The Lecture is held from 3 March, Every Wednesday, 10:00-11:00, on Zoom.

Meeting ID: 847 131 107 37

Code: 13 23 78

 

Tutorial 1 (Week 2): Introduction: the state/market dichotomy

Week Beginning 8 March

In this introductory tutorial you are encouraged to explore the relationships between the economy and society in a general sense. The set reading makes a case for markets being understood as ‘socially embedded’ which means that markets inevitably depend upon and are structured by social institutions. This should provide you with a focus for your initial thoughts, but discussion can range beyond this. While you needn’t agree with the propositions outlined in the set text, it is important that you understand them so that you can evaluate their usefulness.

Required Reading

• Ian Bruff, ‘Overcoming the State/Market Dichotomy’, in Stuart Shields, Ian Bruff and Huw Macartney (eds) Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate and Dissensus (London: Palgrave, 2011): pp. 80-98.

Further Reading

• Ben Spies-Butcher, Joy Paton and Damien Cahill, Market Society: History, Theory, Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): pp. 1-3.

Tutorial 2 (Week 3): Market Dependence and Social Property Relations

Week Beginning 15 March

Having examined the relationships between the economy and society at a very general level of analysis, attention now turns to a consideration of the social property relations specific to capitalism. Given its apparent centrality to the disciplines of economics and political economy, one might reasonably assume that there is a settled, agreed-upon definition of capitalism and its constituent features. On the contrary, however, ‘capitalism’ is an essentially contested concept. Where its usage is deemed appropriate at all (for example, some economics dictionaries do not contain a definition of capitalism), it is the subject of ongoing debate among scholars as to its meaning and core components. This tutorial encourages you to think about the defining features of capitalism and what makes it distinct as an economic system. Discussion is organised around Ellen Meiksins Wood’s proposition that capitalism is a system of ‘market dependence’ founded on particular social relations of production (i.e. the rights and claims on the inputs and outputs of production).

Required Reading

• Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism A Longer View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): Chapter 1 ‘The Separation of the “Economic” and the “Political” in Capitalism’.

Also available in: Ellen Meiksins Wood ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism’, New Left Review (I), No. 127 (1981): 66-95.

Further Reading

• Charles Post (1982) ‘The American Road to Capitalism’, New Left Review, I/133: pp. 30-51.
• Jairus Banaji (2013) ‘The Fictions of Free Labour: Contract, Coercion and So-Called Unfree Labour’, Historical Materialism, 11(3): pp. 69-95.
• Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 1999), Chapter 4.
• Sébastien Rioux, ‘The Fiction of Economic Coercion: Political Marxism and the Separation of Theory and History’, Historical Materialism, 21:4 (2013): 92-128.
• Larry Patriquin (ed), The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader (Leiden: Brill, 2012): ‘Chapter 1: Capitalism’.
• John Lie, ‘Visualizing the Invisible Hand: The Social Origins of 'Market Society' in England’, Politics and Society, 21:3 (1993).

Tutorial 3 (Week 4): Fictitious Commodities

Week Beginning 22 March

Commodification is the process whereby things that exist outside of the market system are transformed into commodities with a price (in Marx’s language, when ‘use values’ become ‘exchange values’). It is a key feature of capitalist economies. This tutorial encourages to you examine the dynamics of commodification. Discussion is organised around Karl Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation and his concept of ‘fictitious commodities’ – things that have a price, and are traded in markets, but are not produced for sale. You are encouraged to evaluate this concept and consider the social nature of commodification and the implications, if any, of social processes being integral to the constitution of key capitalist commodities.

Required Reading

• Karl Polanyi The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, Beacon Press, 1950, Chapter 6: ‘The self-regulating market and the fictitious commodities: labor, land and money’.

Further Reading

• Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: The limits of the market, Polity, London, 2010.
• Jamie Peck, Work-Place: The Social Regulation of Labour Markets, The Guildford Press, New York, 1996, esp. Chapter 2.
• Karl Polanyi The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, Beacon Press, 1950, Chapters 11 & 12.
• Chris Holden, ‘Decommodification and the Welfare State’, Political Studies Review 1(3), 2003, pp. 303-316.
• Ayşe Buğra and Kaan Ağartan (eds), Reading Karl Polanyi for the twenty-first century: market economy as a political project, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007.
• Joy Paton (2010), ‘Labour as a (Fictitious) Commodity: Polanyi and the Capitalist ‘Market Economy’, The Economic and Labour Relations Review 21(1): 77-88.

