Knowledge, Class, and Economics

Marxism without Guarantees

Theodore Burczak, Robert Garnett Jr., Richard McIntyre, Theodore A. Burczak, Robert F. Garnett Jr., Richard McIntyre, Theodore Burczak, Robert Garnett Jr., Theodore A. Burczak, Robert F. Garnett Jr., Richard McIntyre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138634466
• eBook ISBN: 9781351798075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Knowledge, Class, and Economics: Marxism without Guarantees surveys the "Amherst School" of non-determinist Marxist political economy, 40 years on: its core concepts, intellectual origins, diverse pathways, and enduring tensions. The volume's 30 original essays reflect the range of perspectives and projects that comprise the Amherst School—the interdisciplinary community of scholars that has enriched and extended, while never ceasing to interrogate and recast, the anti-economistic Marxism first formulated in the mid-1970s by Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff, and their economics Ph.D. students at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

The title captures the defining ideas of the Amherst School: an open-system framework that presupposes the complexity and contingency of social-historical events and the parallel "overdetermination" of the relationship between subjects and objects of inquiry, along with a novel conception of class as a process of performing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor. In a collection of 30 original essays, chapters confront readers with the core concepts of overdetermination and class in the context of economic theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, continental philosophy, economic geography, economic anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary theory/studies.

Though Resnick and Wolff's writings serve as a focal point for this collection, their works are ultimately decentered—contested, historicized, reformulated. The topics explored will be of interest to proponents and critics of the post-structuralist/postmodern turn in Marxian theory and to students of economics as social theory across the disciplines (economics, geography, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, among others).

Part I
Knowledge, class, and economics

1 A conversation with Rick Wolff

Richard McIntyre

Conducted over several days in New York City, this extended interview explores Wolff’s early years as a product of the Monthly Review school of post-World War II U.S. Marxism, the formation and development of his partnership with Steve Resnick, the establishment of and enduring divisions within the radical economics Ph.D. program at UMass-Amherst, the shift in Resnick and Wolff’s work after their encounters with Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst’s Pre-capitalist Modes of Production and the writings of Louis Althusser in the 1970s, and their ongoing collaborative work with current and former Ph.D. students that led to the founding of the journal Rethinking Marxism in the late 1980s. The interview also covers tensions between the epistemological and class aspects of Resnick and Wolff’s work, Wolff’s recent popular advocacy of worker self-directed enterprises, and the relationship between workplace democracy and other social movements.

You initially came out of the Monthly Review School of Marxism. Can you tell us a little about how this influenced you – and Steve, too, if that’s possible?

For both Steve and me, the Monthly Review School of economics was an important influence. I had grown up knowing Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy ever since high school. My parents were personal friends of both Magdoff and his wife and Sweezy and his wife. So I moved into being one of their students in almost a family kind of way, because they would socialize together. And in the case of Magdoff, there was an assumption that if anything ever happened to my parents, I would kind of go into that family. It was never put in so many words, but my parents let me know there had been “conversations.”

When I graduated from college and decided to go to graduate school rather than to be a lawyer – my father wanted me to be a lawyer but I wanted to learn economics – it was Paul and Harry who said there was only one place I should go, which was Stanford because Paul Baran was a professor there. So I went to Stanford and got in with him. I was his only graduate student. Nobody else wanted to get near this scary Marxist, whereas I was there expressly to do it. Stanford in those days was kind of intimidated by East Coast Ivy League, so it was good for Baran that a student coming from Harvard wanted him. And it was good for me that he wanted me, since I got a lot of attention that I would never have gotten otherwise. He loved cognac, and I learned to enjoy cognac with him. Unfortunately I arrived in September and the following March he had a massive heart attack and died. So at that point I left Stanford, which was an awful place, and went to Yale, which took me because of all the Ivy League stuff and gave me a ton of money.

The program at Yale was wonderful for me. You could earn two degrees, the Masters and the Ph.D., which you could pursue either way: Ph.D. in history and masters in economics or vice versa. I chose the Ph.D. in economics, but I studied history with C. Vann Woodward. I met Staughton Lynd there. He was teaching labor history then, the job that David Montgomery got after him. I learned from all those people, but meanwhile in the economics Ph.D. program there was really nobody to work with except these junior professors: Resnick, who was unapproachable and scary, and his buddy Stephen Hymer. Hymer ended up being on my dissertation committee but not Steve Resnick.

