Abstract:

In this issue we begin the publication of the series of remarkable papers that were delivered in the plenary sessions that took place during the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference. All three main sessions were attended by many hundreds of scholars, students, and activists, who were treated to provocative new ideas and an engaging set of debates among the speakers and with the audience.

On Friday evening, the topic was "imperialism and the fantasies of democracy" and the session, which was coordinated by Vincent Lyon-Callo and Maliha Safri (building on and extending the long line of articles on the issue of imperialism published over the years in RM, which are listed on the conference section of the web site), included presentations by Antonio Callari, Ernesto Laclau, and Ella Shohat. The goal of the session was to chart a path beyond simple critiques of imperialism by recognizing the role that democratic discourse plays both in constituting today's imperial visions and in mobilizing the growing reactions to imperialism around the world.

Shohat, in an essay excerpted from a forthcoming book coauthored with Robert Stam, approaches the issue of the relationship between imperialism and democracy by focusing on the question of exceptionalism, a relational form of "national narcissism" in and through which the idealized "we" of the imagined national family attempts to exalt itself vis-à-vis other nations. The particular form of narcissism that most concerns them is American exceptionalism, which in their view can best be considered in a historicized, relational, and transnational frame. Thus, for example, the grounds of the belief in the exceptional status of the United States have changed over time, from the "city on the hill" of uniquely democratic institutions and the exercise of benevolent power in the world through the "American dream" of upwardly mobile prosperity and the "Washington Consensus" of free markets and smaller government to the neoconservative "will to power." From the beginning these have been conjoined with various forms of self-delusion, universalism, and the myth of innocence. The "perverse new twist" to American exceptionalism is the idea that the United States makes exceptions for itself when it comes to international law and human rights. But, according to Shohat and Stam, some Marxists misunderstand the nature of American exceptionalism, reducing it to a Protestant cultural essence and treating it as entirely without precedent. They cite the examples of French exceptionalism, which was consolidating republican democracy under the Third Republic as it was exercising imperial autocracy abroad, and of Brazilian attempts to reconcile liberal enlightenment principles of democracy and inequality with racialized injustice - not to mention the imperial projects of Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain. Shohat and Stam encourage us to recognize both the lethal menace that U.S. hyperpower represents in the world today and the ways postcolonial Europe, notwithstanding its questioning of the U.S. war in Iraq, remains implicated in "institutional racism, neocolonialism, and top-down globalization."

The spatial dimensions of globalization have been considered from two different perspectives, those that emphasize the homogenization of space and those that focus on the renewed importance of regional economies and local development. For Giuseppe Cocco, the apparent opposition between these approaches can be overcome by examining the conflicts inherent in the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization associated with the "new quality of labor" created by the shift to post-Fordism. Utilizing concepts drawn from three different sources - the geophilosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the microphysics of power outlined by Michel Foucault, and the political economy of migration in Yann Moulier-Boutang's recent work - Cocco sets out to comprehend the new spaces of post-Fordist labor. On one hand, labor is being deterritorialized, outside the striated space defined by industry and "beyond the juridical barriers placed by the Nation-States," thus provoking capital to become both decentralized and global; on the other hand, labor has become reterritorialized through "networks of interaction," creating an identity between "the public and the common," which capital attempts to privatize, leading to the creation of new xenophobic regionalisms. Cocco credits Paul Krugman with grasping exactly this combination of deterritorialization/reterritorialization characteristic of postindustrial cities like Los Angeles, which can be understood in terms of the complementary and conflicting axes relating to two key shifts: from the disciplinary space of dead labor to the living labor of the territories (and thus to biopower) and from discipline to the biopolitical control of the territories. The set of antagonisms within these new "nomadic" territories can also be seen in the decision to locate a new Volkswagen plant in the city of Resende in Brazil: for Cocco, this factory represents the end of the forms of discipline and control associated with the factory paradigm, and therefore another step in the "deterritorialization and dematerialization of labor," accompanied by the attempt on the part of capital to control global productive networks, thus creating a new society of control over life within territories. In Cocco's view, the new approach that is required should focus not on the opposition between mobility and lack of mobility across territories but, rather, on the conflicts that arise between two different forms of mobility within territories: the striated local and global spaces constituted by the dead labor of capital versus the smooth, nomadic space of living labor that draws its power from interaction and cooperation.

