Overdetermination and Surplus Theory versus Marxian Theory (Part 1 and 2)

Part 1

Following the financial crisis of 2007 the space in the mainstream media for alternative economic ideas to neoliberalism expanded.  The media opportunities for Marxian economists increased and Wolff is one of those to have benefitted.  He has achieved something of a celebrity status in the United States in the past five years with regular radio and television appearances.  In a world where the name of Karl Marx is generally media-unfriendly, Wolff in particular has achieved attention through his media-friendly personality and style.  Stephen Resnick co-wrote several books with Wolff and they worked together for many years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and their work has been labelled ‘Amherst Marxism’.

In 1987 Resnick and Wolff published a book titled Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical and recently they expanded and updated the theme with the publication of Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian (2012).  On the face of it a book which compares Marxian economics favourably with neo-liberal and Keynesian economics appears as if it should be given a warm welcome by socialists.  But all is not quite as it seems.  By far the longest section of the book, that dealing with Marxian economic theory, does not a present a summary of Marxian economics but the theories of Resnick and Wolff.  At first glance their work may appear to be merely a quirky presentation of Marxian economics but the further you read the more it becomes clear that they are revising it to incorporate their own theories.  One of their other books is called New Departures in Marxian Theory (2006) and their work as a whole should really been seen in this light.  Not so much building critically on Marxian theory (which is how they would like to see themselves) but departing from it. 

Resnick and Wolff rightly call the body of thought associated with Marx’s ideas Marxian rather than Marxism.  This is because it is not a vision or doctrine laid down by a socialist prophet but a body of critical thought to which many have contributed both during and after Marx’s lifetime.  Karl Marx’s thought was developed within the revolutionary socialist movement which both shaped and built on his ideas.  Marxian thought has classically been understood as having introduced three integrated areas of critical thought: Marxian economics (the labour theory of value as the basis for understanding the exploitation of the working class in capitalism), historical materialism (economic development and class struggle as the basis for understanding broad social change) and dialectical materialism (philosophical materialism combined with dialectics as the basis for understanding where ideas about the world come from and how they change).   Resnick and Wolff, however, remove two of these pillars, dismissing the historical and materialist perspectives of classical Marxian thought as determinist and undialectical. Their focus is on Marxian economics within a philosophical method that they term ‘overdetermination’.

Overdetermination is a concept originally developed by Sigmund Freud in relation to psychoanalysis but was adapted by the French philosopher Louis Althusser in the 1960s and 1970s in his writing on the work of Karl Marx.  Althusser was a member of the French Communist Party and wrote books such as For Marx (English translation, 1969), Reading Capital (1970) and Lenin and Philosophy (1971).  Despite being difficult to read with often impenetrable text, these books influenced a generation of university students of Marx.  In short, Althusser rejected the classical Marxian view of social change as rooted in the contradiction (or antagonism) between the forces of production (technology, the development of the means of production) and the relations of production (who owns and controls the means of the production).  Instead, Althusser posited a highly abstract and complex view of society as being a totality of multiple contradictions and non-contradictions in which change occurs as ruptures in the social structure when the contradictory aspects of a given society overcome its non-contradictory aspects.  The emphasis was on theory and ideology as an important determinant of social consciousness and therefore to the stability or otherwise of the social structure and this led to E.P. Thomspson’s valid criticism (in his The Poverty of Theory, 1978) of Althusser’s work as a form of idealism.  Althusser, however, still saw the economic base of society as being the dominant causative relation to other aspects of society.

Resnick and Wolff are admirers of Althusser’s work but they develop overdetermination beyond his ideas by dismissing both the causative dominance of the economic base and philosophical materialism.  Rather, they want their readers to see all areas of life as both the cause and effect of each other, a dialectical understanding of the world with the materialism of Marx removed.  The myriad aspects of life exist either in contradiction or support of each other but no one aspect could be described as the cause of another. It is argued that events and individuals are the sites of infinite determinants which cannot be isolated as causes or effects.  The notion of making decisions based on arguments of economic efficiency, for example, is rejected because of the complexity involved in assessing the outcome of changes to the economy.  Social class is likewise argued to be complex, being both formed by and partly forming the sum total of all other aspects of social life and the environment.  They refer to class as their (and Marx’s) ‘entry point’ into the infinite number of determinants made up of the material world (our experiences) and thought (our ideas) which are in a dialectical relationship.  Historical and philosophical materialism is rejected as irredeemably determinist because they argue that it elevates the economic aspect of life as the cause of effects in other areas of life (such as society, politics, culture, and so on).

