David Harvey

Reinventing Geography

Since the Second World War, the typical field for Marxist research has been history. Your path was more original. How did you become a geographer?

There’s a trivial answer to this, which actually has profundity. When I was a kid, I often wanted to run away from home but every time I tried, I found it very uncomfortable, so I came back. So I decided to run away in my imagination, and there at least the world was a very open place, since I had a stamp collection, which showed all these countries with a British monarch on their stamps, and it seemed to me that they all belonged to us, to me. My father worked as a foreman in the shipyards at Chatham, with its very strong naval traditions. We lived in Gillingham. Once every year during the war, we would be taken for tea in the dockyards, on a destroyer; the romance of the high seas and of empire left a strong impression. My earliest ambition was to join the navy. So that even in the very gloomy days of 1946–47, just after the war, there was still an imaginary that encompassed this whole imperial world. Reading about it, drawing maps of it, became a childhood passion. Later, when I was in my teens, I cycled all over north Kent, getting to know a great deal about the geology, agriculture and landscape of our local area. I greatly enjoyed this form of knowledge. So I’ve always been drawn to geography. At school I was also strongly attracted to literature. When I got into Cambridge, which was still a bit unusual for a boy from my background, I took Geography rather than Literature partly because I had a teacher who had been trained in Cambridge, who made it clear to me that if you studied English there, you didn’t so much read literature as deal with F. R. Leavis. I felt I could read literature on my own, and didn’t need Leavis to tell me how to do it. So I preferred to follow the track of geography, though of course I never ceased to be interested in history and literature.

Geography was quite a big, well-established school at Cambridge, which gave a basic grounding in the discipline as it was practised in Britain at the time. I went on to do a PhD there, on the historical geography of Kent in the nineteenth century, focusing on the cultivation of hops. My first publication was actually in the house journal of Whitbread, the brewing concern—as a graduate student I earned a tenner for a piece published side by side with an article by John Arlott.

Your first book, Explanation in Geography, published in 1969, is a very confident intervention, of ambitious scope, in the discipline. But it seems to come out of a very specific positivist setting—a horizon of reference that is exclusively Anglo-Saxon, without any sense of the powerful alternative traditions in geography in France or Germany?

Explanation in Geography was looking for an answer to what I regarded as a central problem of the discipline. Traditionally, geographical knowledge had been extremely fragmented, leading to a strong emphasis on what was called its ‘exceptionalism’. The established doctrine was that the knowledge yielded by geographical enquiry is different from any other kind. You can’t generalize about it, you can’t be systematic about it. There are no geographical laws; there are no general principles to which you can appeal—all you can do is go off and study, say, the dry zone in Sri Lanka, and spend your life understanding that. I wanted to do battle with this conception of geography by insisting on the need to understand geographical knowledge in some more systematic way. At the time, it seemed to me that the obvious resource here was the philosophical tradition of positivism—which, in the sixties, still had a very strong sense of the unity of science embedded in it, coming from Carnap. That was why I took Hempel or Popper so seriously; I thought there should be some way of using their philosophy of science to support the construction of a more unitary geographical knowledge. This was a moment when, inside the discipline, there was a strong movement to introduce statistical techniques of enquiry, and new quantitative methods. You could say my project was to develop the philosophical side of this quantitative revolution.

What about the external role of the discipline, as these internal changes took hold? Historically, geography seems to have had a much more salient position in the general intellectual culture of France or Germany than in Britain—it’s been more closely linked to major public issues. The line of Vidal de la Blache’s geography, descending into the Annales School, is clearly concerned with a problematic of national unity; von Thünen’s, in Germany, with industrialization; Haushofer’s with geopolitical strategies of imperial expansion—there was an Edwardian version of this in Mackinder, but more peripheral. How should post-war British geography be situated?

By the sixties, it was connected here far more than anywhere else to planning—regional planning and urban planning. By that time there was a certain embarrassment about the whole history of empire, and a turning away from the idea that geography could or should have any global role, let alone shape geopolitical strategies. The result was a strongly pragmatic focus, an attempt to reconstruct geographical knowledge as an instrument of administrative planning in Britain. In this sense, the discipline became quite functionalist. To give you an indication of the trend, I think there are hardly any areas where, if you put the word ‘urban’ in front of research, you would say this is the centre of the field. Urban history is essentially a rather marginal form; urban economics is an equally marginal thing; so, too, is urban politics. Whereas urban geography was really the centre of a lot of things going on in the discipline. Then, too, on the physical side, environmental management is often about the handling of local resources in particular kinds of ways. So that in Britain, the public presence of geography—and I think it was quite strong—operated in these three particular areas; it wasn’t projected outwards in any grander intellectual formulation of the sort we might find in Braudel or the French tradition. You need to remember that for many of us who had some political ambitions for the discipline, rational planning was not a bad word in the sixties. It was the time of Harold Wilson’s rhetoric about the ‘white heat of technology’, when the efficiency of regional and urban planning was going to be a lever of social betterment for the whole population.

Yet a striking feature of Explanation is the absence of any political note in it. It reads as a purely scientific treatise, without any mention of concerns of this kind. One would never guess from it that the author might become a committed radical.

