Toward a Class-Based Conception of Territory: Ontogenesis, Power, and Epistemological Critique in Geography

This article proposes a critical reconstruction of the concept of territory from a class-based perspective grounded in historical-dialectical materialism. It argues that the widespread contemporary use of the term “territory” in geography and public policy has occurred alongside its theoretical reduction, primarily due to the dissociation between territory, class struggle, and political economy. Through an epistemological analysis of geographical thought, from classical political geography to contemporary critical geography, this text examines the processes of emergence, erasure, and the resurgence of territory as a central category, highlighting the limits of statocentrism, institutionalism, relational-symbolic approaches, and structural-functionalism. It contends that such perspectives, although relevant, tend to dissolve territory into uses, networks, institutions, or cultural representations, thereby obscuring its condition as a historical form of spatial appropriation mediated by relations of power, without disregarding other mediations (such as those of race and gender) constitutive of class. As a result, this article advances an ontogenetic and class-based conception of territory, understood as a contradictory product of social struggle that articulates state, labour, property, coercion, and consensus within the capitalist totality.