Structural Marxism and Human Geography: A Critical Assessment

Abstract This paper assesses critically both the strong theoretical claims and the empirical work of a number of structural marxists in analyzing the geography of advanced societies. Such work offers a holistic mode of explanation that has important philosophical affinities with Hegelian idealism. In explanation, reified entities such as capital are treated as the formal cause while people are regarded as the efficient cause, the mere carriers of a structural logic. This perspective raises a number of serious theoretical problems that are not resolved, including the status of individuals as a creative force in shaping events, the ontological status of structures, the relationship between consciousness and structure, and the tendency to functionalism and teleology in explanation. These shortcomings have severe consequences for empirical study. The fundamentally economic nature of the central categories provide at best a partial analysis and not a general comprehension of society as a whole. If applied literally, key categories, such as the dichotomous class system, fit poorly with empirical events. However, if adjusted to match historical events, they depart markedly from the form of the theoretical structure. The result is a confused interplay between theory and empirical study, and a tendency toward the mystification of causal processes and the denigration of empirical study in order to sustain the integrity of the theoretical argument.