Stephen A. Resnick - New Departures in Marxian Theory

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 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.

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

Rationality, Institutions and Economic Methodology

Edited by Uskali Mki, Bo Gustafsson, and Christian Knudsen

New Directions in Economic Methodology

Edited by Roger Backhouse

Who Pays for the Kids?

Nancy Folbre

Rules and Choice in Economics

Viktor Vanberg

Beyond Rhetoric and Realism in Economics

Thomas A. Boylan and Paschal F. O'Gorman

Feminism, Objectivity and Economics

Julie A. Nelson

Economic Evolution

Jack J. Vromen

Economics and Reality

Tony Lawson

The Market

John O'Neill

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 do Economists Know?

Edited by Robert F. Garnett, Jr

Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge

Edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio

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

Reorienting Economics

Tony Lawson

Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics

Edited by Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper

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

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

New Departures in Marxian Theory

Edited by
Stephen A. Resnick and
Richard D. Wolff

LONDIN AND NEW YORK

First published 2006
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

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2006 editorial matter and selection, Stephen A. Resnick and
Richard D. Wolff; individual chapters, the contributors

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ISBN 0-203-08667-8 Master e-book ISBN