J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff,Re/presenting Class: Essays in Post-Modern Marxism. London: Duke University Press, 2001. 336 pp. $54.95 cloth; $18.95 paper

In: International labor and working class history: ILWCH, Band 66, S. 205-207

Abstract

Re/Presenting Class is a timely and evocative collection of essays devoted to exploring the contribution postmodern Marxist class theory can make to the contemporary study of political economy. This multifaceted exploration marks a refreshing departure from the conventional focus of the political economic tradition on classical Marxist analysis of the capitalist system as a total system or mode of production. On this conventional approach, class functions merely as an instrument of the dominant mode of capital accumulation. By contrast, the essays in Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff's collection employ various forms of class analysis as an independent means to illuminate contemporary and historical political economies. Here class is understood not simply as an instrumentality of capitalist accumulation, but as a set of independent "processes of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labor" (17, 169). In essence, the essays attempt, in various ways, to extricate class analysis from general "theory of the capitalist totality," (1) and to examine what kinds of insight it can offer as an independent framework in its own right. In general, the project repays the investment just as the book rewards reading.