Outline

Overview

This is an advanced unit in the theoretical foundations of political economy which extends and deepens your knowledge gained from ECOP3911 and complements your studies in ECOP4012. You will interrogate the main schools of critical scholarship, and how they can be deployed in our research practice to illuminate and advance new understandings of contemporary issues in political economy. This will assist your choice of the theoretical framework for your Honours thesis, and inform your knowledge of appropriate application of methodologies as you construct the research project for this thesis.

Unit details and rules

Academic unit	Political Economy
Credit points	6
Prerequisites ?	None
Corequisites ?	None
Prohibitions ?	None
Assumed knowledge ?	None
Available to study abroad and exchange students	No

Teaching staff

Coordinator	Adam David Morton, adam.morton@sydney.edu.au

Type	Description	Weight	Due	Length
Online task	Learning journal Written form	15%	Multiple weeks	1000 words
Outcomes assessed:
Assignment	Seminar paper Written form	15%	Week 07 Due date: 03 Apr 2023 at 23:59	1000 words
Outcomes assessed:
Assignment	Research essay Written form.	50%	Week 13 Due date: 22 May 2023 at 23:59	3000 words
Outcomes assessed:
Presentation	Seminar leadership Oral presentation form.	20%	Weekly	1000 words
Outcomes assessed:

Assessment summary

Detailed information for each assessment can also be found on Canvas. The seminar room for teaching is Building A02, Social Science Building, Room 105, meeting Thursdays 12:00-2:00.

Seminar paper / short-form essay (15%):

Submit a 1,000 word essay online by 23:59 on Monday 3 April.

Bertell Ollman famously elaborated on Vilfredo Pareto’s claim that in Marx there was a problem because in his writing words were confusingly like bats, “one can see in them both birds and mice”. Your short essay should consider the validity of Pareto’s paradox and explore the limits and possibilities of Marx’s method and the broader philosophy of internal relations that it reveals as the hallmark of historical materialism.

Question:

Referring to Bertell Ollman’s arguments in Alienation on “Pareto’s paradox”, what are the limits and possibilities of the philosophy of internal relations as a dialectical method of analysis?

Research or long-form essay (50%):

Submit a 3,000 word essay online by 23:59 on Monday 22 May.

There are numerous contributions to competing understandings of 1) the origins of capitalism and 2) uneven and combined development. For example, on the origins of capitalism the arguments of Robert Brenner or Ellen Meiksins Wood in critiquing Immanuel Wallerstein stand out. Similarly, on uneven and combined development the contributions of Justin Rosenberg and Benno Teschke have pivotally drawn from classic social theory on the topic. Your long essay should situate your own critical reading of How the West Came to Rule with these sorts of wider debates.

Question:

Critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of Alexander Anievas’ and Kerem Nişancioğlu’s How the West Came to Rule in relation to competing understandings of the origins of capitalism and uneven and combined development.

Assessment criteria

The University awards common result grades, set out in the Coursework Policy 2014 (Schedule 1).

As a general guide, a High distinction indicates work of an exceptional standard, a Distinction a very high standard, a credit a good standard, and a pass an acceptable standard.

Result name	Mark range	Description
High distinction	85 - 100
Distinction	75 - 84
Credit	65 - 74
Pass	50 - 64
Fail	0 - 49	When you don’t meet the learning outcomes of the unit to a satisfactory standard.

For more information see guide to grades.

Late submission

In accordance with University policy, these penalties apply when written work is submitted after 11:59pm on the due date:

Deduction of 5% of the maximum mark for each calendar day after the due date.
After ten calendar days late, a mark of zero will be awarded.

Academic integrity

The Current Student website provides information on academic integrity and the resources available to all students. The University expects students and staff to act ethically and honestly and will treat all allegations of academic integrity breaches seriously.

We use similarity detection software to detect potential instances of plagiarism or other forms of academic integrity breach. If such matches indicate evidence of plagiarism or other forms of academic integrity breaches, your teacher is required to report your work for further investigation.

