Political economy versus political Economy: bringing back classical political economy into geographic research

Since the launch of radical geography, the questions of capital’s spatial dynamics and the consequent socio-spatial relations, such as the evolving ‘North-South’ relation touched on in the conference call, have been central to the field. However, according to Kevin Cox (2013), already from the 1980s with the rise of critical realism as the dominant theory of science, classical (Marxist) political economy theory has been marginalized in favor of a new institutionalist economic theory with analytical and explanatory implications: rather than a focus on economic structures and macro-dynamics of capital we find a focus on political structures, agency, institutions and ideological hegemonic structures–often apparently in void of any economic processes. In the current moment of dramatic transformations of the capitalist world economy, we contend that it is worth revisiting classical PE theory so as to examine whether and how it has something to offer geography today. Consequently, we in this article aim to present building blocks for a PE for human geographers inspired by classical PE and its crucial attention to economic structures and macro-dynamics of capital accumulation. In doing so, we draw upon empirical challenges and tensions that the dominant, institutionalist approach to PE in our neck of the woods in geography (namely the sub-fields of resource and urban geography) creates and counterpose them with superior explanatory power of classical PE that does not suffer from such tensions.