization around ‘difference’
was, in both instances, the way chosen to usurp those in the working class
above them, and achieve the dominant capitalist values.
All this suggests that capital’s tendency to indifference to ‘difference’ has

to be regarded as, indeed, ‘tendential’ to which will be opposed, as long as
capitalism is around, that is, tendencies towards the creation of ever new
‘differences’: something inscribed in deeply held values of what it means
to work in capitalist society and what life’s purposes should be. And to
the extent that success is achieved, it is to be secured by kicking away the
ladder for those underneath; while those standing lower down are trying
to displace you, drawing on discourses of difference, of long-standing
oppression, as indeed in the cases of Quebecois and Afrikaner national-
ism reviewed above. The shifting pattern of uneven development, there-
fore, as indeed in those two instances, has been a crucible of the capitalist
politics of difference. It is the focus of the next chapter.
Notes
1. See Cox (2014: 102–15).
2. Women were still being formally excluded from British pubs as late as the
1980s. Where they were allowed in, they were expected to sit in the snug
room, separated off from the tap room, which was for men only, supposedly
to protect their more delicate sensibilities from the boorish behavior of men
together, spitting into the sawdust trench on the floor that paralleled the bar
itself.
3. See Jeffery (2017) for an extended discussion of Liverpool Toryism.
4. See Luli Callinicos (1981) for an excellent discussion.
5. The Rand Revolt of 1922. Intriguingly one of the miners’ slogans was
‘Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa.’
6. Another compelling case is recounted by Cynthia Cockburn in Brothers
(1983).
7. Nancy Fraser (2000) has come close to this thesis, arguing for the replace-
ment of identity-based conceptions of recognition with one that is
more status-based, and responding to what she describes as ‘institutional
subordination.’
8. It was perfectly fine for a woman to be the headmistress or principal of
an elementary or primary school but not of a secondary school. Likewise,
there might be room for a female mayor but not a female Prime Minister or
President, to put the divisions at their starkest.
11 Geographies of uneven
development
Introduction
It is clear to even the most uninformed that capitalist geography, consid-

ered abstractly, is highly uneven in its development. A simple index like
life expectancy or the per capita consumption of electricity varies hugely
across the world and even across the cities of the more developed coun-
tries. Immediately, to talk about development and its geography raises the
crucial question of exactly what it is we mean by the term. Marx would
have acknowledged that how we currently understand it is very narrow.
Development, for him, meant the development of the person, and in order
for that to occur, the capitalist form of development was a necessary, if
painful, precursor. Commonly, when people refer to variations in devel-
opment they are talking about per capita incomes. This is unsatisfactory
and highly contestable. Ultimately, under capitalism, development means
the development of the productive forces: the ability of the immediate
producer, equipped with instruments of labor and working on objects of
labor, to produce more. The product assumes the form of value which is
then divided up. Incomes as a measure of development are inadequate
because of the way value is transferred elsewhere and those who produce
the wealth are deprived of the developmental advantages it might endow.
Is it actually the case that Monaco or Santa Barbara is more developed
than Wolverhampton or Colorado Springs?
While we can agree that capitalist development, at least at the level of use
values, means the development of the productive forces, it is also resistant
to easy definition because of the way geography is engaged with in that
process: something quite different from the transfer of value from centers
104
GEOGRAPHIES OF UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT 105
of industry to the shareholders or owners of the corporations living

elsewhere. Through the socialization of production, there are relations of
mutual dependence among those in the technical division of labor that
yield an enhanced product even while its sharing out is highly contestable:
more ‘skilled’ workers typically claim a higher share, but what exactly is
‘skill’? The way in which ‘difference’ gets embedded in the division of
labor adds a further wrinkle.
This is, though, a socialization that is itself unevenly developed so that

to talk about ‘uneven development’ is not entirely improper. The social-
ization of production in terms of the division of labor, the articulation
with the state, including educational institutions, is far less developed
in, say, Uganda than it is in Denmark. On the other hand, because the
socialization of production also has a scalar geography, particular places
in less developed countries can be incorporated into much wider (spatio‑)
socializations of production. Accordingly, Uganda can borrow the bene-
fits of socialization elsewhere through the importation of more advanced
equipment, through the advice of international consultants, and the
introduction of knowledge through multinational corporations. This then
introduces the possibility of value transfers from the less developed to the
more developed countries. Accordingly, levels of income are, once again,
quite deceptive with regard to where value is produced.
Spatial divisions of labor
In an important paper published in 1979, Doreen Massey drew a contrast

between two concepts of the spatial division of labor, fraught with impli-
cations for how one might think about uneven development. There was,
she argued, an older one, based on specialization in particular products;
in the United Kingdom, the ship building concentrations on the Clyde
in Scotland, on the Tyne and Wear in England and on the Laggan in
Northern Ireland; the woolen district of West Yorkshire; the cotton dis-
trict of Lancashire; the metal products of the Black Country; and the coal-
fields. Alongside this sort of geographical specialization a new one was
emerging, displacing it as some of the older specializations shrank under
the impact of competition from the Newly Industrializing Countries; this
was a spatial division of labor of the individual firm, one based less on
particular final products and more on a partition of a particular labor

process into its constituent parts. She differentiated between what she
called ‘clone’ and ‘parts-process’ divisions of labor, though there were
clearly lots of hybrid formations. In the clone form, numerous plants
owned by the same firm produced the same final product; the headquar-
ters function, and perhaps research and development, might be located
somewhere else. In a parts-process spatial division of labor, as typified by
assembly industries, various sub-assemblies might be manufactured in
branch plants, drawing on components from yet others, before moving
on to a point of final assembly. In this instance, the component producers
might be under the same corporate umbrella or act as sub-contractors.
She developed her argument with particular reference to the United

Kingdom, but it obviously has wide applicability, and not just within
countries. There have been at least two globalizations: periods marked
by rapid growth of international trade and investment. The first lasted
from about 1870 to 1914 and had its characteristic geographic division
of labor much as Massey imagined her first type: very broadly, there was
a division between Western Europe and North America, on the one hand,
and the producers of foodstuffs and raw materials elsewhere in the world:
so copper from Chile, rubber and tin from Malaysia, and wool and wheat
from Australia in exchange for manufactured products, both capital
goods and consumer products.
The second globalization is the one which took off in the late 1970s
and is now, very possibly, on the verge of petering out. An important
distinguishing feature has been the development of spatial divisions of
labor of the second sort – clone and parts-process divisions, in various
sorts of combinations – spanning the globe and taking in, at any one
time, both more developed and less developed countries in relations of
corporate ownership or sub-contracting. Examples are well-known and
include something like Nike, which has its headquarters and research and
development function in Beaverton, Oregon, in the Portland suburbs, but
whose manufacturing is done almost entirely at plants in East Asia; or the
way in which corporations have off-shored some of their more standard-
ized office work to locations in India (for English-language firms) and to
Morocco (for the French). But the examples are legion and have been the
object of considerable research.
Geographic specialization of the first type endures, but often now overlain
by that of the second, in fact adopting some of its logics as firms come to
produce at numerous different locations: coal companies with their head-
quarters in some major American city, owning mines around the country;
or the sub-contracting relations between the big meat companies and the
cattle and hog suppliers, often clustered close together in proximity to the
meat packing plants; but again, the headquarter office is likely to be else-
where, away from all the unseemliness of the production line. Likewise,
on a global level, one spatial division of labor overlaps another: Malaysia
is home to production sites for firms based in the United Kingdom and
the USA, but its function as a producer of rubber and tin, inherited from
the first globalization, endures.
The separation out of headquarters functions, marketing, finance and

overall superintendence, has promoted the growth of larger cities. These
are the locations with the airline connections necessary to administering
a far-flung corporation, the cultural facilities prized by at least some of
the executive class, and already outfitted with a sizeable middle-class
population reproducing the sorts of skills in demand. And as they have
clustered, so the banks, the lawyers and the accountants have become still
more concentrated, as part of the characteristic division of labor in the
post-industrial city discussed in Chapter 8. The larger ones, with their
relatively dense clusters of multi-national corporations, have now been
absorbed into a new category: that of ‘world cities.’
Meanwhile, actual production is likely to go on in smaller towns, though

some can be of considerable size: branch plant towns, but embracing
a significant spectrum of activities, from those requiring more experi-
enced, perhaps technically qualified labor, to those requiring much less.
So a town like Derby, in central England, a city of about 250,000, would
tend to fall into the first category in virtue of the presence of Rolls-Royce’s
jet engine division and a major rail engineering plant owned by the
Canadian multinational, Bombardier. An American equivalent would be
Milwaukee, a much larger city, but equally heavy in engineering indus-
tries. For every Derby or Milwaukee, there is a more prosaic branch plant
town specializing in more mundane assembly work. These are the more
de-skilled parts of the labor process that are more location indifferent and
so subject to the temptations of places where the value of labor power is
significantly lower: small towns virtually anywhere, therefore.
This is a crude characterization as all these functions can be found in very

large cities, but corporations do try to keep at least the more basic, easily
learnt parts of the labor process, at a distance.1 Something similar happens
with the multinationals, as in the case of Nike, exploiting the cheap labor
of the Newly Industrializing Countries, but also food corporations like
Chiquita which produces and sells bananas: the HQ is in Charlotte NC,
the R&D in Cincinnati, and the production, of course, in Latin America,
most notably Ecuador.
The significance of this for development is how this separation of func-

tions can be the basis, and is often the purpose,2 of securing a particular
division of the value produced: how value, in other words, tends to be
transferred upwards, from less developed to more developed countries;
from branch plant to head office and shareholders. Discussion here has
tended to focus on international transfers. The assumption is one of com-
modity chains stretching between corporations in more developed coun-
tries and producers in the less developed, and typically orchestrated by
the former, but with differences in market power at different points in the
chain. A common image is of a major corporation in the developed world
which controls access to final markets through its branding powers, while
suppliers compete against one another in industries in which entry costs
are relatively low. The garment industry is a classic case. In the same way,
the processing and distribution of foodstuffs like coffee, cocoa, tea and,
increasingly, bananas has tended to lodge in the hands of very large firms
that dominate final markets (Barry 1987: Chapters 2–4; Murray 1987).
Their brand names give them a market power that is difficult to break.
The producers of the raw cacao, coffee beans, however, are numerous
and easy to substitute for by the Western buyers so they can drive a hard
bargain and pocket the difference.
A more recent example involves the big US retail chains that source from
less developed countries, most notably China: their buying power is
immense, based as it is in a huge retail market and they can use this power
to play off one sub-contractor against another, which then means a wage
squeeze for the worker (Heintz 2006). The surplus value that is pumped
out is then enhanced by the fact that the value of labor power in less devel-
oped parts of the world is that much lower, while the retail chains can sell
them at the price prevailing in Western Europe or the USA.3 Importantly,
this sort of exploitation does not involve any increase in the mass of
surplus value; rather, it is a redistribution subsequent to differences of

power in the exchange relation.
The same sorts of relations occur within the countries of the more devel-
oped world, not to mention across multinational organizations like the
EU, particularly since the accession of the former communist states of
Eastern Europe, but in a quite bewildering diversity of ways. This takes
us back to the relation between branch plants, particularly those that for
a variety of reasons, can pay low wages – lower skills or a more feminized,
even immigrant workforce (compare Mitter 1986), for example – and
firm headquarters; but also between sub-contractors, often in sectors that
are relatively easy to enter, like clothing and so highly competitive, and
the retail chains (Rainnie 1984). This is a story that has then repeated itself
across the EU as the big corporations of the more developed Western
European members hive off their production to the lower wage coun-
tries of Eastern Europe. How otherwise to explain the rise of Slovakia as
a major country for auto assembly?
In other words, there is a drain of value away from those places where the
branch plants or sub-contractors are located to elsewhere. It is important
to recognize what is going on here. The language of unequal exchange
represents the process as a territorial one, but obviously, that is merely
coincidental. Geography helps in facilitating the process of value transfer
but it is a transfer from the working class to a managerial class and the
shareholders. Lower value labor power means that wages can be held
down, while the product is sold at its social value, undercutting firms
caught on the wrong foot in this process of dispersing the production
function. The more skilled branch plant activity is less subject to this
sort of value skimming since the computer programmers, the polyvalent
maintenance workers, even the line workers, have abilities that are harder
to replace.
Aside from transfers to the managerial element in the headquarters cities,