Tutorial 4 (Week 5): Commodity Fetishism

Week Beginning 29 March

In this tutorial, you are encouraged to consider the ways by which the structure of capitalist economies conditions how we see and experience it, and how this may obscure certain key constitutive features of the capitalist system. This tutorial introduces Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism – the phenomenon whereby relationships between people appear as (or become) relationships between things. It opens up consideration of the ways in which the material structure of the capitalist economies privileges certain ways of thinking about capitalism – e.g. as a system of commodities and their prices as distinct from a set of social relations.

Required Reading

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’ (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 163-78.
• Maurice Godelier, ‘Market Economy and Fetishism, Magic and Science According to Marx’s Capital’, in Maurice Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 152-65.
• David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (London: Verso, 2010), ‘Section 4: The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’, pp. 38-47.

Further Reading

• Ben Spies-Butcher, Joy Paton and Damien Cahill, Market Society: History, Theory, Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 32-34.
• I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Black and Red, Detroit, 1972, esp Chapter 1.
• Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho, Marx’s Capital, 4th edition, Pluto Press, London, 2004, ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’, pp. 25-29.
• David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, Brill Leiden, 2011, pp. 126-132 & Chapter 3.
• A Hussain, ‘Commodity Fetishism’ in John Eatwell, Murray Milgate ad Peter Newman (eds), The New Palgrave Marxian Economics, Macillan, London, 1990, pp. 85-86.
• Thanasis Maniatis and Phillip O’Hara, ‘Commodity Fetishism’ in Phillip O’Hara, Encyclopedia of Political Economy, Routledge, London, 1999.
• Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1980, Chapter 2.

 

**Mid-Semester Break Week Beginning 5 April**

 

Tutorial 5 (Week 6):  Essay Feedback

Week Beginning 12 April

If you submitted your short-essay by the due date you will have received your mark and written feedback from the examiner. This tutorial provides you with the opportunity to receive more detailed feedback from your tutor, and to discuss what makes a strong essay and identify those elements of essay-writing upon which you can improve in the future.

Tutorial 6 (Week 7): The Social Embeddedness of the State

Week Beginning 19 April

This tutorial encourages you to think about the nature and role of the state in a capitalist economy. Taking a historical view suggests that the state has only grown in importance within capitalist economies during the last 150 years. This alone should prompt skepticism about claims that the state is simply an exogenous interference in otherwise autonomous market processes, as in often implied in popular and neoclassical economic discourse. In this tutorial you are encouraged to move beyond such over-simplifications and instead ask why the state has become central to the capitalist economy, what governs how the state regulates the economy, and in whose interests this occurs.

Required Reading

• Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), Chapter 7 ‘Accumulation Strategies, State Forms and Hegemonic Projects’, pp. 196-219.

Further Reading

• Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), ‘State and Civil Society’, pp. 206-76.
• Ben Spies-Butcher, Joy Paton and Damien Cahill, Market Society: History, Theory, Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 93-115.
• James O'Connor, ‘The Expanding Role of the State’, in R. Edwards et.al., The Capitalist System, 2nd edn, 235-242.
• Theda Skocpol, ‘Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research’ in Peter Evans et. al. (eds) Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985.
• James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1973, esp. Introduction.
• Gavan Butler, ‘Fiscal Crisis of the State’, in Phillip O’Hara, Encyclopedia of Political Economy, Routledge, London, 1999.
• James O’Connor, Accumulation Crisis, Basil Blackwell, New York, 1984, ‘Chapter 7: Economic and Social Reproduction and the Capitalist State’.
• Michal Kalecki, ‘Political Aspects of Full Employment’, The Political Quarterly 14(4), 1943: 322-330.
• Ralph Miliband, ‘State Power and Class Interests’, New Left Review 138: 57-68, 1983.
• Martijn Konings, ‘Renewing State Theory’, Politics 30(3): 174-182, 2010.
• Colin Hay, ‘Marxism and the State’, in Andrew Gamble et al (eds), Marxism and Social Science, Macmillan, London, 1999