Well, my politics at that time were closer to a Fabian progressivism, which is why I was very taken with the ideas of planning, efficiency and rationality. I would read economists like Oskar Lange who were thinking along these lines. So in my mind, there was no real conflict between a rational scientific approach to geographical issues, and an efficient application of planning to political issues. But I was so absorbed in writing the book that I didn’t notice how much was collapsing around me. I turned in my magnum opus to the publishers in May 1968, only to find myself acutely embarrassed by the change of political temperature at large. By then I was thoroughly disillusioned with Harold Wilson’s socialism. Just at that moment, I got a job in the US, arriving in Baltimore a year after much of the city had burnt down in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the States, the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were really fired up; and here was I, having written this neutral tome that seemed somehow or other just not to fit. I realized I had to rethink a lot of things I had taken for granted in the sixties.

What took you to the States?

At that time, American universities were expanding their Geography departments. Training in the discipline was much stronger in Britain than in the US, so there was quite an inflow of British geographers to fill the new positions. I had taught in the States on visiting appointments at various times, and when I was offered a job at Johns Hopkins, felt it was an attractive opportunity. The department there was interdisciplinary, combining Geography and Environmental Engineering. The idea was to put together a whole group of people from the social sciences and the natural sciences, to attack issues of environment in a multi-disciplinary way. I was one of the first to come into the new programme. For me, this was a tremendous situation, particularly in the early years. I learnt a great deal about how engineers think, about political processes, about economic problems: I didn’t feel constrained by the discipline of Geography.

What was the political atmosphere?

Hopkins is an extremely conservative campus, but it has a long history of harbouring certain maverick figures. For instance, someone who interested me a great deal when I first arrived there—his Inner Asian Frontiers of China is a great book—was Owen Lattimore, who had been at Hopkins for many years, before he was targeted by McCarthyism.1 I spent a lot of time talking to people who were there about what had happened to him, and went to see Lattimore himself. Eventually I tried to get Wittfogel, who had been his accuser, to explain why he had attacked Lattimore so violently.2 So I was always fascinated by the political history of the university, as well as of the city. It’s a small campus, which has always remained very conservative. But, for that reason, even a small number of determined radicals could prove quite effective—at the turn of the seventies, there was quite a significant anti-war movement, as well as civil rights activism around the university. Baltimore itself intrigued me from the start. In fact, it was a terrific place to do empirical work. I quickly became involved in studies of discrimination in housing projects, and ever since the city has formed a backdrop to much of my thinking.

What is the particular profile of Baltimore as an American city?

In many ways, it is emblematic of the processes that have moulded cities under US capitalism, offering a laboratory sample of contemporary urbanism. But, of course, it has its own distinctive character as well. Few North American cities have as simple a power structure as Baltimore. After 1900, big industry largely moved out of the city, leaving control in the hands of a rich elite whose wealth was in real-estate and banking. There are no corporate headquarters in Baltimore today, and the city is often referred to as the biggest plantation in the South, since it is run much like a plantation by a few major financial institutions. Actually, in social structure, the city is half Northern and half Southern. Two-thirds of the population are African American, but there is nowhere near the level of black militancy you find in Philadelphia, New York or Chicago. Race relations are more Southern in pattern. Mayors may be African American, but they are largely dependent on the financial nexus, and are surrounded by white suburbs who don’t want anything to do with the city. Culturally, it is one of the great centres of American bad taste. John Waters’s movies are classic Baltimore—you can’t imagine them anywhere else. Architecturally, whatever the city tries to do it gets a little bit wrong, like an architect who builds a house with miscalculated angles, and then, many years later, people say, ‘Isn’t that a very interesting structure?’ One ends up with a lot of affection for it. At one time, I thought I might write a book called Baltimore: City of Quirks.

Your second book, Social Justice and the City, which came out in 1973, is divided into three sections: Liberal Formulations—Marxist Formulations—Syntheses. Did you write these as a deliberate sequence from the start, to trace an evolution of your own, or did they just emerge en cours de route?

The sequence was more fortuitous than planned. When I started the book, I would still have called myself a Fabian socialist, but that was a label which didn’t make much sense in the US context. Nobody would understand what it meant. In America, I would then have been termed a card-carrying liberal. So I set out along these lines. Then I found they weren’t working. So I turned to Marxist formulations to see if they yielded better results. The shift from one approach to the other wasn’t premeditated—I stumbled on it.

But you were engaged in a reading group studying Marx’s Capital from 1971 onwards, not long after you got to Baltimore—an experience you have recently described as a decisive moment in your development. Were you the main animator of this group?

No, the initiative came from graduate students who wanted to read Capital—Dick Walker was one of them—and I was the faculty member who helped organize it. I wasn’t a Marxist at the time, and knew very little of Marx. This was anyway still a period when not much Marxist literature was available in English. There was Dobb, and Sweezy and Baran, but little else. Later, you people brought out French and German texts, and the Penguin Marx Library. The publication of the Grundrisse in that series was a step in our progression. The reading group was a wonderful experience, but I was in no position to instruct anybody. As a group, we were the blind leading the blind. That made it all the more rewarding.

At the conclusion of Social Justice and the City, you explain that you encountered the work of Henri Lefebvre on urbanism after you’d written the rest of the book, and go on to make some striking observations about it. How far were you aware of French thinking about space at this stage? Looking back, one would say there were two distinct lines of thought within French Marxism that would have been relevant to you: the historical geography of Yves Lacoste and his colleagues at Herodote, and the contemporary urban theory of Lefebvre, which came out of the fascination of surrealism with the city as a landscape of the unexpected in everyday life.

Actually there was another line in France, which was institutionally more important than either of these, connected to the Communist Party, whose most famous representative was Pierre Georges. This group was very powerful in the university system, with a lot of control over appointments. Their kind of geography was not overtly political at all: it focused essentially on the terrestrial basis on which human societies are built, and its transformations as productive forces are mobilized on the land. Lefebvre was not regarded as a geographer. Georges was a central reference point in the discipline.

