| | This course examines the changing nature of global capitalism over the last half century. We will consider how capital seized the crises of the 1970s as an opportunity to reconfigure itself, introducing a new international division of labour and installing finance as the principal generator of profit. We will also address how this new order of things almost imploded in the Great Financial Crash and how the world economy has responded to the challenges of the pandemic era. While the course addresses the economic changes that have occurred in the last couple of generations, it further seeks to examine how these transformations have been reflected and refracted through political ideologies and popular culture. This course attempts, then, to provide a critical account of the complex interactions between politics, economics and culture that define and deform the world in which we now live. Although global in its focus, the course will centre largely on Ireland, which illustrates better than most other countries the complex changes that capital has undergone since the convulsions of the 1970s. |
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM 
Semester 1 