Marxist aesthetics and cultural studies are replete with debates concerning the commodification of art - how it operates, what effect it has on aesthetic value, what consequences it has for the possibility of political contestation or critique, and so on. What happens, though, when the system of commodity exchange and debt is interrupted by bankruptcy, and when the person declaring bankruptcy is an artist whose work is considered to be a potential asset? Jeremy Boyle found himself in exactly that circumstance, and his account of the experience documents both the mundane and extraordinary dimensions of the event. On one hand, the settling of accounts in bankruptcy court is a routine matter in that it involves millions of individuals every year across the United States (including the 40 who were present when Boyle appeared with his lawyer before the judge). But it is an extraordinary event for most of the individuals who are forced to file, made even stranger by the Trustee's concern that someone who regularly engages in the activity of performing labor and producing objects might not be motivated solely by "economic return." Why the concern that he might be attempting to subvert the system of commodity exchange? Is he more or less of an artist - or, for that matter, a person, a commodity-owning subject - because his art does not have higher market value? After this brief moment of questioning, when the conventions defining the system appear to be suspended, normality is quickly restored by the Trustee: Boyle's is declared a "no-asset case."

Capitalism is the only game in town - or so it seems for many of our students, colleagues, and fellow citizens. Marxists, of course, notwithstanding their many theoretical and political differences, hold a different view: that capitalism is not the only way of organizing the economy and society, that another - collective or communal - world is both necessary and possible. But do we have a good set of arguments to make this case? Richard Wolff sets out to explain why he, from a Marxist perspective, prefers communism to capitalism. He begins by defining capitalist exploitation, in terms of the social relationship whereby capitalists are able to appropriate surplus value from workers who receive in the form of wages only part of the value they create. Capitalists then distribute this surplus to themselves and others (such as supervisors and government officials) who create the economic and social conditions within which capitalism continues to exist. Wolff argues that capitalist exploitation should be viewed in a negative light - for moral and ethical reasons (in the sense that it introduces inequality as well as "opposition, conflict, tension, and potential explosiveness" into the community of interdependent workers) and in terms of its social effects (ranging from an "unequal development of human skills, aptitudes, and attitudes" and impoverished forms of democracy to the passive consumption of cultural commodities and a hardening of the distinction between so-called high and low culture). Communism, on the other hand, is defined as a form of production in which workers collectively appropriate and distribute the surplus. In Wolff's view, while the communist class process cannot be expected to introduce social harmony (since he expects that tensions and struggles over such issues as the distribution of the surplus, the interdependence among enterprises, and collective and individual forms of consumption would exist), it does involve the elimination of capitalist exploitation and an expansion of "the social issues subject to democratic decision-making." For these reasons, and against the neoliberal equation of capitalism and freedom, "comm unism remains as both utopian vision and impetus for concrete social analyses and anticapitalist social action."

Media coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between Hamas and Fateh and rarely mentions the Palestinian Communist Party (later renamed the People's Party). Orayb Aref Najjar seeks to fill this absence by examining the documents and press of the People's Party (utilizing a methodology borrowed from Stuart Hall's Paper Voices) to determine how the Party has understood and played out its role in Palestinian politics after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and, later, with the rise of the Islamists. Historically, Najjar explains, the Palestinian Communist Party was forced to negotiate a tangled web involving the Communist Party of Israel, the anticommunist politics of Jordan, the Soviet position on the partition of Palestine, the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (which the Party eventually joined in 1987), and the involvement of the Islamic movement in the uprising against the Israeli occupation. After the renaming of the Party in 1991, Najjar argues that it moved to embrace the human rights and democracy movement in the occupied territories as a way of creating a "common language" with the world. The Party's weekly newspaper, Attalia, included a running debate on the meaning of democracy as well as a strong defense of a "pluralistic society that respects religion but is not dominated by it." But the Party itself fell into a deep crisis - which was financial (forcing it to slash its publishing budget), organizational (losing badly in local and national elections), and ideological (having distanced itself from its own past achievements and current roles within various nongovernmental organizations). Najjar finds evidence, however, suggesting that the Party has now "come full circle" by embracing its Marxist past and attempting to enter into negotiations with Hamas and the new government. Discussions at the Party's upcoming fourth conference will determine how it redefines its mission and its political program to create a progressive alternative amidst increasingly bleak conditions in the occupied territories.

Jacques Bidet has long argued that Marx's Capital is an indispensable source for analyzing the "pathologies" - the inequalities and forms of exclusion - inherent in contemporary society, which needs to be explained to a new generation of thinkers and activists. But he also believes that Marx's approach needs to be reconstructed, in order to overcome the "epistemological and political obstacles classical Marxism came up against" and to provide a "more realistic" conception of contemporary global capitalism. The results of this project of explanation and reconstruction (initially published as a book by the same title in France) are summarized here for the first time in English. Bidet identifies Marx's approach as starting from one pole, the market; his key "correction" to Capital is to add a second pole, organization. On the basis of this "more complex beginning," Bidet proceeds to elaborate what he considers to be the "general question of the capitalist form of society" as well to redefine key Marxian concepts (such as class and world-system) and to introduce new concepts (such as multitude and world state). At the root of Bidet's scheme is the idea that the "metastructure" (the presupposed structure) of modern society comprises both market and organization, each of which presumes a certain "face" or rational understanding: the economic (which implies individual contract) and the juridico-political (based on central or social contract). Whereas Marx describes a historical sequence from market to organization, Bidet sees the two poles in terms of a "structural complementarity" within modernity from its very beginning. From this starting point, Bidet elaborates a new conception of the capitalist class structure (with a dominant class founded on both economic capital and cultural/organizational capital and an exploited class defined by market relations, organizational relations, and a combination of the two) and a distinctive view of politics (comprising three positions - the two complementary and antagonist poles of the dominant class, e.g., Republicans and Democrats, plus a third position "from below"). Bidet thus interprets the objective of socialism not in terms of abolishing completely market and organization but, rather, as eliminating the roles both poles play in producing and reproducing classes. His goal is to carry out this reconstruction at various levels, from the nation-state through the world-system, where he glimpses the "gestation of a Global State" governed by the law of capital and, facing it, a global civic movement, which is demanding "another sort of globalization."

