ON WORKERS' THEORETICAL (IN)VISIBILITY IN THE WRITING OF CRITICAL URBAN GEOGRAPHY A COMRADELY CRITIQUE

Abstract

Marxist geography has been at the forefront of understanding the urban dynamic of advanced capitalism. There is, however, a paradox in much of this work. Whereas Marxist geographers implicitly take workers' experiences under capitalism as their political starting point, ironically, much Marxist work in urban geography has tended to ignore workers' proactive roles in shaping the urban landscape. Rather, Marxist urban geographers have focused largely on how capital and the state shape the built environment. Essentially, they have written urban geographies from the perspective of capital and the state and, in so doing, have failed to make working-class people the subjects of their own historical geographies. In this paper I argue that urban geographers need to pay much greater attention to how workers and their institutions shape the built environment. To illustrate this argument I draw upon the example of workers' struggles to control the geography of work in the U.S. East Coast longshore industry.

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