E.P. Thompson’s criticism of Althusser as an idealist is even more applicable to the dialectics offered by Resnick and Wolff.  Their latest work is called Contending Economic Theoriesprecisely because they wish to lay clear theoretical choices before their readers.  Their purpose is to lay before them a Marxian economic theory that will alter their perception of that social experience and thereby change it because they argue that “What we see is shaped in part by how we think just as how we think is shaped in part by what we see.”(Contending Economic Theories, p.43)  In the concept of overdetermination, theory plays a fundamental part in shaping the world.  It is not just a case of different perspectives, of seeing the same world but from a different position.  According to Resnick and Wolff’s argument, when people hold different theories, literally “the world each sees is not the same.”(p.43) 

By contrast, the classical Marxian approach is a materialist one that argues that social and political thought develops in relation to social and economic reality.  It is not determinist as Wolff and Resnick insist.  Rather, it merely argues that, ultimately, the material world provides the limits of our perception.  Our thoughts always relate to the real world, to the necessity for food and shelter and social production and to current social and economic relationships and the struggles associated with them.  Thought itself does not exist independently of material reality but is part of it.  Our material world does not reflect our ideas but, rather, our ideas emerge from our experience of the material world and help to shape it.  What we see is not actually different according to our idea, or theory, of it.  Our ideas are different according to our perspective, where we stand in relation to the real material world, the most important of which is our economic life, how we obtain the means of living and the social relations pertaining to this.

Resnick and Wolff offer a literally infinitely more complex model in which everything is shaped by everything else and thought has a semi-autonomous relationship to the material world.  Theory thereby takes on great importance as an agent for social change because it can literally alter how we see the world.  They reject historical materialism because they tend to associate classical Marxian theory with the vulgar, mechanical Marxism which emanated as apologetics from the former USSR and other state capitalist regimes.  By doing so they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  That said, their practice does not always reflect their ideas as they do often tend to analyse society, culture and politics as reflecting underlying economic and class factors and in terms of cause and effect.  In fact, when they let their dialectical guard down their work can be insightful and is the reason why some of their work can still usefully be read by socialists. 

Although historical materialism can be interpreted crudely, rigidly and deterministically, the works of Marx and Engels and many Marxian theorists since suggest a different understanding.  The classical Marxian approach is not a determinist one but describes the reciprocal relationship between individual action and social and economic context.   Social change relative to the development of the forces of production and the relations of production is not pre-determined.   It is contingent on conscious political action, which requires social, i.e. class, awareness.  Everyone is aware, however vaguely, of the social and political struggles going on in the world around them and most members of the working class are aware that their potential and that of society around them is constrained.  One aim of socialists is to build on this awareness and encourage working class recognition of the fact that the productive forces of humanity have outstripped the capacity of the current relations of production (their control by a tiny minority of capitalists) to deliver that productive capacity for the benefit of the vast majority of people who do not own the means of production (the working class). 

Wolff and Resnick do emphasise the labour theory of value as an important theory for understanding the exploitation of the working class in capitalism.  But, as with their approach to dialectics, what they promote is a distinct theoretical model of their own, ‘surplus theory’, rather than that of Marx.   This is reflected in their views on class and in their definition of communism and how to achieve it, which will be looked at in part 2 of this critique.

Part 2

Socialists reject the minority seizure of power (Leninists, etc.) or governing with a programme of reforms (Labour party, etc.) with the aim of achieving socialism at some point in the future.  They argue that pursuing an objective of seizing power in the name of the working class or of a programme of reforms that aim at removing the worst excesses of capitalism do not move society any further towards socialism.  Replacing the immediate objective of socialism with more immediate aims in effect removes the socialist objective altogether.  Others, most others in fact, who have called themselves socialist or communist in the last century and more have rejected this approach.  They have argued for the necessity of the seizure of state power by minority parties or, more often, have seen in the reform programmes of  labour parties the hope of gradual socialist transformation.  The experience of the twentieth century saw the failure of these approaches to transform society on socialist lines.  What ensued was the collapse of confidence in the possibility of socialism and that there is any alternative to capitalism.