There is a now a large, and largely critical, literature concerning the general oppression of women within the Mexican maquiladora sector. But James Hamm notices a recent shift in this literature, in an attempt to understand the gender dimensions of maquiladora workers' lives being "produced in multitudinous variations." His own case study introduces class into this discussion, with the goal of examining the "unpredictable, constantly challenged, and frequently renegotiated" dynamic between capitalist enterprises and their workers, which at least in the case of one married couple - Pablo and María, both maquiladora workers in Ciudad Juárez - has led to a more egalitarian household and to their participation in noncapitalist relations. Prior to migrating from Oaxaca, Pablo was a self-employed furniture-maker, who appropriated his own surplus labor individually in the shop and, together with his wife, collectively in their communal household. (But, Hamm notes, there was nothing fixed about the household relationship. At some times, it became a feudal relationship, with Pablo appropriating the surplus labor performed by María.) After moving to the border, their lives changed in dramatic fashion. Inside the household, the performance and appropriation of surplus labor became more communal (although Hamm does recognize the possibility of seeing their labor differently, as independent producers). In the factory, both became exploited laborers within the capitalist class process. Their plans, however, are for Pablo to become an independent furniture-maker again, which depends on a whole host of conditions, from their ability to accumulate savings and renegotiate household responsibilities to the opportunities afforded by his moving in and out of maquiladora employment. In a more general sense, Hamm sees his use of Marxian class analysis in ethnographic investigation as undoing the conception that the "people a globalization approach holds to be passive both have agency and affect globalization in the process of being affected by it." It also raises questions about the meanings of such terms as exploitation and oppression, both in households and in factories. As an anthropologist, Hamm believes it is necessary to tell a "variety of stories," amongst which lingering contradictions "must be allowed to exist," in order to convey the complexity of the lived relations of people like Pablo and María.

The first Remarx essay is devoted to a critique of traditional Marxist conceptions of wage-labor. In comparing capitalism and slavery, Marxists have long insisted on both the radical difference between them (capitalist wage-labor coinciding with negative ownership rights in the means of production and formal marketplace freedom, the freedom to sell one's ability to perform labor) and a fundamental similarity (based on the unfreedom associated with exploitation, referring to wage-labor as a form of wage-slavery). For Rakesh Bhandari, however, Marx and latter-day Marxists have mistakenly taken many instances of labor performed under the conditions of plantation slavery to be fundamentally different from and historically prior to capitalist wage-labor. Bhandari's own view is that wage-labor has long existed in the "disguised forms" of serfs, bonded labor, and slaves and that Marxists have been guilty of relying on metaphysical, Orientalist, and technological assumptions to deny the extensive role of wage-labor in early capitalism. The metaphysical mistake derives from an uncritical reliance on the dialectics of Hegel's Logic, such that history is seen as the unfolding of stages, for example, from precapitalist relations of personal dependence to capitalist relations of personal independence based on objective dependence. What Bhandari considers to be the Eurocentrism or Orientalism in Marx's conception of capitalist wage-labor stems from a particular conception of the trajectory of freedom, such that "wage-labor is specified as free and incompatible with formally unfree labor relations." Bhandari highlights Marx's debt to the work of Richard Jones, especially the latter's analysis of the forms in which surplus labor had been appropriated from precapitalist producers and of the capitalist labor fund, to devise a theory of ground rent, according to which capitalist wage-labor is identified with a freedom that uniquely emerged within Western history. While Bhandari does believe that the concept of the Asiatic mode of production may have served a useful purpose for Marx (emphasizing, in contrast, the degree of interdependence among enterprises within the capitalist totality), in the Marxist lit erature itself the East came to be represent "in fantastic form" the use of coercion that distinguishes the treatment of exploited direct producers before capitalism from that of wage-laborers. Finally, Bhandari points out that both Marx and contemporary Marxists (like G. A. Cohen) rely on problematic technological arguments in opposing slavery and wage-labor - in presuming that the formal subsumption of labor and the continuous reorganization of the labor process can only be based on free wage-labor. Bhandari's alternative explanation is that slavery may not have fettered mechanization (e.g., in the U.S. South) but, instead, that there were limited possibilities for mechanizing agricultural production. In the end, Bhandari argues that, when wage-labor is appropriately reconceptualized not in terms of formal freedom but as a form of enslavement - in the sense that the class of wage-laborers is enslaved to the capitalist class - the Marxist theory of history needs to be radically rethought: "wage-labor can take the form of slavery and that capitalism could have rested on slavery for centuries."

