55 © The Author(s) 2019 J. van der Merwe, N. Dodd, The Political Economy of Underdevelopment in the Global South, International Political Economy Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05096-2_4 CHAPTER 4 Marx, Gramsci, and Power Networks Building on the literature discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3, power networks will be used as a departure point for theorising the notion of ‘the com- plex.’ It will be argued that ‘complexes’ are a defned sub-type of these ‘power networks.’ Our conceptual framework seeks to bind economic determinism with the ideational power behind material production. But before we can discuss this, it will be necessary to ground our dis- cussion in Harvey’s updating of Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’ and gen- eral theory of imperialism, along with Cox’s application of Gramscian analysis to the international sphere. Although Marx and Gramsci provided us with the basis for serious political-economic analysis through their con- tributions Capital and Prison Notebooks, the discussion here is primarily focused on the two noteworthy extensions and updates to their work. THE TWO LOGICS OF IMPERIALISM As already discussed, processes of imperialism and colonialism are the main drivers of underdevelopment. As a Marxian scholar, Harvey’s con- cepts are useful in understanding the primacy of capital accumulation and Some of this work draws on Van der Merwe’s DPhil thesis at Oxford University.