Re/presenting Class

"Re/presenting Class" is a collection of essays that develops a poststructuralist Marxist conception of class in order to theorise the complex contemporary economic terrain. Both building upon and reconsidering a tradition that Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff - two of this volume's editors - began in the late 1980s with their groundbreaking work "Knowledge and Class", contributors aim to correct previous research that has largely failed to place class as a central theme in economic analysis. Suggesting the possibility of a new politics of the economy, the collection as a whole focuses on the diversity and contingency of economic relations and processes. Investigating a wide range of cases, the essays illuminate, for instance, the organisational and cultural means by which unmeasured surpluses - labour that occurs outside the formal workplace' such as domestic work - are distributed and put to use. Editors Resnick and Wolff, along with J. K. Gibson-Graham, bring theoretical essays together with those that apply their vision to topics ranging from the Iranian Revolution to sharecropping in the Mississippi Delta to the struggle over the ownership of teaching materials at a liberal arts college. Rather than understanding class as an element of an overarching capitalist social structure, the contributors - from radical and cultural economists to social scientists - define class in terms of diverse and ongoing processes of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labour and view class identities as multiple, changing, and interacting with other aspects of identity in contingent and unpredictable ways. "Re/presenting Class" will appeal primarily to scholars of Marxism and political economy.