In the second Remarx essay, Craig Prichard proposes a closer connection and a new engagement between the fields of postmodern class analysis and critical management studies. From Prichard's perspective, those (like Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff) who utilize a postmodern class analysis to criticize contemporary capitalism argue that exploitation is perpetuated by a lack of conscious understanding that a class "theft" is taking place; what is missing, however, is an analysis of how this seeming lack of consciousness is orchestrated in and around the workplace. And this is exactly one of the key areas on which the critical management literature has focused, on the ways in which identities are constituted - in a far from straightforward manner - through work practices and organizationally legitimate forms of knowledge. Prichard offers the example of the ethnographic research in accounting firms carried out by Mark Covaleski and his colleagues, who show how the processes of mentoring and so-called management-by-objectives produce corporate clones "whose very sense of themselves is tied to organizational objectives and control." What this means for Prichard is that employees have little room for maneuver in confronting class relations and that they are actively engaged in their own exploitation. But the potential contribution moves in the other direction, too. The concept of class defined in terms of surplus labor (as against other, e.g., Weberian, notions of class) can be integrated into critical management studies with the aim of analyzing such phenomena as multiple class positions, the effects of political and cultural processes on the performance of surplus labor, the relationship between capitalist and noncapitalist class processes, and much more. Prichard sees both fields grappling with similar questions: how do people ignore or put aside knowledge of existing forms of exploitation, oppression, and domination, and "what should be done about it?"

Finally, we are pleased to announce that we have just signed a new five-year contract extension with Routledge (carrying us through to the end of 2012). Clearly, RM has benefitted from the publishing resources and international reach of such an organization. We have also had the great fortune of collaborating with the very capable staff at Routledge (especially the people with whom we have worked most closely, Tracy Roberts, Katherine Burton, Rebecca Vickerstaff, and Joel Phipps) and our own (Julie Graham, Jackie Southern, James Ford, and Peter Tamas) to edit, produce, promote, and distribute this journal - and we look forward to continuing our collaboration for many years to come.

The Editors

Notes:

In this issue we begin the publication of the series of remarkable papers that were delivered in the plenary sessions that took place during the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference. All three main sessions were attended by many hundreds of scholars, students, and activists, who were treated to provocative new ideas and an engaging set of debates among the speakers and with the audience.

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ISBN:

0415700035

URL:

http://www.chinesecapitalism.com/

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In the past fifty years, the experience of the Chinese economy has continually challenged the assumptions of laissez-faire economics. It has sustained a strong growth rate, changed the structure of international economic relationships and has become critical to many multinational corporations. Now, it appears to be on the verge of becoming a new economic superpower. Addressing the structure and dynamics of the Chinese economy, Satyananda J. Gabriel examines in-depth the connection between growth and the particular version of Marxism that has been adopted by the Communist Party of China. One of the most comprehensive analyses of the contemporary Chinese economy, this book covers industry and agriculture, rural and urban enterprises, labour power and financial markets, and the process of integrating the Chinese domestic economy into global capitalism. Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision identifies the current transition in China as a historic passage from state feudalism to state capitalism that will significantly alter both the internal political and economic dynamics of China and the global political economy.

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URL:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415934869/rethinkingmar-20

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According to Nehru, the transition from a backward agricultural society to a modern industrialized society was the only road for India to progress. So, for the past few decades, India has focused its transitional development around movement away from a state-controlled economy toward that of a free market economy. Transition and Development in India challenges the current basis of this theory of development, laying the groundwork for an entirely new Marxist approach to transition that should apply not just to India, but to all developing nations.

Anjan Chakrabarti is a Reader of Economics at the University of Calcutta. Stephen Cullenberg is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Riverside.

