This unit examines the uneven development of global capitalism. You will analyse the explanations offered by different theoretical perspectives of the long-term emergence of uneven development within the global political economy. To understand the dimensions, scale and implications of the uneven development of global capitalism, you will consider: the conditions of uneven development and the prospects for state developmental catch-up; the international monetary system’s formation during the era of “embedded liberalism”; the post-World War II long boom; contentions over modernisation and dependency; the era of mid-twentieth century Import Substitution Industrialisation, notably in Latin America; structural adjustment under neoliberalism; and contemporary themes related to spaces of resistance against global capitalism, the drug wars, and conditions shaping the uneven development of state capitalism today. The unit concludes with a set of reflections on the possibilities for spaces of non-capitalist development.
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Week 1:
(Lecture: 27 February)
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Introduction: Uneven Development
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Week 2:
(Lecture: 6 March)
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Embedded Liberalism
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Week 3:
(Lecture: 13 March)
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Essays, Ideas + Early Feedback Task
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Week 4:
(Lecture: 20 March)
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Long Boom
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Week 5:
(Lecture: 27 March)
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Dependency and Development
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Week 6:
(Lecture: 3 April)
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Primitive Accumulation
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Week 7:
(Lecture: 10 April)
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Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI)
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Week 8:
(Lecture: 17 April)
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Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)
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Mid-semester break
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Week 9:
(Lecture: 1 May)
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Spaces of Resistance (EZLN)
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Week 10:
(Lecture: 8 May)
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Drug War Capitalism
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Week 11:
(Lecture: 15 May)
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State Capitalism
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Week 12:
(Lecture: 22 May)
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Post-capitalism: taking back the economy?
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Week 13:
(Lecture: 29 May)
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Conclusion and Overview
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TUTORIAL GUIDE
Learning Structure
Classes consist of 1 x one-hour lectures and a one-hour tutorial per week, which immediately follows the lecture in the same room. You must attend at least 80% of tutorials.
Lectures introduce you to key concepts and debates about the uneven development of global capitalism. They help frame. and contextualise information and serve as the starting point for your investigations. Although attendance is voluntary, it is strongly recommended.
Power-point slides will primarily be used in lectures to highlight key points rather than to summarise the lecture content. Because this is a senior unit of study, it is expected that you are familiar with the basic skills of note taking. The sparse use of text in power point slides in this unit of study should encourage you to develop further your independent note-taking skills. This will require you to be discerning in your note taking and to develop the ability to identify and summarise key arguments.
Tutorials provide a forum for you to develop, articulate and test your ideas about the uneven development of global capitalism, with prompts from the set readings, written questions and guidance from your tutor. You are encouraged to express your own views on the set topics, but please try and support all of your contentions with logically consistent argument and evidence. You are expected to have read the required readings before each tutorial, and to come to class prepared to discuss them with your fellow students.
Assessment Criteria
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ASSESSMENT TASK
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DESCRIPTION
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WEIGHTING
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DEADLINE
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Tutorial Participation
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In class participation.
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15%
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N/A
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Essay 1
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2500 words.
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35%
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23:59, 7 April
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Essay 2
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3500 words.
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50%
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23:39, 30 May
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All assessment tasks are compulsory and must be attempted for a student to be eligible to pass.
Tutorial participation (10%)
You are required to participate in tutorials, ask questions, shape ideas and build up your knowledge based on completing the readings. Your mark for this assessment will be based upon your involvement in the discussions AND how well you stimulate and guide in-class discussion during the tutorial.
Essay 1 (35%)
You must write a 2500-word essay on the following topic.
Question: What specific political economy patterns and processes characterise the uneven development of capitalist accumulation?
This essay encourages you to engage critically with the concepts introduced in the first few weeks of lectures and tutorials, notably led by Niel Smith and David Harvey who have both fashioned a historical geographical materialist approach to uneven development. The essay provides a chance for early feedback on your writing style, your ability to construct an argument and your understanding of key concepts.
