Marx and Philosophy Review of Books: Marxist Thought and the City

Marxist Thought and the City indeed points the way forward for the burgeoning fields of spatialized Marxism and radical geography in which much work still remains to be done in face of the pressing contradictions of our environment and contemporary political situation.

MarxistThought_coverHenri Lefebvre’s Marxist Thought and the City fits into a wider constellation of texts addressing the production of space from the vantage point of a reformulated historical materialism. In comparison to other translations, this volume differs substantially, for example, from the sprawling exploration in The Production of Space or the more programmatic The Urban Revolution. More thematically circumscribed than these other works, the present volume offers an attentive reading of Marx and Engels with respect to the theme of the city. In this regard, the text reads like a well-crafted set of research notes, constituting a preliminary step toward the concrete elaboration of ‘the urban’ as a historical mode of production. Yet, beyond an assiduous foregrounding of the urban milieu in Marx and Engel’s oeuvre, a number of other important philosophical concerns emerge both in response to Lefebvre’s immediate political conjuncture and to the ongoing philosophical debates in Marxist theory that were hotly contested at that time.

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Published in: Marx and Philosophy Review of Books
By: Jared Bly