On David Harvey’s Historical-geographical Materialism Thoughts

David Harvey is one of the representatives of contemporary Marxist in the UK and America, he inherited and developed the essence of Marx’s materialism, on the basis of which he proposed the famous historical-geographical materialism with geographical imagination. By using this analysis method, Harvey understood the sources of inequality and expressed the desire of achieving social and environmental justice. Harvey critiqued the mode of production of contemporary capitalist society and its spatial processes with economic, social, and political and, simultaneously, showed his attention to capital, society and space.Through the analysis of keyword extraction and relevant literature, the introduction part of this article discusses the status of both domestically and abroad scholars’researches on Harvey’s philosophy from the perspective of time, quantity and content precisely. But at present, the domestic research quality lags far behind abroad for not only because it is hard to access to the first hand materials, but also for the existing second hand data translators cannot grasp the real intention of the author exactly. Therefore, the innovation points of this article lie in two aspects:first one is on the foundation of previous studies, this paper states Harvey’s theory in detail and comprehensively as well from the opinion of his recent works; the other is by comparison of two theories of Marx’s historical materialism and Harvey’s historical-geographical materialism, then goes further by analyzing the limitations of Harvey’s historical-geographical materialism through Marx’s point of view, which is actually an innovation from the former researches. The following is the frame structure of this article. The first part describes the sources of Harvey’s historical-geographical materialism, which based on both historical and theoretical backgrounds simultaneously. It is from the transformation of Capitalist mode of production that Harvey puts up with his paradigm of analyzing the historical-geographical materialism, which based upon Marx’s materialism, Hegel’s dialectic and Lefebvre’s space theory. Under not only the social environment of anxiety of modernization and penetration of globalization, but also the theoretical background of the spatial turn in philosophy as well as the dialectical turn in geography. The second part continues by addressing Harvey’s perspective of the reconstruction of Marx’s historical materialism from three aspects, which is rebuilt by basic principles, methods and approaches, on the other hand this part goes on by describing the specific shape of Harvey’s theory particularly from theories such as the uneven geographical development and the time-space compression. The last sector of this paper is the evaluation of Harvey’s thought by summarizing and sublimating of the entire article. It starts from Harvey’s understanding and interpretation of the historical materialism, later on a comparison is made between the two famous theories that are historical materialism and historical-geographical materialism which displays some differences and learnings. His judgment of "inevitable demise of capitalism" clearly has a significant meaning in demonstrating the times value of Marx’ philosophy; the appeal of environmental justice shows his concern and awareness about ecological, environment and society, as well as his city theory, which has profound theoretical and practical significance in both city development and urban construction at the time and even in contemporary society actually. However, if it is said that in Harvey’viewpoints, Marxist historical materialism has only sole "Time" dimension, then "Space" dimension has to be implanted into Marx’s historical materialism; While the ignorance of the complexity of Marx’s historical materialism which has rich connotations theories that contains multiple angles and multilayered perspectives, to some extent, will inevitably limited the interpretation scope of historical materialism. Finally, and most importantly, Harvey’s critique of capitalism, the appeal of social justice and planning of urban space are still staying in the imagination and discourse level so that it cannot be implemented into practice, in other words, it is a kind of realistic space-time dialectical utopia with idealistic and will never come true.Nevertheless, just like every coin has two sides, we should approve firstly is Harvey’s spirit of innovation, secondly is his pursuit of the ideal society and most important is the faith in Marx at the same time when we critique it. When it comes to the situation of China, We originally must have a clear understanding of the current status of development through the whole country at the beginning, which is we still on the process of the primary stage of socialism for the moment and the near future as well. This explains a roadmap to us that is we can’t develop without Marxism, more importantly, we must adhere to Marx theory as our guide to build a socialist country with Chinese special characteristics under the help of the development of Marx’s theory. Last but not least and more specifically, within the country we can establish remarkable harmonious cities and green cities, on top of which is the only way to realize our Chinese dream. Only in this way can we finally achieve the great rejuvenation of the whole Chinese race in the end.