New Departures in Marxian Theory

433 Pages·2006·3.266 MB·English

by  Stephen Resnick, Richard 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 Theoryconfronts 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.
Economics as Social Theory
Series edited by Tony Lawson
University of Cambridge
Social Theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical
analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies and of the
types of method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be
endorsed for the scientific study of social objects, are re-emerging. Economists
are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure,
between economy and the rest of society, and between the enquirer and the object
of enquiry. There is a renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as
causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order,
organization, power probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth,
uncertainty, value etc.
The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary
economics the label “theory” has been appropriated by a group that confines
itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical “modelling.” Economics as
Social Theory thus reclaims the “Theory” label, offering a platform for alternative
rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorizing.
Other titles in this series include:
Economics and Language Rules and Choice in
Edited by Willie Henderson Economics
Viktor Vanberg
Rationality,Institutions and
Economic Methodology Beyond Rhetoric and Realism in
Edited by Uskali Mäki, Bo Economics
Gustafsson, and Thomas A. Boylan and
Christian Knudsen Paschal F. O’Gorman
New Directions in Economic Feminism,Objectivity and
Methodology Economics
Edited by Roger Backhouse Julie A. Nelson
Who Pays for the Kids? Economic Evolution
Nancy Folbre Jack J. Vromen
Economics and Reality Reorienting Economics
Tony Lawson Tony Lawson
The Market Toward a Feminist Philosophy of
John O’Neill Economics
Edited by Drucilla K. Barker and
Economics and Utopia Edith Kuiper
Geoff Hodgson
The Crisis in Economics
Critical Realism in Economics Edited by Edward Fullbrook
Edited by Steve Fleetwood
The Philosophy of Keynes’
The New Economic Criticism Economics
Edited by Martha Woodmansee and Probability, uncertainty and
Mark Osteeen convention
Edited by Jochen Runde and Sohei
What do Economists Know? Mizuhara
Edited by Robert F. Garnett, Jr
Postcolonialism Meets
Postmodernism,Economics and Economics
Knowledge Edited by Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin and
Edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack S. Charusheela
Amariglio and David F. Ruccio
The Evolution of Institutional
The Values of Economics Economics
An Aristotelian perspective Agency, structure and Darwinism in
Irene van Staveren American institutionalism
Geoffrey M. Hodgson
How Economics Forgot History
The problem of historical specificity Transforming Economics
in social science Perspectives on the critical
Geoffrey M. Hodgson realist project
Edited by Paul Lewis
Intersubjectivity in Economics
Agents and structures New Departures in Marxian
Edward Fullbrook Theory
Edited by Stephen A. Resnick and
The World of Consumption,2nd Richard D. Wolff
Edition
The material and cultural revisited
Ben Fine

New Departures in Marxian
Theory
Edited by
Stephen A. Resnick and
Richard D. Wolff
First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2006 editorial matter and selection, Stephen A. Resnick and
Richard D. Wolff; individual chapters, the contributors
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN10: 0–415–77025–4 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–77026–2 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–08667–8 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–77025–5 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–77026–2 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–08667–4 (ebk)
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
255
WITH J. AMARIGLIO
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 Capitalwith 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