askchapo

Wow that’s an awesome question.

It sounds like you have essentially rediscovered the concept of Marxist Geography all on your own, so congratulations and that’s something to actually be proud of. I’ll go into it a little bit and then give you some recommendations from there, because you sound very interested.

Marxist Geography, summarized as shortly as I can, is the study the spatial implications of capitalism, focusing on how economic order and social inequalities, resource distribution, and the organization of space mold each other. Importantly, unlike the study of geography under capitalism which functions to increase exploitation, Marxist Geography seeks liberation by fully understanding the role of geography in perpetuating class struggle. From this understanding we can determine that societies are reflections of their relation to material conditions, and what must be done to achieve liberation.

You’ve already figured this out. You perfectly highlighted how understanding that society is a reflection of its material conditions is a very powerful tool in the hands of people with the ability to impact material conditions within society. That’s why understanding spatial relations through geography was so important to the ruling class in early proto-capitalist societies. These people understood that control over the resources is control over material conditions and thus the society that exists around them (and in the case of the nobility and capitalists, the society that exists for them).

You can’t understand how a watermill works without understanding what powers it. You can’t plan where to put another watermill without understanding where you might find the correct conditions to power it. You can’t use a watermill to grind grain if the labor power to transport grain to the mill is not worth the effort. You can’t use your watermill if somebody was able to determine a more economically advantageous position to build their own and makes yours obsolete. You can’t use your watermill if you failed to properly enclose the commons and somebody else diverted your water source. You can’t sell the grain from your watermill if the town’s collective farming covers their own needs for grain. It goes back even into feudalism, where the landholding class understood that if peasants could freely till their own land, they would labor for only themselves or their immediate community. So what is so important about understanding geography and geology? It’s that engineering, mathematics, biology, physics, or even religion can’t exist isolated from their spatial relationship with the world around them, and the people that are a reflection of that world.

I recommend reading David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, where he talks about exactly this in the modern context!