by Theodore A. Burczak (Editor), Robert F. Garnett Jr. (Editor), Richard McIntyre (Editor)
About the Author
Theodore Burczak is Professor of Economics at Denison University and author of Socialism after Hayek.
Robert Garnett is Associate Dean and Honors Professor of the Social Sciences in the John V. Roach Honors College at Texas Christian University, USA.
Richard McIntyre is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Economics Department, University of Rhode Island, USA.
About this book
Knowledge, Class, and Economics: Marxism without Guarantees surveys the "Amherst School" of non-determinist Marxist political economy, 40 years on: its core concepts, intellectual origins, diverse pathways, and enduring tensions. The volume’s 30 original essays reflect the range of perspectives and projects that comprise the Amherst School―the interdisciplinary community of scholars that has enriched and extended, while never ceasing to interrogate and recast, the anti-economi-stic Marxism first formulated in the mid-1970s by Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff, and their economics Ph.D. students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
The title captures the defining ideas of the Amherst School: an open-system framework that presupposes the complexity and contingency of social-historical events and the parallel "overdetermination" of the relationship between subjects and objects of inquiry, along with a novel conception of class as a process of performing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor. In a collection of 30 original essays, chapters confront readers with the core concepts of overdetermination and class in the context of economic theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, continental philosophy, economic geography, economic anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary theory/studies.
Though Resnick and Wolff’s writings serve as a focal point for this collection, their works are ultimately decentered―contested, historicized, reformulated. The topics explored will be of interest to proponents and critics of the post-structuralist/postmodern turn in Marxian theory and to students of economics as social theory across the disciplines (economics, geography, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, among others).
Table of contents
Introduction: Marxism without guarantees
Part I Knowledge, class, and economics
1 A conversation with Rick Wolff
Part II Economics without guarantees
2 Strangers in a strange land: a Marxian critique of economics
3 Marxian economics without teleology: the big new life of class
4 Class-analytic Marxism and the recovery of the Marxian theory of enterprise
5 Uncertainty and overdetermination
6 Catallactic Marxism: Marx, Hayek, and the market
Part III Labor, value, and class
7 Class and overdetermination: value theory and the core of Resnick and Wolff’s Marxism
8 Wolff and Resnick’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of value and surplus-value: where’s the money?
9 Rethinking labor: surplus, class, and justice
Part IV Heretical materialism
10 T he last instance: Resnick and Wolff at the point of heresy
11 A leatory Marxism: Resnick, Wolff, and the revivification of Althusser
12 Process: tracing connections and consequences
Part V Appraising the postmodern turn
13 Marxism’s double task: deconstructing reconstructing postmodernism
14 Overdetermination: the ethical moment
15 The cost of anti-essentialism
16 Marxism and postmodernism: our goal is to learn from one another
Part VI Postcolonial Marx
17 Global Marx?
18 Primitive accumulation and historical inevitability: a postcolonial critique
19 Draining the “blood energy”: destruction of independent production and creation of migrant workers in post-reform China
20 Problematizing the global economy: financialization and the “feudalization” of capital
21 Reproduction of noncapital: a Marxian perspective on the informal economy in India
Part VII Capitalism and class analysis
22 Management ideologies and the class structure of capitalist enterprises: shareholderism vs. stakeholderism at Scott Paper Company
23 Lewis L. Lorwin’s “Five-Year Plan for the World”: a subsumed class response to the crises of the 1930s
Part VIII Communism without guarantees
24 Bad communisms
25 Hope without guarantees: overdeterminist anticapitalism amidst neoliberal precarity
Part IX Knowledge and class in everyday life
26 The work of sex
27 Homelessness as violence: bad people, bad policy, or overdetermined social processes?
28 Family farms, class, and the future of food
29 A long shadow and undiscovered country: notes on the class analysis of education
30 Ecological challenges: a Marxist response
Series: Economics as Social Theory
Length: 532 pages
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (October 15, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1138634484
ISBN-13: 978-1138634480