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Political Economy of Labour and Work

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Course Type Course Code No. Of Credits
Foundation Core SGA1GS301 4

Course Coordinator and Team:Tanya Chaudhary

Email of course coordinator: tchaudhary@aud.ac.in

Aim: The course will be offered as a core course to third year undergraduate BA students at Karampura Campus. It contributes to developing AUD and SGA’s interdisciplinary vision of higher education. For BA-GS students, this course foregrounds them to one of key thematic areas of the programme, i.e., Global Political Economy. This course will provide UG students with a conceptual grounding to the methods of political economy from the standpoint of labour and work. In doing so, it would cover the different schools of thought that shape and reshape political economy as a mode of analysis in comprehending the global.

Course Outcomes:

  1. To understand the use of political economy as one of the ways of knowing the idea of the global.
  2. To make students understand how these interrelations go ontoto becoming the object of study in global political economy.
  3. To cover some key concepts in political economy that deal with labour theory of value, surplus and surplus-value, modes of production and exploitation, historical materialism and alienation.
  4. The students would be introduced to the works of three historically prominent thinkers in political economy – Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx alongwith contemporary schools of thought, namely, the Neoclassicals, Institutionalists and Marxists.

 Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

  1. Module 1: Different schools of Political Economy and contemporary global Labour questions [2 weeks]

The course introduces how different schools of thought [Neoclassical, Institutionalist and Marxist] conceptualize the labour question and how this re/structures the global. In this module, we focus on the methods of political economy and the trajectories traversed by the discipline from its Classical origins to the periods between the World Wars, and the following periods right up to contemporary times.

  1. Module 2: Slavery: Old and new forms [1 week]

This module looks at old and new forms of slavery. This module introduces students to the specificities of Indenture, Contract, Extractive and Plantation based capitalism both historically and the contemporary forms that persist at present. It will explore the debates on Slavery from a standpoint of the global south.

  1. Module 3: Feudalism and transition [1 week]

The module looks at the question of transition from the ancient world to feudalism and then to capitalism by focusing primarily on the agrarian roots of capitalism. This will help students develop an understanding for the way lives and livelihoods are structured for the majority of workers around the global economy. Thedivergence between various political economists (Ricardo, Marx) on the question of transition will be discussed. 

  1. Module 4: Asiatic Mode of production and Historical Materialism [1 week]

This module introduces the two concepts of modes of production and historical materialism by looking at the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ from a standpoint of the global south. These two concepts, i.e. modes of production and historical materialism, would also be key threads in understanding labour and work across time and space.

  1. Module 5: Trade and Merchant/commercial capitalism [1 week]

This module deals with histories of commercial capital and how it shaped labour and work from the Arab trade-empire to company capitalism, from corporate capitalism to early forms of commerce. This will help in contextualizing the present workings of the financial system and the global economy.

  1. Module 6: Factory system: Changing landscapes [2 week]

This module deals with the creation of industrial capitalism, the coming in of the factory system, making of the working class, the degradation of work in the advances of capitalism especially the rise of global corporations in contemporary times as well as in the last few centuries. The module will also look at Fordism and Taylorism as ways of organizing work and labour in the modern capitalist economy. This will help in contrasting with the gig economy as it exists in contemporary times.

  1. Module 7: Labour regimes and global value chains [2 weeks]

This module analyses labour regimes by starting from labour camps in Nazi Germany and then goes on to discuss different such regimes in contemporary capitalism across different regions of the globe. The political economy of Fascism and its interlinkages with advanced capitalism is explored in detail.

  1. Module 8: Digital labour and Digital Work [2 week]

This module starts with introducing students to the contemporary forms of Labour and Work, namely digital labour and digital work, so as to contextualize the present. The module then revisits the subject matter of political economy and evaluate certain key concepts in the contemporary global context namely labour theory of value, surplus and surplus-value and alienation.

Assessment Details with weights:

Given the enabling vision of the University’s learner-centric paradigm, the course relies on the concept of an open book exam for all the assessments. This technique attempts to make the learner have an opinion about the readings as the questions are designed in such a way. The student also learns responsibility in an exam hall by not cheating as it is an open book. Finally, the by nullifying the component of surveillance, the exam tries to make the student think out of the box.

i. Monthly Assessment (3X20% = 60%): Open book written assessment based on Units covered in a month.

ii. Final examination (40%): essay-based final exam based on full semester syllabus

Reading List:

Essential readings:

  1. Aston, T.H. & Philpin, C.H.E. (2005), Introduction, The Brenner Debate : Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre- Industrial Europe, Cambridge University Press, New Delhi.
  2. Banaji, J. (2013), Theory as History, Essays on Modes of Production and  Exploitation, Chapter 9 – Islam, Mediterranean and the rise of Capitalism, Themes in Historical Materialism.
  3. Benner, A. Louis Putterman (1998), Introduction, Economics, Values and Organization, Introduction, Cambridge University Press, New York
  4. Brandt, W. (2020) The Brandt Equation: 21st Century Blueprint for the New Global Economy
  5. BuggeIn, M. (2009), Building to Death: Prisoner Forced Labour in the German War Economy — The Neuengamme Subcamps, 1942—1945, European History Quarterly 39(4), pp. 606-632. Edition, Pluto Press, London
  6. Engels, F. (1975), Anti-Dühring, Part II: Political Economy – Subject Matter and Method, Progress Publishers, Moscow
  7. Epstein, S.R. (2006), Rodney Hilton, Marxism and the Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism
  8. Fine, B and Saad-Filho (2004), Commodity Production, Marx’s Capital, Fourth Edition, Pluto Press, London
  9. Fine, B and Saad-Filho (2004), History and Method, Marx’s Capital, Fourth Edition, Pluto Press, London
  10. Fuchs, C and Sevignani, S (2013), What is Digital Labour? What is Digital Work? What’s their Difference? And why do these questions matter for understanding social media.
  11. Hunt, E.K. and Lautzenheiser, M (2011), Introduction, History of Economic Thought, Third Edition, M.E. Sharpe Inc., Armonk, New York
  12. Lerche J. (2010) 'From ‘Rural Labour’ to ‘Classes of Labour’: Class Fragmentation, Caste and Class Struggle at the Bottom of the Indian Labour Hierarchy'. In: Harriss-White, Barbara and Heyer, Judith, (eds.), The Comparative Political Economy of Development of Africa and South Asia. London: Routledge, pp. 66-87.
  13. Marcel van der Linden & Roth, K. H. (2014), Introduction, Beyond Marx: Theorising the Global Labor Relations of the Twenty-First Century, London, Brill.
  14. Marx, K. (1970), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The Method of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow
  15. Mezzadri A. (2017) Intoduction, The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation and Garments Made in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  16. Mies, M. (2007),Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale-revisited (Keynote lecture at the Green Economics Institute, Reading, 29 October 2005) published in International Journal of Green Economics, Vol 1, Nos. 3/4.
  17. North, D.C. (1990), Introduction in Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press
  18. Taussig, Michael T. (1980), Introduction, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, USA
  19. Thomson, E.P. (1963), Introduction, The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage Books, New York.

Supplementary readings:

  1. Smith, Adam (1776), The Wealth of Nations, edited W.B. Todd, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
  2. Mill, John Stuart (1848), Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, in J.M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volumes II and III, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965.
  3. Marx, K. (1970), Capital Vol. 1: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, (1970)
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