there is distribution in a geographically more diffuse way to where the
shareholders live. Within countries, the way value gets transferred is
harder to trace. Looked at internationally, it is not so difficult. One might
say that through the relation of its retail chains to China, the value is being
sucked out by the USA. But it is not an abstract entity like the USA that is
doing the sucking. Rather, the big winners are the shareholders, and those
with shares in the big retailers are dominantly American; the stock sold on
national stock markets is for the most part sold to nationals. Track them
down and you’ll find them bidding up housing prices in places like La
Jolla CA and Naples FL.
Two forms of uneven development
Doreen Massey distinguished between two different sorts of geographic

specialization: one between corporations and the other within them.
In 2001, John Weeks drew an equally significant contrast. This was
between what he referred to as ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ forms of uneven
development. ‘Primary’ uneven development resulted, at its base, from
variations in production relations: while no part of the world has been left
untouched by capitalism, some are more purely capitalist than others; in
some there are still clear pre-capitalist remnants. Uneven development
of the secondary sort then resulted from the effects of competition and
technical innovation within the more purely capitalist parts of the world.
His point was that capitalist production relations are the motor of devel-
opment as we know it. Through the pressures of the working class they
are the necessary condition for a competition among capitalists whose
result is the socialization of production: the development of the division
of labor, the exploitation of means of production in common, all with
a view to constant capital in the form of instruments and objects of labor,
soaking up more surplus labor which can be thrown back into production
on an expanding scale. According to Marx, however, it started in the
English countryside with the revolutionization of the productive forces in
agriculture (1867/1976: Part 8). The separation of immediate producers
from the means of production and reuniting them through money wealth
inaugurated capitalist development on the land. Tenant farmers commit-
ted to paying rent, had to produce for the market. This, in the context of
competition with others, provided the incentive for increasing the pro-
ductivity of their workers. Fewer were needed and this created a pool of
labor power for industry; meanwhile, increasing agricultural production
meant that industrial workers could be fed. The accumulation of wealth
in the countryside then created a home market for industrial capital. As
Charles Post (1982) later affirmed, the course of development in much of
the USA outside the South, would be very similar: farmers might own the
land, but it had been purchased with a mortgage, which again meant that
they had to sell; the same cycle of increased agricultural productivity as
the basis for industrial development would repeat itself, albeit with labor
power supplemented by immigrants who had been subject to disposses-
sion elsewhere. On the other hand, and as Marx himself pointed out in
his discussion of the unfortunate Mr Peel,4 where capitalist production
relations do not apply or are present in only a partial form, then develop-
ment is going to be retarded. And indeed there are large parts of the world
that still fit that category. This was the basis for Weeks’s idea of uneven
development of the primary sort.
Primary
Sub-Saharan Africa is an important example of a case where capitalist
production relations apply in only the patchiest manner. Over large parts
of the sub-continent, with the exception of parts of Southern Africa, most
notably South Africa, land is not privately held. Access to land is the
prerogative of the tribe and granted by a chief to males on marriage. This
has been an obstacle to the development of the productive forces (Cox
and Negi 2010). Even if they wanted to, those who occupy land cannot
obtain credit to develop it since the land is not private property and so
cannot be offered as collateral for a loan. And even if through saving
and reinvestment, a peasant manages to develop the land to which he
enjoys access, there is no way in which he can drive others out of farming
through his ability to undercut them on the market, and so buy them
out and take advantage of economies of scale. The point is that the sort
of security offered by tribal tenure implies no need to produce for sale.
There is an incentive, but it is primarily through the need to pay state
taxes, and those who occupy the land cannot be deprived of it. As a result,
farming for subsistence is still important. Development of the productive
forces is retarded: immediate producers are not released for wage work in
industry, and the division of labor, along with the home market, develops
very slowly. In short, that socialization of production on which capitalist
development depends, struggles to take off. In other cases, land might be
private, but the immediate producers have been secure in their access to
land, while having limited incentive to develop it. Such was the case with
the minifundios of Latin America (Feder 1971) or the share cropping and
labor tenancy that was characteristic of much of South Africa until the
1970s (Morris 1980).
In an important intervention, Henry Bernstein (2001; 2006) has argued

that the fact that agrarian revolution might be stymied in some parts
of the world, is now of limited account. His claim is that as a result of
the global trade in foodstuffs, industrialization can take off without any
development of the productive forces in the countryside. He does not say
where the labor power will come from but one can reasonably assume
that in virtue of population growth, it will be available. In the meantime,
the growth of agricultural production in North America and in Western
Europe has been the necessary condition for aid to less developed coun-
tries taking the form of cheap food. This, however, reduces the viability
of peasant production, thus generating a desperate search for wage work
to supplement declining incomes. A further challenge is the encroach-
ment of agribusinesses, intent on export crops, and taking over by force
(Thomson 2011); or, alternatively by agreement with a government which
holds rights to land formerly held by tribal chiefs, land once occupied by
peasants, as the literature on ‘land grabbing’ in Africa affirms. The result
is diminishing access to land and a desperate search for supplements in
the informal economy or in migratory labor. This has been the context for
two developments.
The first is the emergence of movements of the landless or land-scarce

pushing for land reform that would enhance their access to land: the
Landless People’s Movement in South Africa and the Landless Workers’
Movement in Brazil are some of the better known examples. The second
has been the explosive growth of cities in the developing world with
the mushrooming of informal settlements and of a population lacking
opportunities in wage work and struggling to get by through what is
known as the informal economy: selling goods on the street, the sale
of medicinal herbs sourced from rural areas, or simply acting as a car
guard in exchange for the possibility of a tip. As Mike Davis has argued,
“Urbanization … has been radically decoupled from industrialization,
even from development per se” (2004: 9); in short, a very different form of
urbanization from that discussed in Chapter 8.
Secondary
According to Weeks, uneven development of the secondary sort is
what characterizes those parts of the world where capitalist production
relations have been generalized. What produces it, and as its contours
shift, what Storper and Walker (1989) referred to as ‘capital’s inconstant
geography,’5 is the competition of capitals, both to continually lower their

costs by revolutionizing production in all its aspects, and to innovate in
terms of new products. New products have the potential to dramatically
change geographies: the rise of the package holiday in Europe in the 1960s
spelt the demise of resorts in Northern Europe and a boom along the
Mediterranean coast of Spain, just as earlier the invention of electricity
reshaped industrial geography in the United Kingdom, liberating it from
the coalfields. New institutional forms can range anywhere from the new
spatial divisions of labor adopted by firms and whose significance was
underlined by Massey, to something like the EU which, through eliminat-
ing customs barriers over a wide area, led to closures and relocations as
marketing strategies changed.
This is to oversimplify. More often it is a juxtaposition of conditions that

allow, even impel, change in the contours of the space economy, produc-
ing new growth areas and new rust belts. The package holiday was made
possible by more than the twinkle in the eye of some travel agency. Cheap
jet transport, and rising incomes helped, along with changes in sex mores
as in the ‘sun, sand and sex’ sobriquet. Electricity was only part of the
reason for the growth of industry in England, in what came to be known
as the axial belt.6 The new consumer goods industries looked for strategic
locations close to the market, and London and the Southeast, extending
up into the Midlands were where they were. The fact that London itself
accounted for a major part of the British market – just short of one fifth
of the total population in 1939 – accentuated this gravitation. But London
had long been the center of the British economy.
So although capitalist geography is inconstant, it also shows some dura-

bility. This is particularly the case with larger cities. In virtue of more
developed divisions of labor, less one-sided than smaller, more specialized
towns, they demonstrate an ability to reinvent themselves, or at least
provide congenial conditions for capitalists aiming to exploit their dis-
tinct resources in order to, unintendedly, give a city a new economic base.
In the 1930s, London was a major center of production for secondary
industry; it had financial services, but not on the current scale. Moreover,
as corporations have separated headquarter functions from production,
the bigger cities, with their better-developed transport connections, have
exercised a gravitational pull.
When we examine this durability at a global level, it is even more

apparent. There have certainly been changes since the beginning of
the twentieth century, most notably the great leaps in development in
East Asia. But North America and Western Europe still dominate. The
industrialization of East Asia then seems to confirm another fact of
world economic geography: that there is a northern hemisphere bias. The
settler societies of the southern hemisphere, most notably those of Latin
America’s Southern Cone,7 Australia, New Zealand and South Africa,
have developed but on a very limited basis: a distinct position in the
global division of labor, as producers of raw materials and foodstuffs and
with limited industrial capacity. The fact is that geography matters in the
direction that development takes. The ability to exploit economies of scale
is unevenly developed8 and gives firms in East Asia, North America and
Western Europe a cost advantage that frustrates further industrialization
in the southern hemisphere. On the other hand, this argument assumes
that capital is global in its relations: something not to be taken for granted,
as we will now see.
Countries
It is also the case that countries differ in their patterns of uneven devel-
opment. There is more than a suggestion that the economic geography
of the United States is much more dynamic, more ‘inconstant,’ than that
of the West European countries.9 Not only does the center of gravity of
American urbanization shift to a degree that finds no peer in Western
Europe or even Canada or Australia, as the frontier of urbanization shifts,
so the newer, growing cities expand at impressive rates. In part it is a func-
tion of historically inherited patterns of urbanization.
Consider, for a start, France and the United Kingdom. In terms of

patterns of urbanization and transport networks, we are talking about
two highly centralized countries. London and Paris had always enjoyed
a pre-eminence in their respective countries simply in virtue of being
capital cities; this had led to an embryonic convergence of the highway
network, such as it was. From the early nineteenth century, though, they
pulled away to a remarkable degree, dominating their respective urban
systems, and as they did so, becoming the centers of their railroad net-
works and later, freeways and airline connections. The USA was always
different. No city has ever dominated to the degree of London or Paris.
New York was big but has now been overtaken by Los Angeles, while
Chicago still remains dominant. Meanwhile an earlier set of major cities
in the old Manufacturing Belt has been overtaken by upstarts like Atlanta,
Dallas, Denver, Miami and Seattle. Partly this has been a matter of the
sheer size of the USA and the way in which, despite the aridity of large
parts of the country, the population is so dispersed; no one city could
provide the functions of a London or a Paris to the rest of the country.
This in turn, though, has had implications for the rapidity of change in
the various space economies. London and Paris have always been an over-
whelming point of attraction for new investments, like those of the 1930s
in the new consumer goods industries, including household goods and
automobile production,10 simply in virtue of first, the consumer market
that they themselves provided; and second, because they sat at the very
center of national distribution networks. In the USA it has been different.
The geography of investment opportunities, of possibilities of new growth
industries taking root and establishing themselves, has been more even.
Furthermore, the size of the country’s home market offers a scope for
economies of scale that promise explosive growth.
Features of the American state have then clicked in to give an extra push
to this dispersing impetus. At the heart of this is its extreme decentraliza-
tion: a radical federalism allied to the delegation of powers and responsi-
bilities, by the states, to local governments. Three particular expressions
of this seem apposite. The first is a history of banking regulation designed
to limit tendencies to the centralization of ownership and so monopoly.
This goes back to the reforms of the Progressive era and the introduction
of limits to bank branching across state lines and in many cases, across
county lines. Since the 1970s, these restrictions have been progressively
dismantled, but what it meant was an enhanced interest on the part of
banks, particularly where there were limits to inter-county banking, to
promoting local growth. There they could monopolize local savings –
something interestingly overlooked by the Progressives – but they needed
outlets for loans. This was never the case in the West European countries
where, aside from Germany with its Bank deutscher Länder, banking
tends now to be concentrated among a few, with virtually country-wide
branching.
Second, and again in contrast to the West European countries, considera-

ble swathes of labor law are a state responsibility. The center piece of this
is undoubtedly the – misleadingly named – right-to-work clause of the
1947 Taft–Hartley Act. This gave the states the option of declaring them-
selves ‘right-to-work’ states meaning, essentially, that the union shop was
banned; which in turn made it much harder for the labor unions to organ-
ize. Their coverage across the country is uneven. The South and the Great
Plains states, and the Mountain West11 are uniformly in the right-to-work
camp but battles have recently been won in the old Manufacturing Belt
in Michigan and Wisconsin. The geography is certainly coincident with
some of the rapid, even startling, urban growth in the USA, as in Atlanta,
Charlotte, Nashville, and Austin, Dallas and Houston in Texas. Respective
states vigorously market themselves, foregrounding right-to-work status
as an aspect of their favorable ‘business climate.’ To emphasize: this is
foreign to other of the advanced capitalist countries where labor law is
centralized and, so, uniform.
In Chapter 7 we discussed the capitalist state and why it is capitalist.

