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This paper provides an account of my intellectual journey. Beginning with an un-theorised concern with inequality, this journey has taken me through jousts with statistical models of social systems to theoretical and empirical investigations of primitive accumulation, capitalist dynamics and human–nature interactions. Marx has played an essential role in this intellectual journey, though increasingly his insights have been supplemented by other traditions of social scientific thought, including feminism, physical geography and ecology. For me, as (seemingly) for most on the left, it has proved a frustrating task to reconcile the core insights of Marx about capitalist dynamics with the knowledge provided by these other traditions – a task that remains incomplete.