Use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and automated writing tools

You may only use generative AI and automated writing tools in assessment tasks if you are permitted to by your unit coordinator. If you do use these tools, you must acknowledge this in your work, either in a footnote or an acknowledgement section. The assessment instructions or unit outline will give guidance of the types of tools that are permitted and how the tools should be used.

Your final submitted work must be your own, original work. You must acknowledge any use of generative AI tools that have been used in the assessment, and any material that forms part of your submission must be appropriately referenced. For guidance on how to acknowledge the use of AI, please refer to the AI in Education Canvas site.

The unapproved use of these tools or unacknowledged use will be considered a breach of the Academic Integrity Policy and penalties may apply.

Studiosity is permitted unless otherwise indicated by the unit coordinator. The use of this service must be acknowledged in your submission as detailed on the Learning Hub’s Canvas page.

Outside assessment tasks, generative AI tools may be used to support your learning. The AI in Education Canvas site contains a number of productive ways that students are using AI to improve their learning.

Learning support

Simple extensions

If you encounter a problem submitting your work on time, you may be able to apply for an extension of five calendar days through a simple extension.  The application process will be different depending on the type of assessment and extensions cannot be granted for some assessment types like exams.

Special consideration

If exceptional circumstances mean you can’t complete an assessment, you need consideration for a longer period of time, or if you have essential commitments which impact your performance in an assessment, you may be eligible for special consideration or special arrangements.

Special consideration applications will not be affected by a simple extension application.

Using AI responsibly

Co-created with students, AI in Education includes lots of helpful examples of how students use generative AI tools to support their learning. It explains how generative AI works, the different tools available and how to use them responsibly and productively.

Weekly schedule

WK	Topic	Learning activity
Week 01	Introduction: On the philosophy of internal relations	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 02	The separation of the "economic" and the "political" in capitalism	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 03	No Class	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 04	No Class	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 05	The Problem of Eurocentrism	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 06	The Transition Debate	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 07	Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 08	Understanding Structure and Conjuncture	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 09	Imperial Rivalry	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 10	Primitive Accumulation	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 11	Bourgeois Revolution	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 12	Dutch Colonisation	Seminar (2 hr)
Week 12	The Rise of the West	Seminar (2 hr)

Attendance and class requirements

Attendance: According to Faculty Board Resolutions, students in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences are expected to attend 90% of their classes. If you attend less than 50% of classes, regardless of the reasons, you may be referred to the Examiner’s Board. The Examiner’s Board will decide whether you should pass or fail the unit of study if your attendance falls below this threshold.
Lecture recording: Most lectures (in recording-equipped venues) will be recorded and may be made available to students on the LMS. However, you should not rely on lecture recording to substitute your classroom learning experience.
Preparation: Students should commit to spend approximately three hours’ preparation time (reading, studying, homework, essays, etc.) for every hour of scheduled instruction.

Study commitment

Typically, there is a minimum expectation of 1.5-2 hours of student effort per week per credit point for units of study offered over a full semester. For a 6 credit point unit, this equates to roughly 120-150 hours of student effort in total.

Required readings

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 book will be used as our foundation text. This is:

Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2015).

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

You are advised to purchase the foundation text but this is not compulsory.

The aim of this unit is to provide students with the opportunity to engage deeply with canonical texts by leading thinkers 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 and the violence of abstraction have become central motifs in the work of Bertell Ollman and Derek Sayer. 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. It is these sorts of debates that will 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.

REFLECTIVE JOURNAL - 15%

Submit a total of 2 x 500 word papers for any two seminars in weeks 2 to 12. One of these may be the week of your presentation.

Seminar papers are due online before class (i.e. by 9am) on the day of the seminar. Your paper should provide a critical response to the week’s seminar focus. Additional research beyond the set readings is not required. Brief written feedback will be provided in the week following submission. A single mark for all three seminar papers will be awarded at the end of semester.