Chakrabarti and Cullenberg’s work on India succeeds beautifully in rethinking many of the classical Marxist understandings of class, labor, history, and change, yet within an engaged, committed critique of capitalist political economy. Lisa Lowe, co-editor of The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital

An energetic, imaginative defense of postmodern Marxist theory. More impressively, they have provided a lucid and utterly undogmatic analysis of the moment of economic transition. This book will be useful for all those interested in contemporary changes not only in India but also the rest of the world. Amitava Kumar, author of Bombay-London-New York

The authors do an admirable job of reviewing the relevant literature on the ‘transition to capitalism’ in India, formulating important points of criticism of that literature, and presenting their alternative notion of transition and applying it to the current debate concerning economic liberalization in India. Their treatment is both thorough and balanced, providing both background material for relative novices and challenging theses for more advanced readers. David Ruccio, co-author of Postmodern Moments in Modern Economics

Transition and Development in India will irritate, and hopefully stimulate, orthodox Marxists and non-Marxists alike. Chakrabarti and Cullenberg dissect the debates in India over modes of production and subaltern studies and offer a reformulated, postmodernist Marxist theory to shed light on the economic reforms introduced in India after 1991. This book is essential reading for those who want to know the direction in which modern Marxism is going. Keith Griffin, author of Alternative Strategies for Economic Development

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Contents

• The Crisis, the Third World, and North-South, East-West Relations Samir Amin1
• From Civilization to Barbarism Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen 9
• Reflections on Concepts of Class and Class Struggle in Marx's Work Charles Bettelheim 15
• The Labor Theory of Value and the Specificity of Marxian Economics Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis 31
• The Centrality of Money, Credit, and Financial Intermediation in Marx's Crisis Theory: An Interpretation of Marx's Methodology James Crotty 45
• Dialogue, Utopia and the Division of Labor: Reflections on Some Themes by Harry Magdoff Kim Edel and Matthew Edel 83
• Sweezy and the Proletariat Richard Edwards 99
• A Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter Centenary and the Editors of Monthly Review Andre Gunder Frank 115
• Illusions of Liberation: The Psychology of Colonialism and Revolution in the Work of Octave Mannoni and Frantz Fanon Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese 127
• Value, Exchange and Capital Donald J. Harris 151
• The Theoretical Status of Monopoly Capital Michael A. Lebowitz 185
• On the Analysis of Advanced Capitalist Economy David Levine 205
• Marx and Engels on Commodity Production and Bureaucracy Ernest Mandel 223
• State Power and Capitalist Democracy Ralph Miliband 259
• Capital, Crisis, Class Struggle James O'Connor 273
• The Politics of Intervention: The Italian Crisis of 1976 Cheryl Payer 295
• A Marxian Reconceptualization of Income and its Distribution Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff 319
• The Organic Composition of Capital and Capitalist Development Bob Rowthorn and Donald J. Harris 345
• Monopoly Capital vs. the Fundamentalists Howard J. Sherman 359
• Marx and Underdevelopment Immanuel Wallerstein 379
• Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy: Biographical Notes Michael Hillard 397
• Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy: Selected Bibliographies Michael Hillard 405

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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0819562920/rethinkingmar-20

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• These valuable and provocative essays touch upon all the major aspects of Althusser’s multifaceted theoretical and critical work. They offer the reader careful analyses and discussions of these categories and concepts for which Althusser is best known, and which account for Althusser’s continuing relevance to some of the most thorny and intensely debated issues that are being confronted today by political philosophers, social theorists, Marxist intellectuals, cultural critics, and so on. Joseph Buttigieg
• Althusser’s approach has been one of the most important developments in Marxist theory in the second half of the 20th century. The book provides one of the most comprehensive studies yet of its various dimensions. Given the depth of the various contributions and the wide range of the topics covered, it is indispensable reading for all those interested in contemporary socialist theory. Ernesto Laclau

Contents

Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio: Introduction: Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory

Part 1: The Role Of The Subject: The Individual and The Masses

• Antonio Negri: Notes on the Evolution of the Thought of the Later Althusser
• Grahame Lock: Subject, Interpellation, and Ideology
• Warren Montag: Beyond Force and Consent: Althusser, Spinoza, Hobbes
Part 2: Totality, Causality, and Explanation
• Etienne Balibar: Structural Causality, Overdetermination, and Antagonism
• Stephen Cullenberg: Althusser and the Decentering of the Marxist Totality
• Richard Wolff: Althusser and Hegel: Making Marxist Explanations Antiessentialist and Dialectical
Part 3: Class Analysis and Political Economy
• Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff: The New Marxian Political Economy and the Contribution of Althusser
• Bruce Roberts: The Visible and the Measurable: Althusser and the Marxian Theory of Value
• J. K. Gibson-Graham: Althusser and Capitalism: An Encounter in Contradiction
• Richard McIntyre: Mode of Production, Social Formation, and Uneven Development, or Is There Capitalism in America?
Part 4: Politics: Class and Beyond
• Emmanuel Terray: An Encounter: Althusser and Machiavelli
• Jonathan Diskin: Rethinking Socialism: What’s in a Name?
• AnnMarie Wolpe: Schooling as an ISA: Race and Gender in South Africa and Educational Reform
• Alain Lipietz: Political Ecology and the Workers' Movement: Similarities and Differences
Part 5: Louis Althusser
• Gregory Elliott: Analysis Terminated, Analysis Interminable
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URL:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/089862424X/rethinkingmar-20

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Containing more than 50 papers and other presentations from the “Marxism in the New World Order: Crises and Possibilities” conference held at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in November 1992. Contributors include Etienne Balibar, Barbara Epstein, Nancy Fraser, Rosemary Hennessy, M. C. Howard and J. E. King, Douglas Kellner, Richard Levins, Ernest Mandel, Ralph Miliband, Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, Martha Rosler, Sheila Rowbotham, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Immanuel Wallerstein.

