New Departures in Marxian Theory

New Departures in Marxian Theory Edited by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff New Departures in Marxian Theory Major changes have shaken Marxism over recent decades. This collection of essays, by two American authors of international repute, documents what has become the most original formulation of Marxist theory today. Resnick and Wolff’s work is shaping Marxism’s new directions and new departures as it repositions itself for the twenty first century. Their new non-determinist and class-focused Marxist theory is both responsive to and critical of the other movements transforming modern social thought from postmodernism to feminism to radical democracy and the “new social movements.” New Departures in Marxian Theory confronts the need for a new philosophical foundation for Marxist theory. A critique of classical Marxism’s economic and methodological determinisms paves the way for a systematic alternative, “overdetermination,” that is developed far beyond the fragmentary gestures of Lukacs, Gramsci, and Althusser. Successive essays begin by returning to Marx’s original definition of class in terms of the surplus (rather than in terms of property ownership and power). Resnick and Wolff develop and apply this class analysis to produce new understandings of modern capitalism’s contradictions (with special emphasis on the US), communism, households, gender differences, income distribution, markets, and monopoly. Further chapters specify how this “overdeterminist class theory” differentiates itself in new ways from the alternative traditions in economics. This collection of topically focused essays enables readers (including academics across many disciplines) to understand and make use of a major new paradigm in Marxist thinking. It showcases the exciting analytical breakthroughs now punctuating a Marxism in transition. Resnick and Wolff do not shy away from exploring the global, political, and activist implications of this new direction in Marxism. Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff are Professors of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgments xii Introduction: Marxism without determinisms 1 PART I Marxian philosophy and epistemology 9 1 Marxist epistemology: the critique of economic determinism 11 2 Rethinking complexity in economic theory: the challenge of overdetermination 51 3 Althusser’s liberation of Marxian theory 68 4 Althusser and Hegel: making Marxist explanations antiessentialist and dialectical 79 PART II Class analysis 89 5 Classes in Marxian theory 91 6 Power, property, and class 118 7 Communism: between class and classless 137 8 For every knight in shining armor, there’s a castle waiting to be cleaned: a Marxist-Feminist analysis of the household 159 viii Contents PART III Marxian economic theory 197 9 A Marxian reconceptualization of income and its distribution 199 10 Class and monopoly 221 11 Class, contradiction and the capitalist economy 238 PART IV Criticisms and comparisons of economic theories 253 12 Division and difference in the “discipline” of economics WITH J. AMARIGLIO 255 13 Radical economics: a tradition of theoretical differences 279 14 “Efficiency”: whose efficiency? 303 PART V History 307 15 The Reagan-Bush strategy: shifting crises from enterprises to households 309 16 Capitalisms, socialisms, communisms: a Marxian view 330 17 Exploitation, consumption, and the uniqueness of US capitalism 341 Notes 354 References 395 Index 408 Foreword It is enough, in the course of a scholarly and activist lifetime, to make a contribution to a critical theoretical and political debate. It would be more than enough to have one’s contribution become a turning point in such a debate, a transformation that would allow future generations to pursue a road previously untaken. In their articles, books, speeches, and other interventions over the past 25 years, Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff have far surpassed this achievement. In giving rise to a vast resituating of Marxist economic and social theory, they have founded a veritable movement, and certainly an entire school and tradition within the broader Marxian framework. The essays contained in this collection are testimony to the far-reaching reformulation of Marxian theory carried out by Resnick and Wolff. This endeavor continues to flourish, not only in their own recent writings, but also in those of a large number of collaborators and other social thinkers deeply inspired by their influential work. The non-determinist (or “postmodern”) Marxism first initiated by Resnick and Wolff in the late 1970s/early 1980s currently inspirits projects and programs that range from the quarterly journal Rethinking Marxism to the theoretically-informed activism of the Community Economies Collective, headquartered in Western Massachusetts. Hosts of former students have been joined by many other cohorts in extending, while utilizing, the basic and detailed insights about class theory and historical causation that have been crystallized in Resnick and Wolff’s rethinking of Marx’s political economic corpus. Resnick and Wolff’s writings have been pathbreaking, enduring, and enor- mously consequential for Marxian theory and practice in our time, owing much to their overarching but also keenly focused agenda. It is still dazzling to me to read their earliest essays in which they “solve” the problem of how to construct a coherent reading of the protracted, dispersed, and sometimes woolly, theoretical forays of Marx through all 3 volumes of Capital, and then into the 3-volume Theories of Surplus Value. To put this otherwise, in my estimation, no-one prior to Resnick and Wolff had been able to connect the clear but sometimes submerged theory of class-as-surplus in Volume 1 of Capital with Marx’s long dissertations in the other volumes, but most particularly Volume 3, in which a multitude of economic processes and agents appear on the social stage and are set in motion. It had long been the norm for Marxist scholars and socialist practitioners to x Foreword render Marx’s writings in Volume 3 and elsewhere on merchant capital, rentiers, landlords, retainers, and so forth as an extended typology of social groupings based upon their property ownership, and/or their sources and size of income, and/or their place in a larger political hierarchy. Often this typology was termed “class,” but almost invariably the notion of class that was proposed differed sharply from Marx’s reliance on the surplus definition that he proffers in Volume 1. Resnick and Wolff were able to demonstrate, with a welter of careful citation and textual evidence, and also brilliant innovation, that the bulk of Marx’s discussion of these social groupings constitutes a lengthy class analysis, but one that is best illuminated by, and linked to, the surplus definition of class. That is, through their by-now famous concepts of “fundamental and subsumed classes,” Resnick and Wolff showed that Marx’s political economic writings—at least from the Grundrisse onwards, and certainly the three volumes of Capital—were capable of being read uniquely as a continuing and connected discourse about class and its many intricate differentiations and manifestations through surplus production, appropriation, and distribution. What further distinguishes Resnick and Wolff’s contribution, though, is their refusal to interpret this persistent class thread as tantamount to the orthodox Marxist claim that class is the determinant instance in all social, economic, political, and cultural events. There have been few, if any, Marxist political economists who have resisted the easy temptation to translate their disciplinary specialization and field-based insights into a claim of epistemological privilege. Like their mainstream and pro-capitalist brethren, many radical and Marxist economists have long sought to assert a sole or conclusive “truth-value” to their deterministic theories and empirical studies. This epistemological certainty of the determinism of class and the economy, of course, is not limited to political economists; it is my impression that Marx is still read ultimately along these lines, no matter how many “cultural mediations” are introduced, by an array of Marxian and radical social and cultural theorists. Resnick and Wolff, therefore, can be differentiated from others working in the field of Marxian political economy not only by their consistent adherence to a surplus-theory of class, and not only by a marvelous proliferation of class categories that delineate the many and multiple class processes and positions that societies and subjects can contain and/or occupy at a particular moment in historical time. But, indeed, Resnick and Wolff have been insistent from the outset that the persuasiveness and power of Marxian discourse does not need, and in fact is often in direct conflict with, the resort to a privileged and exclusive regime of “truth” (they emphasize that in such a regime, truth is most often considered “absolute” rather than “relative”). As some of their writings about the former Soviet Union have implied, the tragedy of absolutist claims to truth during the supposed socialist experiment was that, among other things, these claims violently impeded the recognition and questioning of an entrenched class structure that, often enough, ran counter to the proclaimed goals of a communist social formation. The essays in the present collection comprise a wonderful introduction for those who have not yet encountered Resnick and Wolff’s version of postmodern Foreword

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