Tutorial 7 (Week 8): The Social Embeddedness of Race

Week Beginning 26 April

This week is focused on the debates swirling around ‘racial capitalism’, how to understand what is meant by notions of racial capitalism and raced markets and the linkages or social embeddedness to wider issues of social reproduction and the history of violence. It will weave together a focus drawing on classics of postcolonial and decolonial literature, notably by Frantz Fanon. There will then be a twin focus on two principal arguments developed by 1) Gargi Bhattacharyya and Cedric Robinson, on racial capitalism; and 2) Lisa Tilley and Robbie Shilliam, on raced markets. The focus will conclude by turning attention back to Australia and the discrediting of the notion that Aboriginal people were mere “hunter-gatherers” prior to colonisation. Can the denial of the existence of an Aboriginal economy based on permanent housing, aquaculture, agricultural storage and preservation be revealed as racialised and therefore of a piece with the violent history of capitalist dispossession?

Required Reading

• Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983/2000), Introduction, pp. 1-8.
• Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018), Introduction and Chapter 1: Beginning, pp. ix-xi and 1-38.

Further Reading

• Lisa Tilley and Robbie Shilliam, ‘Raced Markets: An Introduction’, New Political Economy, 23:5 (2018): 534-43.
• Matthew Watson, ‘Crusoe, Friday and the Raced Market Frame of Orthodox Economics’, New Political Economy, 23:5 (2018): 544-59.
• Robbie Shilliam, Race and the Undeserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2018).
• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [1952], trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Paladin, 1970).
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [1961], trans. Constance Farrington, preface Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Penguin, 1990).
• Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
• Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture [2014] (Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2018).

Tutorial 8 (Week 9): The Social Embeddedness of Ecology

Week Beginning 3 May

This week is focused on what it means to think about nature ‘socially’. In contrast to neoclassical economics, which conceptualises economy and environment as separate spheres, we will consider different ways that capitalism is socially embedded in, and is involved in the production of, ecological configurations. Particular attention will be given to the notion of nature as ‘condition of production’: how and why capital depends on but degrades nature; the role of the state in regulating access to and use of nature; and, contestation over the reproduction of nature, as a condition of life, by social movements.

Required Reading

• James O’Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New York: The Guildford Press), ‘The Conditions of Production and the Production of Conditions’, pp. 144-157.
• Neil Smith, ‘Nature as Accumulation Strategy’, in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds) The Socialist Register: Coming to Terms with Nature (London: Merlin Press, 2007), pp. 16-36.

Further reading

• Altvater E (1993) The future of the market: an essay on the regulation of money and nature after the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’. London: Verso Books.
• Benton T (1989) Marxism and natural limits: an ecological critique and reconstruction. New Left Review (178): 51–86.
• Harvey D (1996) Justice, nature and the geography of difference. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
• Mies M (1986) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women and the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books.
• Moore JW (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.
• Parenti C (2015) The Environment Making State: Territory, Nature, and Value. Antipode 47(4): 829–848.
• Salleh A (2009) Ecological debt: Embodied debt. In: Salleh A (ed.) Eco-sufficiency and global justice: Women write political ecology. London: Pluto Press.
• Salleh A (2017) Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature. Marx and the Postmodern. Second. London: Zed Books.
• Smith N (2008) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Third edition. London: Verso.

Tutorial 9 (Week 10): The Social Embeddedness of Gender

Week Beginning 10 May

The conditions of primitive accumulation directly ensured not only the persecution of indigenous peoples through colonisation, racism and slavery but also and at times simultaneously the degradation of women through access to women’s bodies, their labour, to gain control over the most basic means of reproduction and place the female body at the service of the accumulation of labour-power. This is one of the central contentions of social reproduction theory from feminists such as Silvia Federici, Maria Mies, Ariel Salleh and Lise Vogel. During the dawn of capitalism with the era of primitive accumulation, then, there was the simultaneous expropriation of land from the peasantry and the subjection of nature to capital, not only in the extirpation and enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Americas, but also in  profound transformations in the reproduction of labour power and the social position of women, including control over and free access to women’s bodies and their sexuality within the confining bonds of marriage and procreation. This lecture engages with feminist social reproduction theory to assert the internal relations between gender, class, race, and sexuality and therefore their social embeddedness within modern capitalism.

