Article

THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS POWER

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Abstract

It is imperative to reignite the political passions that suffuse the Manifesto. It is an extraordinary document full of insights, rich in meanings and bursting with political possibilities. While we have not the right, as Marx and Engels wrote in their 1872 preface to the German edition, to alter what has become a key historical document, we have not only the right but the obligation to interpret it in the light of contemporary conditions and historical-geographical experience. 'The practical application of the principles,' wrote Marx and Engels in that Preface, 'will depend, as the Manifesto itself states everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditionsfor the time being existing.' This italicised phrase precisely delineates our present task. The accumulation of capital has always been a profoundly geographical affair. Without the possibilities inherent in geographical expansion, spatial reorganization and uneven geographical develop-ment, capitalism would long ago have ceased to function as a political-economic system. This perpetual turning to ' a spatial fix' to capitalism's internal contradictions (most notably registered as an overaccumu-lation of capital within a particular geographical area) coupled with the uneven insertion of different territories and social formations into the capitalist world market has created a global historical geography of capital accumulation whose character needs to be well understood. How Marx and Engels conceptualised the problem in The Communist Manifesto deserves some commentary for it is here that the communist movement -with representatives from many countries -came together to try to define a revolutionaryagenda that would work in the midst of considerable geographical differentiation. This differentiation is just as important today as it ever was and the Manifesto$ weaknesses as well as its strengths in its approach to this problem need to be confronted and addressed.

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... Instead, it must be grounded in capitalism's work-relations, linking paid and unpaid work, human and extra-human lives (The Salvage Collective 2021). Planetary justice will succeed or fail according to how capably the world's re/producing classes draw on the actual and latent workcentered unities forged by capitalist development -again, taking seriously the Manifesto's geographical logic (Harvey 1998). These differentiated unities find their common thread in the Planetary Proletariat. ...
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