ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concepts from political economy, specifically the Marxian conception of the circuit of productive industrial capital, to help understand the relationship between the legal and illegal in the totality of the production process. It focuses on the spaces and practices through which money generated through illegal activities becomes transformed into clean and legitimate money, and especially money capital, in the legal mainstream economy. The chapter demonstrates a critical political economy perspective offers a more comprehensive account of the accumulation process and its geographies by engaging with the illegal. It agrees with Castells that the difficulties of definition and measurement and in obtaining precise empirical data as to the extent of illegality should not stand in the way of seeking to understand its function and the relations between the legal and illegal. There are, in short, complex and integral relations between the flows and spaces of legal and illegal with contested developmental implications.
