Approaches in Doing Critical Human Geography
Introduction
We cannot understand Marxism without geography, and geography cannot be understood without Marxism too. Marxist geography is focused on the analysis of the geographical processes, conditions, and primarily capitalism. The theory of Karl Marx formed a foundation of what was called critical Geography and whose main aim was to discover, understand, and deal with the production of unequal geographies. His geography was concerned with how the creation of space, place, and landscape is implicated in the production of some social formation. It was developed to counter-attack capitalism as a form of society operations. Its primary concern is unequal development, social justice, and regional imbalance as a result of division and exploitation of labor resources and the environment. He argued that people are secluded by the capitalist system, and in specific reference, the proletariat is exploited and human dignity removed through the selling of their labor. The essay outlines the approaches by Marxist geographies on doing human capital and how the methods have been used in present geographical research using relevant examples.
Geographies of waste
Karl Marx views capitalism as being very wasteful waste cuts across social classes, and it is unevenly distributed. Mogdoff et al. (2017) allude that more production means more waste is attributed to more production. The author further states that waste is a sign of capitalism’s success. As early as 1920, Stuart Chase had identified four systematic sources of waste under capitalism as being; the labor power used to produce useless goods and services, labor power wasted due to high level of unemployment, the unplanned nature of production, and distribution of products leading to overproduction. The ultimate source of waste was the senseless waste and oversize of natural resources.
George (2011) defines waste as rubbish, whatever can’t or won’t be used and, therefore, only suitable for the waste bin. The author clarifies that the capitalist system illustrates the theme “waste” as being in three perspectives; waste resources, waste social cohesion, and waste people. Capitalism wastes people by organizing them in levels and preventing the vast majority of workers or laborers from having any say in running the companies, capitalism only sees employees as nothing but only as a cost factor. Most of the employees have little or no control over their career development and especially during the time of crisis. An example is France, where employees in France. Telecom has been complaining of being treated poorly.
Capitalism wastes cohesion in that it naturally creates significant inequalities. In the United States, the CEO of a large company is paid more than 400 times as much as his/her average employee Banker and traders continue to receive huge bonuses despite the havoc their capitalist methods have wreaked on consumers. The increase in inequalities and the breaking of social cohesion are closely related to other phenomena like drug addiction and infant mortality, where the costs are high even for the rich.
Capitalism wastes resources through techniques such as the deliberate introduction of small and meaningless innovations that are done through mass advertising. An example in Vienna was the bread that was not sold during the day is thrown out and removed to the public dump, instead of being distributed to the homeless and the needy or merely producing less bread. A lot of energy is wasted before doing any work at all. In most countries, vast quantities of food are lost in storage, processing, and distribution before getting to the consumer.
Most sincerely, capitalism devastates nature by laying waste on the planet, compromising the continued existence of human habitation pollution at the environment is promoted by capitalism and has even failed to supply basic needs like food and water to all inhabitants. The rate of pollution is so high in capitalistic countries like China-Defenders of the system underscore capitalism’s undeniable ability to promote innovation. As much as its expansion has allowed hundreds of people to escape poverty as depicted in China, its costs and wastefulness outweigh its benefits (George 2011)
Geographies of Capital
(Martinez 2001, P.3) Wallerstein defined a world system as a social system that has boundaries structure, member groups, and coherence. It has the characteristics of an organism in that it has a life span over which its features change in some places and remain constant in others. Wallerstein termed the world system as the world economy, integrated through the market rather than a political point, where two or more geographical regions are interdependent concerning basic needs like food, fuel, and protection. Wallerstein says that the world system is a multicultural territory with the division of labor in which the production and exchange of essential goods are necessary for the daily life of inhabitants. The division of work refers to the force and therefore leads to the existence of two interdependent regions, namely the core and periphery. There are different regions geographical and culturally as one focuses on labor-intensive production. (Martine 2001, P.4)
The current world system is characterized by a power hierarchy between the core and periphery, whereby the powerful and wealthy core societies dominate and exploit weak and poor peripheral nations. One of the critical factors that determine the positioning of countries in core and peripheral positions is the use of technology. Advanced and developed ones are the core, while the less developed ones are the periphery. Developing countries are structurally constrained to experience a kind of development that reproduces their dependence status. Stable states reinforce and increase the differential flow of the surplus products to the core zone. This is what Wallerstein called an unequal exchange, the transfer of surplus from the periphery to the high technology, industrialized region.
Dependency Theory
The theory becomes popular in the 1960s after it was discovered that the increase in the wealth of rich nations was at the expense of the poorer countries. The theory is based on the Marxist view of the world, which attributes globalization to the spread of capitalism and the exploitation of cheap labor and resources. The view of the theory is that there are dominant world capitalists that rely on division of labor between the rich or what Karl Marx called the core countries and the poor or peripheral countries. With time, the core countries will exploit the poor by their dominance over an ever-increasing marginalized periphery or developing countries. The resources are sold to sophisticated economies, which have the means to transform the material into finished products at high prices, depleting the capital they might be otherwise devoted to improving their productive capacity. The result is then a vicious cycle that promotes the division of the world economy between the rich core and poor periphery.
In recent geographical research, the development and of western countries to African countries could be seen in a Marxist way. By improving or boosting the economic system of the developing countries. The western states are trying to help the African countries to sort their production of goods and services. They also try to lay a fair government to create an open political system that helps reduce the inequalities between countries (Henny, 2012). The dependency theorists recommend strategies and policies to help the states at the periphery to industrialize and develop. The united nation has designed the United Nations Committee on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to monitor and help the underdevelopment nation (Zulkifli, 2010)
Conclusion
Marxist geographies approaches have been of critical value to modern human geography. The discussion tabled by Karl Marx in the past few years has been used by modern Geographers to analyze present-day human geography. The geographies of capital, as discussed by Wallerstein, who continued Karl Marx’s work, analyzes how core countries deployed the periphery by advancement in technology in the rich countries, therefore, taking the surplus from the developing countries. Karl Marx also examines the dependency theory, where he alludes that the developing countries are structurally forced to rely on the rich countries for the production of necessary goods and services. Still, the core countries exploit the poor ones. In his last geography, Karl Marx examines the wastes associated with capitalism and states all forms of waste-related with capitalisms; wastes people wastes cohesion and wastes resources. But most seriously, Karl Marx discusses how capitalism wastes the natural environment through the use of space and landscape. The geographers of Karl Marx have been widely used by modern geographers to study the relevant issues.
References
George, S., 2011. Waste And Capitalism. [online] Transnational Institute. Available at: <https://www.tni.org/en/article/waste-and-capitalism> [Accessed 18 April 2020].
Henny, L., 2012. Marxist Geography – Geography. [online] Geography.ruhosting.nl. Available at: <http://geography.ruhosting.nl/geography/index.php?title=Marxist_Geography> [Accessed 18 April 2020].
Munro, A., 2020. Dependency Theory | Definition & Facts. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/topic/dependency-theory> [Accessed 18 April 2020].
Martínez-Vela, C.A., 2001. World systems theory. Engineering system division, 83, pp.1-5.
Magdoff, F., Williams, C., Morris, D., McClenaghan, M. and Qayyum, M., 2017. Capitalist Economies Create Waste, Not Social Value. [online] Truthout. Available at: <https://truthout.org/articles/capitalist-economies-create-waste-not-social-value/> [Accessed 18 April 2020].
Zulkifli, N., 2010. MARXISM AND THE THEORY OF DEPENDENCY. [online] Available at: <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326988217_MARXISM_AND_THE_THEORY_OF_DEPENDENCY> [Accessed 18 April 2020].