Marxism

Abstract

We compare and contrast two different kinds of Marxism: traditional (orthodox) and overdeterminist. The argument pinpoints key theoretical and political consequences of each kind of Marxism for the history of the Left and for anticapitalist struggle today. Our preference, overdeterminist Marxism, places the elimination of class exploitation (conceived in surplus labor terms) back on the Left's agenda for social change where Marx had placed it. We explain why this overdeterminist focus on reorganizing the production and distribution of the surplus (eliminating exploitation) is different from traditional Marxism's focus rather on eliminating private ownership of the means of production and/or empowering workers. The conclusion suggests why and how overdeterminist Marxism can help to restructure society so as to achieve a new kind of class democracy.

Keywords:

• Marxism
• Overdetermination
• Exploitation
• Capitalism
• Class

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article appeared in 2011 as “Persistance du Marxisme traditionnel et pertinence du Marxisme surdéterministe,” Actuel Marx 50 (Deuxième Semestre): 136–52.

Notes

¹Over the 1930s and 1940s, a significant group of left U.S. intellectuals moved from a defense of to a rejection of the USSR (Alterman 2012, 95–6). After spending a lifetime writing about Marxism and the Soviet Union, Alec Nove wrote, “if this [the USSR] really was socialism, I would prefer to be elsewhere” (Nove 1983, ix).

²Traditional Marxism's economic determinism stems from two well-known and often-quoted passages by Marx (1981, 926–8; 1970, 20–1). Both assert a determining causal role for the mode's “relations of production” or the form they take—namely, “property relations.” While many have critically encountered this determinism (Resnick and Wolff 1987, chap. 2), the tradition continues. One of the latest and most succinct examples can be found in the foreword to and text of a book published as a part of the Historical Materialism Book Series (Post 2012). The foreword presents Ellen Meiksins Wood's understanding of Marx's historical materialist approach: “Capitalism has its own distinctive social-property relations, from which derive its own unique systematic logic, its own distinctive social imperatives, and its own specific ‘laws of motion’” (xii). Quoting favorably Robert Brenner's work, she adds that capitalism operates “according to the ‘rules for reproduction’ imposed by their own system of social property relations” (xii). What occurs in capitalism is governed by this determining property cause. Post follows a similar logic in his highly interesting analysis of U.S. history. A revealing sentence tells us that “capitalism's unique social property or ‘surplus-extraction’ relationship shapes a labour process that is the basis of industrialization and its attendant social changes” (Post 2012, 41). Here we have together both (1) traditional Marxism's conflation of a political process of property ownership with an economic process of surplus extraction and (2) the bestowing of a determinist causal power on them.