Knowledge, Class, and Economics ─ Marxism Without Guarantees

The historical materialism of the classical Marxist tradition envisions human history as a developmental sequence, with each stage defined by the level of technology and the corresponding mode of production. Marx and Engels themselves expressed confidence that socialism and communism were gestating within 19th century capitalism, just as capitalism had gestated for centuries within European feudalism. Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, both Economics professors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, responded to the teleology and economism of this Marxist orthodoxy by adopting a notion of overdetermination from Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. In the hands of Resnick and Wolff, overdetermination became a methodological-cum-ontological premise according to which every social phenomenon is to be understood as the byproduct of an infinitely complex causal web that defies reduction to any subset of causes. For Resnick and Wolff, the Marxist project is to envision and examine the conditions and consequences of class processes: exploitative and non-exploitative, actual and envisioned.

This book presents a broad, reflective survey of the "Amherst school" of non-determinist Marxist political economy inspired by the work of Resnick and Wolff: its elemental concepts, intellectual origins, and future prospects, and the multiple pathways explored in its 40-year evolution. The volume’s original essays reflect the range of projects and perspectives that comprise the Amherst school and it’s defining ideas: a novel conception of class as a process of performing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor, and an overarching open-system framework that presupposes the irreducible complexity and contingency of social-historical events. The Amherst school has influenced contemporary economic theory, literary theory, diverse strands of the Marxian tradition, and major intellectual movements of the late 20th century: postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, feminism, deconstruction, poststructuralism and postmodernism.

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.