Your response to Lefebvre’s ideas strikes quite a distinctive note, one that recurs in your later work. On the one hand, you warmed to Lefebvre’s radicalism, with a generous appreciation of the critical utopian charge in his writing; on the other hand, you point to the need for a balancing realism. This two-handed response becomes a kind of pattern in your work—one thinks of the way you both imaginatively take up, and empirically limit, the notion of ‘flexible accumulation’ in The Condition of Postmodernity, or your reaction to ecological apocalyptics in your more recent writing: an unusual combination of passionate engagement and cool level-headedness.

One of the lessons I learnt in writing Social Justice and the City has always remained important for me. I can put it best with a phrase Marx used, when he spoke of the way we can rub different conceptual blocks together to make an intellectual fire. Theoretical innovation so often comes out of the collision between different lines of force. In a friction of this kind, one should never altogether give up one’s starting point—ideas will only catch fire if the original elements are not completely absorbed in the new ones. The liberal formulations in Social Justice and the City don’t entirely disappear, by any means—they remain part of the agenda that follows. When I read Marx, I’m very aware that this is a critique of political economy. Marx never suggests that Smith or Ricardo are full of nonsense, he’s profoundly respectful of what they had to say. But he’s also setting their concepts against others, from Hegel or Fourier, in a transformative process. So this has been a principle of my own work: Lefebvre may have some great ideas, the Regulationists have developed some very interesting notions, which should be respected in their own right, but you don’t give up on everything you’ve got on your side—you try to rub the blocks together and ask: Is there something that can come out of this which is a new form of knowing?

What was the reception of Social Justice in the discipline? The early seventies were a time of widespread intellectual shift to the Left—did it get a sympathetic hearing?

In the US there was already a radical movement within geography, built around the journal Antipode produced at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts—traditionally one of the major schools of geography in the country. Its founders were strongly anti-imperialist, hating the history of geography’s entanglement with Western colonialism. The journal spawned strong interventions at national meetings in the United States, and the formation of a group called Socialist Geographers. In Britain, Doreen Massey and others represented a similar sort of movement. So I’d say, at the beginning of the seventies, there was a very widespread kind of movement amongst younger people in Geography, to explore this particular dimension. Social Justice and the City was one of the texts which recorded that moment, becoming a reference point as time went on. It was also read outside the discipline, particularly by urban sociologists, and some political scientists. Radical economists, of course, were interested in urban questions, too—they had become central political issues in the States. So the setting was quite favourable for the reception of the book.

The Limits to Capital appeared some nine years later, in 1982. It is a major work of economic theory—a startling leap from your previous writing. What is the history of this mutation?

I had some background in neoclassical economics and planning theory, from Cambridge. For any geographer, von Thünen’s location theory was a very important point of reference, from the start. Then, of course, in writing Explanation in Geography I had steeped myself in positivist discussions of mathematical reason, so that when I came across works by Marxist economists like Morishima or Desai, I had no major difficulties in understanding what was going on. Morishima’s work and, naturally, Sweezy’s Theory of Capitalist Development were very helpful to me. But to be honest, in writing The Limits to Capital I stuck with Marx’s own texts most of the way. What I realized after Social Justice and the City was that I didn’t understand Marx, and needed to straighten this out, which I tried to do without too much assistance from elsewhere. My aim was to get to the point where the theory could help me understand urban issues—and that I couldn’t do without addressing questions of fixed capital, which no one had written much about at the time. There was the problem of finance capital, fundamental in housing markets, as I knew from Baltimore. If I had just stopped with the first part of the book, it would have been very similar to many other accounts of Marx’s theory that were appearing at the time. It was the later part, where I looked at the temporality of fixed-capital formation, and how that relates to money flows and finance capital, and the spatial dimensions of these, that made the book more unusual. That was hard to do. Writing Limits to Capital nearly drove me nuts. I had a very difficult time finishing it; also struggling to make it readable—it took me the best part of a decade. The book grounded everything that I’ve done since. It is my favourite text, but ironically it’s probably the one that’s least read.

What was the response to it at the time? NLR certainly paid no attention, but what about other sectors of the Left?

I can’t really recall anyone who would call themselves a Marxist economist taking it seriously. I always found that guild spirit odd, because it is so unlike Marx’s own way of proceeding. Of course, there were some circumstantial reasons for the blank reaction. The controversy over Sraffa and Marx’s concept of value was still going on, which I think put off many people from any attempt to consider Marx’s theories of capitalist development. There were other versions of crisis theory available—Jim O’Connor’s or John Weeks’s. The ending of the book could be made to seem like a prediction of inter-imperialist wars, which was easy to dismiss. The only real debate about the book occurred when Michael Lebowitz attacked it in Monthly Review, and I replied, some time after it appeared. Overall, the book didn’t seem to go anywhere.

Well, you were in good company. After all, Marx was so short of responses to Capital he was reduced to writing a review of it under a pseudonym himself. In retrospect, what is striking is the extent to which your theory of crisis anticipates later work by two Marxists, who also came from outside the ranks of economists: Robert Brenner, from History, and Giovanni Arrighi, from Sociology. In both, space becomes a central category of explanation in a way nowhere to be found in the Marxist tradition, prior to your book. The register is more empirical—detailed tracking of post-war national economies in one case, long-run cycles of global expansion in the other—but the framework, and many of the key conclusions, are basically similar. Your account offers the pure model of this family of explanations, its tripartite analysis of the ways in which capital defers or resolves its tendencies to crisis—the structural fix, the spatial fix and the temporal fix—laid out with unexampled clarity.