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URL:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822324148/rethinkingmar-20

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Tales of child sacrifice, demon lovers, incestual relations, and returns from the dead are part of English and Irish gothic literature. Such recurring tropes are examined in this pioneering study by Margot Gayle Backus to show how Anglo-Irish gothic works written from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries reflect the destructive effects of imperialism on the children and later descendents of Protestant English settlers in Ireland.

Backus uses contemporary theory, including that of Michel Foucault and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to analyze texts by authors ranging from Richardson, Swift, Burke, Edgeworth, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary Irish novelists and playwrights. By charting the changing relations between the family and the British state, she shows how these authors dramatized a legacy of violence within the family cell and discusses how disturbing themes of child sacrifice and colonial repression are portrayed through irony, satire, "paranoid" fantasy, and gothic romance. In a reconceptualization of the Freudian family romance, Backus argues that the figures of the Anglo-Irish gothic embody the particular residue of childhood experiences within a settler colonial society in which biological reproduction represented an economic and political imperative.

Backus’s bold positioning of the nuclear family at the center of post-Enlightenment class and colonial power relations in England and Ireland will challenge and provoke scholars in the fields of Irish literature and British and postcolonial studies. The book will also interest students and scholars of women’s studies, and it has important implications for understanding contemporary conflicts in Ireland.

Contents:

• The Other Half of the Story: English and Irish Social Formations, 1550-1700
• “Does She Not Deserve to Pay for All This?” Compulsory Romance in the Constricting Family Cell
• “Something Valuable of Their Own”: Children, Reproduction, and Irony in Swift, Burke, and Edgeworth
• “A Very Strange Agony”: Parables of Sexual Subject Formation in Melmoth the Wanderer, Carmilla, and Dracula
• Irish Gothic Realism and the Great War: The Devil’s Bargain and the Demon Lover
• Somebody Else’s Troubles: Post-treaty Retrenchment and the (Burning) Big House Novel
• “Perhaps I May Come Alive”: Mother Ireland and the Unfinished Revolution

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URL:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/2711.ctl

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This is a highly controversial and innovative work on Marxian theory. The book ranges from subtle theoretical analyses of the epistemological foundation of currently predominant Marxist interpretations, to the theory of the firm, and to a new interpretation of the State in market economies. Resnick and Wolff are rejecting economic determinisms of all kinds. Actually, they are rethinking Marxism.

—Claude Menard

This book is remarkable in many ways. Its writing, for example, is remarkably clear, but, more importantly, the argumentation is remarkably liberating in the context of traditional Marxist discourse. Wolff and Resnick successfully undermine Marxist dogmas, expose the rigid ways in which Marxists tend to use concepts such as economic determinism and class, and indicate the possibilities for a new reading of Marx's work. Their book will challenge established Marxist thinking and stimulate a Marxist approach that is 'open' in the sense that it is self-conscious of its own process. The book is important reading for Marxists. The book will also be of interest to critics of conventional economic methodology. I perceive, namely, remarkable similarities with recent work that conceives orthodox economics as a form of rhetoric or as distinctive discursive practices.

—Arjo Klamer

Contents

• A Marxian Theory
• Marxian Epistemology: The Critique of Economic Determinism
• A Marxian Theory of Classes
• Class Analysis: A Marxian Theory of the Enterprise
• Class Analysis: A Marxian Theory of the State

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URL:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1557868638/rethinkingmar-20

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Why does the future (not to mention the present) seem to offer no hope of escape from capitalism? Ironically, the author argues, it is not the economic discourse of the right but primarily the socialist and Marxist traditions that have constituted capitalism as large, powerful, active, expansive, penetrating, systemic, self-reproducing, dynamic, victorious, and capable of conferring identity and meaning. What this has meant for left politics is the continual deferral of anticapitalist projects of social transformation and noncapitalist initiatives of economic innovation, since these presumably would have little chance of success in the face of a predominantly or exclusively capitalist economy.

In this book J.K. Gibson-Graham explores the possibility of more enlivening modes of economic thought and action, outside and beyond the theory and practice of capitalist reproduction. Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist retheorizings of subjectivity and the body, and on anti-essentialist traces within Marxism, she takes on the many forms of capitalist representation to be found in theories of globalization, post-Fordist development, and contemporary urban space. She seeks (and finds) protean representations of capitalism not only in economic policy discourse but in the discursive practices of feminism and cultural studies and in left political practices. Challenging the vision of capitalism as necessarily and naturally hegemonic, J.K. Gibson-Graham liberates a space of economic difference, one in which a noncapitalist politics of economic invention might take root and flourish.

