Richard D. Wolff

Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical

Wolff and Resnick provide a unique, balanced explication of the differing assumptions, logical structures, and arguments of neoclassical and Marxian economics. They address broader aspects of evaluating or choosing between alternative theories, but their conclusions are nonpolemical. Throughout, math is used simply and sparingly.

Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism

Re/presenting Class is a collection of essays that develops a poststructuralist Marxian conception of class in order to theorize the complex contemporary economic terrain. Both building upon and reconsidering a tradition that Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff—two of this volume’s editors—began in the late 1980s with their groundbreaking work Knowledge and Class, contributors aim to correct previous research that has largely failed to place class as a central theme in economic analysis. Suggesting the possibility of a new politics of the economy, the collection as a whole focuses on the diversity and contingency of economic relations and processes. Investigating a wide range of cases, the essays illuminate, for instance, the organizational and cultural means by which unmeasured surpluses—labor that occurs outside the formal workplace‚ such as domestic work—are distributed and put to use. Editors Resnick and Wolff, along with J. K. Gibson-Graham, bring theoretical essays together with those that apply their vision to topics ranging from the Iranian Revolution to sharecropping in the Mississippi Delta to the struggle over the ownership of teaching materials at a liberal arts college. Rather than understanding class as an element of an overarching capitalist social structure, the contributors—from radical and cultural economists to social scientists—define class in terms of diverse and ongoing processes of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor and view class identities as multiple, changing, and interacting with other aspects of identity in contingent and unpredictable ways. Re/presenting Class will appeal primarily to scholars of Marxism and political economy. Contributors. Carole Biewener, Anjan Chakrabarti, Stephen Cullenberg, Fred Curtis, Satyananda Gabriel, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Serap Kayatekin, Bruce Norton, Phillip O’Neill, Stephen Resnick, David Ruccio, Dean Saitta, Andriana Vlachou, Richard Wolff

For Every Knight in Shining Armor, There's a Castle Waiting To Be Cleaned: A Marxist-Feminist Analysis of the Household

Households and their profound influence upon modern society have been badly and unjustifiably neglected in Marxian social theory. However, that theory and particularly its class analytics can be applied to contemporary households to help remedy that neglect. Feminist theories of gender, of the social construction of what “male” and “female” are supposed to mean, can likewise yield original insights into the dynamics of households today. We propose here to combine the two approaches into a distinctive Marxist-Feminist theory of the household.

The Economic Crisis: A Marxian Interpretation

Like most capitalist crises, todays challenges economists, journalists, and politicians to explain and to overcome it. The post-1930s struggles between neoclassical and Keynesian economics are rejoined. We show that both proved inadequate to preventing crises and served rather to enable and justify (as “solutions” for crises) what were merely oscillations between two forms of capitalism differentiated according to greater or lesser state economic interventions. Our Marxian economic analysis here proceeds differently. We demonstrate how concrete aspects of U.S. economic history (especially real wage, productivity, and personal indebtedness trends) culminated in this deep and enduring crisis. We offer both a class-based critique of and an alternative to neoclassical and Keynesian analyses, including an alternative solution to capitalist crises.

Ideological State Apparatuses, Consumerism, and U.S. Capitalism: Lessons for the Left

Althussers pioneering concept of “ideological state apparatuses” is extended to the unique role of consumerism as a particular ideology enabling and supporting U.S. capitalism. It is argued that rising levels of worker consumption have functioned effectively to compensate workers for (and thereby allow) rising rates of exploitation and their negative social effects. For such compensation to succeed requires that workers embrace an ideology stressing the importance of consumption—namely, consumerism. It is argued that the weakness of the U.S. left (in labor unions, parties, and movements) stems in part from having endorsed this consumerism rather than undermining it within the framework of an anticapitalist politics.

The Diversity of Class Analyses: A Critique of Erik Olin Wright and Beyond

Class analyses are both very old and quite new. This essay argues that Marx contributed a new class definition and analysis focused on the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor. Yet, that innovative, new class analysis was lost by being dissolved into either pre-Marxian conceptualizations of class in terms of property and power or later social theories in which class was determined by peoples consciousness and self-identifications. In this context, the essay pays special attention to the recent work of E.O. Wright. Class analysis based on the surplus labor definition of class is compared and contrasted with Wrights differently based definition and analysis.

The Transformation Trinity: Value, Value Form and Price

The 1970s saw a flurry of activity, generated by Sraffa (1960), re-examining Marx’s theory/theories of value and price. Sraffa’s work seemed to confirm the reservations about the Marxian relationship between values and prices that a well-known list of authors had proclaimed as the (in)famous ‘transformation problem’. The Sraffian system, exploring fully the mutual determination of production costs and prices of outputs, and capturing the essence of this mutual determination through the device of a standard system, supported the view that Marxian values were either wrong or redundant. This history is rather well known.

Economic Crisis from a Socialist Perspective

The crisis in capitalism today is not, or not yet, a crisis of capitalism. Whether it evolves into a crisis of capitalism – when the system itself is in question for significant numbers of people – depends on three factors. The first is the extent of the economic meltdown now underway, and the mass suffering, resentment, and opposition it provokes. The second factor comprises the policies undertaken to contain and reverse the crisis, their effects, and their public perception. Finally, how socialists assess the crisis in capitalism and intervene in it will also help determine whether it becomes a crisis of capitalism. Appreciating the difference between crises in and of capitalism is, we shall argue here, crucial for socialist strategy. Crises within capitalism are mostly endured; sometimes they are also managed by changing capitalism’s form. For example, in the US today, a serious crisis in a “private” sort of capitalism (relatively less state intervention and control of productive property and markets) provokes a change to a “state” form (relatively more state intervention). Similarly, when crises overtake relatively state-interventionist forms of capitalism (as happened in the US, the UK, and many less developed economies in the 1970s), “solutions” often entail change to more private forms of capitalism. Socialists thus need to distinguish their critique of capitalism, per se, from the repeated critiques of each form of capitalism (especially during their crises) by partisans of the other. Otherwise they risk being absorbed – usually by partisans of state interventionist capitalism, but sometimes by the partisans of the private form of capitalism. Then their distinctive contribution, a critique of capitalism that rejects both its forms, is lost and the prospects for a socialist transformation reduced.

The point and purpose of Marx's notion of class

This response to comments made on Class and Its Others and Re/Presenting Class explains why class exploitation conceived in Marxs surplus labor terms is an outrage. The point of Marxs class analysis is to expose this outrage and its pernicious effects on our lives. The hope is that the resulting awareness will motivate us to eliminate it from our lives, much like any other socially recognized disease or crime. Working for that elimination is a new kind of politics, one aimed squarely at placing workers who produced the surplus in the position to collectively appropriate it.

On Overdetermination and Althusser: Our Response to Silverman and Park

We respond to critical comment directed at our understanding of overdetermination and our argument that Althusser fell into economic determinism despite also offering a way out of it. Our first response reviews what the concept of overdetermination is and what it implies. On that basis, we argue that the first critics claim of “prediction” is logically impossible. Our second response explains why we still think that a tension arises in Althussers work between formulating a notion of overdetermination that in effect rules out any form of causal determination in the last instance and yet affirming economic determination in the last instance. On that basis, we criticize and reject the second critics claim that Althusser escaped this tension between offered nondeterminist and determinist positions.