Looking back, you can say it was prophetic in that way. But what I hoped to be producing was a text that could be built on, and I was surprised that it wasn’t taken in that spirit, but just lay there, rather flat. Of course, it had some currency among radical geographers, and maybe a few sociologists, but no one really used it as I’d have liked it to be. So today, for example, I might take this account of crisis and rub it against, say, world systems theory—in fact, that’s probably what I will try to do in a course next year.

The deeper obstacle to a ready acceptance of what you were doing must lie in the difficulty Marxists have always had in confronting geography as a domain of natural contingency—the arbitrary shifts and accidents of the terrestrial crust, with their differential consequences for material life. The main propositions of historical materialism have a deductive structure independent of any spatial location, which never figures in them. The curious thing is that your theory of crisis in The Limits to Capital, in one sense, respects this tradition—it develops a beautifully clear deductive structure. But it builds space into the structure as an ineliminable element of it. That was quite new. The geographically undifferentiated categories of Capital are put to work on natural-historical terrain—still represented abstractly, of course, in keeping with the demands of a deductive argument. That combination was calculated to throw conventional expectations.

My own intention was, originally, to bounce some historical enquiries into urbanization off The Limits to Capital, but this became too massive a project, and I eventually decanted this stuff into the two volumes of essays that appeared in 1985, Consciousness and the Urban Experience and The Urbanization of Capital. Some of the material in them predates Limits itself. In 1976–77 I spent a year in Paris, with the aim of learning from French Marxist discussions, when I was still struggling with Limits—but it didn’t work out that way. To tell the truth, I found Parisian intellectuals a bit arrogant, quite unable to handle anyone from North America—I felt a touch of sympathy when Edward Thompson launched his famous attack on Althusser, a couple of years later. On the other hand, Manuel Castells—who was not part of the big-name circus—was very warm and helpful, along with other urban sociologists, so my time was not lost. But what happened, instead, is that I became more and more intrigued by Paris as a city. It was much more fun exploring that than wrestling with reproduction schemes, and out of this fascination came the piece on Sacré Cœur and the Commune, which appeared in 1978. Then I backed into the Paris of the Second Empire, a wonderful subject, which became the topic of the longest essay in the two volumes. My interest was: how far might the sort of theoretical apparatus in The Limits to Capital play out in tangible situations?

A notable departure in the Second Empire essay—which could have been published as a short book—is the sudden appearance of so many literary sources, quite absent in your writing up till then. Now they cascade across the pages: Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Hardy, Zola, James. Had you been holding back a side of yourself, or was this in a sense a new horizon?

I’d always been reading this literature, but I never thought of using it in my work. Once I started to do so, I discovered how many historical ideas poetry or fiction can set alight. And once I made that turn, everything came flooding out. This had something to do with my position in academia: by then I was fairly secure; I didn’t feel I had to stay within any narrow professional channels—not that I’d done that too much anyway. But I certainly felt a liberation in deliberately breaking out of them, not to speak of the pleasure of the texts themselves, after the hard grind of Limits.

It looks as if the change also prepared the way for the panoramic style of The Condition of Postmodernity. Presumably by the mid-eighties your antennae were starting to twitch a bit, as talk of the postmodern took off. But what prompted the idea of a comprehensive book on the subject?

My first impulse was one of impatience. Suddenly, there was all this talk of postmodernism as a category for understanding the world, displacing or submerging capitalism. So I thought: I’ve written The Limits to Capital; I’ve done all this research on Second Empire Paris; I know a certain amount about the origins of modernism, and a lot about urbanization, which features strongly in this new dispensation; so why not sit down and produce my own take on it? The result was one of the easiest books I’ve ever written. It took me about a year to write, flowing out without problems or anxieties. And once I embarked on it, of course, my response became more considered. I had no wish to deny the validity of some idea of postmodernity. On the contrary, I found the notion pointed to many developments to which we should be paying the closest attention. On the other hand, this shouldn’t mean surrendering to the hype and exaggeration which was then surrounding it.

The book brings together your interdisciplinary interests in a remarkable way, starting—logically enough—from the urban in its strictest sense, with a discussion of redevelopment in Baltimore that makes two fundamental points against the uncritical celebrations of postmodernism as an ‘overcoming’ of the blights of architectural modernism. The standard argument of the time—blend of Jane Jacobs and Charles Jencks—went: modernism ruined our cities by its inhuman belief in rational planning, and its relentless monolithism of formal design; postmodernism, by contrast, respects the values of urban spontaneity and chaos, and engenders a liberating diversity of architectural styles. You displace both claims, pointing out that it was not so much devotion to principles of planning that produced so many ugly developments, but the subjection of planners to market imperatives, which have continued to zone cities as rigidly under postmodern as modern conditions; while greater diversity of formal styles has been as much a function of technological innovations, allowing use of new materials and shapes, as any aesthetic emancipation.

