From Labor Geography to Class Geography: Reasserting the Marxist Theory of Class
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Class analysis has never been hegemonic in Human Geography, or indeed, in any other social science, although it had some visibility in the 1960s and the 1970s. Recently the claim has been made for a resurgence of class analysis, as with in labor geography and new working class studies. I subject this claim to a brief critique. Although labor geography has shed some light on workers’ agency, its underlying view of class is very problematic. I then offer a map of an alternative view of class more rooted in the Marxist tradition. In mapping the class theory in the form of a dialectical synthesis, I briefly elaborate selected conceptual theses on class. These theses together aim at conceptualizing class as a social-material relation of exploitation that exists at multiple levels, and as (tendentially) connected to class unity, consciousness/ identity and struggle. The theses show class to be a spatial and multi-scalar process. The paper also discusses briefly and illustratively why class matters, in particular, as far as the analysis of social oppression based on race and gender, and (uneven) economic development is concerned. It is about time to move from the labor geography type approach, whose dominant and narrowly-defined agency-oriented concerns include social-democratic manipulation of landscapes of capitalism, to a dialectical-materialist class analysis of social-geographical issues, which has more radical ambitions and which will encompass a less voluntarist and more radical labor geography.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".