Re/presenting Class

Essays in Postmodern Marxism

J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff, Julie Graham, Katherine Gibson, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff, Julie Graham, Katherine Gibson

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780822327202, 9780822327097
• eBook ISBN: 9780822383093
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

Contributors. Carole Biewener, Anjan Chakrabarti, Stephen Cullenberg, Fred Curtis, Satyananda Gabriel, J. K. Gibson-Graham, Serap Kayatekin, Bruce Norton, Phillip O'Neill, Stephen Resnick, David Ruccio, Dean Saitta, Andriana Vlachou, Richard Wolff

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Toward a Poststructuralist Political Economy - J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff
• Reading Marx for Class - Bruce Norton
• Exploring a New Class Politics of the Enterprise - J.K. Gibson-Graham and Phillip O’Neill
• Ivy-Covered Exploitation: Class, Education, and the Liberal Arts College - Fred Curtis
• Nature and Class: A Marxian Value Analysis - Andriana Vlachou
• The Promise of Finance: Banks and Community Development - Carole Biewener
• "After" Development: Re-imagining Economy and Class - J.K. Gibson-Graham and David Ruccio
• Development and Class Transition in India: A New Perspective - Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenberg
• A Class Analysis of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 - Satyananda J. Gabriel
• Sharecropping and Feudal Class Processes in the Postbellum Mississippi Delta - Serap Ayse Kayatekin
• Communal Class Processes and Pre-Columbian Social Dynamics - Dean J. Saitta
• Struggles in the USSR: Communisms Attempted and Undone - Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff
• References
• Contributors
• Index