Yes, I thought it was important to show the new kinds of serial monotony that the supposed flowering of architectural fantasy could bring, and the naivety of a good many postmodernist staging effects—the simulacra of community you often find them striving for. But I also wanted to make it clear that to understand why these styles had taken such powerful hold, one needed to look at the underlying shifts in the real economy. That brought me to the whole area most famously theorized by the Regulation School in France. What had changed in the system of relations between capital and labour, and capital and capital, since the recession of the early seventies? For example, how far could we now speak of a new regime of ‘flexible accumulation’, based on temporary labour markets? Was that the material basis of the alterations in urban fabric we could see around us? The Regulationists struck me as quite right to focus on shifts in the wage contract, and reorganizations of the labour process; one could go quite a way with them there—but not to the notion that capitalism itself was somehow being fundamentally transformed. They were suggesting that one historical regime—Fordism—had given way to another—Flexible Accumulation—which had effectively replaced the first. But empirically, there is no evidence of such a wholesale change—‘flexible accumulation’ may be locally or temporarily predominant here or there, but we can’t speak of systemic transformation. Fordism plainly persists over wide areas of industry, although of course it has not remained static either. In Baltimore, where Bethlehem Steel used to employ 30,000 workers, the same quantity of steel is now produced with less than 5,000—so the employment structure in the Fordist sector itself is no longer the same. The extent of this kind of downsizing, and the spread of temporary contracts in the non-Fordist sector, have created some of the social conditions for the fluidity and insecurity of identities that typify what can be called postmodernity. But that’s only one side of the story. There are many different ways of making a profit—of gaining surplus value: whichever way works, you are likely to find increasing experiments with it—so there might be a trend towards flexible accumulation; but there are some key limits to the process. Imagine what it would mean for social cohesion if everyone was on temporary labour—what the consequences would be for urban life or civic security. We can already see the damaging effects of even partial moves in this direction. A universal transformation would pose acute dilemmas and dangers for the stability of capitalism as a social order.

That goes for capital–labour; what about capital–capital relations?

What we see there is a dramatic asymmetry in the power of the state. The nation-state remains the absolutely fundamental regulator of labour. The idea that it is dwindling or disappearing as a centre of authority in the age of globalization is a silly notion. In fact, it distracts attention from the fact that the nation-state is now more dedicated than ever to creating a good business climate for investment, which means precisely controlling and repressing labour movements in all kinds of purposively new ways—cutting back the social wage, fine-tuning migrant flows, and so on. The state is tremendously active in the domain of capital–labour relations. But when we turn to relations between capitals, the picture is quite different. There the state has truly lost power to regulate the mechanisms of allocation or competition, as global financial flows have outrun the reach of any strictly national regulation. One of the main arguments in The Condition of Postmodernity is that the truly novel feature of the capitalism that emerged out of the watershed of the seventies is not so much an overall flexibility of labour markets as an unprecedented autonomy of money capital from the circuits of material production—a hypertrophy of finance, which is the other underlying basis of postmodern experience and representation. The ubiquity and volatility of money as the impalpable ground of contemporary existence is a key theme of the book.

Yes, adapting Céline’s title, Vie à Crédit. Procedurally, The Condition of Postmodernity actually follows Sartre’s prescription for a revitalized Marxism very closely. He defined its task as the necessity to fuse the analysis of objective structures with the restitution of subjective experience, and representations of it, in a single totalizing enterprise. That’s a pretty good description of what you were doing. What do you regard as the most important upshot of the book?

The Condition of Postmodernity is the most successful work I’ve published—it won a larger audience than all the others put together. When a book hits a public nerve like that, different kinds of readers take different things away from it. For myself, the most innovative part of the book is its conclusion—the section where I explore what a postmodern experience means for people in terms of the way they live, and imagine, time and space. It is the theme of ‘time–space compression’, which I look at in various ways through the last chapters, that is the experimental punchline of the book.

The Condition of Postmodernity came out in 1989. Two years earlier, you had moved from Baltimore to Oxford. What prompted the return to England?

I felt I was spinning my wheels a bit in Baltimore at the time, so when I was asked if I would be interested in the Mackinder Chair at Oxford I threw my hat into the ring, for a different experience. I was curious to see what it would be like. I stayed at Oxford for six years, but I kept on teaching at Hopkins right the way through. My career has, in that sense, been rather conservative compared with most academics—I’ve been intentionally loyal to the places I’ve been. In Oxford, people kept treating me as if I’d just arrived from Cambridge, which I’d left in 1960—as if the intervening twenty-seven years had just been some waiting room in the colonies, before I came back to my natural roosting place at Oxbridge, which drove me nuts. I do have strong roots in English culture, which I feel very powerfully to this day. When I go back to the Kentish countryside that I cycled around, I still know all its lanes like the back of my hand. So in that sense, I’ve got a couple of toes firmly stuck in the native mud. These are origins I would never want to deny. But they were ones that also encouraged me to explore other spaces.

What about the university and city themselves?

Professionally, for the first time for many years I found myself in a conventional Geography department, which was very useful for me. It renewed my sense of the discipline, and reminded me what geographers think about how they think. Oxford doesn’t change very fast, to put it mildly. Working there had its pleasurable sides, as well as the more negative ones. By and large, I liked the physical environment, but found the social environment—particularly college life—pretty terrible. Of course, you quickly become aware of the worldly advantages afforded by a position at Oxford. From being seen as a kind of maverick intellectual sitting in some weird transatlantic department, I was transformed into a respectable figure, for whom various unexpected doors subsequently opened. I first really discovered class when I went to Cambridge, in the fifties. At Oxford I was reminded of what it still means in Britain. Oxford as a city, of course, is another matter. Throughout my years in Baltimore, I always tried to maintain some relationship to local politics: we bought up an old library, and turned it into a community action centre, took part in campaigns for rent control, and generally tried to spark radical initiatives; it always seemed to me very important to connect my theoretical work with practical activity, in the locality. So when I got to Oxford, the local campaign to defend the Rover plant in Cowley offered a natural extension of this kind of engagement. For personal reasons, I couldn’t become quite as active as in Baltimore, but it provided the same kind of connection to a tangible social conflict. It also led to some very interesting political discussions—recorded in the book, The Factory and the City, which Teresa Hayter and I produced around it—a fascinating experience. Soon afterwards I read Raymond Williams’s novel, Second Generation, which is exactly about this, and was astonished by how well he captured so much of the reality at Cowley. So one of the first essays in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference became a reflection on his fiction.

