From Urban–Rural Antagonism to Urban–Rural Integration: A Contemporary Interpretation of Marx’s Theory of Urban–Rural Relations

Abstract

Urban–rural connectivity can deepen while the relations of subordination embedded in it persist. This article explains that divergence through a contemporary reconstruction of Marx’s account of town–country antagonism. Reading selected primary texts alongside scholarship on spatial justice, capabilities, and digital inequality, it distinguishes productive integration, understood as stronger economic coordination, from substantive integration, assessed through usable access, reciprocal benefit, and collective agency. Its contribution is a synthesis that connects group-specific outcomes to the institutional organization of interdependence. Property arrangements allocate assets and surplus; entitlement rules govern eligibility; fiscal systems distribute the costs of social reproduction; organizational rules shape bargaining alternatives. A bounded territorial comparison shows how service eligibility and financing can alter access under equivalent productive connections. A separate organizational proposition explains how restrictions on switching reduce credible alternatives and weaken participants’ ability to negotiate returns. These mechanisms specify why aggregate gains can coexist with exclusion and identify conditions that can interrupt it. The resulting framework treats integration as a political transformation of cooperation: its substantive direction depends on who can use collective resources, obtain a defensible share of benefits, and influence the rules sustaining them.