ECOP4011 presents the analytic foundations of historical materialism through a focus on dialectics and the philosophy of internal relations as intrinsic to understanding political economy and the apparent separation of 'politics' and 'economics'.

In this unit one short book will be used as our foundation text. This is:

1. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (Verso, 1991/2015).

Each week you will be required to read at least one chapter from the book plus one additional reading. Rather than a reading kit, all the source material will be provided digitally, or accessible through the library.

For empirical illustration, the arguments in The Pristine Culture of Capitalism will be connected to the recent controversies surrounding Queen’s Consent, see: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/series/queens-consent. These reports reveal the role of landed property and the Crown within the contemporary constitution of ‘state’ and ‘capital’ in England. Reading Ellen Wood will assist us in understanding the historical roots of this constitution of capitalism and the relationship between ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ within the construction of modern capitalist states today.

You are advised to purchase the foundation text, with Verso perhaps offering the most direct, affordable and best combined digital/print access: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2054-the-pristine-culture-of-capitalism

The aim of this unit is to provide students with the opportunity to engage deeply with canonical texts by a leading thinker in their discipline. Additionally, there will be a constellation of further texts to build up competing understandings of the foundations of historical materialism.

The philosophy of internal relations has become a central feature of Bertell Ollman’s work, ever since the publication of Alienation. He addresses a processual approach to concepts as the first step in understanding their internal relation. Rather than positing the external interaction of entities (e.g. 'politics' and 'economics', or 'states' and 'markets', or the 'state' and 'civil society', or 'productive forces' and 'relations of production'), historical materialism understands the world as a complex of internal relations. This is a dialectical ontology that avoids fetishising concepts or abstracting them from their alienated forms of appearance.

It is the social property relations approach of Ellen Meiksins Wood that strongly exhibits elements of this philosophy of internal relations in her pathbreaking approach to understanding the appearance of the separation of the ‘state’ and the ‘market’ under capitalism. After a general introductory reading from Bertell Ollman, we will examine Ellen Meiksins Wood’s pivotal essay on the separation of the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ under capitalism. This will then be the platform from which to launch into the foundation book as the principal reading.

It is this internal relations perspective that also appears, for example, in the political economy scholarship of David McNally, the feminist social reproduction theory of Tithi Bhattacharya, the ecofeminism of Ariel Salleh, or the world-ecology approach of Jason W. Moore, to name a few. For Derek Sayer, the key issue is to avoid what he refers to as the violence of abstraction. One can see this philosophy of internal relations perspective across inter alia the political economy analyses of figures such as Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, Nicos Poulantzas, E.P. Thompson, or David Harvey. In addition to Karl Marx, some of these figures will also be deliberated during the course of our discussions. Throughout the duration of the unit we will also consider criticisms of the philosophy of internal relations as well as wider methodological work that might exhibit such a perspective useful for the construction of research projects. Here the work of Michael Burawoy and Philip McMichael will be especially pertinent.