Abstracts Geography

Reorienting historical-geographical materialism : a critique of geopolitical economy

by Shang Li

Despite the impact of David Harvey's Marxist thought, his concept of historical-geographical materialism has attracted limited attention. Standing with Harvey, this dissertation argues that Marxism and geography need to maintain a symbiotic relationship in the shape of historical- geographical materialism, which gives processes that internalize time and space ontological priority, eschewing both historical determinism and spatial fetishism. Departing from Harvey, the thesis constructs historical-geographical materialism by means of Marx's materialist conception of history, through a reinterpreted historical geography of modes of production. With the discovery of Marx's anthropological notebooks on Asiatic society, and the re-emergence of Asian studies after the Asian economic "miracles" of the 1970s, a more systematic elaboration of the Asiatic mode of production (AMP) has become possible. Starting by scrutinizing the patterns of ownership and mode of surplus extraction peculiar to the Asiatic mode of production, the present work demonstrates the geographical dimension of historical materialism by illustrating and defending the particularity and reasonability of the AMP in the panorama of Marx's historical geography of modes of production. By comparing the AMP in late imperial China and feudal Europe, and incorporating the concept of relation of intercourse into the traditional two-aspect formulation of modes of production with the aid of Marx's underutilized Chronological Extracts, the thesis depicts the transformative dynamics of pre-capitalism as it transitions into capitalism. This leads to an analysis of theories of crisis and revolution in relation to Covid-19 and social movements such as Black Lives Matter. The thesis points out the necessity of crisis under the capitalist mode of production and its relation to revolution, which cannot succeed unless the heterogeneous multitude unites to organize mass action under the identity of the labourer. Moreover, it demonstrates that historical-geographical materialism concerns not only the past but the present and future prospects of global society.