Books


New Departures in Marxian Theory
New York:  Routledge, 2006

Over the last twenty-five years, Resnick and Wolff have developed a groundbreaking interpretation of Marxian theory generally and of Marxian economics in particular.  This book brings together their key contributions and underscores their different interpretations.

In facing and trying to resolve contradictions and lapses within Marxism, the authors have confronted the basic incompatibilities among the dominant modern versions of Marxian theory, and the fact that Marxism seemed cut off from the criticisms of determinist modes of thought offered by post-structuralism and post-modernism and even by some of Marxiams greatest theorists.

 
   

Class Theory and History

Class Theory and History
New York:  Routledge, 2002

Class Theory and History takes an ambitious and ground-breaking look at the entire history of the Soviet Union and presents a new kind of analysis of the history of the USSR: examining its birth, evolution, and death in class terms.  Utilizing the class analytics they have developed over the last three decades, Resnick and Wolff formulate the most fully developed economic theory of communism now available, and use that theory to answer the question: did communism ever exist in the USSR and if so, where, why and for how long?  Their initial, and controversial, conclusion: Soviet industry never established a communist class structure.  This conclusion then leads to the hypothesis that the twentieth century's defining struggle was not between communism in the USSR and capitalism in the United States, but rather between their respective state and private capitalism's.  Combining class theory and Soviet history, the book yields key lessons for the future of private capitalism, state capitalism, and communism.

Re/presenting Class

Re/presenting Class
Durham: Duke University Press, 2001

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.

Class and Its Others

Class and Its Others
Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2000

While references to gender, race and class are everywhere in social theory, class has not received the kind of theoretical and empirical attention accorded to gender and race.  A welcome and much-needed corrective, this book offers a novel theoretical approach to class and an active practice of class analysis.

The authors offer new and compelling ways to look at class through examinations of such topics as sex work, the experiences of African American women as domestic laborers, and blue- and white-collar workers.  Their work acknowledges that individuals may participate in various class relations at one moment or over time and that class identities are multiple and changing, interacting with other aspects of identity in contingent and unpredictable ways.

The essays in the book focus on class difference, class transformation and change, and on the intersection of class, race, gender, sexuality, and other dimensions of identity.  They find class in seemingly unlikely places - in households, parent-child relationships, and self-employment - and locate class politics on the interpersonal level as well as at the level of enterprises, communities, and nations.  Taken together, they will prompt a rethinking of class and class subjectivity that will expand social theory.

Bringing It All Back Home

Bringing It All Back Home
London: Pluto Press, 1994
Copies available from the authors upon email request

Bringing It All Back Home uses the intimate arena of the household as the novel setting for a groundbreaking study of the relationships between class, gender and power today.  The authors - and the feminist scholars who offered responses to their critique - integrate the rich traditions of Marxism and feminism, and more recent developments in Marxian theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theorise a new approach to the contemporary crisis of the family.  They offer an innovative reading of the relationship between class and gender, in which the household itself can be seen as the site of conflict and of profound transformation.  In the process, they suggest a new range of possibilities for thinking about and understanding the complexity of human existence.

Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical

Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987

Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical is the text with a difference.  It teaches the fundamentals of economics comparatively - systematically contrasting neoclassical theory with the new Marxian theory that represents the most developed and critical alternative economics.

Instead of the orthodox Marxism of Eastern Europe's discredited command economies, the theory elaborated here represents the systematic alternative to neoclassical theory developed over the past twenty-five years by Marxian scholars in the West.  It begins on the solid and systemic foundation set by Marx, but it avoids the dogmatisms that trapped many Marxists in their focus on the U.S.S.R.

Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick provide a fresh and balanced explication of the differing assumptions, logical structures, and arguments of both theories.  Their discussion of neoclassical theory stresses a coherent overview often obscured in standard texts.  The treatment of Marxian theory assumes no familiarity with the subject, proceeding from first principles through analysis and social implications.

Wolff and Resnick address the political and philosophical aspects of evaluating and choosing between alternative theories, but without polemics.  Whether you teach principles (of micro- or macro-economics), Marxian economics, or comparative economic systems, Wolff and Resnick's comparative approach offers a new and revealing perspective on economics and processes of economic theorizing.

Knowledge and Class

Knowledge and Class
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987

Intense debates in recent decades have provoked major new directions in Marxist theory.  Earlier reductionist notions of knowledge, dialectics, contradiction, class, and capitalism have been challenged and profoundly transformed.  Economic determinism has given way to new kinds of philosophic, social, and economic analysis such as the one Resnick and Wolff here develop around overdeterminism.  Showing that Lenin, Lukacs, Gramsci, Mao, and Althusser contributed concepts of knowledge, class, and society that can radically alter traditional dialectical materialism, the authors demonstrate how this alteration also transforms Marxist economic theory.  The dramatic result is a new Marxian theory, a new analysis of class, enterprise, and state.

Rethinking Marxism

Rethinking Marxism
New York: Autonomedia, 1985

This festschrift volume honors the works of Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy. An introductory essay by the editors examines the evolution of their contributions to Marxian theory and analysis. A bibliography provides the most complete listing of their work to the point of publication. Internationally renowned Marxist scholars (including Ernest Mandel, Charles Bettelheim, Immanuel Wallerstein and many others) contributed original essays in fitting tribute to the importance of the honorees' works.