Course syllabus

SOCIOL336 FANTASIES OF FINANCE

COURSE OUTLINE 2017

 

Lecturer

Associate Professor Campbell Jones

Room 908 Human Sciences Building

Office hour Mondays 2.00-3.00pm (during term time) or by appointment

Email: campbell.jones@auckland.ac.nz

 

Tuakana

Alex Birchall

Room 502 Human Sciences Building

Office hours Mondays 2.00-3.00pm

Email: abir196@aucklanduni.ac.nz

 

Lectures

Mondays 12.00midday - 2.00pm

Room: Clock Tower building 105 room 029

 

Tutorials

Fridays 3.00pm-4.00pm

Room: Conference Centre building 423 room 342

Tutorials commence on Friday 10 March (week 1) and run every week including Friday 9 June (week 12).

 

Calendar course description

The financial crisis and global recession have demonstrated the social and political consequences of finance, while research in the sociology of markets, critiques of financialisation and social and cultural studies of finance have provided compelling understandings of the ideological fantasies that maintain the world of finance. This course explores these new approaches that emphasise the relationship between finance and society.

 

Course Objectives

The theme for this course in 2017 will be ‘The Truth of Finance’. The first half of the semester will focus on the relationships between finance, resistance and truth. This will beging by accounting for the spread of finance, in the financialisation of economy, culture, and indeed life itself. This attempted financialisation raises the complex question of the relation of finance to resistance. While it is possible to imagine and to practice a ‘resistance from below’ to the apparently overwhelming power of finance capital, it is also possible to understand that finance is itself resistance, a form of ‘resistance from above’ that constantly responds to the powers and capacities of those from whom finance capital seeks to extort profit.

 

In order to grasp what finance resists, we turn to recent thinking regarding the nature of truth, considering very carefully the different practical consequences when truth is taken variously as (1) correspondence, (2) convention and (3) fidelity to uprising. Finance always produces the prospect of uprising across a range of locations: whether in its crisis phase; in its brutality as banking and rent-seeking; when governmentalised as ‘austerity’; in the form of mass challenges to finance in organised or dispersed decentred movements such as Occupy; in rent strikes and debt jubilees; in strikes and protests in and against financial institutions; in the minute details of taxation policy; in the nationalisation of financial assets; and in the expropriation and/or incarceration of the financial class. Coordinating the upsurge against finance is one of the key stakes of political organisation today and this requires at once understanding finance, the building of political subjects and concrete acts of intervention.

 

The account of the relationships between finance, resistance and truth in the first six weeks sets the stage in the second half of the semester for elaboration of an account of the nature of capitalist expropriation today. This involves accounting for both the expropriation of surplus-value at the point of production and also beyond this in the division of surplus-value into profit, rent and interest. While finance reflects the way that the global capitalist class recalibratates its internal distribution of profit, rent and interest, the left and its political organs today – even when willing to admit that the capital relation inevitably involves that attempt at ever expanding expropriation– has trouble understanding the new forms of capitalist expropriation and their cultural and subjective accompaniments. Education and political organisation of the next generation of the left therefore requires comprehension of the expanded circuit of capitalist expropriation and an ontology adequate to the nature of objects today. Beyond this, it requires a set of concrete decisions regarding how to plan the economy in the future and a determination to undertake the hard work of allowing the new society that is arising from the ruins of the present to materialise.

 

Readings in the first half of the semester will be drawn from recent critical writings on finance, and will be elaborated in weekly lectures. Weekly seminars will consist mainly of joint discussion of selected chapters from volume three of Capital. The reading of volume three of Capital, which will run throughout the semester, will provide the grounds on which it will be possible in the second half of the semester to develop an account of capitalist expropriation that is at once historically grounded while being sensitive to most contemporary forms of capitalist expropriation and the measures that are needed to act against capital.

 

Lectures

 

PART ONE: FINANCE, RESISTANCE, TRUTH

 

1. Introduction (Monday 6 March)
2. Financialisation and biofinancialisation (Monday 13 March)
3. The world of finance (Monday 20 March)
4. Resistance from below and above (Monday 27 March)
5. Three meanings of the word truth (Monday 3 April)
6. Finance, resistance, truth (Monday 10 April)

 

Essay One due Wednesday 12 April

PART TWO: CAPITALIST EXPROPRIATION TODAY

 

1. Beyond finance capital (Monday 1 May)
2. The ontology of class warfare (Monday 8 May)
3. The lesser and greater logics of capitalist expropriation (Monday 15 May)
4. Capitalism, difference and equality (Monday 22 May)
5. Conclusion (Monday 29 May)

 

Essay Two due Friday 2 June

Lectures will run on Mondays and tutorials on Fridays, but note:

1. There will be no tutorial on Friday 14 April (week 6) as this is a public holiday.
2. There will be no lecture on Monday 5 June (week 12) as this is a public holiday. Our last lecture will therefore be on Monday 29 May (week 11)
3. The final normal tutorial, committed to a discussion of volume three of Capital, will be on Friday 2 May (week 11).
4. There will be a revision tutorial on Friday 9 May (week 12)

 

Tutorials

The goals of the tutorials will be to comprehend the set chapters of volume three of Capital. This will require your active participation. If you are unable to do the reading then please do not attend.

 

Readings

Readings in support of the lectures, which you will be required to read to prepare your first essay, will be provided on Canvas.

The reading for the tutorials, which will be required for you to complete your second essay, will be selected chapters from:

Marx, Karl (1991) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin Classics.

This book is required reading. To complete this course you will need to purchase and read  the assigned sections of this book. For a specific breakdown of the readings for each week see Canvas.

You may also wish to purchase:

Jones, Campbell (2013) Can the Market Speak? London: Zero.

 

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is to give the impression that the work of others is your own. Plagiarism is a form of cheating and will be treated with the utmost severity. If you are tempted, think again. It is better to receive zero for one piece of coursework than to be excluded from the University. 

 

If you are at all uncertain about what this means, then make sure you appraise yourself of the University of Auckland policies on Academic Honesty and Plagiarism, online at http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/about/teaching-learning/honesty/

 

Electronic devices in class

Although many students enjoy having open access to electronic devices and wifi access, research in classroom experience has highlighted a series of problems that result from allowing electronic devices such as smartphones, iPads and laptops to be used during lectures and tutorials. When such devices are available it is very difficult to resist the temptation to refer to applications unrelated to the instructional material, and most importantly this use is distracting to other participants in the class.

 

This class will require undivided attention for 3 hours of class time a week and so all participants are asked to turn all phones off before class, and to not use iPads or laptops for notetaking. To make this withdrawal less traumatic than might be possible, two steps have been taken. First, paper copies of lecture slides will be provided at the start of class, and students are invited to annotate these and to make their own personal notes by hand with pen and paper. Second, electronic recordings of all lectures will be posted on Cecil shortly after the lecture. It is advised that if you take longhand notes with a computer then these should be made outside of class time with the lecture recordings and notes at hand.

 

If you have a medical or other condition that makes this situation difficult then you are asked to consult with the course lecturer before lectures begin.