Clearly, though, while all capitalist states have similar structures –
a radical separation from the economy, certain characteristic forms of
provision and at least in the advanced capitalist societies, formal democ-
racy – closer up they can be seen to differ. There is always some provision
for the representation of more local or regionally based interests but in
the USA it has assumed almost dramatic proportions. Given the country’s
size and the possibilities of rapid, localized growth based on the huge
market represented by the USA, this has given uneven development an
unusual instability. State structures, however, are part of a broader, more
organic set of social relations. In particular, they cannot be divorced from
the class nature of respective national capitalisms. The sort of decentral-
ization of some aspects of labor law, as in the Taft–Hartley Act was only
possible in the context of a relatively weak labor movement. In the USA,
and unlike Western Europe, there are no parties representing the working
class; and at the time Taft–Hartley was passed, the Democrats were actu-
ally a strange coalition of labor union support and the plantation, segre-
gationist South, keen to keep African Americans in their place (Farhang
and Katznelson 2005). Countries (taken in toto), class relations, state
structure, and the sheer size of the home market, matter and affect the
way in which Weeks’s uneven development of the secondary sort unfolds.
Globalization
The conditions of uneven development have then played out over suc-
cessively larger spaces of accumulation. In talking about the emergence
of national and then global space economies, there has been a tendency
to emphasize the cheapening of long-distance transport: a succession of
innovations stretching from the canal, through the railroad and steam
ship to the container and air transport. This is to oversimplify. Monies
have been revolutionized in their spatial reach. The creation of state
monopolies in the supply of money displaced local banks that showed
alarming tendencies to run short of it when depositors came to withdraw.
The growth of international trade would then generate a demand for
world money and the gold standard would be its first incarnation. Since
the abolition of the modified gold standard in the early 1970s, the dollar
has performed the necessary lubricating function. The other condition
that tends to be overlooked is the law of property and contract. Without
some uniformity, and one solicitous of capitalist interests, foreign direct
investment and the international loans that give continuity to exchange
in difficult times would be greatly reduced. Competition for inward
investment reproduces these arrangements: property and contract law as
an important aspect of what has come to be known as ‘business climate.’
The increasing geographic reach and development of capitalism has then

been the occasion of what Trotsky called ‘the whip of external necessity’
(2009: 4). The ‘necessity’ to which he referred was directly economic in
the form of the ability of corporations in more developed countries to
nip development in other countries in the bud, and so to frustrate their
development projects; and also military – how to prevent subjugation by
force to the capitalist sway of some other country. This, he argued, could
be and had been the occasion for state intervention aimed at catching up:
something greatly facilitated by the fact that one could import the most
up-to-date technologies and organizational forms from the more devel-
oped countries. On the other hand, he also saw that development of this
sort would have to be ‘combined’ with pre-existing forms of development
and practice and that this could generate contradictions.
This thesis, along with Gerschenkron’s (1952) later additions regarding

catchup, has received increased attention in the context of the most recent
round of globalization and a neo-liberal gospel that has lauded the virtues
of openness to trade and foreign investment. The cases of the so-called

Newly Industrializing Countries have given rise to the idea of the devel-
opmental state. East Asia, particularly South Korea, Taiwan and China,
have been the focus. Through state control of the banks and hence finance
for industry, selective tariff protection, and a state-orchestrated build
up of industrial skills, proceeding from simpler labor processes, notably
cotton textiles, through iron and steel and shipbuilding, to automobile
and telecommunication equipment, catchup has clearly occurred.12 This
has entailed limits on multinationals that have their own views about
development planning, typically involving the transfer of value elsewhere,
as discussed earlier. But it can also work the other way around where
multinationals are so hot to get into a particular market, they are willing
to negotiate some collaboration on more advanced aspects of their par-
ticular labor processes, transferring skills and knowledge in the process.
This is relatively straightforward for China and its huge domestic market
but much harder for a country like South Korea.
As a universal means to promoting development in the rest of the less

developed world, however, we need to be skeptical. It is not just that
success has been conditional upon the existence of strong states, with
control of the banks and the ability to coordinate what capitalists there
are, around a development plan. It is also the reality of the division of
labor on a global scale. Just as a world where everyone is a lawyer is an
impossibility, so is that the case for one in which all countries are not just
industrial but producing the skills- and information-intensive goods to
which orthodox economists give the label, ‘higher value added.’ And to
argue that all countries can be simply more balanced in their growth, with
a representation of both agriculture and industry, goes against capital’s
contradictions, the result of which is pressure to seek markets on a world-
wide scale.
The rise of China as an industrial country, moreover, radically alters the

prospects for developmental states elsewhere. Its huge internal market
allows it to exploit economies of scale, which along with relatively low
wages, promise major incursions into world markets for industrial goods,
allowing it to curtail industrial growth there. The economist Dani Rodrik
(2016) has referred to ‘premature de-industrialization.’ The relative
shrinkage of industrial employment first noted in the advanced capitalist
countries of North America and Western Europe, is now appearing in less
developed countries, like Brazil, India and South Africa. Little wonder,
therefore, at the ‘urban growth- without-industrialization’ that Mike

Davis (2004) referred to. The struggling peasant is caught between two
forces: not just the squeeze on her earnings from the land but also the
diminishing prospects of wage labor through which to supplement them.
* * *
In discussions of uneven development, countries often provide a frame-

work for discussion, along with regions: a mute canvas against the
background of which play out the various dynamics of shifting spatial
divisions of labor and uneven development according to the two distinct
logics enunciated by John Weeks. However, uneven development and its
shifting geography can incite reactions of a highly territorialized sort and
capitals have often been more than willing to mobilize ideologies of that
nature and to call on respective states, or their various local and regional
branches to defend and enhance the national/regional/local economy –
read ‘spaces of accumulation’ – on which they have come to depend. This
has been the basis of a geopolitics of capital that has indeed tended to
more obvious territorial expressions but which has also been mobilized
more directly in the ongoing struggle with labor, as we will see in the final
chapter.
Notes
1. See Gordon Clark (1981).
2. Ibid.
3. This is to discuss the question of unequal exchange without reference to
Emmanuel’s (1972) contentious work. For a rebuttal but a restatement that
succeeds in showing the empirical fact of unequal exchange, see Foot and
Webber (1983).
4. See note 5 in Chapter 7.
5. More inconstant in some cases than in others. See Cox (2018; 2019).
6. The area anchored by Leeds and Liverpool in the north, stretching through
the English Midlands, to southeast England. See Fawcett (1932).
7. Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.
8. See Cox (2018) on the case of the USA.
9. See my blogs on Unfashionable Geographies: ‘The Dynamics of Uneven
Development and the American Exception’ (https://kevinrcox.wordpress
.com/2019/05/29/the-dynamics-of-uneven-development-and-the-american
-exception/), and ‘Uneven Urbanizations’ (https:// kevinrcox .wordpress
.com/2018/03/30/uneven-urbanizations/).
10. Paris more than London, since it had both Citroen and Renault; but the
London area included Ford at Dagenham and the new Morris motor works
was only 60 miles away at Oxford.
11. With the exception of Colorado and New Mexico.
12. Alice Amsden wrote compellingly on the South Korean case; see, for
example, Amsden (1990).
12 The geopolitics of
capitalism
Context
How the spoils of capitalist development are to be divided up is fought

over at all levels of the political hierarchy: between regionally based
groups, between cities and between countries. These appear as territo-
rial struggles rather than ones of class: who gets what, where. They are
seemingly about rust belts and new growth areas, about once hegemonic
countries like the United Kingdom contesting with upstarts of their time,
like Germany and Japan; and now, perhaps, soon, the United States, con-
testing with newly industrializing countries, most notably, in terms of its
size, China. And they are about the competition not just of countries and
regions, but of particular cities for inward investment and for government
policies that will favor them rather than others. At the international level,
this is the conventional stuff of what is known as geopolitics. But there is
also a geopolitics of regions, of cities and conventional geopolitics cannot
afford to overlook them.
Regardless, all of these look as if geopolitics is a politics of territorial

conflict and competition that overrides class interests. This would be
a mistaken conclusion. As we learnt earlier, competition under capitalism
has as its necessary condition the class relation. Cost competition is more
than it seems; fundamentally it is about squeezing more surplus labor out
of the working class and at an increasing rate. The same applies to the
conditions underlying territorial competition and conflict. The crucial
entry point is the socialization of production. In its various expressions,
the point is to speed up the circulation of money capital so that, in the
form of the means of production, it can soak up more surplus value. It
121
tends to be localized at some scale or another. It requires physical and

social conditions that are hard to move around, or to change, which
makes adjustment that much more difficult, for there is no guarantee
that value will continue to flow through the social relations of any one
(localized) socialization. Herein lies the key to the geopolitics of capital-
ism. Its typical form is competition of a territorial sort, but that should
not distract from the fundamentally class nature of the process. This has
been more apparent at some periods of capitalist history than at others.
We should not be misled by the current moment when it seems to be all
about territory. There have been times when geopolitics was much more
obviously about class than it is today. And one does not need to look too
closely to see that underneath the current hubbub about territory, capi-
talist interests in extracting surplus value from the working class are still
going about their business.
The geopolitics of capital as a territorial politics
Capitalist development proceeds through the socialization of production,

the goal of which is to speed up the extraction of surplus value. It assumes
characteristic forms in the division of labor and means of production
in common, respectively, but now projected onto a spatial plane: the
socialization of production is always a socio-spatialization. Regardless of
the scale at which it occurs, within the factory, within a city, among the
cities and regions comprising a country, or the countries making up the
global economy, the division of labor is always a geographic one, as we
saw in the last chapter. The same goes for the shared physical and social
infrastructures which mediate production: not just the physical premises
where production occurs or the massive shared instruments of labor,
like the assembly line, the oil refinery or the blast furnace, but the high-
ways, railroads, ports, and electricity and communication networks that
perform an auxiliary function for production processes. They have to be
located in a particular configuration if they are to facilitate the circulation
of capital. Likewise, without housing for the workers, there can be no
production. There are also the obvious social infrastructures like a reliable
means of exchange and the rule of law. Most crucially, the class nature
of production means that there has to be some sort of accommodation
between capital and labor: a class compromise, however uneasy it might
THE GEOPOLITICS OF CAPITALISM 123
be over the longer term. The state is important in this but so, too, are the
circumstances of particular industries. The changing balance between
capital of a fixed sort and that which circulates, discussed in Chapter 6,
means that capital can be under pressure to avoid lengthy strikes: equip-
ment cannot stand idle when there are big loans to pay off. A case in point
is the automobile industry, and this can set a pattern for its penumbra of
suppliers who, unless they can manage their own labor disputes, stand to
lose orders.
These physical and social infrastructures facilitate the circulation of

capital within a particular space, but a space that has its limits. Cost com-
petition puts pressure on speeding up the movement of capital. Things
cannot be so stretched out over space as to mean that some capital is
failing to circulate at what Harvey (1985a) has called its socially necessary
turnover time: something crucially defined by transport technology and
the cost involved and the time it takes to circulate commodities. In short,
the socialization of capital occurs within what one might call a space of
accumulation or, more conventionally, a space economy.
Spaces of accumulation have a hierarchical aspect: particular cities or

urban agglomerations or regions are sites of accumulation within a wider
spatial division of labor and with shared physical and social infrastruc-
tures, which is the material basis for common notions of local, regional
and national economies. They have their own distinctive physical and
social infrastructures conditioned by a position in that wider spatial divi-
sion of labor through which value must circulate: coalfield communities
are different from places dependent on assembly line industries and both
differ from so-called post-industrial cities in both class relations and
housing stock, and the reproduction of labor power. Complex geohisto-
ries can then add a particularity to labor relations, as in the US South, but
also in particular towns or urban clusters, like those of colliery villages,
taken in toto, or manufacturing towns (Moore 1974; Warde 1988). The
result is that spaces of accumulation occur at different geographic scales
and can be regarded as mutually presupposing.
But given the contradictions of capital, this is a particular geography that

cannot endure: rather, in the words of Storper and Walker (1989), and as
discussed Chapter 11, it is a geography destined to be ‘inconstant,’ and for
any number of reasons having to do with the continual urge to find some
competitive advantage and the class pressures that sustain that search.
Within the wider space of accumulation, represented by a particular