SHORT-FORM ESSAY QUESTION - 30%

Submit a 1,000 word essay online by 23:59 on Monday 3 April. Bertell Ollman famously elaborated on Vilfredo Pareto’s claim that in Marx there was a problem because in his writing words were confusingly like bats, “one can see in them both birds and mice”. Your short essay should consider the validity of Pareto’s paradox and explore the limits and possibilities of Marx’s method and the broader philosophy of internal relations that it reveals as the hallmark of historical materialism.

Question:

LONG-FORM ESSAY - 50%

Submit a 3,000 word essay online by 23:59 on Monday 22 May. There are numerous contributions to competing understandings of 1) the origins of capitalism and 2) uneven and combined development. For example, on the origins of capitalism the arguments of Robert Brenner or Ellen Meiksins Wood in critiquing Immanuel Wallerstein stand out. Similarly, on uneven and combined development the contributions of Justin Rosenberg and Benno Teschke have pivotally drawn from classic social theory on the topic. Your long essay should situate your own critical reading of How the West Came to Rule with these sort of wider debates.

Question:

PARTICIPATION - 20%

ECOP 4011 is designed as a seminar-based course. Your weekly participation is essential. Each student will be allocated a specific seminar to present at and lead discussion in during our first class. Your participation mark is equally comprised of both your weekly seminar participation and your seminar presentation/leadership.

Seminar presentations/leadership includes the following tasks (as a single presenter or in groups of two):

(a) Providing a short overview of the arguments laid out in the readings, responding to the week’s seminar question/s. This should take

no more than 10-15 minutes per presenter and will provide the foundation for the following all-class discussion.

(b) Providing 2-3 clearly designed questions to prompt larger group discussion.

(c) Managing the group discussion. Seminar leaders are responsible for managing the class discussion, keeping fellow students on topic and, when necessary, asking follow-up questions that push fellow students to think deeper and more critically on the issues of the week.

1. Seminar presentation/leadership will be assessed according to:

The clarity and insight of the introductory overview;

Clarity and relevance of the design of key questions; and

Skill in leading and guiding group discussion.

2. Seminar participation will be assessed according to:

Your presentation of a critical understanding of key ideas and concepts introduced in the literature;

Your capacity to discuss links between theoretical debates and current and/or historical events; and

Respectful treatment and inclusion of other students in discussion.

Week	Date	Topic	Essential Reading	Additional readings
1	23 Feb	On the philosophy of internal relations	Bertell Ollman, ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Internal Relations; or, How to Replace the Mysterious “Paradox” with “Contradictions” that can be studied and Resolved’, Capital & Class, 39:1 (2015): 7-23.	Tithi Battarcharya, ‘How Not to Skip Class’, in Tithi Bhattacharya (ed.) Social Reproduction Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2017).
2	2 March	The separation of the "economic" and the "political" in capitalism	Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism’, New Left Review (I), No. 127 (1981): 66-95.
3	9 March	No Class	Independent Reading: Noel Castree, ‘Birds, Mice and Geography: Marxisms and Dialectics’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 21:2 (1996): 342-62
4	16 March	No Class	Independent Reading: Tom Brass, ‘Why Unfree Labour is not “so-called”: The Fictions of Jairus Banaji’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 31:1 (2003): 101-36.
5	23 March	The Problem of Eurocentrism	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, pp. 1-12	Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Eurocentric AntiEurocentrism’, Against the Current, 92 (May / June 2001), Available online: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc092/p993/.
6	30 March	The Transition Debate	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, Chapter 1, pp. 13-42
7	6 April	Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, Chapter 2, pp. 43-63.
	MID-SEMESTER BREAK

8	20 April	Understanding Structure and Conjuncture	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, Chapter 3, pp. 64-90
9	27 April	Imperial Rivalry	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, Chapter 4, pp. 91-120
10	4 May	Primitive Accumulation	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, Chapter 5, pp. 121-73
11	11 May	Bourgeois Revolution	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, Chapter 6, pp. 174-214
12	18 May	Dutch Colonisation	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, Chapter 7, pp. 215-244.
13	25 May	The Rise of the West	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, Chapter 8, pp. 245-73.	Anievas and Nişancioğlu, How the West Came to Rule, Conclusion, pp. 274-82.