If you submit your essay by the due date, then you will receive your mark and written feedback in sufficient time to enable you to reflect upon the feedback before you submit your major essay. It is hoped that this will provide guidance as to what areas of your writing and understanding of key concepts might be improved.
Your essay will be marked against the following criteria:
§ Clarity of expression
§ Development of an argument and use of supporting evidence to address the set topic
§ Understanding of relevant concepts
§ Correct use of citations
Essay 2 (50%)
You must write a 3500-word essay on one of the following topics:
Choose one from the following questions:
1. With reference to competing theories, to what extent has there been the “lock-in” of uneven development or developmental “catch-up” within the post-1945 global political economy?
2. Assess the view that embedded liberalism is better understood in terms of the regulation and protection of the market economy, rather than a re-embedding of the market economy itself.
4. To what extent did certain strands of dependency theory play a role in the construction of an alternative political economy, contesting Western notions of modernisation?
6. Debating new state capitalism, Toby Carroll and Daryll Jarvis argue that there is ‘significant eliding of signature political economy debates [that] over time leads to an inaccurate, inchoate and unnecessarily complicated reading’. Discuss.
8. J.K. Gibson-Graham have argued that ‘All over the world people are taking back the economy as a site of politics and negotiation of the everyday’. Critically assess the Rethinking Marxism approach to political economy.
9. ‘The drug war . . . combines terror with policy making in a neoliberal mix, cracking open social worlds and territories previously unavailable to globalised capitalism’ [Dawn Paley]. Discuss.
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The essay encourages you reflect upon the capitalist economy’s uneven development through critical engagement with the literature and concepts examined across the bulk of the lectures (and the corresponding tutorials). There is no single correct answer that the markers will be looking for. Rather you should use the recommended readings and engage independent research to construct an argument, supported by evidence, which addresses the set topic. Your essay will be marked according to:
§ Clarity of expression
§ Development of an argument and use of supporting evidence to address the set topic
§ Understanding of relevant concepts
§ Correct use of citations
TUTORIAL SCHEDULE
Tutorial 1 (Week 2): Introduction: Uneven Development
6 March
This topic introduces the cohort to the theory (rather than ‘law’) of uneven development, recovering its principle aspects from Leon Trotsky and how it has been utilised to understand the spatial organisation and geographical expansion of global capitalism.
§ Neil Smith, ‘On the Necessity of Uneven Development’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 10:1 (1986): 87-104.
§ David Harvey, ‘The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: A Reconstruction of the Marxian Theory’, Antipode, 7:2 (1975): 9-21.
Key question: What does it mean to argue that it is inevitable that uneven development results from capitalism [Harvey] or that uneven geographical development is a necessity of capital accumulation [Smith]?
Tutorial 2 (Week 3): Embedded Liberalism
13 March
This week deliberately juxtaposes the content of the course’s Introduction and its emphasis on uneven development with the liberal focus on the architecture of the international financial system, which is known as “embedded liberalism”.
§ John G. Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization, 36:2 (1982): 379-415.
§ Hannes Lacher, ‘Embedded Liberalism, Disembedded Markets: Reconceptualising the Pax Americana’, New Political Economy, 4:3 (1999): 343-60.
Key question: What is meant by the ‘embedded liberalism compromise’ [Ruggie] and whose interests has this normative framework benefitted [Lacher]?
Tutorial 3 (Week 4): Essays, Ideas and Early Feedback Task
20 March
By introducing a pause in the lecture delivery and tutorial discussion, this week we create some space to raise any questions from the cohort about essay design, content, and organisation ahead of the first assignment submission date.
§ Adam David Morton, ’10 Things to Look Out for About Essay Writing’, Progress in Political Economy (PPE), available at: https://www.ppesydney.net/10-things-to-look-out-for-about-essay-writing/.
Key question: What is meant by an ‘interpretation by proxy’ and can you recognise this in your previous writing practice?
Tutorial 4 (Week 4): Long Boom
27 March
Continuing with the theme of the architecture of the Post-World War II world economy, this week the focus is on the “long boom” of twentieth-century also known as the ‘Trente Glorieuses’, or thirty-year period of economic growth after 1945.
