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Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society

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Dilemmas of theorizing class

J. K. Gibson-graham Version of record first published: 18 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: J. K. Gibson-graham (2005): Dilemmas of theorizing class, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 17:1, 39-44 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0893569052000312881

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RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 17

NUMBER 1

(JANUARY 2005)

Dilemmas of Theorizing Class

J. K. Gibson-Graham
Pushed by our reviewers to revisit perennial (meta)theoretical questions and choices, we confront once again the dilemmas of theorizing. Should we emphasize the emptiness or fullness of categories? What historical baggage comes with our theoretical categories and what violence does theory do to history and geography? Must we sacrifice the heterogeneity within categories to constitute differences between them? Can a category function simultaneously as a ground and a product of analysis? Is there a virtue in consistency? Should theory identify limits or explore possibilities, or should it always do both? What constitutes a broadening of the theoretical imagination? Key Words: Class, Politics of Theory

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Such appreciative and thoughtful responses to Class and Its Others and Re/Presenting Class (Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2001a, 2001b) by Charusheela, Diskin, Feiner, Parker, and Watkins provide a wonderful invitation to reflect on the achievements of these collections and the question of how to move forward given the impetus they provide. Many of the comments raise what are, for us, some of the inescapable tensions of the process of retheorizing*/whether, for example, to risk resignifying concepts that already exist on a well-trodden terrain or to abandon them in favor of creating the new. We feel drawn to direct our response toward some of the tensions referred to and, in the process, to offer several reflections on where our work has traveled since coediting these books. Diskin draws our attention to the variety of methodological choices made by the authors as they apply and develop antiessentialist class concepts with respect to different sites and situations. Aware of possibly contradictory theorizations among the contributions, Diskin applauds the sophistication, if we can call it that, of a debate that allows divergence from left common sense positions and encourages transparency when discussing the methodological issues and investments of particular analyses. His strong endorsement of the multiple ways of producing class knowledge stands in contrast to the more worried stances taken by Parker and Charusheela. They both raise the overarching question of how, if one is endowed with a Marxist pedigree, we are to theorize now */aware, as we are, of the thorny old debates about historicism and theoreticism, conscious of the problem of Eurocentrism potentially posed by Marxist categories and politics, and faced with a frightening array of choices in this postmodern world of heterogeneity,
ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/05/010039-06 2005 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/0893569052000312881

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multiplicity, hybridity, and antiessentialist relativism. For them, the contributions of these collections evoke anxieties that push us now to further clarify what is at stake when assorted and sometimes divergent methodological singularities are allowed. Parker provocatively draws our attention to questions he feels are not asked: Though [class] relations are portrayed as irreducibly heterogeneous and multiple . . . it may be fairer to describe them as internally homogeneous since the selfidentity of each remains unquestioned. He goes on to single out the questionable use of preexisting categories, suggesting that to import the term feudal into an understanding of the dynamic flows of labor and power in a contemporary household, as does Jenny Cameron in Class and Its Others , is to forget that one is dealing with a figure but also to empty the analysis of historical specificity. Above all, Parker worries that by setting up class as the magnetic center of the book it remains more of a ground, more itself, more materialist (determinist?), and altogether less aleatory (random? contingent?) than we might claim. Charusheela mirrors Parkers concern with differentiation and the historical migration of terms when she ponders the fraught question of how to think the distinctions between different exploitative (capitalist and noncapitalist) modes of surplus production, appropriation, and distribution, especially since the categorization of difference that we have inherited is marked with Eurocentric, modernist imaginations of noncapitalist Others. She goes on to unsettle the mood of political optimism attached to the insights produced by some of the antiessentialist class analyses contained in the collections. Have we thought enough, she wonders, about the limits of transformative possibilities and the potential violence they might unleash? Could it be that our desire to insulate the spaces that represent our hopes for collectivity and transformation from the taint of negatives can have the perverse effect of narrowing the very transformative imaginations we seek to nourish? Is there not, she ponders, a tendency to ignore and thus misrecognize the constitutive Outside of communal/communist/collective spaces, a likelihood that we might screen our spaces of hope from scrutiny and thus strengthen the very discourses we seek to displace? These questions and concerns can no longer be answered (now ) in the abstract voice of normative pronouncements on how one is to theorize. We can, however, broach them from the particularity of how we (and others) have been thinking and theorizing lately. In the discussion that follows we start with the issue of inherited categories, differentiation, and the use of the term feudal, and go on to consider transformative spaces of communism and cooperativism and the issue of negotiating relations with Others or outsides. Before doing so we raise the possibility that our discussion might seem unsatisfying if it is read as a counterargument*/a justification for the use of theory in certain ways in particular projects. Perhaps another way of seeing this interchange is as a set of reflections on and from different points in the process of theory making. We are conscious that retheorizing involves steps and moves, provisional attachments and relinquishments. The overdeterminist epistemology we are committed to allows, for instance, for class as an entry point to be seen as both constituting (acting somewhat as a ground, in Parkers terms) and entirely constituted by its conditions of existence*/all of its others. The important

