www.ebook3000.com 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 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 www.ebook3000.com 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 Edited by Willie Henderson Rules and Choice in Economics Viktor Vanberg Rationality, Institutions and Economic Methodology Edited by Uskali Mäki, Bo Gustafsson, and Christian Knudsen Beyond Rhetoric and Realism in Economics Thomas A Boylan and Paschal F O’Gorman New Directions in Economic Methodology Edited by Roger Backhouse Feminism, Objectivity and Economics Julie A Nelson Who Pays for the Kids? Nancy Folbre Economic Evolution Jack J Vromen www.ebook3000.com Economics and Reality Tony Lawson Reorienting Economics Tony Lawson The Market John O’Neill Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics Edited by Drucilla K Barker and Edith Kuiper Economics and Utopia Geoff Hodgson Critical Realism in Economics Edited by Steve Fleetwood The New Economic Criticism Edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteeen What Economists Know? Edited by Robert F Garnett, Jr Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge Edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F Ruccio The Crisis in Economics Edited by Edward Fullbrook The Philosophy of Keynes’ Economics Probability, uncertainty and convention Edited by Jochen Runde and Sohei Mizuhara Postcolonialism Meets Economics Edited by Eiman O Zein-Elabdin and S Charusheela The Evolution of Institutional Economics Agency, structure and Darwinism in American institutionalism Geoffrey M Hodgson The Values of Economics An Aristotelian perspective Irene van Staveren How Economics Forgot History The problem of historical specificity in social science Geoffrey M Hodgson Intersubjectivity in Economics Agents and structures Edward Fullbrook The World of Consumption, 2nd Edition The material and cultural revisited Ben Fine Transforming Economics Perspectives on the critical realist project Edited by Paul Lewis New Departures in Marxian Theory Edited by Stephen A Resnick and Richard D Wolff www.ebook3000.com www.ebook3000.com New Departures in Marxian Theory Edited by Stephen A Resnick and Richard D Wolff www.ebook3000.com First published 2006 by Routledge 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) www.ebook3000.com Contents Foreword Acknowledgments ix xii Introduction: Marxism without determinisms PART I Marxian philosophy and epistemology Marxist epistemology: the critique of economic determinism 11 Rethinking complexity in economic theory: the challenge of overdetermination 51 Althusser’s liberation of Marxian theory 68 Althusser and Hegel: making Marxist explanations antiessentialist and dialectical 79 PART II 89 Class analysis Classes in Marxian theory 91 Power, property, and class 118 Communism: between class and classless 137 For every knight in shining armor, there’s a castle waiting to be cleaned: a Marxist-Feminist analysis of the household 159 www.ebook3000.com viii Contents PART III Marxian economic theory A Marxian reconceptualization of income and its distribution 197 199 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 References Index 354 395 408 www.ebook3000.com 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 enormously 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 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 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 www.ebook3000.com ... or combinations thereof In reading Capital, however, we found stunning and altogether new definitions of class and class struggles that would guide us in developing a new kind of social theory. .. 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... proximateultimate-last instance determinism and moral-material incentives were borrowed from Marx and Engels or newly invented to specify the identity of Marxist theory and economic determinism The continuing felt