Marxism, Geography and

Marxism—one of the world's most powerful and influential ideologies—has had an enormous social and intellectual impact on vast areas of the world, including the discipline of geography. Marxism is simultaneously a form of political economy, a moral theory of justice, a mode of historical perspective, and a platform for political action. It is clearly impossible to summarize this gigantic, complex, diverse, and occasionally contradictory body of work on Marxism in one essay; rather, following a sketch of Marxist political economy, this essay focuses on the multiple ways in which geographers have selectively appropriated Marxism to understand space. The encounter between Marxism and geography, it must be noted, was mutually transformative: As geography incorporated many central notions of Marxism, such as class, power, struggle, labor, and ...