Nature - autonomous learning

80 the ‘nature’ of geographyMarxist geography. During the late 1960s many people in the Westexpressed dissatisfaction with the post-war order.This extended beyondenvironmentalists’ critiques of resource exploitation, species loss andthe like. In addition, there was the civil rights movement in the USA, theanti-Vietnam war protests, the Algerian war of independence, the ‘events’in Paris in 1968, and the challenge to capitalist societies posed by thecommunist bloc. On top of this, there were several epic famines inthe developing world (something of a harbinger), and a concern that theWest’s affluence was being bought at others’ expense. In this context, spatialscience and its behaviourist offshoot seemed not only to ignore the mostpressing issues of the day.They also appeared to be ‘part of the problem’ inso far as they failed to challenge imperialism, racism, oppression, povertyand other social ills in any meaningful way. As David Harvey put it in hislandmark book Social Justice and the City:‘There is an ecological problem, anurban problem, an international trade problem, and yet we seem incapableof saying anything of depth or profundity about any of them . . . Theobjective social conditions . . . explain . . . the necessity for a revolution ingeographic thought’ (Harvey 1973: 129).One can speculate why Harvey and his students turned to Marxism,rather than to any other critical theory of society, to engineer this ‘radicalgeography’ revolution. First, Marx’s ideas, as was well known at the time,had inspired the supposedly ‘emancipatory’ experiments in communismin the USSR, eastern Europe, China, Cuba and several other countries. I saysupposedly because Marx’s ideals – unbeknownst to many in the West– were being perverted by dictatorial communist leaders. Unaware of this,many left-wing individuals in the West saw communism as a living, humanealternative to capitalism and Western economic imperialism. Second,academic Marxism – that is, the critical analysis of how capitalism works– was very influential in Western sociology, anthropology and philosophydepartments during the 1960s.This gave Harvey and his students a traditionof thought ready to hand, as it were. Finally, because Marxism’s mainobject of analysis was capitalism, and because capitalism was an increasinglyglobal economic system, Marxism’s insights seemed to have wide relevanceand applicability.This is not the place to rehearse the history of Marxist geography.For our purposes it’s enough to note the following. First, like humanisticgeography, the Marxist approach said little about the environment.Thiswas arguably a reflection of Marx’s relative inattention to the topic (an