Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson. Graham is Professor of Geography at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Gibson is Senior Fellow of Human Geography at Australian National University.

Stephen A. Resnick is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Richard D. Wolff Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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" There's a lot of talk about 'getting back to class, ' as if all the other things that have concerned social theorists for the last couple of decades were a waste of time. Here's a book that gets back to class a lot wiser for that experience. Even when you don't agree with the contributors, they make you think, and very productively. What more can you ask from a book?"--Doug Henwood, author of "A New Economy"

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Re/Presenting Class - CL

Duke University Press

Chapter One

TOWARD A POSTSTRUCTURALIST POLITICAL ECONOMY

Beginning (Again): Marxism as a Theory of Class

The essays in this volume undertake a multidirectional foray into what for political economy is relatively unexplored territory: Marxian class theory. For some this adventure may seem long overdue. As Bruce Norton powerfully argues, the political economic tradition has from the outset developed one strand of Marx's thought, the theory of the capitalist totality, at the expense of another, the theory of class. Though each of these has a prominent place in Capital and other writings of Marx, the former has become identified with Marxian political economy as it is now practiced, while the latter has been consigned to relative obscurity. Attracted by the intellectual and political possibilities of class analysis-possibilities that seem unavailable within the dominant forms of Marxian thought-we are motivated to redress this imbalance of interest and attention.

The familiar object of Marxian political economy is the capitalist totality in its various incarnations: as capitalist "system" or mode of production; as the global capitalist economy; Fordist or post-Fordist model of development structuring a "capitalist" social formation; or simply and baldly as "capitalism." Centering on the process of capital accumulation, theories of the capitalist totality explore the related processes of economic growth, systemic regulation and crisis, transition and transformation, and long waves of capitalist development. The capitalist enterprise is seen as the agent of capital accumulation (though this function is sometimes displaced onto the figure of "finance capital") and thus of systemic reproduction and expansion. The enterprise is also the locus of the exploitative class relation that makes possible the accumulation of capital. In this vision, class is functional to accumulation, a requisite but not theoretically interesting element of capitalist dynamics.

Traditional Marxian political economy strives to understand and trace the logic of accumulation as it unfolds in history. While references to capitalist "laws of motion" may now seem outmoded, the assumption that capital accumulation is the central dynamic of the economic totality is still widely accepted. This theoretical fixation has had consequential political effects. In the vicinity of capitalism's systemic embodiment and its naturalized tendencies toward expansion, anticapitalist political movements have tended to accept the necessity of accommodation. Since they are not poised-by virtue of an ultimate capitalist crisis-on the verge of socialist transition, they have seen themselves constrained to the "reformist" option of creating capitalism with a human (or perhaps a green) face. The progressive project of building an alternative, noncapitalist society is relegated to a revolutionary future, distant and discontinuous from the practical political terrain.

It is this disheartening political vision that has generated in us a desire for a different form of economic and social theory, one that offers a more complex present and a more open-ended future. Here we have turned once again to Capital, a work that may more easily be read for an analytics of class or a discourse of economic surplus than for a vision of systemic dynamics and dysfunction. Marx's analysis of capitalist class relations-those relations involved in producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor in value form-provides the basics of an accounting framework, a conceptual apparatus that can bring us to see the world in a different way.

Not only may we see through the lens of class theory the presence of exploitation (in both capitalist and noncapitalist forms) and trace its socially constitutive role; we may also sense the existence and possibility of nonexploitative economic relations. Not only do we recognize the role of surplus distributions in constituting and (re)producing specific social positions and formations, but also the real and present option of different distributions and the distinct social identities and practices they might foster or create.

The project of specifying the diverse class relations (and thus also class possibilities) that have existed and continue to exist opens up a world of economic variety where capitalism has been understood to reign. It also places an open-ended range of "revolutionary" political options on the ground of the present, where progressive politics has long encountered theoretical barriers to social and economic transformation. By offering a different approach to class theory, Re/Presenting Class (and other works in this emerging tradition) may potentially contribute to a changed configuration of class politics. Perhaps the politics of postponement, so familiar to those interested in class transformation, can be supplanted by a politics of opportunity and attainment.

Materialism in a Poststructuralist Vein

What has rendered accumulation theory intellectually and politically carceral is not the absence of class theory per se but rather the combined co-presences of epistemological realism, economic determinism, and teleological eventualism. These characteristics of classical and contemporary political economy-perhaps it no longer needs to be argued-present a set of abstract and arbitrary limits on what social analysis can say. To confine the potent and adventurous energies of theory within such narrow quarters now seems too obeisant to the authority of tradition, no matter how distinguished that tradition may be.

Indeed, the realism, determinism, and teleologism of Marxian theory (even in their attenuated recent forms) have come under sustained attack from a number of directions. Feminists protesting the obscuring and devaluing of unpaid household labor; unionists struggling for the recognition of state and service workers alongside those in private manufacturing; postdevelopment theorists criticizing the preeminence accorded industrial capitalism in the vision and enactment of "progress"; post-colonialists arguing against the peripheralization of the so-called Third World in and through Marxian theory, activists around gender, race, and sexuality rejecting the privileging of class actors and objectives-each of these is voicing suspicions of a prespecified hierarchy of determination and order of importance.

It is here that the countertraditional work of Althusser (among others) can be seen to resonate with the import of contemporary critiques. In the face of the economic reductionism of the dominant Marxian tradition, Althusser's work signals both the possibility and the political fruitfulness of another reading of Marx. Contributing his thought to debates within the French Communist party and in the philosophical context of an emerging poststructuralism, Althusser was motivated to read Marx not as an economic determinist but as a dialectician and a "materialist"-as one who refuses to ascribe priority and privilege to any social dimension, who honors the specificity of every site, practice, and conjuncture, who opposes the "reduction of the real to the concept." Althusser termed his materialism "aleatory," referring to its disdain for necessity, its respect for contingency and particularity (Callari and Ruccio 1996, 26).

Building on the Althusserian conception of the mutual implication of every...