Isn’t there a range of affinities between the two of you? Williams’s tone was always calm, but it was uncompromising. His stance was consistently radical, but it was also steadily realistic. His writing ignored disciplinary frontiers, crossing many intellectual boundaries and inventing new kinds of study, without any showiness. In these respects, your own work has a likeness. How would you define your relationship to him?

I never met Williams, though of course I knew of his writing from quite early on. The Country and the City was a fundamental text for me in teaching Urban Studies. At Hopkins I always felt an intense admiration for him, in a milieu where so many high-flying French intellectuals were overvalued. Williams never received this kind of academic validation, although what he had to say about language and discourse was just as interesting as any Parisian theorist, and often much more sensible. Of course, when I got to Oxford, I re-engaged with his work much more strongly. The account Williams gives of how he felt on arriving as a student in Cambridge matched almost exactly my own experience there. Then there was this powerful novel, set in Oxford, where I was now working, with its extraordinary interweaving of social and spatial themes. So I did feel a strong connection with him.

There seems to be an alteration of references in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference in other ways, too. Heidegger and Whitehead become much more important than Hempel or Carnap. It is a very wide-ranging collection of texts. What is its main intention?

It must be the least coherent book I’ve written. There may even be some virtue in its lack of cohesion, since the effect is to leave things open, for different possibilities. What I really wanted to do was to take some very basic geographical concepts—space, place, time, environment—and show that they are central to any kind of historical-materialist understanding of the world. In other words, that we have to think of a historical-geographical materialism, and that we need some conception of dialectics for that. The last three chapters offer examples of what might result. Geographical issues are always present—they have to be—in any materialist approach to history, but they have never been tackled systematically. I wanted to ground the need to do so. I probably didn’t succeed, but at least I tried.

One of the strands of the work is a critical engagement with radical ecology, which strikes a characteristic balance. You warn against environmental catastrophism on the Left. Should we regard this as the latter-day equivalent of economic collapse theories of an older Marxism?

There was quite a good debate about this with John Bellamy Foster in Monthly Review, which laid the issues out very plainly on the table.3 I’m extremely sympathetic to many environmental arguments, but my experience of working in an Engineering department, with its sense for pragmatic solutions, has made me chary of doomsday prophesies—even when these come from scientists themselves, as they sometimes do. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to persuade engineers that they should take the idea that knowledge—including their own technical ingenuity—is still socially constructed. But when I argue with people from the humanities, I find myself having to point out to them that when a sewage system doesn’t work, you don’t ring up the postmodernists, you call in the engineers—as it happens, my department has been incredibly creative in sewage disposal. So I am on the boundary between the two cultures. The chapter on dialectics in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference was designed to try to explain to engineers and scientists what this mystery might be about. That’s why it is cast more in terms of natural process than philosophical category. If I had been teaching dialectics in a Humanities programme, I would, of course, have had to talk of Hegel; but addressing engineers, it made more sense to refer to Whitehead or Bohm or Lewontin—scientists, familiar with the activities of science. This gives a rather different take on dialectical argumentation, compared to the more familiar, literary-philosophical one.

Another major strand in the book—it’s there in the title—is an idea of justice. This is not a concept well received in the Marxist tradition. Historically, it is certainly true that a sense of injustice has been a powerful—if culturally variable—lever of social revolt, as Barrington Moore and others have shown. This hasn’t seemed to require, however, any articulated theory of rights, or justice. In modern times, there have been many attempts to found these, without much success. Marx, following Bentham, was withering about their philosophical basis. Why do you think these objections should be overridden?

Marx reacted against the idea of social justice, because he saw it as an attempt at a purely distributive solution to problems that lay in the mode of production. Redistribution of income within capitalism could only be a palliative—the solution was a transformation of the mode of production. There is a great deal of force in that resistance. But in thinking about it, I was increasingly struck by something else Marx wrote—his famous assertion in the introduction to the Grundrisse, that production, exchange, distribution and consumption are all moments of one organic totality, each totalizing the others. It seemed to me that it’s very hard to talk about those different moments without implying some notion of justice—if you like, of the distributive effects of a transformation in the mode of production. I have no wish to give up on the idea that the fundamental aim is just this transformation, but if you confine it to that, without paying careful attention to what this would mean in the world of consumption, distribution and exchange, you are missing a political driving force. So I think there’s a case for reintroducing the idea of justice, but not at the expense of the fundamental aim of changing the mode of production. There’s also, of course, the fact that some of the achievements of social democracy—often called distributive socialism in Scandinavia—are not to be sneered at. They are limited, but real gains. Finally, there is a sound tactical reason for the Left to reclaim ideas of justice and rights, which I touch on in my latest book, Spaces of Hope. If there is a central contradiction in the bourgeoisie’s own ideology throughout the world today, it lies in its rhetoric of rights. I was very impressed, looking back at the UN Declaration of Rights of 1948, with its Articles 21–24, on the rights of labour. You ask yourself: what kind of world would we be living in today if these had been taken seriously, instead of being flagrantly violated in virtually every capitalist country on the globe? If Marxists give up the idea of rights, they lose the power to put a crowbar into that contradiction.