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes are what students know, understand and are able to do on completion of a unit of study. They are aligned with the University's graduate qualities and are assessed as part of the curriculum.

Outcomes
Graduate qualities

At the completion of this unit, you should be able to:

LO1. understand theories in political economy that are integral to the study of capitalism
LO2. demonstrate a capacity to critically reflect on and evaluate these debates
LO3. apply key conceptual ideas to analyse the political economy of inequality
LO4. participate in all aspects of the unit of study including class presentations and discussions and independent study
LO5. write original and well-researched pieces of work in which you articulate your own unique position and effectively argue your case.

Graduate qualities

The graduate qualities are the qualities and skills that all University of Sydney graduates must demonstrate on successful completion of an award course. As a future Sydney graduate, the set of qualities have been designed to equip you for the contemporary world.

GQ1	Depth of disciplinary expertise Deep disciplinary expertise is the ability to integrate and rigorously apply knowledge, understanding and skills of a recognised discipline defined by scholarly activity, as well as familiarity with evolving practice of the discipline.
GQ2	Critical thinking and problem solving Critical thinking and problem solving are the questioning of ideas, evidence and assumptions in order to propose and evaluate hypotheses or alternative arguments before formulating a conclusion or a solution to an identified problem.
GQ3	Oral and written communication Effective communication, in both oral and written form, is the clear exchange of meaning in a manner that is appropriate to audience and context.
GQ4	Information and digital literacy Information and digital literacy is the ability to locate, interpret, evaluate, manage, adapt, integrate, create and convey information using appropriate resources, tools and strategies.
GQ5	Inventiveness Generating novel ideas and solutions.
GQ6	Cultural competence Cultural Competence is the ability to actively, ethically, respectfully, and successfully engage across and between cultures. In the Australian context, this includes and celebrates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, knowledge systems, and a mature understanding of contemporary issues.
GQ7	Interdisciplinary effectiveness Interdisciplinary effectiveness is the integration and synthesis of multiple viewpoints and practices, working effectively across disciplinary boundaries.
GQ8	Integrated professional, ethical, and personal identity An integrated professional, ethical and personal identity is understanding the interaction between one’s personal and professional selves in an ethical context.
GQ9	Influence Engaging others in a process, idea or vision.

Outcome map

Learning outcomes	Graduate qualities
Learning outcomes

Responding to student feedback

This section outlines changes made to this unit following staff and student reviews.

No changes have been made since this unit was last offered

Disclaimer

The University reserves the right to amend units of study or no longer offer certain units, including where there are low enrolment numbers.

To help you understand common terms that we use at the University, we offer an online glossary.

Current students

Overview

Overview

Unit details and rules

Teaching staff

Assessment

Assessment

Assessment summary

Assessment criteria

Late submission

Academic integrity

Learning support

Learning support

Simple extensions

Special consideration

Using AI responsibly

Weekly schedule

Weekly schedule

Attendance and class requirements

Study commitment

Required readings

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes

Graduate qualities

Outcome map

Responding to student feedback

Responding to student feedback

Disclaimer

On this page

Useful links

Media

Student links

About us

Connect

Current students

ECOP4011: Advanced Theory in Political Economy

Semester 1, 2023 [Normal day] - Camperdown/Darlington, Sydney

Overview

Overview

Unit details and rules

Teaching staff

Assessment

Assessment

Assessment summary

Assessment criteria

Late submission

Academic integrity

Learning support

Learning support

Simple extensions

Special consideration

Using AI responsibly

Weekly schedule

Weekly schedule

Attendance and class requirements

Study commitment

Required readings

Learning outcomes

Learning outcomes

Graduate qualities

Outcome map

Responding to student feedback

Responding to student feedback

Disclaimer

On this page

Useful links

Media

Student links

About us

Connect