Instructions
Write a 5-7 page paper (double spaced, 12 point font, standard margins) on one of the following topics. Your title page and bibliography (and any other pages that are not writing) do not count towards the page count. Please cite all your sources, with an accepted citational standard of your choice. For sources, you may only use:
- Readings assigned in class.
- Other writing by authors assigned in class.
- Sources which address the exact same topic as readings assigned in class (e.g. West African deindustrialization; gender roles in Iriquois Confederacy, etc.).
1. Powered hierarchies based on social difference have existed long before industrial capitalism. However, these systems have interacted with industrial capitalism in particular ways – at times entrenching their power and at other times shifting that power. Using examples, as well as theory, from class and from the readings, trace how industrial capitalism has interacted with racism and white supremacy; with patriarchy; and with the division between the Global North and Global South. How has capitalism exacerbated some of the power differentials between groups, and how has it shifted that power over time?
2. Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) Theory posits that while capitalism is fundamentally unstable and prone to crisis, the accumulation process can find medium-term stability through the coalescence of sets of institutions – an SSA. Eventually, a crisis occurs which reflects the contradictions of these institutions, and the resolution of that crisis occurs when a new institutional framework can resuscitate the profit rate and accumulation. Looking at both the Global North and Global South begin with institutions of Monopoly Capitalism and trace the history of the Great Depression of the 1930s, Regulated Capitalism, the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, Neoliberal Capitalism, and the financial crisis of 2008 and ensuant Great Recession, showing how each followed from the previous. Use examples to reinforce your points.
