Stephen Resnick

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.

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 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.

The distribution of West European trade under alternative tariff policies

r IHE purpose of this paper is to provide empirical answers to the following questions concerning the trade patterns of Western Europe. What were the impacts of the Dillon and Kennedy Rounds of tariff reductions? How did the creation of the EEC (European Economic Community) and EFTA (European Free Trade Association) affect their trade? How will the enlargement of the EEC in the context of a broader area of free trade affect the level and distribution of trade in Western Europe? The investigation is based upon the simulation of an econometric model estimated for 1953 to 1968 of bilateral trade flows for ten West European countries.1 The model is specified in a multistage framework combining traditional total import demand equations with share equations explaining the division of the total. For each of the ten EEC and EFTA countries which we call Europe, total real imports of non-food goods depends upon real income, relative prices, and a pressure of demand variable. Next, these imports are distributed between two main blocs, Europe and the rest of the world, where prices of the respective blocs are the arguments of the linear share equations. Third, imports from Europe are distributed between two competing blocs, the EEC and EFTA countries, where again prices of the respective blocs appear as arguments determining the relative shares. Finallv. the model exnlains the distribution of imports within each of the basic blocs of the system (EEC and EFTA) using prices of the individual member countries as arguments.2 The specification of the model provides estimates not only of direct price effects on bilateral trade but also of cross-price effects.3 Moreover, since the price variables referred to above are specified inclusive of tariffs, this permits us to use the estimated price coefficients directly to simulate trade patterns under alternative tariff configurations.4 The analysis in this paper is based upon the pattern of West European imports in 1968. The tariff policy simulations are designed to answer the questions: what would the 1968 trade pattern have looked like if a different constellation of tariffs had been in force and how would it have differed from the actual or some other predicted pattern. Section II presents the results of two retrospective simulations: the impact of the Dillon Round of tariff reductions and of the formation of the EEC and EFTA. Section III presents the results of two prospective simulations: the impact of the Kennedy Round of tariff reductions and of the enlargement of the European Community. The values of the relevant average tariffs used in the simulations are summarized in table 1. The simulations of the 1968 pattern of trade involve three simplifications: (1) we assume that 1968 domestic and export prices are independent of the changes in tariffs; 5 (2) we ignore

A REFORMULATION OF MARXIAN THEORY AND HISTORICAL-ANALYSIS

The paper develops a Marxian approach to economic history utilizing some recent, far-reaching reformulations of Marxist theory. On the basis of a new specification of class structures, the approach permits a nondeterminist analysis of the interactions of class and nonclass aspects of social change.

Class, Contradiction and the Capitalist Economy

Two major contributions differentiate Marx’s explanation for how a capitalist economy works. One involves theorizing its functioning from the perspective of class, namely the processes of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labour. Adding Marx’s concept of class to economic explanation provides a potential threat to capitalism, for the stark implication is that the value received by industrial capitalists exactly equals what they exploit from their workers. In direct contrast to the claims of non-Marxian economic theory, class exploitation, and not the latter’s marginal productivity, determines the economic rewards of industrial capitalists as well as of the managers, merchants, state officials, landlords and bankers who live off the surplus distributed to them by those capitalists. That class exploitation supports the incomes received by such an otherwise venerated group of individuals in society tarnishes, if not makes ridiculous, non-Marxian claims of capitalism’s underlying fairness and efficiency.