§ Thomas Piketty, ‘Putting Distribution Back at the Centre of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29:1 (2015): 67-88.
§ Jamie Morgan, ‘Piketty’s Calibration Economics: Inequality and the Dissolution of Solutions?’, Globalizations, 12:5 (2015): 803-23.
Key question: What is Thomas Piketty’s historical and political economy approach to income and wealth in the twentieth-century [Piketty] and to what extent would you accord with the argument that it is ‘a palatable form. of radicalism’ [Morgan]?
Key resource: Adam David Morton, “Piketty Digests”, Progress in Political Economy (PPE) blog that offers a week-by-week summary of every chapter in Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century, starting from #1 to #18. See: https://www.ppesydney.net/piketty-forum/.
Tutorial 5 (Week 5): Dependency and Development
3 April
Although neglected in recent years, there is somewhat of a renaissance at present in the return to dependency theory as a radical political economy approach to understanding uneven development. This week we recover aspects of dependentista thought focusing on some of the classic theorists, including Ruy Marini and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto.
§ Ruy Mauro Marini, ‘Brazilian “Interdependence” and Imperialist Integration’, Monthly Review, 17:7 (1965).
§ Fernando Henrique Cardoso, ‘Dependent Capitalist Development in Latin America’, New Left Review I, No. 74 (1972): 83-95.
§ Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, Dependency and Crisis in Brazil and Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), Chapter 1: ‘Neoliberalism, neodevelopmentalism and uneven and combined dependency’.
Key question: What is meant by ‘super-exploitation’ [Marini] and what are forms of ‘dependent development’ existed in Latin America during the mid-twentieth century era of era of Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) [Cardoso + Faletto]?
Key resource: Adam David Morton, Review of Dependency and Development in Latin America, by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Progress in Political Economy (PPE) blog. See: https://www.ppesydney.net/fernando-enrique-cardoso-and-enzo-faletto-dependency-and-development-in-latin-america/.
Tutorial 6 (Week 6): Primitive Accumulation
10 April
The monstrous horror of capitalism is often associated with a social hell where capital comes into being, citing Marx in Capital, Volume 1, ‘dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’.
§ Andreas Bieler et al., ‘The Enduring Relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 19:3 (2016): 420-47.
§ Silvia Federici, ‘The Great Caliban: The Struggle Against the Rebel Body’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 15:2 (2004): 7-16.
§ William Clare Roberts, ‘What Was Primitive Accumulation? Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept’, European Journal of Political Theory, 19:4 (2020): 532-552.
Key question: What are some of the historical features of primitive accumulation [Luxemburg] and in what ways is the violence of primitive accumulation still ongoing in the present [Bieler et al.]?
Tutorial 7 (Week 7): Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI)
17 April
Picking up on the themes of primitive accumulation, dependency and uneven development, this tutorial looks at such issues through the prism of Import Substitution Industrialisation in Mexico during the mid-twentieth century. The focus is on the achievements of the “Mexican miracle” of developmental catch-up as well as the pitfalls it faced leading to the debt crisis of the 1970s and the subsequent “lost decade” of development in the 1980s.
§ Adam David Morton, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), Chapter 3 ‘Capital Accumulation, State Formation and Import Substitution Industrialisation’.
§ Sylvia Maxfield and James H. Nolt, ‘Protectionism and the Internationalisation of Capital’, International Studies Quarterly, 34 (1990): 49-81.
Key question: How successful was ISI as a strategy of developmental catch-up and what key national or transnational class forces were important in its design and implementation?
Tutorial 8 (Week 8): Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)
1 May
After the binge (ISI) comes the hangover (SAPs). Following the debt burden of ISI in Latin America many states were confronted with the IMF and World Bank conditionality of SAPs based on debt rescheduling through a reduction in government deficits, limits to money supply growth, and currency devaluations. These “Bretton Woods” institutions from the era of embedded liberalism were emboldened with a new Washington Consensus to usher in the dominance of transnational capital.
§ Adam David Morton, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), Chapter 4 ‘Neoliberalism and Structural Change within the Global Political Economy of Uneven Development’.