country, there are changes, by definition unforeseeable, that can threaten
the economic base of particular urban agglomerations or regions. Nobody
foresaw the sorts of new spatial divisions of labor that Massey (1984)
discussed. But de-skilling of the labor process or organizational change in
corporations aimed at curbing wage demands from the less skilled (Clark
1981) would result in some relocation of production to smaller towns and
undermine at least some portion of the economic base of other towns and,
in cities, that of particular neighborhoods. This is one sort of technologi-
cal change. Others have nothing to do with de-skilling but can revolution-
ize the geography of a space of accumulation, challenging some economic
bases while enhancing those of other cities or regions. New products can
have new geographies that impact on the investment patterns, generating
booms in new locations, pulling in workers, and disinvestment elsewhere.
The changes can be fairly quick as in the rise of new cities on the back
of electricity or the collapse of the British seaside town, both discussed,
again, in Chapter 11. The changes may also germinate over a long time
period and then be geographically widespread in their effects. Silicon
Valley is the original stimulus to the digitalization of more and more of
economic life. Without it, something like Amazon and the damage it has
done to small town economic bases across the USA, heavily focused on
retail, while deepening those of larger cities through their distribution
centers, is hard to imagine.
Changes in transport technologies with a very long history – the railroad,

the steamship, the jet airplane, the container – have then helped create
new spaces of accumulation at still larger geographic scales. As we saw,
there have been two notable globalizations. The first tended to fortify
the industrial and mining towns and port cities of the more developed
world on the basis, first, of cheaper raw materials and foodstuffs, some
of which would be the condition for entirely new industries, like the
cacao bean and rubber; and second, through providing new markets for
capital goods: investments in the railroads and port facilities necessary
to get the raw materials out. The most recent globalization, conditioned
by the container, the huge bulk carriers, and the neo-liberal moment has
been different: an international division of labor that has had devastating
effects on the classic heavy industries and coal mining of Western Europe
and North America, and then on a lot of branch plant employment. The
result has been a new expression, ‘the rust belt’; and the decimation of
small town economic bases everywhere as their branch plants have moved
to the likes of Mexico, Eastern Europe and East Asia.
This has been the occasion for a seemingly new politics of location:
attempts to restructure local and regional economies and struggles
over state policy. The most dramatic expressions of these tensions have
been first, the election to the US Presidency of Donald Trump, on the
basis of a populist program of Make America Great Again, targeted at
what have been dubbed the ‘left behinds’ of small towns bereft of their
branch plant employment, and at rust belt populations still reeling from
the closure of steel mills, relocations of manufacturing to the American
South and a changing geography of automobile production, largely under
sponsorship of the Japanese transnationals (Mair et al. 1988). And then,
second, in the same year of 2016, the decision of the British electorate,
by a small margin, to quit the European Union: again, strong ‘leave’ sen-
timent across the rust belts of Northern England, but echoed by similar
sentiments in France, with a very similar geography, and support for the
EU-averse National Front.1
Emphatically, though, there is nothing particularly new about this sort of

thing. In the 1970s, the coalfield areas of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and West
Virginia struggled with the challenge from the cheaper coal from open pit
mining in some Western states. This would reach something of a climax
in the context of the Clean Air Act of 1993 and the attempt to protect
the high sulphur coal of the former from the low sulphur competition
of Western coal (Cox 2016b: 47–9). Earlier still, in Great Britain, Joseph
Chamberlain’s tariff reform movement was aimed at protecting the
metal working industries of the country’s ‘Black Country’ to the west of
Birmingham while appealing to other areas believed to be suffering from
the competition of rapidly expanding industry in Germany. In the first
quarter of the twentieth century, the migration of cotton textile industries
to the American South would create something of a regional crisis in New
England (Cox 2016b: 75).
The difficulty is that in order for production to occur, there has to be

a degree of fixity in the landscape. As we have seen, if the socialization
of production is to occur, then factories, offices buildings, railroads,
highways and airports have to be built, along with housing and schools
for the workers, a water system and one to dispose of sewage. A lot of
physical capital is locked up in that built environment, some of whose
expense may yet to be amortized. These connections are not all obvious.
It is not just the workers who have to worry about their mortgages but the
banks too. The closure of a major employer ripples throughout the local
economy: workers have trouble paying their bills, including their taxes;
the auto dealers will be down in the dumps; the local construction indus-
try will slow down; the firms that serviced the now closed-down plant
have to chase new contracts that will be hard to find. Nobody wants to
buy property there, so values go down. All capital investments are highly
speculative. A lot can go wrong between assuming the debt and paying it
down, and it often does.
That is far from all. Again, and as we saw, the socialization of production
requires a tissue of social relations between the different agents: between
the banks and other businesses, between employers and workforces,
between one worker and another, between firms comprising the same
division of labor – component suppliers, repair services. This is a struc-
ture of social relations important to the flow of value through an area and
hard to reconstitute somewhere else, where profitability and employment
opportunities might be more attractive. Relocation is costly in terms
of the time it takes to build up comparable relations. Businesses have
long-standing connections with banks: relations of trust that take time to
develop. The majority of workers depend for their employment on word
of mouth passed on by friends and relatives: hard to replicate that in some
new place where you do not know anybody.
At one level, this is a contradiction between capital’s necessary mobility

and its necessary fixity. Mobility is necessary if accumulation is to con-
tinue, if the laws of value are to be obeyed and concrete labor times min-
imized. Equally, in order to minimize those concrete labor times, there
has to be production and this entails a chunk of fixed capital which slows
down its circulation. Ultimately it is about the impetus to accumulate and
the continuing effort to suspend the contradiction of the class relation
so that accumulation can indeed occur: always seeking out those new
opportunities to lower concrete labor times or simply increase surplus
value by exploiting workers whose labor power, in virtue of where they
live, is of lower value.
The contradiction is one shared by capital and labor, which is the reason
that contesting the inconstant geography of capital is so often through
various forms of class alliance: businesses joining with workers in calling
for regulatory relief that will, as the saying goes, ‘level the playing field’
with those upstart johnnies elsewhere; or coming together behind efforts
to replace the leading industries that have been lost: trying to convert
Detroit into the next Silicon Valley, or for some small town in the
Midwest, attracting in an Amazon distribution center or a corporation’s
call center to replace the branch plant that has upped and left for China.
But what came to be known as ‘restructuring’2 in the aftermath of the

de-industrialization of the late 1970s and 1980s, is not necessarily easy,
and is often politically fraught. As discussed in Chapter 11, the larger,
more diversified cities or regions find it easier to shift their economic
base. They have a more representative division of labor, often with small
firms that can take advantage of new opportunities; they have a more
varied housing stock that can be converted to new purposes. For smaller,
more specialized towns, it can be more difficult: purpose built housing for
miners is not easily convertible, not to mention a rather narrow spectrum
of skills and a severely limited local division of labor that works against
the germination of a new economic base. Class compromises have to be
reworked. It might be easier to do in a small town with a monopsonistic
employer who can threaten to move unless there are pay cuts, particularly
in an insistent discursive environment of the sort that Margaret Thatcher
reminded us with talk of ‘There is no alternative.’ It is not just that
workers will experience a decline in a standard of living to which they had
become accustomed; a set of expectations entailed by a particular class
compromise. It is also that they have made purchases of long life, notably
housing, that have to be financed. Restructuring in the old auto assembly
cities of the USA, once heavily unionized, has been particularly difficult
in the context of the Japanese transplants and their factories in smaller
towns, drawing on a workforce from surrounding rural areas with, so far,
limited interest in unionization.
On the other hand, it does not necessarily require some long-term

decline to generate a territorial alliance around growth issues: around the
desire to ensure that value continues to flow through a regional or local
economy. Investment in the socialization of production – in individual
plants, in urban infrastructure, in the ‘soft’ investment of forging links
with others in a wider division of labor, creating some compromise with
labor – is always a bet on the future and often a very long-term one. A par-
ticular space of accumulation is not just something to be defended; it also
serves as a base for expansion into new markets. The threat of capital’s
inconstant geography is just as real for not being realized but kept at bay.
As in the accumulation process of the individual firm, the capitalist does
not wait for the bankruptcy lawyers to come knocking at the door but
takes steps to avoid it. Wider spaces of accumulation, rather, are to be
structured to the advantage of a particular country or region. Urban pol-
itics in the USA has long been dominated by developers keen to promote
the growth of ‘our’ city, but they form coalitions with local governments
anxious about the property taxes that they might lose if a shopping center
goes elsewhere; and with residents who will support the ‘right sort of
development’ – something of which the developers are keenly aware.
The nineteenth-century struggle for empire, both formal and informal,

and continuing into the first half of the twentieth century, was exactly
of this genre, securing sources of raw materials and markets for capital
goods like railways and for consumer goods for the settlers. The formal
nature of the empires of that time has been exaggerated; there were
equally informal ones secured more by complementary positions in the
international division of labor, by the long leash of loans, and then by
cultural ties: the British in Latin America’s Southern Cone (Ferns 1953;
Winn 1976) or the Germans in Eastern Europe after the First World War
are classic cases. Imperialism continues but now virtually entirely through
these informal means. Use is made of a particular space of accumulation,
in this case a national one, to structure the world to one’s own advantage.
American dominance of the global economy had long been in the offing,
at least since the 1920s. Institutionally it would then be secured by the
Bretton Woods agreements of 1944, at the heart of which was a modified
gold standard under American control; something highly contested by
the British, desperately trying to cling to a global economic hegemony
which by then was clearly beyond their grasp. Bretton Woods is long gone
but in its place, the Americans have been able to exploit the sheer size of
the national economy to impose the dollar as the world money;3 and then
to use supposedly global institutions, like the IMF, to impose ‘solutions’
to the debt problems of other countries that will work to the advantage of
American corporations (Wade and Veneroso 1998).
Regardless of scale – country, region or whatever – all these territorial

coalitions make clear ideological appeals cross-cutting those of class. The
references will be to territorial identities: ‘our country/city/region.’ The
fact that many workers own property will be happily engaged with by
business interests, as in ‘protecting our property values.’ Region will be set
against region: how London is getting the lion’s share of infrastructural

spending by the British government. Ideas of territorial exploitation,
therefore – not class exploitation, please note – loom large.4 The public
agenda is one of ‘growth’ or ‘revival’ with the sense that everyone will
gain from national, regional, local effort, regardless; whereas the goal is
actually to revive business profitability in whatever way necessary, even
if it means attracting in cheaper labor from elsewhere, or using govern-
ment money to ‘modernize’ production in a way that is going to put large
numbers out of work.
It can also be that these sorts of, seemingly territorial, struggle spill over
into ones around the territorial structure of the state. The rest of England
is unlikely to break away from London and the Southeast, but uneven
development across the regions has stoked the fires of independence
movements in Scotland and in Wales. Scottish business has long railed
about British interest rate policy: inflationary pressures in London and
the Southeast prompt the Bank of England, the British central bank, to
raise interest rates, even while there are no such pressures in Scotland.
These sorts of anxiety are particularly strong among smaller businesses
which are more regionally concentrated in their activities. In Italy, on the
other hand, it has been interests in the wealthier, more industrial North
of the country which have taken the lead in a move to create an entirely
new state. The view has been that the Italian government has long acted
as an intermediary to transfer ‘their’ taxes to support through various
transfers, people in the South. Growth in the North is being held back, it is
claimed, by a Southern population, cross-cutting the classes, long viewed
as somehow lacking: one territorially based population against another,
therefore, with class interests barely getting a look in (Cox 2002: 21–4).
The geography of territorial struggle varies, and this is because countries

matter. Territorial struggle has long been a major feature of American
politics for reasons having to do with its distinctiveness as a social for-
mation and the peculiarities of its state form, again as we saw in Chapter
11. The relative weakness of the labor movement in the country has made
it easier to seduce workers into territorial forms of politics. The highly
decentralized form of the American state – a radical federalism and del-
egation of various developmental responsibilities from the states to local
governments – has then not only encouraged but facilitated territorialized
forms of capitalist politics (Cox 2016b: Chapter 8). In the more central-
ized states of Western Europe and with a history of more intense class
polarization, the territorial seductions common in the USA have been less
in evidence, at least at more local levels. Which brings us to the history
behind all this.
From a geopolitics of class to a geopolitics of territory
In thinking about geopolitics it is useful to go back to one of the found-

ing texts: Halford Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919),
most commonly known for its enunciation of the Heartland Theory.
As pointed out elsewhere (Cox 2019a), there is more to Mackinder than
meets the eye. You do not need to look too closely to see that capitalist
dynamics were at the center of his analysis. He recognized that it was the
drive to accumulate that was inciting the search for markets on a global
scale and generating conflict not just between countries, but between
labor and capital, and possibly organizing internationally. His answer
was more balanced development within countries so that the pressure
for overseas markets would diminish.5 This should be accompanied by
a balanced development across the regions of the country as a whole; class
cohesion within communities would replace class tensions across them:
“If the real organization of the Nation be by classes and interests – and
that is the alternative to organization by localities – it is quite inevitable
that the corresponding classes in neighboring nations will get themselves
together, and that what has been described as the horizontal cleavage
of international society will ensue” (Mackinder 1919: 130). And while
Mackinder was writing this, his American geopolitical comrade-in-arms,
Isaiah Bowman, was speculating on the global future of the United States,
but in a different modulation. It was the country’s expanding frontier, he
argued in the final chapter of The New World, that had acted as a safety
valve for class tensions. The frontier was now filled out. To alleviate class
tensions, the USA would have to look outwards for new markets so that
working-class aspirations could be sated by the economic growth that
that would allow.
The context for these claims is of major significance. Mackinder and