Required Reading

• Alessandra Mezzadri, ‘A Value Theory of Inclusion: Informal Labour, the Homeworker, and the Social Reproduction of Value’, Antipode, Online first: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12701.

Further reading

• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004.
• Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics, 2d edition (London: Zed Books, 2017), ‘For and Against Marx’, pp. 108-31.
• David McNally, ‘Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory’, in Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.) Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017), pp. 94-111.
• Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1998), Chapter 5 ‘Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Primitive Accumulation of Capital’, pp. 145-74.
• David McNally, ‘The Dialectics of Unity and Difference in the Constitution of Wage-Labour: On Internal Relations and Working-Class Formation’, Capital & Class, 39:1 (2015): 131-46.
• Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Chicago: Haymaket Books, 2013).
• Silvia, Federici, ‘Prostitution and Globalisation: Notes on a Feminist Debate’, in Matt Davies and Magnus Ryner (eds) Poverty and the Production of World Politics: Unprotected Workers in the Global Political Economy (London: Palgrave, 2006): pp. 112-36.
• Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, reproduction and feminist struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).

Tutorial 10 (Week 11): The Social Embeddedness of Capital

Week Beginning 17 May

What is the role of space relations and the production of space in relation to the circulation and accumulation of capital? This lecture turns our attention to the social embeddedness of modern capitalism by drawing together insights from Karl Marx on the spatial and geographical dynamics of capital accumulation and their inner contradictions. Specifically, how Marx considers the “annihilation of space by time” in relation to the movements of money, production, and commodity in Capital Volume 2, will be the focus. These insights are weaved together with the pivotal commentary of David Harvey to assess how investments in the means of communication and transportation revolutionise the geographical landscape that capital creates, to reduce spatial barriers, and to ensure space-time compression across the space economy of machines and their factories, transport networks, built environments and physical infrastructures. These spatial structures and dynamics that we commonly take for granted are intrinsic to the laws of motion of capital and therefore the social embeddedness of capitalism.

Required Reading

• David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 2 (London: Verso, 2013), Chapter 8: ‘The Time and Space of Capital’, pp. 267-86.

Further reading

• David Harvey, ‘The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: A Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory’, Antipode, 7:2 (1975): 9-21.
• David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, Updated edition (London: Verso, 2006): ‘Crises in the Space Economy of Capitalism: The Dialectics of Imperialism’, pp. 413-445.
• Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008), Chapter 2 ‘The Production of Nature’ and Chapter 3 ‘The Production of Space’.
• Neil Smith, ‘On the Necessity of Uneven Development’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 10:1 (1986): 87-104.

Tutorial 11 (Week 12): The Social Embeddedness of Space

Week Beginning 24 May

Under capitalism, how does the state organise space in our everyday lives through the streets we walk, the monuments we visit, and the places where we meet? This question animates this lecture and tackles our understanding of spatial political economy as a social embedded process to analyse the different functions of space within capitalism. It does so by focusing on the work of Henri Lefebvre to reveal the social production of space and the role of capitalism in ordering state spaces. The case study of the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City is drawn on to highlight how class struggle is inscribed in space.

Required Reading

• Henri Lefebvre, ‘Space and the State’ (1978) in Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009): pp. 223-53.
• Adam David Morton, ‘The Architecture of “Passive Revolution”: Society, State and Space in Modern Mexico’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 50:1 (2018): 117-52.

Further reading

• Henri Lefebvre, ‘Space: Social Product and Use Value’ (1979) in Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World: Selected Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009): pp. 185-95.

• Neil Smith, ‘On the Necessity of Uneven Development’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 10:1 (1986): 87-104.

• Japhy Wilson, ‘Plan Puebla Panama: The Violence of Abstract Space’, in Łukasz Stanek, Christian Schmid and Ákos Moravánsky (eds) Urban Revolution Now: Henri Lefebvre in Social Research and Architecture (London: Ashgate, 2014): pp. 113-32.

• Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

• Frank Stilwell, Understanding Cities & Regions: Spatial Political Economy (Pluto Press, 1992).

• Franklin Obeng-Odoom, Reconstructing Urban Economics: Towards a Political Economy of the Built Environment (London: Zed Books, 2016).

Tutorial 12 (Week 13): Conclusion

Week Beginning 31 May