The Capitalist Mode of Power: A Research Seminar(YorkU, GS/POLS 6260 6.0, Graduate, Fall Term, 2009-10)

Capitalism is often understood as a mode of production and consumption. The seminar critiques this view and offers an alternative perspective of capitalism as a mode of power. Thematically, the course consists of five parts: (1) Dilemmas of Political Economy: the two basic bifurcations separating 'politics' from 'economics' and the 'real' from the ‘nominal’, and how these dualities have gradually fractured political economy; (2) The Enigma of Capital: the liberal and Marxists conceptions of value and capital and why political economists still try to sort them out; (3) Capitalization: how discounting conquered the world while political economists looked the other way; (4) Bringing Power Back In: the history and theory of the capitalist mode of power; and (5) Capital as Power: a radical alternative to liberal and Marxists theories of accumulation. Pedagogically, the seminar seeks to prepare students toward conducting their own independent research. Students are introduced to various electronic data sources, instructed in different methods of analysis and tutored in developing their empirical research skills. As the seminar progresses, these skills are used both to assess various theories and to develop the students’ own theoretical/empirical research project