Bowman were both writing at approximately the beginning of what Eric
Hobsbawm (1994) called the short twentieth century. He dates it from the
beginning of the First World War to the collapse of the Soviet Union in
1990. I am more inclined to date it from the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The particular interpretation that I am going to give this is of a big but
barely recognized story: the way in which the challenge of the interna-
tional labor movement was pushed back, domesticated, and then crushed.
The territorialization of politics, and geopolitics as we now know it, is the
other side of that coin.
There are two related dramas. The first played out internationally. From
the standpoint of class struggle on a global scale, the First World War
had been a surprise. There had been copious evidence prior to that, that
the ruling classes of the world should pay attention to the revolutionary
demands of a significant part of the labor movement.6 The fact that
Germans, Brits and French so happily went to the trenches suggested that
the worry had been premature. The Russian Revolution of 1917 would
then be a wakeup call, and the alarm bells would go on ringing into the
1920s with the abortive revolutions in Germany and Hungary and a more
general labor unrest that would reach a peak in that decade; a high point
never repeated (see Silver 2004: Figure 1).
As Mann (1995) has outlined, the counter-attack would then be on. He

outlines three particular forms of this: the resurgence of religion in poli-
tics through Catholic labor unions and political parties; the legitimation
of rule by appeal to a supposedly class-neutral expertise; and nationalism.
We should note in passing that the particular mix and the intensity of
the reaction varied. It was different in France, Germany and Spain, than
it was in Great Britain and in the United States. In the former, more
backward countrysides, sometimes dominated by the Church and large
landowners, lent industrial transformation a more fraught character. This
was because the struggle between capital and labor overlay anxieties about
secularization and on the part of the big landowners, a shunting aside
from a former predominance (Rosenberg 1934). Moreover, what Mann
does not refer to is the significance of what some have called Europe’s
civil war (Graham 2005; Traverso 2016): a struggle by the ruling class
to reimpose its dominance and played out most vigorously in Franco’s
triumph and subsequent bloodletting in Spain and in the repression of the
labor movement by other fascist countries. Meanwhile, the ruling class in
France and Great Britain was quite happy to allow this to happen; Nazi
Germany intervened in Spain but they did not. According to one view
(Pauwels 2020), the French ruling class was utterly complicit in German
victory in 1940, since it would facilitate not just curbing, but extinguish-
ing the pretensions of the working class. Working-class resistance would

continue during the war through the communist-dominated resistance
movements. It would only be finally settled, at least for the time being,
with the end of the civil war in Greece in 1949: again, we should have no
doubt which side ruling classes elsewhere, including the British and the
Americans, actively supported.
This is not to argue that the Second World War was not also about global
hegemony: not just countering the threat of Germany and Japan to the
USA’s ambitions but also the USA putting a nail in the coffin of the
British Empire through the way it negotiated its war aid deals: no shared
anglophone sentimentality there! Germany led the charge against the
USSR but Britain and the USA were fine with that; it was the long-term
implications of German victory for domination of the global economy,
and therefore the implications for the US business classes that worried
the Americans.
Once the war was over, the struggle against the working classes of the
world would continue in the form of the Cold War: the attempt to push
back what would come to be called the ‘evil empire’ and save capitalism
for the world. Countries like Cuba, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and those
of Southern Africa, would now be accorded heightened importance in
geopolitical calculations. Why capitalism prevailed in this particular
struggle, aside from the huge advantage in material resources that it
was able to deploy, is complicated, but we can get a better sense of what
happened by focusing on how the struggle unfolded within individual
countries.
For alongside the internationalization of politics represented in the clas-

sical geopolitics of Mackinder and Bowman, there was also a nationaliza-
tion of politics that would provide the second part of the drama, gathering
speed after 1945, but whose foundations had been laid earlier. Within the
labor movement, battles between more radical and more accommodating
elements had occurred everywhere in the couple of decades around the
turn of the century. With the extension of the franchise to all men, the
more accommodating would gain the upper hand. Henceforth, it would
be the parliamentary road that was taken; little short of disastrous for the
workers’ movement, as elections required class alliances and short-term
improvements instead of structural transformation (Przeworski 1980).7
This would then play a role in the fragmentation of the working class into
so many unanchored individuals: customers of the political parties rather
than participants in their respective politics. The slow disintegration of
the classic sites of the labor movement in exclusively working-class com-
munities, the fragmentation of (loosely) extended families (Cox 2020)
and the corresponding emergence of what Habermas (1973: 77) would
call ‘familial-vocational privatism’ would be further nails in the coffin.
Globalization would be the coup de grâce, bringing de-industrialization
in its wake and the collapse of the ‘evil empire’ (Clarke 1990a). The labor
movement everywhere is in tatters and this despite the huge disparities in
wealth that ruling classes have been able to establish: a return to condi-
tions not seen since before the Second World War (Harvey 2007: 16–17)
and reflected in a geography which, judging from the election of Trump
and Brexit, has facilitated a territorialization of politics entrenching ruling
classes further.
This is, one might argue, a very West-centric view, but this is how it
played out, because outside of the heartlands of global capitalism one
encounters social formations of a quite different nature, as John Weeks
(2001) urged when referring to uneven development of the primary
sort: the difference between social formations of a more purely capitalist
nature, and social formations which retain strong pre-capitalist elements,
where capitalist development has struggled to take off. If it does not take
off, then the sort of class relations that one associates with the capitalist
world are not going to be apparent: no struggle for democratic rights,
therefore, and state forms that are scarcely capitalist (Cox and Negi 2010).
Anxieties about communism in Southern Africa and Central America
in the later stages of the Cold War were always overblown and, in one
sense, revealed a Eurocentricity of which others have complained in
a quite different context in arguments about the politics of difference:
so-called post-colonialism (Cox 2014: 111–15). The assumption was that
in post-colonial Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and so
forth, you could count on a serious working-class challenge. Given social
relations there, with their strong pre-capitalist forms or at least residues,
that was always an absurd assumption, one verified by the superficial
nature of the communist regimes that emerged and which were inev-
itably short-lived. But Eurocentricity lives on. The assumption now is
one of ‘failed states,’ which is to attribute to those countries to which the
sobriquet is applied a particular state norm: that of a capitalist state. The
problem is that they cannot be regarded as such, because respective social
formations are scarcely capitalist to begin with. But the easy stigmatiza-
tion continues and is absorbed into a new (geo)politics of difference.
Notes
1. See Cox (2016c).
2. In the urban and regional development literature, this was an idea that
surged to the fore in the 1980s, as in the British localities project (Cooke
1989). See also Clark et al. (1992).
3. Every country needs dollars, since, as a result of the size and diversity of the
American economy, it is likely that they will need to trade with the USA for
at least something. See McKinnon (2001).
4. How this gets expressed at the national level is often a matter of the balance
of taxes sent to the central government and how money in various forms gets
distributed across regions or, in the USA, states (Massey 2007; Cox 2016b:
11–12). In the metropolitan areas of the United States, a common complaint
from revenue-stretched central cities is that suburbanites make use of city
services without contributing to their financial support.
5. As it happens, a naïve idea given capital’s contradictions and the imperatives
to expand outside a home base.
6. See, for example, Suzanne Berger’s (2013) discussion of the French labor
movement during the first globalization.
7. The supposed high point of this engagement would be the postwar welfare
state, but, as Myrdal (1960: Chapter 9) reminded people at that time, its
national character tended to foreclose a more equal development across
countries and the liberation of the working class on an international level.
Afterword
Marx is a challenge because his view of the world is so alien to that which
is the received wisdom in capitalist societies and how that wisdom reflects
and reinforces dominant practices. This is true not just of the lay world
but also of the academic one, and not least in human geography. After
an initial burst of enthusiasm in the 1970s, for most human geographers
Marxism has become a curiosity; something that fascinates like some-
thing mildly titillating but which makes no lasting impression. When
he speaks at the geographers’ academic conferences, the attendance for
David Harvey will typically be standing-room only; but after that, not
much happens, or if any lessons are learnt, they are rather superficial
ones. Human geography is still waiting for that revolution in thought that
seemed to be the promise of the 1970s.
If indeed that is still because of the challenge of Marx’s arguments, then

I hope that this book will help shine a light. In the first part, I set out the
major arguments, and where useful, drew on bourgeois social science as
a contrast. The second half comprised some applications to topics which
are a focus not just of self-identified Marxist geographers but of human
geography as a whole. Again, this is a different light on themes like nature,
uneven development and difference. The chapters are stand-alone but the
interrelations should be evident. The geopolitics of capitalism is hard to
talk about without some reference to difference and the assignment of
blame as in the idea of ‘failed states.’ There are other topics that I might
have focused on. There is an important Marxist literature on landscape as
a central concept in human geography; the work of Denis Cosgrove and
Don Mitchell comes to mind. I would like to have given more focused
attention to the significance of countries to historical geographical mate-
rialism, but space considerations precluded it.
Beyond providing some initial enlightenment, my aim has been to get the
reader to the point where they can engage with some of the rich literature
that is Marxism in human geography. David Harvey’s contributions
are to the fore here. I would suggest The Enigma of Capital as a useful
135
bridging point to more challenging reading. The latter would include

his magisterial Limits to Capital, in which ‘limits’ is in part geographic
irony: the limits to Marx’s understanding of capital, in that he did not
develop its geographic aspects; but also the geographic limits that capital
continually seeks to overcome. Limits to Capital is central to developing
a more profound understanding of the arguments laid out in this book.
But anything by Harvey, and there is a lot of it, is rewarding. Other books
(and articles) on the reading list should include those by Denis Cosgrove,
Ray Hudson, Don Mitchell, Dick Peet, Eric Sheppard, Erik Swyngedouw,
Richard Walker, Michael Webber and Jane Wills. There are also the
honorary Marxist geographers, most notably Mike Davis. There are some
critical human geographers worth following: I always read what Roger
Lee, Linda McDowell, Ron Martin, Erica Schoenberger and Allen Scott,
among others, have to say and invariably find it rewarding. And the work
of Doreen Massey, alas now deceased, was invariably highly stimulating.
In addition, this should be the moment for expanding an understanding

