Skip to main content

LUP Student Papers

LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

A Critique of Critical Geographies

Grahn, Jonas LU (2017) SGEL36 20171
Department of Human Geography
Abstract
In the 2016 fall issue of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, a themed section in the journal was dedicated to a revisiting of Friedrich Engels’s pamphlet The Housing Question, written in 1872. Six articles were published where the authors were asked to frame their analyses in reference to Engels’s pamphlet and the subsequent intellectual engagements with it. My teachers, Henrik Gutzon Larsen and Anders Lund Hansen, were two out of the four editors of the themed section. They wrote in their introduction to the themed section that: for Engels, private property rights constituted the chief institutional arrangement that made capitalist urban expansion possible, and were responsible for the creation of stark inequalities,... (More)
In the 2016 fall issue of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, a themed section in the journal was dedicated to a revisiting of Friedrich Engels’s pamphlet The Housing Question, written in 1872. Six articles were published where the authors were asked to frame their analyses in reference to Engels’s pamphlet and the subsequent intellectual engagements with it. My teachers, Henrik Gutzon Larsen and Anders Lund Hansen, were two out of the four editors of the themed section. They wrote in their introduction to the themed section that: for Engels, private property rights constituted the chief institutional arrangement that made capitalist urban expansion possible, and were responsible for the creation of stark inequalities, grotesque exploitation, and appalling injustices. In the following, I will project that this is: (1) simply not true, no such formulation exists in Engels’s pamphlet; and (2) that this is a problematic view that in essence is no different than the Proudhonist conception Engels is critiquing.
This essay seeks to propose an alternative interpretation of Engels’s pamphlet. By approaching Engels’s pamphlet from the theoretical perspective of Marxist-humanism in general, and Raya Dunayevskaya’s theory of state-capitalism in particular, I will argue that Engels’s argument leads towards a critique of such criticism of private property rights, that my teachers suggests. Instead, I propose that Engels’s argument that the housing question cannot be sufficiently solved unless the capitalist mode of production is abolished, necessarily would involve, not new forms of human relations on the market, but new forms of human relations in production. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Grahn, Jonas LU
supervisor
organization
course
SGEL36 20171
year
type
M2 - Bachelor Degree
subject
keywords
The Housing Question, Engels, Proudhonism, Marxist-humanism, State-capitalism
language
English
id
8923110
date added to LUP
2017-08-31 15:45:41
date last changed
2017-08-31 15:45:41
@misc{8923110,
  abstract     = {{In the 2016 fall issue of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, a themed section in the journal was dedicated to a revisiting of Friedrich Engels’s pamphlet The Housing Question, written in 1872. Six articles were published where the authors were asked to frame their analyses in reference to Engels’s pamphlet and the subsequent intellectual engagements with it. My teachers, Henrik Gutzon Larsen and Anders Lund Hansen, were two out of the four editors of the themed section. They wrote in their introduction to the themed section that: for Engels, private property rights constituted the chief institutional arrangement that made capitalist urban expansion possible, and were responsible for the creation of stark inequalities, grotesque exploitation, and appalling injustices. In the following, I will project that this is: (1) simply not true, no such formulation exists in Engels’s pamphlet; and (2) that this is a problematic view that in essence is no different than the Proudhonist conception Engels is critiquing.
 This essay seeks to propose an alternative interpretation of Engels’s pamphlet. By approaching Engels’s pamphlet from the theoretical perspective of Marxist-humanism in general, and Raya Dunayevskaya’s theory of state-capitalism in particular, I will argue that Engels’s argument leads towards a critique of such criticism of private property rights, that my teachers suggests. Instead, I propose that Engels’s argument that the housing question cannot be sufficiently solved unless the capitalist mode of production is abolished, necessarily would involve, not new forms of human relations on the market, but new forms of human relations in production.}},
  author       = {{Grahn, Jonas}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{A Critique of Critical Geographies}},
  year         = {{2017}},
}