Inventor of “ radical geography “, David Harvey tries to reconcile Marxism and geography to show that cities and terroirs strive to constitute monopoly annuities. Because the injustices of globalization are embodied in spaces: the countries of the South victims of unequal development and, conversely, the places where an alternative vision of the world develops, like Porto Alegre.
In March 2008, an international geography conference brought together at the University of Nanterre researchers in the social sciences around the theme “ Justice and spatial injustice ». For all, the work that David Harvey has been carrying out for over thirty years constituted a basis for reflection and a reference in epistemology of geography. Editorial chance, it was precisely in March 2008 that the publishing house Ordinary meadows Published the texts of David Harvey for the first time in French. This initiative is to be compared to other works published recently by the same house, such as that of Mike Davis dedicated to Dubai. The texts thus gathered under the catchy title of Geography of domination represent fundamental essays of Harvey’s work. They are extracted from a book published by Routledge in 2001, Spaces of Capital: TOWARDS A Critical Geography.
David Harvey is a geographer of British origin who has spent most of his career in the United States, where he still teaches at New York University. In American intellectual circles, David Harvey is a great celebrity, as evidenced, for example, the crowd which rushed to his conference in April 2008 in Boston, during the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), conference entitled “ Radical geography forty years after 1968 ». For many, David Harvey embodies this protest current of geography born in the United States in the early 1970s. He is in any case one of the most emblematic representatives, with other authors like Edward Soja and Manuel Castells. There Radical Geographytranslated into French by the unsatisfactory term of “ radical geography “(Or sometimes” critical geography ») Find its origin in the challenge of dominant geography then, based in particular on the search for the modeling of social facts. This quantitative geography highlighted invariants in the organization of space and claimed to be able to explain geographic differences by valid theoretical models everywhere and at all scales. In contrastradical geography, born from protest movements which express themselves in the United States in the 1960s, emphasizes the explanation of spatial and social inequalities by structural facts (economic, political, social, etc.) and involving actors.
David Harvey then published several of the major works of this current of thought, which is based explicitly on a Marxist analysis: it is Social justice and the city (1973) which truly constitutes the founding book of Harvey’s thought, followed in 1982 of The limits to capital. More recently, David Harvey has written several works rooted in the economic and political reality of the 2000s who stimulated reflection in the social sciences. In Spaces of Hope (2000), he thus evokes the places where according to him develops an alternative vision of the world, a space for protest movements opposing a form of globalization, like Porto Alegre. The subject is summarized in Geography of domination ::
A space conducive to political thought and action, a space in which can be conceived and continue with alternatives (…). It is this space that protest movements must intensely explore and cultivate. It is one of the main spaces of hope open to the construction of an alternative globalization. A globalization where it would be the progressive forces of culture that would appropriate those of capital and not vice versa.
Another topical subject on which David Harvey intervenes is the North-South report or the question of development: Marxist geography rejects Rostow’s economic theory presenting the difficulties of the countries of the South as under a simple delay in integration into the process of capitalist accumulation and correlatively of globalization. In this context, David Harvey proposes the concept of “ unequal development “(a developing) to characterize the organization of the current world: globalization does not lead according to him to a homogenization of the territories, but on the contrary to the digging of geographic inequalities and therefore to an unequal development of spaces.
These themes, developed elsewhere by David Harvey, are not mainly at the heart of the small book which interests us here and which brings together two short tests, “ The art of rent ” And “ Geopolitics of capitalism ». These are lively, very stimulating texts, which alternate a very concrete approach to geographic facts (David Harvey develops for example an analysis on Disneyworld, on the metamorphosis of Barcelona in the 1990s or on the world trade in wine) and a very abstract epistemological reflection: thus, “ Geopolitics of capitalism »Begins with a long presentation of the contradictions of capitalism according to Marxist analysis.
Marxism and Geography
In any case, David Harvey strives to think about a spatialization of Marxism. Starting from the observation that space has been neglected in Marx’s theory, which granted primate to time, the author tries to propose a geography of Marxism which he justifies epistemologically. The author’s thought then develops in several scales, in order to study how capitalism structures space.
He is first interested in urban space as the revealing of the field of exercise of capitalism, trying to understand the springs. Harvey chooses to develop the economic concept of monopoly annuity applied to the city. For this, he is interested in the exploitation of the “ symbolic capital »Cities by the various local actors, starting from the known case of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao: how to understand the enthusiasm it aroused and how to understand that this project has attracted international funding ? Through the example of Barcelona, Harvey shows that each city is trying to highlight its cultural goods, its clean assets both in terms of local history, architecture and traditions. However, in doing so, this policy carried by local actors (elected officials, entrepreneurs, artists, etc.) paradoxically leads to provoking a standardization of cities in the world, each trying to imitate the other and at the same time losing its signs of distinction. Thus, each port city now promotes artistic development of its docks, leading to a standardization of these spaces around the world: Barcelona now resembles London, Baltimore or Belém. Harvey thus denounces the capacity of capitalism to appropriate until “ Local cultural differences To establish its dynamics.
This argument can be transposed to the regional scale. David Harvey is interested this time in monopoly annuities relating to a type of product, such as wines identified with a terroir: according to Harvey, the discourse on the uniqueness of a wine and its terroir is in fact the same everywhere in all the producing regions of the world. This allegedly local discourse only serves to ensure the sustainability of a monopoly. Harvey denounces the instrumentalization of local traditions by a discourse and shows how “ Local cultural traditions are absorbed in the calculations of the political economy in order to generate monopoly annuities (P. 39). He refers to the famous wine critic Robert Parker, who was the target of many defenders of the uniqueness of regional wines in the film Mondovinoto show that its approach to wine is actually uniform worldwide, regardless of local production characteristics.
In “ The art of rent “, Harvey shows how we can transpose the economic notion of monopoly annuity to urban space, through the theme of cultural institutions promoted by a city to develop its image, and to the regional organization, in which he studies” the economic area of competition ». In both cases, this approach which articulates political economy and spatial organization gives a central place to the actors: producers, promoters, architects, urban planners, local elected officials, etc. Among all these actors in space, the case of what he calls “ Growth Coalitions Cait attention. These are moving organizations of local interest groups which aim to promote the competitiveness of metropolises or to support regional development (p. 40): composed of elected officials, real estate developers, local newspapers, gas and electricity companies, these groups mobilized for the defense of the local economy constitute major players in a geopolitics of capitalism. Urban space as regional space are the place of a relentless competition ; They house the spatial translation of internal tensions in the mode of capitalism production.
By seeking to identify in space the conflicts born of capitalism, Harvey indeed aims to theorize a “ geopolitics of capitalism ». This analysis is developing on a global scale, the world space being considered that where capitalism is deployed. For this, the test responding to this title focuses on the circulation of capital, a phenomenon neglected by the Marxists who centered their analyzes on the fixity of production and on the crises of capitalism. David Harvey strives to develop a “ Historical geography of capitalism », Referring for example the urban concentration of capital during the first industrial revolution, the crucial question in his eyes of taking into account transport and infrastructure as factors of production and that of the spatial mobility of the workforce, at the base of capitalism. Studying the internal contradictions of capitalism, he deduces from these spatial data chronic instability of regional configurations in the capitalist framework, including in the colonial dimension. These analyzes lead him to predict the end of capitalism in violent crises and conflicts.
Geography of domination Offer to the reader a stimulating introduction to American radical geography, an interesting reflection on current urban policies and, more broadly, an attempt to spatialize Marxist analysis.