of the Marxist arguments developed in the first part of the book. Capital
Volume 1 has to be at the top of this list. David Harvey has provided an
excellent guide to this in his A Companion to Marx’s Capital: absolutely
indispensable. His website https://davidharvey.org/includes some excel-
lent lecture courses that can be followed on YouTube. There are also
the journals: Human Geography is dedicated to Marxist work; Antipode
carries some useful contributions. Outside of geography, I find useful
(in no particular order of preference), Capital and Class, Historical
Materialism, International Socialism and New Left Review.
Marx’s work and that of those who have drawn on his ideas, sheds an
entirely new light on the world. It is a light on the world as a totality,
unrelenting in its sheer scope and intellectually exciting. It is a world to be
rediscovered therefore, and not least, a human geography.
Bibliography
Alexander, T (1996), Unravelling Global Apartheid. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Altvater, E (2007), The social and natural environment of fossil capitalism. In
L Panitch and C Leys (eds.), Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register
Volume 43, pp. 37–59. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Amsden, A H (1990), Third world industrialization: ‘global Fordism’, or a new
model? New Left Review 1/182, 5–31.
Bachrach, P (1967), The Theory of Democratic Elitism. Boston, MA: Little Brown
and Company.
Banaji, J (2011), Theory as History. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
Barry, T (1987), Roots of Rebellion: Land and Hunger in Central America. Boston,
MA: South End Press.
Berger, S (2013), Puzzles from the first globalization. In M Kahler and D Lake
(eds.), Politics in the New Hard Times: The Great Recession in Comparative
Perspective, Chapter 6. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bernstein, H (2001), ‘The peasantry’ in global capitalism: who, where and why? In
L Panitch and C Leys (eds.), Working Classes, Global Realities: Socialist Register
Volume 37, pp. 25–51. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bernstein, H (2006), Is there an agrarian question in the 21st century? Canadian
Journal of Development Studies 27, 449–60.
Boserup, E (1965), The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of
Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure. London: Allen & Unwin.
Bowman, I (1928), The New World, rev. edn. New York: World Book Company.
Braverman, H (1974), Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in
the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Brenner, J and Ramas, M (1984), Rethinking women’s oppression. New Left
Review 1/144, 33–71.
Brenner, R (1977), The origins of capitalist development: a critique of neo-Smithian
Marxism. New Left Review 1/104, 25–92.
Burawoy, M (1976), The functions and reproduction of migrant labor: compara-
tive material from Southern Africa and the United States. American Journal of
Sociology 82, 1050–87.
Callinicos, L (1981), Gold and Workers 1886–1924. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.
Caplovitz, D (1967), The Poor Pay More. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Charmes, E (2007), Le malthusianisme foncier. Etudes foncières, Compagnie d’édi-
tion foncière, 12–16, available at https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/file/index/
docid/486447/filename/malthusianisme_foncier_charmes_2010.pdf.
Clark, G L (1981), The employment relation and the spatial division of labor:
a hypothesis. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 71/3, 412–24.
Clark, G L, McKay, J, Missen, G and Webber, M (1992), Objections to economic
restructuring and the strategies of coercion: an analytical evaluation of policies
137
and practices in Australia and the United States. Economic Geography 68,
43–59.
Clarke, S (1990a), Crisis of socialism or crisis of the state? Capital and Class 42,
19–29.
Clarke, S (1990b), The Marxist theory of crisis. Science and Society 54, 442–67.
Cockburn, C (1983), Brothers: Male Dominance and Technical Change.
London: Pluto Press.
Cohen, G (1978), Karl Marx’s Theory of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Cooke, P (1989), Localities. London: Unwin Hyman.
Cox, K R (2002), Political Geography: Territory, State and Society. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Cox, K R (2014), Making Human Geography. New York: Guilford Press.
Cox, K R (2016a), Geographies, critical and Marxist, and lessons from South
Africa. Human Geography 9/3, 10–26.
Cox, K R (2016b), The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the
American Exception. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Cox, K R (2016c), Brexit, Frexit, and Trump. Unfashionable Geographies, available
at https://kevinrcox.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/brexit-frexit-and-trump.pdf.
Cox, K R (2018a), Peter Gowan and uneven development. Unfashionable
Geographies, available at https://kevinrcox.wordpress.com/2018/09/28/peter
-gowan-and-uneven-development/.
Cox, K R (2018b), Uneven urbanizations. Unfashionable Geographies, available at
https://kevinrcox.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/uneven-urbanizations/.
Cox, K R (2019a), A Mackinder centenary and a revisionist note. Unfashionable
Geographies, available at https://kevinrcox.wordpress.com/2019/01/27/a
-mackinder-anniversary-and-a-revisionist-note/.
Cox, K R (2019b), The dynamics of uneven development and the American
exception. Unfashionable Geographies, available at https://kevinrcox.wordpress
.com/2019/05/29/the-dynamics-of-uneven-development-and-the-american
-exception/.
Cox, K R (2020), Geographies of decline and the labor movement. Unfashionable
Geographies, available at https://kevinrcox.wordpress.com/2020/07/02/
geographies-of-decline-and-the-labor-movement/.
Cox, K R and Negi, R (2010), The state and the question of development in
sub-Saharan Africa. Review of African Political Economy 37, 71–85.
Davis, M (2002), Late Victorian Holocausts. London: Verso.
Davis, M (2004), Planet of slums. New Left Review NS 26, 1–34.
De Decker, P (2008), Facets of housing and housing policies in Belgium. Journal
of Housing and the Built Environment 23, 155–71.
Doeringer, P B and Piore, M J (1971), Internal Labor Markets and Manpower
Analysis. Lexington, MA: D C Heath and Co.
Dunleavy, P (1979), The urban basis of political alignment: social class, domestic
property ownership, and state intervention in consumption processes. British
Journal of Political Science 9, 409–43.
Emmanuel, A (1972), Unequal Exchange. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Farhang, S and Katznelson, I (2005), The Southern imposition. Studies in
American Political Development 19, 1–30.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 139
Fawcett, C B (1932), Distribution of the urban population in Great Britain, 1931.

Geographical Journal 79, 100–113.
Feder, E (1971), The Rape of the Peasantry: Latin America’s Landholding System.
New York: Anchor Books.
Ferns, H S (1953), Britain’s informal empire in Argentina, 1806–1914. Past and
Present 4, 60–75.
Fine, B and Rustomjee, Z (1996), The Political Economy of South Africa: From
Minerals-Energy Complex to Industrialization. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Foord, J and Gregson, N (1986), Patriarchy: towards a reconceptualization.
Antipode 18, 186–211.
Foot, S P H and Webber, M J (1983), Unequal exchange and uneven develop-
ment. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1, 281–304.
Fraser, N (2000), Rethinking recognition. New Left Review, NS 3, 107–20.
Freund, B (2018), Twentieth-Century South Africa: A Developmental History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garner, J (1984), The Model Company Town: Urban Design Through Private
Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century New England. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press.
Gerschenkron, A (1952), Economic backwardness in historical perspective. In B
Hoselitz (ed.), The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas, pp. 3–29. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Graham, H (2005), The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Guy, J (1987), Analysing pre-capitalist societies in Southern Africa. Journal of
Southern African Studies 14, 18–37.
Habermas, J (1973), Legitimation Crisis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Hart, N (1989), Gender and the rise and fall of class politics. New Left Review
1/175, 19–45.
Harvey, D (1971), Social processes, spatial form and the redistribution of real
income in an urban system. In M Chisholm (ed.), Regional Forecasting,
pp. 267–300. London: Butterworth. [Re-printed as Chapter 2 of D Harvey
(1973), Social Justice and the City. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.]
Harvey, D (1974), Population, resources and the ideology of science. Economic
Geography 50, 256–67.
Harvey, D (1975), The geography of accumulation. Antipode 7/2, 9–21.
Harvey, D (1978), Labor, capital and class struggle around the built environment
in advanced capitalist societies. In K R Cox (ed.), Urbanization and Conflict in
Market Societies, Chapter 1. Chicago, IL: Maaroufa.
Harvey, D (1982), Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harvey, D (1985a), The geopolitics of capitalism. In D Gregory and J Urry (eds.),
Social Relations and Spatial Structures, Chapter 7. London: Macmillan.
Harvey, D (1985b), The Urban Experience. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Harvey, D (1996), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Harvey, D (2007), A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Harvey, D (2014), Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D (2020), Value in motion. New Left Review NS 126, 99–116.
Heintz, J (2006), Low-wage manufacturing and global commodity chains: a model
in the unequal exchange tradition. Cambridge Journal of Economics 30, 507–20.
Hindess, B (1971), The Decline of Working Class Politics. London: MacGibbon
and Kee.
Hobsbawm, E (1994), The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century,
1914–1991. London: Michael Joseph.
Huberman, M (1987), The economic origins of paternalism: Lancashire cotton
spinning in the first half of the nineteenth century. Social History 12, 177–92.
Jeeves, A H and Crush, J (1995), The failure of stabilization experiments on South
African gold mines. In J Crush and W James (eds.), Crossing Boundaries,
Chapter 1. Cape Town: Institute for Democracy in South Africa.
Jeffery, D (2017), The strange death of Tory Liverpool. British Politics 12, 386–407.
Joyce, P (1980), Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later
Victorian England. London: Methuen.
Kellett, J R (1969), The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Mackinder, H J (1919), Democratic Ideals and Reality. London: Constable.
Mair, A, Florida, R and Kenney, M (1988), The new geography of automobile
production: Japanese transplants in North America. Economic Geography 64,
352–73.
Mamdani, M (1986), Peasants and democracy in Africa. New Left Review 1/156,
37–49.
Mann, M (1995), Sources of variation in working-class movements in
twentieth-century Europe. New Left Review 1/212, 14–54.
Mann, S and Dickinson, J M (1978), Obstacles to the development of a capitalist
agriculture. The Journal of Peasant Studies 5, 466–81.
Marx, K (1857–58 [republished 1973]), Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books.
Marx, K (1867 [republished 1976]), Capital Volume 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books.
Marx, K and Engels, F (1846 [reprinted 1978]), The German Ideology. New York:
International Publishers.
Marx, K and Engels, F (1848/1998), The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition.
London: Verso.
Massey, D (1979), In what sense a regional problem? Regional Studies 13, 233–43.
Massey, D (1984), Spatial Divisions of Labor. London: Macmillan.
Massey, D (2007), World City. Cambridge: Polity Press.
McDowell, L and Massey, D (1984), A woman’s place. In D Massey and J Allen
(eds.), Geography Matters! A Reader, Chapter 16. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
McKinnon, R I (2001), The international dollar standard and the sustainability
of the U.S. current account deficit. In Brookings Papers on Economic Activity,
pp. 227–39. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Meiksins-Wood, E (1988), Capitalism and human emancipation. New Left Review
1/167, 1–20.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 141
Mitter, S (1986), Industrial restructuring and manufacturing homework: immi-

grant women in the UK clothing industry. Capital and Class 27, 37–80.
Mollenkopf, J (1983), The Contested City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Molotch, H (1976), City as a growth machine. American Journal of Sociology 82,
226–38.
Moore, J (2012), Cheap food and bad money: food, frontiers, and financialization
in the rise and demise of neoliberalism. Review 33, 125–61 available at http://
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.692.616.
Moore, J (2014), The end of cheap nature, or, how I learned to stop worrying
about ‘the’ environment and love the crisis of capitalism. In C Suter and C
Chase-Dunn (eds.), Structures of the World Political Economy and the Future
of Global Conflict and Cooperation, pp. 1–31. Berlin: LIT, available at http://
citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.691.2992&rep=rep1&type
=pdf.
Moore, R S (1974), Pitmen, Preachers and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Morris, M L (1980), The development of capitalism in South African agriculture:
class struggle in the countryside. In H Wolpe (ed.), The Articulation of Modes
of Production, Chapter 6. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Murray, R (1987), Ownership, control and the market. New Left Review 1/164,
87–112.
Myrdal, G (1960), Beyond the Welfare State. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
O’Connor, J (1991), On the two contradictions of capitalism. Capitalism, Nature,
Socialism 2, 107–9.
Offe, C (1985), Disorganized Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ollmann, B (2003), Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Panitch, L and Leys, C (eds.) (2007), Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist
Register Volume 43. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Parkin, F (1971), Class Inequality and Political Order. London: MacGibbon and
Kee Ltd.
Pauwels, J R (2020), France 1939–1945: from strange defeat to pseudo-liberation.
Journal of Labor and Society 23, 337–48.
Piven, F F and Cloward, R (1971), Regulating the Poor. New York: Vintage Books.
Post, C (1982), The American road to capitalism. New Left Review 1/133, 30–51.
Poulantzas, P and Miliband, R (1972), The problem of the capitalist state. In R
Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science, Chapter 11. London: Fontana/
Collins.
Przeworski, A (1980), Social democracy as a historical phenomenon. New Left
Review 1/122, 27–58.
Rainnie, A (1984), Combined and uneven development in the clothing industry:
the effects of competition on accumulation. Capital and Class 22, 141–56.
Rioux, S (2013), The fiction of economic coercion: political Marxism and the
separation of theory and history. Historical Materialism 21, 92–128.
Rodrik, D (2016), Premature deindustrialization. Journal of Economic Growth 21,
1–33.
Rosenberg, A (1934), Fascism as a Mass Movement. Reprinted in Historical

