FROM A GEOGRAPHY OF LABOR TO A LABOR GEOGRAPHY - LABORS SPATIAL FIX AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF CAPITALISM

Mainstream neoclassical economic geography and its Marxist critique ha ve largely failed to incorporate active conceptions of working class p eople in their explanations of the location of economic activities. Ne oclassical approaches tend to conceive of workers simply as factors of location, whereas Marxist approaches primarily focus on how capital s tructures the economic landscape in its search for profit and frequent ly relegate labor to the status of ''variable capital.'' Both approach es present Geographies of Labor. They have not really examined how wor kers try to make industrial landscapes. In contrast, I argue that work ers have an interest in how the economic geography of capitalism is ma de; consequently, they seek to impose what we might call ''labor's spa tial fix'' and so play an active role in the unevenly developed geogra phy of capitalism. Examining how workers try to develop their own spat ial fixes allows us to incorporate a more active sense of workers as g eographical agents into understandings of the production of space unde r capitalism. Recognizing that workers' efforts to create ''labor's sp atial fix'' are significant allows us to theorize how workers attempt to make space as an integral part of their social existence (a Labor G eography) and so to write less capital-oriented economic geographies.