I was intimidated by him. Steve was a hardass at Yale. As a graduate student I remember going to a couple of seminars to hear visiting people. I think it was the first time I heard Paul Krugman. Sometimes somebody famous would come and we would all go. Steve would often be there, and the guy – there were no women – would give his talk, and Steve would sit in a corner and wait, like a lion crouching to get that gazelle. Steve would go after the guy on theoretical grounds, on the econometric stuff. So graduate students backed away from Steve because it was a nightmare to have a teacher do that to you. Not that he would have done that in class. I never had a class with him, but he was tough. Hymer was much softer, which is why he was on my committee rather than Steve. Also Hymer did work on Africa, my dissertation was on Africa, so it made a certain sense.

I didn’t become friendly with Steve until we began teaching at City College. We were both living in New Haven and taking the commuter train. We really became friends because we had so many hours together, basically on the train.

In those days the Monthly Review had – I don’t remember what they called it – these famous lunches at their offices in New York. Any Marxist or radical economist from around the world who had come to New York for whatever reason would have lunch with Harry and Paul. They would have sandwiches brought in, and you would sit around and talk for an hour or two. And because I was very close to them, they would invite me when I was teaching uptown at City College to visit lower Manhattan where their offices were, and I did that very often. I met Theotonio Dos Santos, Joan Robinson, a whole host of people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. I brought Steve with me, and that’s how he began to know Paul and Harry.

Steve and I read Sweezy’s work and Magdoff’s work – all of it closely – talked about it, wrote based on it, assigned it for our students. There was always a lot of respect, admiration, and appreciation for what they were doing and not just for what they had written. They were like mentors, very encouraging. We saw them as people who had kept Marxism alive in the United States in the worst years of the McCarthy period and the Cold War, and they were kind of heroes for having stayed with it. Magdoff was a New York City kid, immigrant parents, City College graduate, scrabbling up the ladder trying to make it. Paul Sweezy was a Brahmin, part of the Rockefeller family, lots of money. He didn’t go to City College; he went to Harvard, etc. But they worked together well, as far as we could see. We also met Harry Braverman at those lunches.

So the Monthly Review was the inspiration. We admired Magdoff and Sweezy, we respected them, we learned from them. But as we thought more about their work, we began to have disagreements. Mostly not explicit – we didn’t bring this up to them. But we talked about them between us.

I’m trying to think about how to characterize this. The first thing that bothered us was that Paul and Harry told us there was no need to study economic theory anymore. The theory issues were settled. Bourgeois theory was neoclassical and Keynes. Marxian theory was them, and the definitive work was Sweezy’s The Theory of Capitalist Development. We were to learn it, master it and then move on. For them, the important thing for us to do was apply it. For instance, the first article I was commissioned to write for The Monthly Review was an article about the rise of multinational banking: how big American banks moved abroad. This article was applied Magdoff/Sweezy, applied Monthly Review. They liked it, they published it, that’s what I was to do. When they got to know Steve, they appreciated that he had been to the Philippines, that he knew all this stuff about third world countries. They wanted us to apply their approach to problems of development. They wanted us to cash in on our pedigrees. Steve had been to Penn and MIT and I had gone to Harvard and Yale. That’s when it became very clear that both of them were victims; they had been pushed out of these jobs. Magdoff had never even gotten in; he was a working class kid….

So they saw you doing what they had not been able to do?

Yeah, a little bit of that. They pushed hard for us to be big shots as Marxists at a fancy university. And I think that, for instance, they were not particularly thrilled with our move to UMass.

Because it was a state university, or in the countryside, or … ?

They never got that explicit. If I were to guess, it was because it wasn’t prestigious enough. Steve had been a young professor at Yale; more of that was what they wanted. My first job offer when I was finishing at Yale was from Johns Hopkins. When I told Sweezy, he urged me to take it. I turned it down, after which James Tobin (at Yale) called me into his office and told me, “You can’t do that. No one turns down Johns Hopkins for City College. I can’t write a letter for a person who does that.” That was a straight out threat. I never asked him for a letter in any case, because he didn’t know me that well.

