Category Archives: Historical Materialism

Lefebvre: State, Space, World

Lefebvre, Henri. 2009. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. [Intro, Ch. 1, 2, 3, 11] So far, as this particular reading confirmed, no other thinker seems better equipped than … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Carl Schmitt, Critique, GWF Hegel, Henri Lefebvre, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Karl Marx, Law, Marxism, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Power, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 3 Comments

The Poverty of Theory Debate

Thompson, E.P. 1978. “Poverty of Theory or An Orrery of Errors” Anderson, Perry. 1980. Arguments Within English Marxism. London: Verso. Is there any polemic more biting in its wit, rigor and distaste than E.P. Thompson’s (EP) “Poverty of Theory”? Today, … Continue reading

Posted in Critique, Historical Materialism, Marxism, Political Economy, Power, The State | 2 Comments

Geographical Imaginations

Gregory, Derek. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. [Ch. 2 & 6] Chapter 2 sets out to explore critiques of the spatial science geography of the 1950s and 1960s from two perspectives: humanism and historical materialism, which were also in tense … Continue reading

Posted in David Harvey, Gender, Henri Lefebvre, Historical Materialism, Post-Colonial, Race & Ethnicity, Spatiality, The Body | 1 Comment

Soja’s Postmodern Geographies

Soja, Edward W. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. [Ch 1-3] I learned a lot from this book. Reading about Marxism and geography feels a bit like peering into a family album. Ed … Continue reading

Posted in David Harvey, Dialectics, Henri Lefebvre, Historical Materialism, Marxism, Michel Foucault, Spatiality | Comments Off on Soja’s Postmodern Geographies

Spaces of Capital

Harvey, David. 2001. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge. [Chapters from Part II]. Geography of Capitalist Accumulation (1975) In this first chapter, we can see Harvey beginning to develop much of what later becomes central aspects … Continue reading

Posted in David Harvey, GWF Hegel, Historical Materialism, Karl Marx, Marxism, Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation, Spatiality, The State | 3 Comments

The Spatial Fix Revisited

Harvey defines his notion of the “spatial fix” in terms of the junky that needs a “fix,” but that fix is entirely fleeting and never satiates the junky’s need for smack, or in this case capitalist expansion. The resolution is … Continue reading

Posted in David Harvey, Historical Materialism, Marxism, Political Economy, Spatiality | 2 Comments

Hegemony and the Philosophy of Praxis

After reading Antonio Santucci’s short political biography on Gramsci and after re-reading some of the Prison Notebooks (edited and translated by J. Buttigieg), I want to offer a reading of the relation and significance of “hegemony” within what Gramsci conceives … Continue reading

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Dialectics, Hegemony, Historical Materialism, Marxism, The State | 2 Comments

Jacobins of the Black Atlantic

In the preface to Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss credits the positive reception of her original article to the “unconventional topologies of time and space that it mapped out” (ix). The analogy with topology—a field in mathematics—is particularly … Continue reading

Posted in Dialectics, Historical Materialism, Historical-Geographies, Post-Colonial, Spatiality, Violence | 2 Comments

Notes on “The German Ideology”

Marx is moving away from questions of rights and philosophy to the study of political economy and capitalism. The book has both a political and a philosophical dimension. First, Marx and Engels are railing against German Idealism’s view that consciousness … Continue reading

Posted in Historical Materialism, Karl Marx, Marxism, Political Economy, The State | 1 Comment

Imagined Communities

Anderson, Benedict. 2006 [1983]. Imagined Communities. London: Verso. Anderson is first and foremost trying to account for nationalism from a Marxist perspective, citing for instance the conundrum of internecine strife in the Marxist region of Indochina in the late 1970s. … Continue reading

Posted in Historical Materialism, Marxism, Nation/Nationalism, The State | 2 Comments