Re/presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism

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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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