Contents

• Strategies
• Capitalism and Anti-Essentialism: An Encounter in Contradiction
• Class And The Politics Of "Identity"
• How Do We Get Out Of This Capitalist Place
• The Economy, Stupid! Industrial Policy Discourse And The Body Economic
• Querying Globalization
• Post-Fordism As Politics
• Toward A New Class Politics Of Distribution
• "Hewers Of Cake And Drawers Of Tea"
• Haunting Capitalism: Ghosts On A Blackboard
• Waiting For The Revolution. . .

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URL:

http://www.resistancebooks.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=203

Abstract:

Bringing It All Back Home uses the intimate arena of the household as the novel setting for a groundbreaking study of the relationships among 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

Contents

• INTRODUCTION by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• For Every Knight in Shining Armor, There's a Castle Waiting to Be Cleaned: A Marxist-Feminist Analysis of the Household
• Debating the Marxist-Feminist Interpretation of the Household
  • Julie Matthaei
  • Zillah Eisenstein
  • Kim Lane Scheppele
  • Nancy Folbre and Heidi Hartmann
  • Stephanie Koontz
• The Reagan-Bush Strategy: Shifting Crises from Enterprises to Households
• Anorexia as Crises Embodied: A Marxist-Feminist Analysis

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URL:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822327201/rethinkingmar-20

Abstract:

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.

Table of Contents:

• Toward a Poststructuralist Political Economy J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, Richard D. Wolff 1
• Reading Marx for Class Bruce Norton 23
• Toward a New Class Politics of the Enterprise J. K. Gibson-Graham and Phillip O'Neill 56
• Ivy-covered Exploitation: Class, Education, and the Liberal Arts College Fred Curtis 81
• Nature and Class: A Marxian Value Analysis Andriana Vlachou 105
• The Promise of Finance: Banks and Community Development Carole Biewener 131
• "After" Development: Re-imagining Economy and Class J. K. Gibson-Graham and David Ruccio 158
• Development and Class Transition in India Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenberg 182
• A Class Analysis of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 Satyananda J. Gabriel 206
• Sharecropping and Feudal Class Processes in the Postbellum Mississippi Delta Serap Ayse Kayatekin 227
• Communal Class Processes and Precolumbian Social Dynamics Dean J. Saitta 247
• Struggles in the USSR: Communisms Attempted and Undone Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff 264
• References 291
• Contributors 317
• Index 319

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URL:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0816636184/rethinkingmar-20

Abstract:

A surprising and innovative look at class that proposes new approaches to this important topic.

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.

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URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Global-Economy-Justice-Alternatives-Neoliberalism/dp/0415224012/ref=sr_1_2/104-9758216-9796705?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176061580&sr=8-2

Abstract:

This volume rejects the claim of neoclassical economics that the global, market-based economy emerging today represents the highest possible stage of economic development. In place of global neoliberalism, the book calls for new policy regimes that promote global equality.

Global Economy, Global Justice explores a vital question that is suppressed in most economic texts: "What makes for a good economic outcome?" Neoclassical theory embraces the normative perspective of "welfarism" to assess economic outcomes. This volume demonstrates the fatal flaws of this perspective -- flaws that stem from objectionable assumptions about human nature, society, and science. Exposing these failures, the book obliterates the ethical foundations of neoliberalism.

George DeMartino probes heterodox economic traditions and philosophy in search of a suitable, viable alternative to welfarism. Drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, DeMartino proposes the egalitarian principle of the "global harmonization of capabilities" to guide economics. This principle provides a basis for resisting oppression the world over while nevertheless demanding respect for cultural diversity. DeMartino puts this principle to work adjudicating contemporary debates over global policy regimes, and completes the book with a set of deeply egalitarian global policies for the year 2025.

The engaging prose of Global Economy, Global Justice will appeal to those seeking to understand the intersection between economics and political philosophy. Its focus on the normative foundations of contemporary policy disputes makes it unique in the literature on globalisation.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction

• PART I Normative matters
• Neoclassical theory and welfarism
• Welfarism and the market
• Distributive justice and economic heterodoxy

• PART 2 Global neoliberalism
• Whose values, whose rules?
• Contesting competitiveness
• The trade debate

• PART 3 Rethinking global policy regimes
• Global economic policies for the year 2025

• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

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URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Falling-Rate-Profit-Directions-Rethinking/dp/0745308783/ref=sr_1_1/104-9758216-9796705?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176061326&sr=8-1

Abstract:

Description

The longstanding and hotly contested debate over the tendency of the rate of profit to fall has been a major source of controversy within Marxian political economy since the 19th century. The Falling Rate of Profit offers a lucid critique of the arguments, a fresh reading of the debate itself, and an alternative model of the contradictory movement of the rate of profit, in a cogent and compelling new study.