But what got us upset wasn’t that kind of attitude. It was Paul and Harry’s notion that the theory was finished that bothered us. By this time we were reading a lot of Marx and were excited by it, as a lot of people were at that time. The idea that the theory was settled when we had so many theoretical questions struck us as very strange. We didn’t say much. We were dutiful towards them, they were our masters.

Was there a particular theoretical problem that bothered you?

Yes, there were two, but the really important one was economic determinism. Magdoff and Sweezy were perfectly comfortable with economic determinism. They talked like that, they reasoned like that, and for Steve and me, for whatever complicated reason, this was a problem. We didn’t read Marx that way, and we didn’t like that kind of argument. I don’t think we had a good alternative, but we were very uncomfortable with determinism.

The other theoretical issue we had – really an epistemological question but we didn’t know that at the time – was their “history proves” argument. Harry especially (but also Paul) was always telling me, “This is a settled matter, the empirical record shows….” Harry, if you remember his writings, loved to take a proposition that was generally agreed to in the profession and then give you 47 facts that contradicted it. And then he’d make the claim that these 47 facts proved something. I don’t think we could have articulated why at that time, but this bothered us.

We began to distance ourselves from them, but there was no trouble between us. We did not air things out with them. That waited until we went to UMass.

Could you say a bit more about your partnership with Steve and why it worked so well and for so long? Initially there was some difference in status. How did you work all that out?

As I said, I got to know Steve at City College. This was my first real job. I had taught both at undergraduate and graduate levels at Yale, but this was still as a graduate student. I got to City College in 1969 and Steve came along, I think, in 1971. He was told at Yale that it was very unlikely that he would get tenure. He made a strategic error. He signed a petition that was circulated by students. I believe the petition was to get the ROTC off campus, which was going around at many colleges and universities at the time. When he signed it, this irritated someone at the higher level. This person spoke to the chair of the economics department who, as a friend, told Steve that signing the petition was viewed as a grievous error. Steve got the idea that he’d better look for another job.

At that time the chair of economics at City College, who had brought me in, was a man by the name of Alfred Conrad who was married to Adrienne Rich, the poet. He had been a professor at the Harvard Business School and, together with John Meyer, had written a book on the economics of slavery. I remember thinking “Oh my God” when I met him when I visited City College for the first time, because he had an SDS button on the lapel of his jacket. He turned out to be a radical who had taken the job in New York because he wanted to make a radical department there. He thought that was the most exciting thing he could do, and I was the first person hired in that process. Then he went after Hymer, but I think Hymer already had a job at the New School. And then he went after Resnick. (This was before Steve and I were friends.) And he had plans for many more.

Steve was a professor at Yale, remember, when I had been a graduate student. But when he came to City College, we were both professors. He was an associate professor; I was an assistant. There was never any kind of status thing with Steve. I think he found me interesting, and his friendship with Hymer had changed. Hymer had moved to New York and was having horrible psychological and marital problems, and Steve was a much more straight-laced guy, married to his high school sweetheart, etc. So I replaced Hymer in a way as his friend, and the fact that I was a few years younger never made any difference that I ever felt.

By the time we got to UMass we were already good friends, but the move to UMass really solidified it. The first phone calls that Sam Bowles made in putting the department together were to Steve and me, to be the other half of the radical contingent with his buddies, Herb Gintis and Rick Edwards. He wanted us to come up from City College, they would come from Harvard, and we would meet in Amherst and make this thing happen. This is hard to convey, but we very quickly felt “other” in relation to those three. It’s hard to explain. Steve had a line that we used for many years. There are two kinds of people in the world: those that will go into the woods to fight with you, and those that will not; those three, uh-uh. It was his assessment that there was something fundamentally unserious about them. This was not a comment on their economics, or their theoretical knowledge, or their qualities as teachers. None of that. This was a comment on their political commitment to anti-capitalism, for lack of a better term. I didn’t have this judgment, but I listened to him – smart guy, Steve Resnick. He made this judgment pretty early on. They were our buddies; we had come together. We would cover for each other; we would work as a solid group. And we did for the first five, six, seven years. We supported them and they supported us. But they were different from us. It is hard to explain. Steve and I talked about it often, trying to explain it to ourselves. The words I would use now – I didn’t understand it then – they were more interested in the careers; we were more interested in the political project. They had a fundamental distrust of this project being able to go very far. And they felt vindicated in 1990. I remember Sam writing to me once, saying our efforts to change had failed. I remember thinking, “What is he talking about? History has a reverse; does he think it’s going to just follow a straight line?” In retrospect they were always more interested in the here and now, not in a broader political project, which I think is what Steve was getting at with who would go into the woods to fight with you. Who do you really trust?

