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).

Table of Contents:
List of Figures and Tables List of Contributors Introduction: Marxism without guarantees Richard McIntyre, Theodore Burczak, and Robert Garnett Contributors Part I: Knowledge, class, and economics Chapter One A Conversation with Rick Wolff Richard McIntyre Part II: Economics without guarantees Chapter Two Strangers in a Strange Land: A Marxian Critique of Economics David F. Ruccio Chapter Three Marxian Economics without Teleology: The Big New Life of Class Bruce Norton Chapter Four Class-Analytic Marxism and the Recovery of the Marxian Theory of Enterprise Erik Olsen Chapter Five Uncertainty and Overdetermination Donald W. Katzner Chapter Six Catallactic Marxism: Marx, Hayek, and the Market Ted Burczak Part III: Labor, value, and class Chapter Seven Class and Overdetermination: Value Theory and the Core of Resnick and Wolff’s Marxism Bruce Roberts Chapter Eight Wolff and Resnick’s Interpretation of Marx’s Theory of Value and Surplus-Value: Where’s the Money? Fred Moseley Chapter Nine Rethinking Labor: Surplus, Class, and Justice Faruk Eray Düzenli Part IV: Heretical materialism Chapter Ten The Last Instance: Resnick and Wolff at the Point of Heresy Warren Montag Chapter Eleven Aleatory Marxism: Resnick, Wolff, and the Revivification of Althusser Joseph W. Childers Chapter Twelve Process: Tracing Connections and Consequences Yahya M. Madra Part V: Appraising the postmodern turn Chapter Thirteen Marxism’s Double Task: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Postmodernism Jan Rehmann Chapter Fourteen Overdetermination: The Ethical Moment George DeMartino Chapter Fifteen The Cost of Anti-Essentialism Paul Smith Chapter Sixteen Marxism and Postmodernism: Our Goal is to Learn from One Another Richard D. Wolff Part VI: Postcolonial Marx Chapter Seventeen Global Marx? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Chapter Eighteen Primitive Accumulation and Historical Inevitability: A Postcolonial Critique Anjan Chakrabarti, Stephen Cullenberg, and Anup Dhar Chapter Nineteen Draining the "Blood Energy": Destruction of Independent Production and Creation of Migrant Workers in Post-Reform China Joseph Medley and Lorrayne Carroll Chapter Twenty Problematizing the Global Economy: Financialization and the "Feudalization" of Capital Rajesh Bhattacharya and Ian J. Seda-Irizarry Chapter Twenty One Reproduction of Noncapital: A Marxian Perspective on the Informal Economy in India Snehashish Bhattacharya Part VII: Capitalism and class analysis Chapter Twenty Two Management Ideologies and the Class Structure of Capitalist Enterprises: Shareholderism vs. Stakeholderism at Scott Paper Company Michael Hillard and Richard McIntyre Chapter Twenty Three Lewis L. Lorwin’s "Five-Year Plan for the World": A Subsumed Class Response to the Crises of the 1930s Claude Misukiewicz Part VIII: Communism without guarantees Chapter Twenty Four Bad Communisms Maliha Safri and Kenan Erçel Chapter Twenty Five Hope without Guarantees: Overdeterminist Anti-Capitalism amidst Neoliberal Precarity Ellen Russell Part IX: Knowledge and class in everyday life Chapter Twenty Six The Work of Sex Harriet Fraad Chapter Twenty Seven Homelessness as Violence: Bad People, Bad Policy, or Overdetermined Social Processes? Vincent Lyon-Callo Chapter Twenty Eight Family Farms, Class, and the Future of Food Elizabeth Ramey Chapter Twenty Nine A Long Shadow and Undiscovered Country: Notes on the Class Analysis of Education Masato Aoki Chapter Thirty Ecological Challenges: A Marxist Response Andriana Vlachou Index