Wouldn’t a traditional Marxist reply: But precisely, the proof of the pudding is in the eating? You can have all these fine lists of social rights, they’ve been sitting there, solemnly proclaimed for fifty years, but have they made a blind bit of difference? Rights are constitutionally malleable as a notion—anyone can invent them, to their own satisfaction. What they actually represent are interests, and it is the relative power of these interests that determines which—equally artificial—construction of them predominates. After all, what is the most universally acknowledged human right, after the freedom of expression, today? The right to private property. Everyone should have the freedom to benefit from their talents, to transmit the fruits of their labours to the next generation, without interference from others—these are inalienable rights. Why should we imagine rights to health or employment would trump them? In this sense, isn’t the discourse of rights, though teeming with contrary platitudes, structurally empty?

No, it’s not empty, it’s full. But what is it full of? Mainly, those bourgeois notions of rights that Marx was objecting to. My suggestion is that we could fill it with something else, a socialist conception of rights. A political project needs a set of goals to unite around, capable of defeating its opponents, and a dynamic sense of the potential of rights offers this chance—just because the enemy can’t vacate this terrain, on which it has always relied so much. If an organization like Amnesty International, which has done great work for political and civil rights, had pursued economic rights with the same persistence, the earth would be a different place today. So I think it’s important that the Marxist tradition engage in dialogue in the language of rights, where central political arguments are to be won. Around the world today, social rebellions nearly always spontaneously appeal to some conception of rights.

In the first essay of Spaces of Hope, ‘The Difference a Generation Makes’, you contrast the situation of a reading group on Capital in the early seventies with a comparable one today. Then, you remark, it required a major effort to connect the abstract categories of a theory of the mode of production with the daily realities of the world outside where, as you put it, the concerns of Lenin rather than those of Marx held the stage, as anti-imperialist struggles and revolutionary movements battled across the world. By the nineties, on the other hand, there was little or no revolutionary ferment left, but the headlines of every morning’s paper, as corporate acquisitions or stock prices relentlessly dominated the news, read like direct quotations from Theories of Surplus Value. Reviewing the contemporary scene at the end of the essay, you criticize the over-use of Gramsci’s adage—taken from Romain Rolland—‘optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect’, arguing for the validity of a robust optimism of the intellect, too. The conclusion is quite unforced, it comes as entirely natural. But it casts an interesting light on your development. For what it suggests is that the whole Communist experience, unfolding across a third of the earth’s land mass, scarcely registered in your line of sight at all—as if you were neither anti-communist, nor pro-communist, but developed your own very energetic and creative Marxism, while bypassing this huge drama altogether. If the collapse of the USSR, and the hopes once invested in it, has been the principal background to pessimism of the intellect on the Left, it is logical that you would be rather unaffected. But it still raises the question of how you could mentally avoid such a large object on the horizon.

Part of the answer is circumstance. I had no background in Soviet geography, and though I was interested in China, I was never involved in anything to do with it. But if that was in a sense fortuitous, there was a temperamental preference as well. Marx was my anchor, and what Marx wrote was a critique of capitalism. The alternative comes out of that critique, and nowhere else. So I was always more interested in trying to apply the critique and see the alternative where I actually was, in Baltimore, or Oxford, or wherever I happened to be. That may be my own form of localism. On the one hand, I develop a general theory, but on the other, I need to feel this rootedness in something going on in my own backyard. Marxism was so often supposed to be mainly about the Soviet Union or China, and I wanted to say it was about capitalism, which is rampant in the USA, and that must have priority for us. So one effect of this was to insulate me a bit from the fallout of the collapse of Communism. But I should also concede that this is a real limitation of my own work. For all my geographical interests, it has remained Eurocentric, focused on metropolitan zones. I have not been exposed much to other parts of the world.

In your most recent writing, you turn a number of times to the theme of evolution, engaging with E. O. Wilson’s work in a sympathetic if critical spirit, very unlike most responses to his writing on the Left. His notion of the ‘consilience’ of the sciences might well appeal to anyone once attracted to Carnap, though you make clear your own reservations. But it is Wilson’s emphasis on the genetic dispositions of every species that offers the occasion for a remarkable set of reflexions on human evolution, which you suggest has left the species a ‘repertoire’ of capacities and powers—competition, adaptation, cooperation, environmental transformation, spatial and temporal ordering—out of which every society articulates a particular combination. Capitalism, you argue, requires all of these—not least its own forms of cooperation—yet gives primacy to a particular mode of competition. But if competition itself could never be eliminated, as an innate propensity of humanity, its relations with the other powers are in no way unalterable. Socialism is thus best conceived as a reconfiguration of the basic human repertoire, in which its constituent elements find another and better balance. This is a striking response to the claims of sociobiology on its own terrain. But a committed champion of the existing system would reply: Yes, but just as in nature the survival of the fittest is the rule whatever the ecological niche, so in society the reason capitalism has won out is its competitive superiority. It is competition that is the absolute centre of the system, lending it an innovative dynamic that no alternative which relativized or demoted the competitive drive into another combination could hope to withstand. You might try to mobilize competition for socialism, but you would want to subordinate it as a principle within a more complex framework, whereas we don’t subordinate it—that is our unbeatable strength. What would be your reply to this kind of objection?