If it was assumed that various governments in modern global history had been or were in fact variants of socialism or communism then it is quite understandable that confidence in that political outlook would either diminish or that a reworking of assumptions would occur, given that the populations of these ‘socialist’ countries appeared to prefer capitalism.  Marxism or ‘socialism’ could either be discarded or the understanding of them reassessed.  Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff are in the latter category and have reworked Marxian economics into ‘surplus theory’, which attempts to reinterpret Marxian economics in the light of the failure of so-called ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ governments to arrive at their declared communist objective.

To their credit they do not define the former USSR, China, Cuba, etc. as socialist but as state-capitalist.  Likewise they acknowledge that the various attempts attempts to regulate or reform capitalism in the name of socialism resulted in merely more regulated capitalism rather than something different to capitalism.  In fact, Wolff and Resnick describe quite nicely the swings, often in response to economic crises, between relatively less or relatively more regulated capitalism in the last century or so.  They reject the idea of socialism as it is commonly misunderstood  –  as state ownership and planned production as against capitalist private ownership and production for the market. At the root of their argument is the understanding that private or state capitalism merely changes the exploiter and does not remove the exploitation.  However, their understanding of the root of the exploitation of the working class is at odds with the arguments developed by most other Marxian socialists who regard the former USSR and other such regimes as state capitalist.

For Marxian socialists, capitalism remained intact in the USSR because buying and selling, commodities, value, prices and profit continued.  The owners of capital, the employers, ceased to be private individuals and became instead the state, which owned and controlled the large scale means of production and received the surplus value produced.   In place of a narrow elite of private owners of the means of production emerged a narrow social elite who controlled the state.  The fundamentally exploitative relationship between capital and labour remained intact with the continued existence of money, wages, commodities, exchange, prices and the growth of a bureaucratic and brutal state.  We argue that the disappearance of all of these facets of capitalist society would in fact be necessary before a socialist society could be argued to exist.

For Resnick and Wolff on the other hand capitalism remained intact because the mere legal transfer of private to state property and the shift of power from private capitalists to the state did not produce change at the enterprise level.  The workers, the producers of surplus value, they argue, must also become the appropriators of surplus value.  Their definition of communism is a society where those who produce the surplus in a given enterprise are the same people who own it and control its distribution.   Their argument is the result of the application of their ‘surplus theory’, which condenses the three volumes of Capital into the argument that Marx was essentially analyzing past and present societies  according to who appropriates and distributes the surplus produced  in a given society.  In this way ‘surplus theory’ can be applied to areas like the family, where it is argued that men have historically extracted surplus labour from women in the home.

Whilst Resnick and Wolff promote their analysis as Marxian, it is in fact a simplified departure from classical Maxian ideas.  Marx and Engels and many subsequent socialists considered socialism to be a society which transcends wage-labour in favour of free-exchange.  ‘Surplus theory’, by contrast sees no problem with the continuance of money, wages, commodities, exchange, prices and the state.  From its perspective, as long as the productive workers derive the surplus-value of their work and control its distribution then society is communist.  Of course there is a thorny issue for ‘surplus theory’ to deal with in the relationship between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ workers.  This is a distinction between those workers in capitalist societies who produce surplus value (e.g. factory workers) and those workers who are paid from this surplus value (the managers, administrative staff, security guards, etc.).  Of course the one cannot exist without the other and in socialism according to our definition there would no longer be such a distinction as there would be no surplus value (although there would be a surplus of goods, of use-values).  However, in a socialist society as defined by Resnick and Wolff there would be a tension between those who produced the surplus value and those that drew from it without contributing to it.  They get around this by suggesting job-rotation and other practical but pointless solutions.