§ David F. Ruccio, ‘When Failure Becomes Success: Class and the Debate over Stabilisation and Adjustment’, World Development, 19:10 (1991): 1315-1334.
Key question: Was structural adjustment imposed on states in the global south and was it a success or a failure?
Tutorial 9 (Week 9): Spaces of Resistance (EZLN)
8 May
The struggle-driven process of capitalism always entails resistance and class war. This was no more so than in the movement of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN: Zapatista Army of National Liberation) that stepped into the public imagination on 1 January 1994 in Chiapas with its rebellion against the Mexico state. The EZLN declared to a group of tourists ‘Disculpen las molestias, pero esto es una revolución’ [Sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution]. This tutorial will deliberate the novel tactics of the EZLN and its attempt to enact a small ‘r’ revolution, rather than the singular big ‘R’ revolution of the past.
§ Adam David Morton, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), Chapter 7 ‘Uneven Agrarian Development and the Resistance of the EZLN’.
§ Chris Hesketh, ‘Producing State Space in Chiapas: Passive Revolution and Everyday Life’, Critical Sociology, 42:2 (2014): 211-28.
Key question: Discuss the extent to which revolutions are not simply the occasional punctuation marks, but the very grammar of modern world history.
Tutorial 10 (Week 10): Drug War Capitalism
15 May
The geography of uneven development within the global political economy has also been a world the criminal economy has been paramount. This is especially so with drug trafficking and its associated economic practices that can range, of course, from human trafficking to money laundering to avocado production. In 2005 narcotics production was valued at $13 billion, the wholesale industry was a priced at $94 billion and retail estimated at $332 billion. $1.6 trillion is the amount of money laundered in the global financial system through transnational organised crime (TOC) according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s Research Report in 2011. So, this week we will be deliberating whether the drug wars are good for business.
§ Dawn Paley, ‘Drug War as Neoliberal Trojan Horse’, Latin American Perspectives, 42:5 (2015): 109-32.
§ Alexander Aviña, ‘Mexico’s Long Dirty War’, NACLA: Report on the Americas, 48:2 (2016): 144-56.
Key question: To what extent do you agree with the assessment that the drug wars have bolstered a strategy of dispossession and terror in order to expand neoliberalism?
Tutorial 11 (Week 11): State Capitalism
22 May
Since the 2000s, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have experienced an expansion with so-called state-capital hybrids reëmerging from the era of ISI to become increasingly relevant. Some have called this the ‘new state capitalism’ of uneven development. In 2020, the share of state-owned enterprises among the world’s 2000 largest firms doubled to 20 percent with assets worth $45 trillion (equivalent to half of global GDP) up from $13 trillion in 2000. This session will put the spotlight on the ‘new state capitalism’ and question its growth within the current era of uneven development.
§ Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon, ‘Uneven and Combined State Capitalism’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 55:1 (2023): 72-99.
§ Toby Carroll and Daryll Jarvis, ‘Understanding the State in Relation to Late Capitalism: A Response to “New” State Capitalism Contributions’, Antipode, 54:6 (2022): 1715-37.
Key question: To what extent are state-capital hybrids such as state-owned enterprises, sovereign wealth funds, or national development banks now the new major engines of global capitalism?
Tutorial 12 (Week 12): Post-capitalism: taking back the economy?
29 May
A major feminist critique of political economy has highlighted how capitalocentrism pervades analysis of the uneven development of global capitalism, referring to the penetration of capital into all modes of life and social spaces including the colonies of capitalism. How is it possible to focus on economic activity that is noncapitalist? What forms of alternative economy organising might be envisaged so that we can inhabit noncapitalist economic spaces?
§ J.K. Gibson-Graham (2014) ‘Rethinking the Economy with Thick Description and Weak Theory’, Current Anthropology, 55(S9): pp. 147-53.
§ Chris Hesketh, ‘The Survival of Noncapitalism’, Environment and Planning D, 34:5 (2016): 877-94.
Key question: How do we become not merely opponents of capitalism but subjects who can create “noncapitalism”?