ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an approach that recognises the need for differing levels of abstraction in analyses of capitalist economies and economic geographies and that recognises that capitalist economic development is an improbable and contradictory social process that necessarily involves collaboration between people with contradictory and opposing interests. It draws on Marxian political economy to clarify why capitalist economies function as they do – the imperatives of surplus-value production, profits, accumulation and the structural limits and parameters that these define. Insofar as there is recognition of the necessary role of the state in securing the conditions for economic activity, it is limited to enabling exchange in markets which will result in economies attaining the desired state of equilibrium. Economic activity requires bringing together a variety of people and organisations with conflicting interests to nonetheless work together, sometimes collaborating more or less willingly, sometimes coerced in particular ways in specific times and places.