Wolff and Resnick describe a process within capitalism where capitalists appropriate surplus value and then redistribute portions of it in order to reproduce the process.  These payments are termed ‘subsumed class payments’ and include such things as taxes, wages to ‘unproductive’ employees, rent, interest, advertising, etc.  Whilst ‘surplus theory’ attempts to simplify the class structure of capital accumulation and reproduction it does so in a way that is deceivingly simplified.  Capitalism is an anarchic system of social production in which the capitalist class as a whole appropriates surplus value from the working class as a whole and cannot be understood adequately at the level of the individual enterprise and its surplus.  There is no easy room in ‘surplus theory’ for the averaging of the rate of profit, generalised deviation of price from value, etc.  Whilst it may be appear to be useful as a simplified tool for explaining Marxian economic ideas, its agenda runs far deeper.

The use of ‘surplus theory’ can be confusing because it is written in terms familiar to Marxian socialists but with a quite different meaning.  When they discuss class, for example, they define it by relationship to surplus vale and reject definitions based on power, property or consciousness.  Your place in capitalism is defined by whether you produce surplus value, derive your wages from surplus value (both working class according to our definition) or whether you appropriate the surplus value and control its distribution (the capitalist class).  All processes which do not relate to the direct production of ‘surplus vlaue’ are classified as ‘non-class processes’, such as education, culture and even politics.  Their philosophical concept of overdetermination comes into play again because class is also argued to be no more important than non-class aspects of society – it is argued that that would be reductionism.  By this reasoning if you change the class relationship, if you change the ownership and control of surplus value, other changes (at this point unknowable) will follow as class relates dialectically to all other areas of life.

This is a deliberate attempt to try to keep ‘surplus theory’ clear of issues of ownership or power.  Socialism has failed to date, Resnick and Wolff argue, because socialism has been defined according to who owns the means of production and/or who controls them.  This has led to various governments being called socialist because some of the means of production have passed into state ownership and, if enough of the means of production have been transferred, a large measure of social and political power is likewise conferred.  This leads to their abstruse and obfuscating ‘surplus theory’ in which ‘communism’ according to their definition can exist in an economy with state ownership or private ownership and with state planning or markets or a blend of all of these features.

However, capitalism is a system of social production in which private property and the state developed to enable and maintain the expropriation of surplus value via wage-labour.  Class (in the classical Marxian sense of the relation of the individual to the means of production) is, of course, not the only or necessarily the most important relation in a given identity or event – it does not determine our lives in any mechanical way.  It does, though, suffuse our social experience and shapes and limits our individual and social possibilities.  The position of classical Marxian socialists is at odds with Resnick and Wolff‘s ‘surplus theory’.  Socialism, they contend, entails a working-class consciousness of the basis of our exploitation and the necessity of political action to gain control of the state as part of a revolutionary process in which common ownership and democratic control of the means of production would replace capitalism, the private or state ownership of the means of production.  Their understanding of class involves awareness of the importance not just of the appropriation of surplus value but its mutual dependence on property relations and the state as well as, crucially, the developed political consciousness of the capitalist class and the currently limited political consciousness of the working class.

So, after all their work developing the theories of overdetermination and ‘suplus theory’ what are the practical solutions offered up by Wolff and Resnick.  How are the working class to advance towards a world in which they appropriate and distribute their own surplus?  Wolff in particular promotes a strategy to achieve social change around the concept of Workers Self Directed Enterprises (WSDEs).  These are, despite Wolff’s efforts to argue that they are something new, essentially worker’s co-operatives.  These, it is argued, combined with activism to promote democracy and gain political support could be the basis for achieving social transformation.  Here we are on familiar and not new ground.  Wolff’s argument is similar to that of Eduard Bernstein who argued over a century ago that worker’s co-operatives were transforming capitalism from within, obviating the need for social revolution.  Rosa Luxemburg countered then that workers forming a co-operative “are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur – a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers’ interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.”  Who could argue other than that historical experience has proved her right.  To achieve meaningful change through WSDEs would require massive social and political struggle with the end being a form of capitalism in which workers collectively exploit themselves.

CSK1904

From here

https://impossibilism.wordpress.com/