In this essay, I offer a brief discussion of a materialist conception of history and how this framework is used and developed by David Harvey in his work on Paris. I argue that Consciousness and the Urban Experience, his important monograph published in 1985, exemplifies historical materialist research that engages a general or 'authentic' history, relational theories of scale, and attention to the particularities of place. Moreover, it is attuned to the intersecting political, cultural, economic, and ideological forces of a specific city in a moment of crisis, and tacks back and forth between the particular and the general, as well as the empirical and the theoretical. For these reasons, I believe the work should be considered part of the genealogy of conjunctural geographies.
Unequal exchange (UE) research explains how trade generates unevenly distributed costs and benefits by connecting geographies of extraction, exploitation, appropriation, and accumulation. Yet the field remains fragmented: Marxist, ecological, and post-Keynesian traditions often talk past one another, each accusing the others of misunderstanding core concepts. This paper offers a selective review of these three traditions and examines the assumptions underlying their disagreements. A key source of confusion, I argue, is the conflation of labor value and monetary value in parts of the Marxist literature. By reducing exploitation to wage-profit differentials, some Marxist writings undermine their own case for the labor theory of value (LTV)-based UE developed by Emmanuel, exposing them to critiques that the approach is empirically wrong, theoretically unnecessary, and idealist. Against this, I argue an LTV-based UE remains necessary for three reasons: it explains empirical blind spots that net transfer approaches cannot; it accounts for how prices and wages themselves form, not just how they redistribute biophysical flows; and it grounds a distinction between exploitation within nations and the international appropriation of surplus value through UE—two connected but analytically separate processes. The task ahead is not to choose between these theories, but to make them speak to each other.
This contention reads Teresa Margolles' La promesa as a material geography of working-class exposure in Ciudad Juárez. The work begins with an abandoned Infonavit house, purchased by the artist, dismantled, crushed into gravel, transported to Mexico City, and collectively reworked inside the museum. I argue that this movement makes visible a historical process in which housing, labor, and bodily integrity cease to operate as supports for the reproduction of working-class life. Against readings of violence that isolate spectacular death from the infrastructures that precede it, the essay proposes the inhuman as a politically produced condition: a threshold at which rights remain formally legible while the material supports that make them enforceable are withdrawn. Situating La promesa within the history of land dispossession, maquila-led urbanization, neoliberal housing policy, and the violence of the tiempo malo in Ciudad Juárez, the essay shows how the ruined house condenses a broader geography of de-reproduction under neoliberal and hyper-imperial conditions. The collective labor that activates the work does not restore the lost home, but it interrupts the house's reduction to debris, allowing its material to appear again as common ground and as a practical figure for rebuilding the relation between work, shelter, and future.
In advanced capitalist countries, the seamless circulation of goods depends more than ever on the labour of migrant truck drivers. The trucking industry has undergone significant transformations in recent decades, including deregulation, fragmentation, platformization and periods of freight recession. Through the lens of racial capitalism and critical logistics studies, this paper examines how the Canadian logistics and long-haul transportation sector increasingly relies on racialized migrant truck drivers to sustain itself during economic downturns. By using precarious immigration status as a competitive advantage, carriers have intensified their pressure on migrant drivers. Drawing on an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with migrant truck drivers, company owners and key industry actors, the article reveals how migrant truck drivers experience semi-legal and illegal practices. The analysis section demonstrates that the race-to-the-bottom in labour standards is not incidental but structural. Some carriers bend labour and migration laws and use tactics such as unpaid waiting time, logbook falsification, deportation threats, wage theft and in-cab technological surveillance.
This article examines the relationship between total sectoral export responsiveness to changes in European Union (EU) income and the sectoral rate of profit in EU economies. Building on Marxian approaches to profitability, foreign trade and uneven development, it investigates whether export responsiveness is uniformly associated with profitability or whether the relationship varies across countries. Using sectoral panel data for 15 EU economies over 1996–2020, the analysis estimates country-specific models controlling for capital intensity, foreign direct investment and crisis effects. The results reveal substantial heterogeneity. Germany emerges as the clearest positive case, while Spain also displays a positive and statistically significant association. In several other economies, the relationship is negative or statistically insignificant. These findings suggest that sectoral export responsiveness is associated with profitability in uneven ways within the EU.
