David Harvey once evoked an observation attributed to Antonio Gramsci nearly a century ago: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.” Whereas Gramsci orients toward political possibility, Harvey appears resigned to the existential reality of a hegemonic condition. This essay proposes a third formulation that embraces both Harvey’s acceptance of a dominant reality and a Gramscian stance toward possibility.
Class is one of the most important, widely used, and complicated concepts in human geography and the social sciences. It underpins economic geographies and intersects with geographies of gender, race, and sexuality. Different notions of class have been in use, along the spectrum from neoclassical to Marxist economic theories. These theories have also been reworked by feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist scholars in order to augment critiques of class-related inequalities and to construct possibilities for imagining and producing progressive geographies of class.
