Economic Geography

The new economic geography of the 1970s: economic
geography’s engagement with Marxian political economy
The limitations of both location theories and behavioural critiques of them 
led economic geographers to search for more powerful conceptualisations of 
the processes that generated geographies of economies. In their search for more
powerful explanations, economic geographers increasingly turned to Marxian
political economy as a source of theoretical inspiration. Marxian political econ-
omy is centred on powerful concepts of structure, of the social structural rela-
tions that defined particular types of societies and offered a powerful challenge
to the spatial fetishism of locational analysis and spatial science – that is, to the
belief that spatial forms could be explained by spatial processes devoid of social
content.
In the 1970s, then, economic geographers turned to Marxian political econ-
omy in order to get more powerful insights into social processes and the social
grounding and relations of the economy, of what defined capitalist economies as
capitalist. They recognised the need to get below and beyond the surface appear-
ances of capitalist economies and their geographies to those structural relations
and processes that had causal effectivity and that could help explain why capital-
ist economies and their geographies were as they were. This above all was the
central issue. The concepts of value theory provided the tools to do so. Concepts
such as mode of production, the dialectical class structural relationship between
capital and labour, commodities and their exchange value and use value, labour-
power and the labour process, and uneven development allowed a much more
powerful understanding of the geographies of capitalist economies than had
hitherto been possible. Extensions to include notions such as social formations
and the articulation of modes of production allowed a more sophisticated under-
standing of the relations between capitalist and non-capitalist economies and social
relations, deepening understanding of the mosaic of uneven development at multi-
ple spatial scales. Without doubt, the most powerful and sophisticated version of this

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Ray Hudson
revived and enriched historical–geographical materialism emerged in 1982 with the
publication of David Harvey’s (1982) magisterial account of The Limits to Capital.
Despite subsequent critiques, economic geographers continue to argue the case
for Marxian political economy. For example, Doreen Massey (1995: 307), in
another of the major landmark publications of the last four decades in economic
geography, Spatial Divisions of Labour, was at pains to emphasise the continuing
relevance of Marxian political economy. For Massey, the law of value enables us
to think through the broad structures of the economy and forms the ‘absolutely
essential basis for some central concepts – exploitation for instance’. Value theory
therefore helps elucidate the social relationships specific to capitalism and its
economic geographies – while recognising that there are things that value theory
cannot deal with: for example, issues such as emotion and feelings cannot be
captured in value categories.
In short, economic geographers continue to need Marxian political economy
but they do not only need Marxian political economy. As Massey’s work 
emphasised, specifying precisely how particular geographies of capitalist
economies evolved within the structural limits defining economies as capitalist
remained problematic and in turn led economic geographers to search for other
approaches to theorising, either as complements to, or as alternatives to, Marxian
approaches.