Emancipating the Place and Labor: Exploring a Possible Synthesis of David Harvey’s Theory of Capitalist Production of Spaces and Marx-Engels’ Emancipatory Class Politics

Abstract

With the desperate usurpation of global spaces under the ever-expanding capitalist mode of production, the political struggle still necessitates an emancipatory class politics as aimed by Marx and Engels. This paper will be a synthesis of Marxist geographer David Harvey’s theory of capitalist production of space and Marx-Engels’ notion of freedom, and their notion of emancipatory class politics. According to David Harvey, its survival as a system is through its wide scale control on the production of spaces. I will first expose the theory of the Marxist geographer David Harvey
on how capitalism produces a space through his theory of the capitalist production of space. This necessary strategy of capitalism to own and extend to spaces is essential to its nature to increase capital and profit. According to him, capitalism always needs to expand territories to create new sources of labor, wealth, and new markets. This necessitates obtaining profits to sustain capital accumulation amidst its problem of crises. The spatial ontology of
capital will be the springboard showing a possible construction of the type of freedom or emancipation that is necessary in forwarding a class politics of spatiality. In effect, emancipating the place is tied with the classical notion of the liberation of the proletariat. I conceptualize the concept of place as a signifier of the spaces that humanity produces—may it be their home, their work, or geometries of modern life—but have been put under the dictates and design of capital. Thus, I will go back to the classical notion of emancipatory politics of Marx and Engels. This synthesis combines the possibility of emancipatory class politics based on the ontology of the present capitalist production of space.