Materialism 20 (2012), 144–89.
Sayer, A (1985), The difference that space makes. In D Gregory and J Urry (eds.),
Social Relations and Spatial Structures, Chapter 4. London: Macmillan.
Sayer, A (1986), New developments in manufacturing: the just-in-time system.
Capital and Class 30, 43–72.
Silver, B (2004), Labor, war and world politics: contemporary dynamics in
world-historical perspective. In B Unfried, M Van der Linden and C Schindler
(eds.), Labour and New Social Movements in a Globalizing World System,
pp. 19–38. Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt.
Smolensky, E and Gomery, J D (1971), The urban problem as an exercise in the
theory of efficient transfers. Prepared for presentation as the luncheon address
at the Third Annual Meeting of the Mid-Continent Section of the Regional
Science Association; University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, June 15, 1971.
Storper, M and Walker, R A (1989), The Capitalist Imperative. Oxford: Blackwell.
Subra, P (2007), Géopolitique de l’Aménagement du Territoire. Paris: Colin.
Swyngedouw, E (2007), Technonatural revolutions: the scalar politics of Franco’s
hydro-social dream for Spain, 1939–1975. Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers NS 32, 9–28.
Therborn, G (1977), The rule of capital and the rise of democracy. New Left
Review 1/103, 3–41.
Thompson, E P (1971), The moral economy of the English crowd in the eight-
eenth century. Past & Present 50, 76–136.
Thomson, F (2011), The agrarian question and violence in Colombia: conflict and
development. Journal of Agrarian Change 11, 321–56.
Traverso, E (2016), Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945. London:
Verso.
Trotsky, L (2009/1932), The History of the Russian Revolution: Vol. 1. Chicago,
IL: Haymarket.
Wade, R and Veneroso, F (1998), The Asian crisis: the high debt model versus the
Wall Street-Treasury-IMF Complex. New Left Review 1/228, 3–24.
Walker, R A (1985), Is there a service economy? Science and Society 49, 42–83.
Walker, R A and Large, D B (1975), The economics of energy extravagance.
Ecology Law Quarterly 4, 963–85.
Warde, A (1988), Industrial restructuring, local politics and the reproduction of
labor power: some theoretical considerations. Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 6, 75–95.
Watts, M J (1983a), On the poverty of theory: natural hazards research in context.
In K Hewitt (ed.), Interpretations of Calamity, Chapter 13. London: Allen and
Unwin.
Watts, M J (1983b), Hazards and crises: a political economy of drought and
famine in northern Nigeria. Antipode 15/1, 24–34.
Weeks, J (1981), Capital and Exploitation. London: Edward Arnold.
Weeks, J (1997), The law of value and the analysis of underdevelopment.
Historical Materialism 1, 91–112.
Weeks, J (2001), The expansion of capital and uneven development on a world
scale. Capital and Class 74, 9–31.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 143
Weiss, M (1980), The origins and legacy of urban renewal. In P Clavel, J Forester
and W W Goldsmith (eds.), Urban and Regional Planning in an Age of
Austerity, Chapter 4. New York: Pergamon Press.
Wilkinson, R W (1973), Poverty and Progress: An Ecological Approach to Economic
Development. London: Methuen.
Winn, P (1976), British informal empire in Uruguay in the nineteenth century.
Past and Present 73, 100–126.
Wolfe, A (1982), America’s Impasse. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Wolpe, H (1980), Capitalism and cheap labor power in South Africa: from segre-
gation to apartheid. In H Wolpe (ed.), The Articulation of Modes of Production,
Chapter 8. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wrigley, E A (2010), Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Zelizer, V (1994), Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of
Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Index
absolute surplus value 29, 30, 42 difference and 97

abstract labor 22–3, 25 ecological relationship 84
accumulation 18–20, 39–47 fixed 52–3, 123, 126
capitalist cities 73 geopolitics of 122–30
coercive state power 64 global relations 114
historical forms 42 ‘inconstant geography’ 112–13,
nature contradiction 90 123, 128
social reproduction 40–41 labor subsumption to 42, 44
spaces of 83, 117, 119, 123–4, machinery for 53, 68
127–8 ‘malthusianist’ contradictions 88
accumulation fund 43–4 nature and 91
Alexander, Titus 95 overaccumulation 44–6, 47
Amsden, Alice 120 socialization of 62
supply and demand, controls
Bachrach, Peter 67 both 43
Banaji, Jarius 21 surplus value 33
Bernstein, Henry 112 urbanization of 73–84, 102
Boserup, Esther 88 working class balance 41
Bourdieu, Pierre 99 capital goods 51
Bowman, Isaiah 130, 132 capitalism 10–11, 18, 71
branch plant towns 107, 109, 125 commodity production 12–13
Brenner, Johanna 100 competitive strategies 17–19
Brenner, Robert 21, 100 contingent circumstance 6
‘business climate’ 117 development under 8
difference and 94–103
CAFOs (confined animal feeding geopolitics of 121–36
operations) 91 ideology under 58–69
capital 12–20 naturalization 63
accumulation 39–46, 47 nature/labor separation 87
circulating 32–3, 44–5, 50, 52–4, social relations 2
123 technologies/products 56
sphere of illusion 59–60 value of labor power 27, 35
velocity 32–3, 50, 91, 121 capitalist cities 73–84
class relations 8–9, 47–8 capitalist state 58–69, 116
development of 35, 47–57 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring 85
Chamberlain, Joseph 125
144
INDEX 145
cities 73–84, 107–9, 112–15, 121, global scale 92

123–4, 127 production/living place 77–8
class urbanization 74–8, 83
contradictions 19–20, 75–8 corvée labor 13
difference 95–8 Cosgrove, Denis 135
geopolitics of 122–3, 130–134 cost competition 18, 25, 55, 96, 121
class alliances 126–7 countries 114–15
class relations 8–9, 36–7, 40, 47–8, territorial struggle 129
57–8, 99, 133 uneven development 114–15
class struggle 74–5, 83 crisis
climate change 88 circulation 44–5
clone divisions of labor 106 tendency for the rate of profit to
coercion fall 45
economic 64 critical human geography 71, 136
extra-economic 64
state 64–5, 69 Davis, Mike 112, 119
cohesion, ‘factors of’ 58–69 decentralization 115–16
Cold War 132, 133 de-industrialization, premature 118
commercial capital 49 demand 22, 24, 43–5, 80
commodification of nature 89–90 democracy and capitalism 66–7
commodities 12–14, 24 de-skilling 26, 124
labor power as 12–13, 15–16, development 3, 6, 7–8
20, 23 geopolitics and 130
value of 12–15, 22 income variations 104–5
commodity relations 19 luxury goods 35
competition 17–19, 24, 26–7, 47–8 meaning of 104
class difference 96 socialization of production 111
cost 18, 25, 45, 48, 55, 83, 96, 99, workday lengthening 19
121 ‘development industry’ 79
geopolitics 121, 123 developmental states 118
globalization 117 Diamond, Jared 62
product 55–6, 124 difference 94–103
productivity and 32 division of labor 19, 53–5
state power and 65 between firms 51
confined animal feeding operations functional 49–50
(CAFOs) 91 gendered 36, 76, 98, 100
constant capital 28, 45–6, 110 geopolitics 122
consumption 4–5, 18, 45 international 124
consumption fund 43–4 social life 62
consumption goods 56, 67–8, 89–90, socialization of production 50–52
115 spatial 56, 71, 105–10, 113
content–form inversion 59–60 technical 37, 71, 74, 75, 100, 103
contingent, capitalism as 6 double freedom of labor power 13, 47,
contradiction 7–9, 47–8 61–4
accumulation/nature 90 Downs, Robert 63
capital 81, 83, 88, 126 dual-labor market theory 38
class 75–8
fixity/mobility 123, 125–6 ecological Marxism 90–93
ecological theory 84, 88–9 Habermas, Jürgen 133

economic forces 64, 69 Hardin, Garrett, The Tragedy of the
economic regulation 22 Commons 85
economics, defining 70 Harvey, David 71, 93, 123, 135–6
economies of scale 114, 118 hegemony, global 128, 132
education and labor power 36 historical geographical materialism
Ehrlich, Paul and Anne 85 2–11
electoral systems 84 historical materialism 2–11
emancipation 99–101 Hobsbawm, Eric 130–131
empire-building 128 housing question 76, 77–8, 80
Engels, Friedrich 3, 10, 11 human geography and Marxism
equality 60, 67 challenges to 135
before the law 66, 69 distinct needs of 70
of opportunity 68 insights 71
Eurocentricity 94, 133 people-nature relationship 85–93
Europe’s civil war 131–2
exchange relations 4 idealism 5
exchange value 12, 14–15, 21–2, 109 ideology 58–69, 81–2
dehistoricizing 63
failed states 133–4, 135 economic/political 69
family 2, 18, 25, 36, 100–101 naturalizing 63
Faulkner, William 11 reproducing difference 98–9
fetishization of nature 86–90 separating 61–3, 76, 90
feudalism 6–7, 13, 37, 64 urban 82
finance capital 26, 49 income inequality 81
First World War 131 income measures and development
formal subsumption of labor to capital 104–5
42, 44 income redistribution 81–2
form–content inversion 59–60 individual value of the product 31–2
franchise, struggle for 66–7 industrial capital 49–50
Fraser, Nancy 103 industrial reserve army of labor 43–4
‘free time’ 76 industrial revolution 88–9
freedom 13–14, 47, 61–4, 67–8 informal economy 112
of opinion 66 instruments of labor 28–9, 52
Friedman, Thomas 63 ‘intellectual property rights’ 57
functional division of labor 49–50 international division of labor 124
‘intersectionality’ 96
Galbraith, John K 67
gender difference 94, 96, 99–100 labor
gender discrimination 97–8, 103 capital contradictions 126
gendered division of labor 36, 76, 98, condition of production 28
100 ‘dead’ 53
gentrification 81 difference and 97
geopolitics of capitalism 121–36 industrial reserve army of 43–4
Gerschenkron, Alexander 117 living 52
global warming 92–3 nature and 86–7
globalization 10, 106–7, 114, 117–19, subsumption to capital 42, 44
124, 133 value of 22–3, 108
INDEX 147
labor law 116 means of production 13–14, 40, 45

labor power shared 52
as commodity 12–13, 15–16, 20, Meiksins-Wood, Ellen 96–7
23 migrant labor 36
double freedom of 13, 47, 61–4 Mitchell, Don 135
equality 60 Mitterrand, François 62
limits of 30 mobility of capital 126
markets in 21, 38 mobility of labor power 26
as natural force 91 modes of production 12, 19
protection of 65 money capital 20, 39
reproduction of 36–7, 40–41, money commodity 23
54–5 monopoly effects 26–7
value of 15–16, 27, 28–9, 31, 34–7, Myrdal, Gunnar 134
109
labor process 3, 5, 19–20, 106 national difference 94, 98–100, 102
nature and 86 ‘national economy’ 83
socialization of 51 nationalization of politics 132, 134
surplus value 29, 31 ‘natural’ disasters 87–8
labor supply 13 nature 85–93
labor time as consumption good 89–90
socially necessary 14–16, 18, fetishization of 86–90
23–5, 29, 31 labor time 16
land 6–7, 21–2, 86–7, 111–12 production relation 3
law, equality before 66, 69 social relations 2
law of value 22–4
leisure time, idea of 89, 90 objects of labor 28–9, 49
living place 75–8 obsolescence
location, politics of 125 physical 53
luxury goods 35 social 53
O’Connor, James 93
machinery 53 opinion, freedom of 66
Mackinder, Halford 130, 132 opportunity, equality of 68
Malthus, Thomas 59, 88 overaccumulation of capital 44–6, 47
Malthusianism 88–9, 93
Mann, Michael 131 parts-process divisions of labor 106
market power 27, 34, 108–9 patriarchy 95, 100
market theories 38 Peel, Mr 63, 69, 111
Marx, Karl political ecology 86–7
Capital 2, 5, 7, 9, 43–4, 59–60, political economy 21, 59–60
63, 136 political forces, state power 69
Communist Manifesto 10 politics
A Contribution to the Critique of of location 125
Political Economy 8, 19 nationalization of 132, 134
The German Ideology 3, 11 and territorial forms 129
Grundrisse 5, 86 population growth 88–9
Marxism, challenges of 135–6 Post, Charles 110
Massey, Doreen 105–6, 110, 113, 124 post-colonialism 133
materialism 2–11
post-industrial cities 79, 107 ‘redlining’ 80

