ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly outlines some of the foundational Marxian concepts. It seeks to uncover the critical social relationships that define and shape economies and their geographies and provides the conceptual basis for understanding the economy and its spatiality, crucially recognising that analyses at different levels of abstraction are critical in this task. Rather than seeing these as alternatives to Marxian political economy, however, it seeks to bring these together with it to provide a more powerful explanatory framework in which to understand the geography of economies, the shifting restless landscapes of capitalist economies and economic landscapes of uneven development. The recognition that environmental and socio-economic processes are co-evolutionary that is, mutually causative and multi-scalar is both important and challenging for understanding economic geographies. Economic geography had very little to say on resource or environmental issues at a time when the linkages between economic growth, development and the environment were acquiring huge social and political significance.