My answer is—oh, but you do: you do subordinate competition in all kinds of areas. Actually, the whole history of capitalism is unthinkable without the setting up of a regulatory framework to control, direct and limit competition. Without state power to enforce property and contract law, not to speak of transport and communications, modern markets could not begin to function. Next time you’re flying into London or New York, imagine all those pilots suddenly operating on the competitive principle: they all try to hit the ground first, and get the best gate. Would any capitalist relish that idea? Absolutely not. When you look closely at the way a modern economy works, the areas in which competition genuinely rules turn out be quite circumscribed. If you think of all the talk of flexible accumulation, a lot of it revolves around diversification of lines and niche markets. What would the history of capitalism be without diversification? But actually the dynamic behind diversification is a flight from competition—the quest for specialized markets is, much of the time, a way of evading its pressures. In fact, it would be very interesting to write a history of capitalism exploring its utilization of each of the six elements of the basic repertoire I outline, tracing the changing ways it has brought them together, and put them to work, in different epochs. Knee-jerk hostility to Wilson isn’t confined to the Left, but it is not productive. Advances in biology are teaching us a great deal about our make-up, including the physical wiring of our minds, and will tell us much more in the future. I don’t see how one can be a materialist and not take all this very seriously. So in the case of sociobiology, I go back to my belief in the value of rubbing different conceptual blocks together—putting E. O. Wilson in dialogue with Marx. There are obviously major differences, but also some surprising commonalities—so let’s collide the two thinkers against each other. I’m not going to claim I’ve done it right, but this is a discussion we need. The section of Spaces of Hope which starts to talk about this is called ‘Conversations on the Plurality of Alternatives’, and that’s the spirit in which we should approach this. I have questions, not solutions.

What is your view of the present prospect for the system of capital? Limits set out a general theory of its mechanisms of crisis—over-accumulation, tied to the rigidity of blocs of fixed capital, and of its typical solutions—devalorization, credit expansion, spatial reorganization. The Condition of Postmodernity looked at the way these surfaced in the seventies and eighties. Where are we now? There seem to be two possible readings of the present conjuncture, of opposite sign, allowed by your framework, with a third perhaps just over the horizon. The first would take as its starting point your observation in that book that the devalorization necessary to purge excess capital is most effective when it occurs, not in the classic form of a crash, but rather slowly and gradually—cleansing the system without provoking dangerous turmoil within it. On one view, isn’t this what has been imperceptibly happening, through successive waves of downsizing and line-shifting, since the start of the long downturn of the seventies—the kind of cumulative transformation you cited at Bethlehem Steel; finally unleashing a new dynamic in the mid-nineties, with a recovery of profits, stable prices, surge of high-tech investment and increase in productivity growth, giving the system a new lease of life? On another view, equally compatible with your framework, this is not the underlying story. Rather, what we have mainly been seeing is an explosion of the credit system, releasing a tremendous wave of asset inflation—in other words, a runaway growth of fictitious capital—one that is bound to lead to a sharp correction when the stock bubble bursts, returning us to the realities of continued and unresolved over-accumulation. There is also a third alternative, which would give principal weight to the fall of Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia, and the Open Door to foreign trade and investment in China. These developments pose the question: isn’t capitalism in the process of acquiring—in your terms—a gigantic ‘spatial fix’ with this sudden, huge expansion in its potential field of operations? This would still be in its early phase—as yet the US has a large negative trade balance with China—but aren’t we witnessing the construction of a World Trade Organization order that promises to be the equivalent of a Bretton Woods system for the new century, in which for the first time the frontiers of capitalism reach to the ends of the earth? These are three different scenarios, all of which could be grounded in your work. Do you have a provisional judgement of their relative plausibilities?

I don’t think there’s any simple choice between these explanations. Both a process of steady, ongoing devalorization—downsizing, reorganizing and outsourcing—and of spatial transformation, along lines traditionally associated with imperialism, are very much part of the real story. But these massive restructurings wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible power of fictitious capital today. Every major episode of devalorization or geographical expansion has been imprinted by the role of financial institutions, in what amounts to a quite new dynamic of fictitious capital. Such capital is, of course, no mere figment of the imagination. To the extent that it brings about profitable transformations of the productive apparatus, running through the whole M–C–M’ cycle, it ceases to be fictitious and becomes realized. But to do so it always depends on a basis in expectations, which must be socially constructed. People have to believe that wealth—mutual funds, pensions, hedge funds—will continue to increase indefinitely. To secure these expectations is a work of hegemony that falls to the state, and its relays in the media. This is something the two great theorists of the last world crisis understood very well—it is instructive to read Gramsci and Keynes side by side. There may be objective processes that block devalorization, or resist geographical incorporation; but the system is also peculiarly vulnerable to the subjective uncertainties of a runaway growth in fictitious capital. Keynes was haunted by the question: how are the animal spirits of investors to be sustained? A tremendous ideological battle is necessary to maintain confidence in the system, in which the activity of the state—we need only think of the role of the Federal Reserve in the nineties—is all-important. Someone who has written well about this, in a non-economic way, is Slavoj Žižek. So the three explanations are not mutually exclusive: they need to be put together, under the sign of a new drive for hegemony. This is a system that has withstood the shocks from East Asia and Long-Term Capital Management, but each time it was a near-run thing. How long it will last no one can say.

But while the adaptability of capitalism is one of its prime weapons in class struggle, we should not underestimate the vast swathe of opposition it continues to generate. That opposition is fragmented, often highly localized, and endlessly diverse in terms of aims and methods. We have to think of ways to help mobilize and organize this opposition, both actual and latent, so that it becomes a global force and has a global presence. The signs of coming together are there. At the level of theory, we need to find a way to identify commonalities within the differences, and so develop a politics that is genuinely collective in its concerns, yet sensitive to what remains irreducibly distinctive in the world today—particularly geographical distinctions. That would be one of my key hopes.