Summary

Marx's theory of the falling rate of profit has long been one of cornerstones of Marxian economic theory. It is still one of the most hotly debated topics in Marxian economics. For some, Marx's theory imparts the dynamic development of capitalism with a dialectic that will eventually lead to capitalism's downfall. For others, it is an imprecise or false theory, which together with the metaphysics of Marxian value theory, should be cast aside for more modern and correct theories.

At the core of this debate are different conceptions of technical change or accumulation, different theories of value, alternative conceptions of the economy, and even different views on the meaning and significance of the rate of profit which is purported to fall or not. At the same time, not far below the surface of the debate, are different views on the political significance of the falling rate of profit, which give this debate a particular urgency and vitality. Roughly, these political positions are of two types: (a) if the rate of profit must necessarily fall that provides the basis for a revolutionary transformation to socialism, or, alternatively, (b) if it doesn't fall, then political action will necessarily be reformist and capitalism can only be slowly transcended, if ever. It is little wonder, then, that this longstanding debate continues to this day.

Thus, the debate over Marx's theory of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) is not simply a debate over the technicalities of value theory, as a cursory reading of the debate might imply, but it also concerns at its very foundation issues concerning the ontological structure of social totalities, different senses of value and profit, opposed theories of causality, and profoundly different political visions. Indeed, as I argue throughout this book, the debate over the TRPF which has occurred now during the better part of the twentieth century, has taken place within the context of two fundamentally different Marxian paradigms, which can be identified by their different understandings of the structure of the social totality. On the one hand, the 'traditional' approach to the debate over the TRPF employs a Hegelian approach to the social totality (discussed in detail in Chapter 2), while the more recent debate over the Okishio theorem employs a Cartesian approach to the social totality (discussed in detail in Chapter 3). The debate over the TRPF, then, is not simply a debate over the movement in the rate of profit, but is also at heart a debate over the very philosophical foundations of social theory. In this way, the debate over the TRPF is part of the larger debate taking place in many fields of social theory over whether micro- or macrofoundations are the correct way to construct a theory of society.

The failure to recognize the presence and consequence of these contending Marxian paradigms at work in the larger debate over the TRPF is, as I argue, critical for understanding why after nearly 100 years this debate still remains such an enormously tangled web. The protagonists of various positions in the debate all too often fail to see or appreciate the now widely accepted position that the meaning and significance of concepts are context-dependent, and therefore the meaning of concepts, words, or sentences do not stand alone, independent of their particular usage. The Hegelian and Cartesian approaches to social totality impart irreducibly different meanings and significance to the key concepts of debate such as profit, technical change, enterprise, and economy. As a result, the issues of contention in one debate become non-issues or literally nonsensical ones in the other, and failure to reach a resolution on what often seems simply to be technical points of logic or mathematics become the frustrating, and then, too often, polemical result.

Despite the fundamental differences in Hegelian and Cartesian approaches, they share in common a commitment to reductionist social theory. For the Hegelian approach, the individual agents (capitalists, workers) are understood to carry out the laws of motion of the capitalist economy, conceived as a structured totality. For the Cartesian approach, the capitalist economy is nothing more than the pattern which emerges from the interaction of independently constituted rational agents. For both approaches, therefore, these is no dialectical interaction between part and whole. One of the purposes of this book is to move the debate over the TRPF beyond what I consider to be the now sterile oscillation between theories based on a microfoundational (Cartesian) or a macrofoundational (Hegelian) approach to social theory. In Chapter 4, I develop a "decentered" approach to the social totality, where neither the part is reduced to the logic of the whole, or the whole is simply an aggregation of preconstituted parts. Given this concept of a decentered totality, Chapter 4 then develops an alternative model of the contradictory movement of the rate of profit, with the hope that this alternative formulation can begin to move the debate over the TRPF in new and more fruitful directions.

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URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Neoclassical-Richard-D-Wolff/dp/0801834805/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-9758216-9796705?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176061052&sr=8-2

Abstract:

Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical is an economics text with a difference--a concise, systematic comparison of the two major contending economic theories in the world today. Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick provide a unique and balanced explication of the differing assumptions and arguments of neoclassical and Marxian economics. Their treatment of Marxian theory assumes no familiarity with the subject proceeding from first principles through analysis and social implications and integrating the important developments of the past twenty-five years. The discussion of neoclassical theory includes a coherent overvew often obscured in standard introductions to economics. Throughout, math is used simply and sparingly. Wolff and Resnick address broader aspects of evaluating or choosing between alternative theories, but their conclusions are nonpolemical. Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical provides not just an explanation but an appreciation of the two great traditions in modern political economy.

Contents

• Two Different Theories
• Neoclassical Theory
• Marxian Theory
• The Importance of Theoretical Differences

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