Massey, Marx, and human geography: disjunctures and provocations

Abstract

Doreen Massey made contributions that command the attention of historical geographical materialists. Although she was close to the left, her work strayed very significantly from Marx. Nevertheless, through her emphases she revealed, intentionally or not, important lacunae in the work of Marxist geography. Methodologically she was close to critical realism. She accepted the idea of separate structures of social relations and patriarchy was one that she emphasized. This put her at odds with Marxist views of the social process as constituted by moments that internalize one another. Her work on space was set in opposition to classical Marxist views, most notably in its insistent particularizing tendency as opposed to one that recognizes particularity but also the way in which it gets structured by the capitalist social process as a whole. This emphasis is also apparent in her work on uneven development where production and the contradictions entailed by the capitalist mode of production get neglected. Even so, in her emphasis on particularity, she provided an important challenge, not least for the way in which we approach questions of gender, the constitution of regions and countries, and the importance of the particularity of place for understanding uneven development.