And then Steve and I got more interested in the theoretical stuff. Someone gave me Hindess and Hirst’s Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production. I don’t even know who. I read this book, and I remember calling Steve on the phone and saying, “you’ve got to get this!” What they had done was written down the theory, the theory of how one class structure is different from another. They really worked it out for you. This is the ancient, this is the capitalist, this is the feudal, and this is the Asiatic (whatever it is). No one had ever done this. And they were answering our theoretical questions.

So you got to Althusser through Hindess and Hirst?

Absolutely. Hindess and Hirst weren’t economists, though at first we thought they were. But they were really using Marxist theory to ask the questions we were interested in. This was magnificent, and they kept footnoting and citing Althusser, so of course we picked up on that. We really worked through Althusser. Just to be clear, what Althusser’s writings said to us was, “I’m a Marxist, you can be a Marxist, and you don’t have to have anything to do with economic determinism.” Without knowing it, that’s what we wanted, because we didn’t like this economic determinism. It made us really nervous, and he was showing us, “You don’t need to be an economic determinist. Marx wasn’t, I’m not.”

What do you think it was for you and Steve that made you so nervous about economic determinism?

Simple mindedness. The criticisms we had read all our lives, in the ’50s and ’60s when we were growing up. One of the main tools of anti-Marxism was the criticism of its simplemindedness, the childishness, of thinking that people are motivated only by their economic interests. We knew this criticism was right, but we loved Marxism, just not that. When you think about your mother, your father, your siblings, yourself, can you explain what happened in your crazy family by economics alone? Come on. Should it be part of the story? Sure. Economics is what makes the world go round? No. And as we read Marx we could see how people read him as an economic determinist, but we could also see another way, and Althusser said yeah, yeah, yeah. If you take the two together, the preponderance of evidence is that Marx is a critic of economic determinism, not a proponent. Thank you, Althusser. This is before we had any contact with him. We had just read him, like everybody else, thanks to the New Left Review.

Let’s talk about your relationship with students, which always seemed different to me.

Our teaching was always a part of the rest of our lives, and the rest of our lives always had a great deal in it of building a different society, and building a movement for that. So for us students were not just sitting in a class to learn some material, or aggrandizing our egos by liking what we were teaching, although I can assure you those students were important to us. But we didn’t want just students, we wanted to build a movement, we wanted these students to go out and make this happen on an enormous scale. And that was always important. We wanted them to go into the woods with us! That’s what we wanted. I don’t know exactly what that meant, but it meant welcoming students into a club, into a society pretty early in the process, where we were all doing something important together. We always talked about this, that what this country needs is lots of people studying Marx, teaching Marx, using Marx, questioning Marx, taking it in new directions, that’s fine. But we’re building a tradition, that’s what we’re doing.

So launching the Rethinking Marxism journal with your Ph.D. students was something you consciously planned?

Steve and I realized early on how much we needed each other. We even talked about it, and we were not the types to usually talk about these things – which tells you something. But we both understood it, and we said look, this place [UMass] could be impossible if we had to navigate the department alone: its tensions, the politics, the politicking among the students, which got to be difficult sometimes. But there were two of us, two sets of eyes and ears, two people having conversations and bringing back their sense of what’s going on. It was invaluable to us, and I think early on we understood that to graduate from UMass – someone like you – and then to go off to another school without someone else to help you: whoa, talk about extra obstacles. That career is going to be very hard. We needed to have an association that could provide support, friendship, a potential colleague you could hire, all of that. We decided early on that there has to be a focus. The journal was a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Contributors
• Introduction: Marxism without guarantees
• Part I: Knowledge, class, and economics
• Part II: Economics without guarantees
• Part III: Labor, value, and class
• Part IV: Heretical materialism
• Part V: Appraising the postmodern turn
• Part VI: Postcolonial Marx
• Part VII: Capitalism and class analysis
• Part VIII: Communism without guarantees
• Part IX: Knowledge and class in everyday life
• Index