Revisiting Resnick and Wolff's Reading of Overdetermination

Abstract

In this symposium on overdetermination, Mark S. Silverman proposes that in Knowledge and Class the concept is deployed in two distinct but related ways that Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff fail to notice and which have important consequences in our appreciation of knowledge production. Specifically, in Silverman's view, the implication that no outcomes can be predicted in advance does not necessarily follow from the recognition “that an entity's very being is constituted by the entire network of relations it has with all other entities.” Meanwhile, Hyun Woong Park proposes that the inconsistencies that Resnick and Wolff highlight in Louis Althusser's use of overdetermination are merely apparent and that, on the contrary, they have to be seen not as inconsistencies between essentialist and antiessentialist moments but as the development of a congruent scaffold. Resnick and Wolff reply by questioning Park's and Silverman's shared need to anchor themselves in some sort or another of determinism.

Keywords:

• Louis Althusser
• Stephen Resnick
• Richard Wolff
• Overdetermination

Notes

¹One can observe the influence of Althusser in the published work of Wolff (1978) in his earlier article on Marxist crisis theories where he tackles alternative conceptions of the different mechanisms in the Marxist tradition that claim to “cause” a crisis.

²The work by these authors has appeared in a variety of places, such as the Seventh International Conference of Rethinking Marxism in 2009, the Eastern Economics Association 2010 Conference, and the UMass/New School 2010 Graduate Student Workshop in Economics.

⁵This and following personal communication with Wolff are from a document attached to email correspondence dated 4 December 2012, reproduced here with permission.

³To give an idea of the rich intellectual exchanges happening at the time, it is worth noting that the publication of their 1979 article in The Review of Radical Political Economics was accompanied by a critique by Herbert Gintis (1979)—a colleague at Umass Amherst, and also a member of the “radical package” hired by the institution in 1973—and a reply by Resnick and Wolff (1979b). An earlier exchange in July and August of 1975 that was published a year later in the pages of Monthly Review between Wolff (1976) and Bowles and Gintis (1976) also reflects the lively intellectual environment at the Economics Department of UMass Amherst, during those days. Bruce Laurie (1985) documents an AESA-sponsored conference that had, as one of its various activities, a panel titled “Power, Property, and Class” composed of Resnick, Wolff, Bowles, and Gintis with philosopher Bob Ackerman as a discussant. Finally, DeMartino (1992) is an example of a dissertation under the guidance of R&W that actively challenges their own approach.

⁴Refer to Wolff (1977) for a discussion that reflects the thinking of R&W at the time of the publication of Hindess and Hirst's Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production and their later Modes of Production and Social Formation.

⁶An example of the theoretical fine-tuning they accomplished in their work in between the years 1979 and 1987 is their separation of property, power, and surplus as theoretically distinct ways of defining class (Resnick and Wolff 1986).

⁷Personal communication with Resnick from a document attached to email correspondence dated 5 December 2012, reproduced here with permission. See Resnick and Wolff (1987, 15–19) for a discussion of Quine and Rorty.