‘the posts’ 94 reformism 67, 82
pluralism of 95 regional geopolitics 121, 123–4, 127–9
Poulantazas, Nicos 58 relative scarcity and value 21–2
pre-capitalist production relations 110 relative surplus value 29, 30–33, 42
pre-capitalist society 24, 61, 86–7, 133 reproduction
see also feudalism; slavery capital accumulation as 39–41
prices and abstract labor 23 of labor power 36–7, 40–41, 54–5
primary sector 38, 53–5 social 40–41
primitive accumulation 7, 9, 14, 42, resource shortage 88–9, 90
61, 64 ‘restructuring’ 127
private property 64 retail sector 33–4, 108–9
product competition 55 Ricardo, David 15
production 3–5, 17 right-to-work laws 116
commodities 12–13 Rodrik, Dani 118
forces of 8, 19, 20, 104, 111 Romantic movement 89
living place, in contradiction rust belt 124, 125
with 77
nature relation 3 Second World War 132
pre-capitalist relations 110 secondary sector 38, 53–5
relations of 8, 18, 19 service sector 54–5, 100–101
social forces of 5–6 slavery 37, 64
social relations of 4, 12, 59 Smith, Adam 15, 59, 63
see also socialization of social forces, production 5–6
production social formations 133–4
products social infrastructure 64–5
individual value 31–2 social mix, class contradictions of 76–7
innovation and capitalist social process 9–10
development 55–7 social relations
social value 31–2 capitalism and 2
profit rate, tendency to fall 45 development and 6
profit and surplus value 28 of production 4, 12, 59, 126
property capital 49, 79–80 thingification of 61
speculative nature 79–80 social stratification 99
property franchise 66 social theory 70–72
property relations 12 social value of the product 31–2
property rights 64 socialization of production 50–52, 62
Przeworski, Adam 67 and geopolitics 121–2, 125–7
and uneven development 105,
race and difference 94, 96, 99–100, 102 110–111
racial discrimination 97–8 urbanization and 73, 76
racial segregation 98 socially necessary labor time 14–16,
Ramas, Maria 100 18, 23–5, 29, 31
real subsumption of labor to capital socially necessary turnover time 123
42, 44 socio-spatialization 122
redistribution of income 81–2 peculiarities of agriculture 32–3
redistribution of surplus value 34, sociology 70
108–9
INDEX 149
spaces of accumulation 123–4, 127–8, thingification 61–3

134 of nature 87, 89
spatial division of labor 56, 71, 105–10, three sector model 53–5
113 totality 8, 62, 80, 134, 136
state 58–69, 116 totalization 96
American 115–16 Trotsky, Leon 117
class relations 8–9 TRPF (tendency for the rate of profit
coercive power 64–5, 69 to fall) 45
countries and variations in state Trump, Donald 125
form 116 turnover time 123
developmental 118
ideology and state power 66–8 unemployment 9, 43, 46
neutrality 82 unequal exchange 109, 119
particularization of 64–5 unequal incomes 81
suspending contradictions 65 uneven development 83, 104–20, 133
territorial struggle 83–4 combined 117
territorial structure 129 countries, importance of 114–16
Storper, Michael 112, 123 northern hemisphere bias 114
stratification, social 99 primary 110, 111–12, 133
subsistence 7, 23, 31, 40, 111 secondary 110, 112–14
subsistence goods 31, 32 urban ideology 82
substitutability urban question 74–5
labor power 37 urban renewal 80, 84
nature 91 urbanization 73–84, 102, 112, 114, 123
resource shortage 89 politics of difference 102–3
subsumption of labor to capital 42, 44 without industrialization 118–19
supply 22, 24, 43, 80 use value 12–14, 22
surplus value 15–19, 28–38
accumulation 39–41, 42–3, 45 value 21–4
circulating capital, velocity of capital accumulation 39–40, 45
32–3, 50 commodities, of 12–15, 22
distribution of 18, 33–4 division of labor 108
economic forces 64 income measures 105
uneven development 108–9 labor power, of 15–16, 27–9, 31,
sustainability 91 34–7, 109
law of 25–7
taxation 67, 69 mainstream concepts of 21–2
technologies 55–7, 92 productive forces, development
tendency for the rate of profit to fall of 104
(TRPF) 45 theory of 21–7, 29
territorial alliance 127, 128–9 and unequal exchange 109
territorial competition 121 value-producing labor see abstract
territorial politics 122–34 labor
territorial struggles 81, 83, 119, 121, variable capital 29, 45
122, 129, 133
tertiary sector 53–4 ‘wage form’ 60
Thatcher, Margaret 127 wage goods 31, 32, 35
Therborn, Göran 67
‘wage labor relation’ see double working classes

freedom of labor power divisions 95, 97, 133
Wakefield, Edward Gibbon 63, 68–9 labor power 36–7
Walker, Richard A 112, 123 patriarchy 100
Wallerstein, Immanuel 21 reproduction of 41
Watts, Michael 87–8 resistance of 8–9
Weeks, John 110–111, 112, 116, 119, subordination of 98
133 territorial politics, and 132
Wilkinson, Richard W 88–9 urbanization 74
Wolfe, Alan 68 working day, length of 8, 16, 19,
women 29–31, 42, 44
emancipation of 99–101 workplace–living place separation
exclusions 103 75–7
Wordsworth, William, Tintern Abbey
89 Zelizer, Viviana 100
Titles in the Elgar Advanced Introductions series include:
International Conflict and Security
International Political Economy Law
Benjamin J. Cohen Nigel D. White
The Austrian School of Economics Comparative Constitutional Law
Randall G. Holcombe Mark Tushnet
Cultural Economics International Human Rights Law
Ruth Towse Dinah L. Shelton
Law and Development Entrepreneurship
Michael J. Trebilcock and Mariana Robert D. Hisrich
Mota Prado
International Tax Law
International Humanitarian Law Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Robert Kolb
Public Policy
International Trade Law B. Guy Peters
Michael J. Trebilcock
The Law of International
Post Keynesian Economics Organizations
J.E. King Jan Klabbers
International Intellectual Property International Environmental Law
Susy Frankel and Daniel J. Gervais Ellen Hey
Public Management and International Sales Law
Administration Clayton P. Gillette
Christopher Pollitt
Corporate Venturing
Organised Crime Robert D. Hisrich
Leslie Holmes
Public Choice
Nationalism Randall G. Holcombe
Liah Greenfeld
Private Law
Social Policy Jan M. Smits
Daniel Béland and Rianne Mahon
Consumer Behavior Analysis
Globalisation Gordon Foxall
Jonathan Michie
Behavioral Economics
Entrepreneurial Finance John F. Tomer
Hans Landström
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Robert J. Brent International Trade Law
Michael J. Trebilcock and Joel
Environmental Impact Assessment Trachtman
Angus Morrison-Saunders
European Union Law
Comparative Constitutional Law Jacques Ziller
Second Edition
Mark Tushnet Planning Theory
Robert A. Beauregard
National Innovation Systems
Cristina Chaminade, Bengt-Åke Tourism Destination Management
Lundvall and Shagufta Haneef Chris Ryan
Ecological Economics International Investment Law
Matthias Ruth August Reinisch
Private International Law and Sustainable Tourism
Procedure David Weaver
Peter Hay
Austrian School of Economics
Freedom of Expression Second Edition
Mark Tushnet Randall G. Holcombe
Law and Globalisation U.S. Criminal Procedure
Jaakko Husa Christopher Slobogin
Regional Innovation Systems Platform Economics
Bjørn T. Asheim, Arne Isaksen and Robin Mansell and W. Edward
Michaela Trippl Steinmueller
International Political Economy Public Finance
Second Edition Vito Tanzi
Benjamin J. Cohen
Feminist Economics
International Tax Law Joyce P. Jacobsen
Second Edition
Reuven S. Avi-Yonah Human Dignity and Law
James R. May and Erin Daly
Social Innovation
Frank Moulaert and Diana Space Law
MacCallum Frans G. von der Dunk
The Creative City National Accounting

Charles Landry John M. Hartwick
Legal Research Methods
Ernst Hirsch Ballin
Empirical Legal Research
Privacy Law Herbert M. Kritzer
Megan Richardson
Cities
International Human Rights Law Peter J. Taylor
Second Edition
Dinah L. Shelton Law and Entrepreneurship
Shubha Ghosh
Law and Artificial Intelligence
Woodrow Barfield and Ugo Pagallo Mobilities
Mimi Sheller
Politics of International Human
Rights Technology Policy
David P. Forsythe Albert N. Link and James
Cunningham
Community-based Conservation
Fikret Berkes Urban Transport Planning
Kevin J. Krizek and David A. King
Global Production Networks
Neil M. Coe Legal Reasoning
Larry Alexander and Emily
Mental Health Law Sherwin
Michael L. Perlin
Sustainable Competitive
Law and Literature Advantage in Sales
Peter Goodrich Lawrence B. Chonko
Creative Industries Law and Development
John Hartley Second Edition
Mariana Mota Prado and Michael
Global Administration Law
J. Trebilcock
Sabino Cassese
Law and Renewable Energy
Housing Studies
Joel. B. Eisen
William A.V. Clark
Experience Economy
Global Sports Law
Jon Sundbo
Stephen F. Ross
Marxism and Human Geography
Public Policy
Kevin R. Cox
B. Guy Peters

Cox, K. (2021) Marxism and Human Geography

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cox, K. (2021) Marxism and Human Geography

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Advanced Introduction to Marxism and Human Geography

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful intro-

Elgar Advanced Introductions

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

A catalogue record for this book

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938663

ISBN 978 1 78990 946 3 (cased)

1 From historical materialism to historical

2 Marx and capital: an overview 12

3 Marx’s theory of value 21

5 The capital accumulation process 39

7 ‘The factor(s) of cohesion’: ideology and state

PART II GEOGRAPHY AND MARXISM

8 The urbanization of capital and struggles around

9 Marxism, nature and human geography 85

10 Capitalist geography and difference 94

11 Geographies of uneven development 104

12 The geopolitics of capitalism 121

This book is, as the series title says, an advanced introduction.

As an introduction it necessarily falls far short of the comprehensive treat-

Production inevitably occurred through a division of labor and within

Historical and materialist

Second, production is always social. We always produce through other

It is in the context of this socially mediated relation to nature that we

In order to understand what is at stake in this materialist approach to the

1. Marx put production at the center of things, but he could instead

otherwise there would be no advertising industry or even new, specu-

Ideas, though, have to be figured out in their material relations. It is

Changes in social relations, therefore, and broadly speaking, have been

One answer is that it was a matter of contingent circumstance. Capitalism

the millennia. Most famously, in the Preface to A Contribution to the

It is absolutely central to development under capitalism and it is important

increase exploitation within them: so improved machinery allowing each

Historical and geographical materialism

In other words, the geographic is an essential aspect of the social process

transform historical materialism into historical geographical material-

One effect of capitalism has been to break down reliance on what is

More concretely, capitalist geographies are constantly changing and,

about them, at an often dizzying speed. Capitalism revolutionizes social

Under capitalism the essential property relation is the commodity which,

is the production of commodities (use values for sale) with commodities

1. The individual must have ownership of his/her labor power: it cannot

The process through which workers become ‘free’ of the means of

Commodities always have values. The concept of value, though, is highly

Commodities always have values in use. These values are qualitative in

Commodities have values. These are proportional to what Marx called

amounts of earth that have to be moved and sifted in order to retrieve

This approach is to be contrasted with what prevails in mainstream

Under capitalism, labor power is a commodity. Like other commodities

– necessary to its production. We will have cause to discuss some amplifi-

People also become more productive. As a result of harnessing the powers

There are diverse competitive strategies. In the early years of capital-

sized competition through cheapening the product: through lowering

So capitalism is technologically dynamic, and competition is part of the

What happens to surplus value? Part of it goes to landlords (rent), part to

for a more effective cheapening of the product, so stealing a march on

Capitalism is one of the modes of production identified by Marx. A mode

This process of capitalist development, however, is an antagonistic one.

The antagonistic nature of capitalism can be understood in part by con-

Mainstream concepts of value

As a starting point, consider how the concept of value is treated in main-

Value in this sense has its determinants. In this regard, introductory

2 Marx and capital: an overview 12

3 Marx’s theory of value 21

5 The capital accumulation process 39

9 Marxism, nature and human geography 85

10 Capitalist geography and difference 94

11 Geographies of uneven development 104

12 The geopolitics of capitalism 121