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thing is the continual theoretical movement between the conceptual fullness of a category that focuses attention on surplus labor relations of production, appropriation, and distribution, and its ultimate emptiness until its schematic and homogeneous form is filled with specific constitutive relations of race, gender, nationality, affect, and so on. A radical heterogeneity of class relations is the product, though not the starting place, of this theoretical process.1 We take our lead from Camerons (2001) adventurous and explicitly stated choice to read Frans household work not in terms of a feudal class process but as a self-appropriating class process. Cameron refrains from seeing Fran as participating in a feudal class process not because of historical dissonance or any particular loyalty to historical specificity, but because of a perception that, as Fran performs the bulk of the household labor for her family, the decision to do so (and to take charge of the distribution of the fruits of her surplus labor) is a power she wields, not something that is wielded over her by her husband. In other situations the term feudal, in Camerons view, might well apply*/for example, when surplus labor is produced by someone who has a legitimate right to the means of production but is appropriated in kind and distributed by another who wields the power, also inscribed in customary right, necessary to make this happen. The antiessentialist strategy is for the term feudal to exist in its emptiness as merely nomenclature until filled with meaning by its constitutive outsides. And the decision to apply the term to any particular reading and representation of social life is overdetermined by many factors, including an individuals penchant for abstraction or concreteness, concern to resignify inherited terms or produce neologisms, desire to communicate with particular audiences, and political purpose. Within the bounds of respectable scholarship there are no rules to follow here, but there are effects to trace. The heterogeneous self-identity of preexisting categories is, indeed, raised by Charusheela when she draws attention to the very different use to which the term feudal is put in Kayatekins analysis of sharecropping in postbellum Mississippi compared with that in the reading of Indias recent economic transitions by Chakrabarti and Cullenberg. Kayatekin (2001) foregrounds the gestalt of the feudal class relationship (paternalistic care of the lesser) and is willing to read rent transactions as a form of feudal surplus-labor appropriation. Her choice to fill up the category feudal with contemporary and historical constituents*/political, juridical, racial, geographical, agricultural, and climatic conditions of existence*/is overdetermined by her political interest in destabilizing the dominant theoretical understanding of the historical dynamics of capitalist development and the resultant empirical readings of southern U.S. history. Her analysis of the prevalence, well into the twentieth century, of a feudal class process in the South, overlaid on a recently/superficially abolished slave class process, provides a powerful cultural and economic story that has the potential to shift and deepen our comprehension of continued race violence and inequality in the United States. In
1. Similarly, the title Class and Its Others could be seen as the binary starting place of this deconstructive process.

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contrast, Chakrabarti and Cullenberg (2001) employ the feudal/slave designation in their class sets to denote any process in which the performer of surplus labor is excluded from any appropriation of their surplus and where their remuneration takes the form of in-kind payment rather than a monetary wage. This grouping of two different terms flies in the face of certain kinds of historical and contemporary specificity, but Cullenberg and Chakrabarti are unconcerned. They evacuate the terms of all content except for these two marked characteristics of exclusion with respect to surplus appropriation and payment in kind. Their purpose is to differentiate the Indian political economy in terms that allow development interventions to be evaluated for their ability to promote nonexploitative class structures (e.g., independent and communal class processes) and fair distribution. I suspect that if Kayatekin, Cullenberg, Chakrabarti, and Cameron were brought into conversation about their different uses of the term feudal (the heterogeneity within the category), a resolution of how this term ought to be applied would not be the outcome. What would emerge is the different ways in which history is being attended to and incorporated into each analysis. History, like class, doesnt speak for itself, but involves a careful choosing of what to include or exclude in a narrative or analysis and, more important, why. In their different applications of the feudal class concept (in Australian households today, the recent past of the U.S. South, and the current Indian context), we see a brave undoing of the modernist, Eurocentric tendency to map the feudal onto the Third World or onto the medieval/ premodern past. Undoubtedly, their discussion would generate fascinating insights into various strategies for complexifying and intervening differently in the politics of economic and social transition. The issue of how to read for difference is brought up again by Charusheela when she questions the interpretation offered by Gibson-Graham and ONeill (2001) of distributive payments made by BHP toward environmental cleanup and indigenous landowners, and the influence this form of corporate legitimization might have on worker subjectivity. Charusheelas preferred reading of this case is as an example of adaptation to a fait accompli and not, as we suggested, of the politics of becoming of new subjectivities, though of course both could be the case. Her implicit belief that transformation (within a capitalist order) does have limits sits alongside a criticism of postmodern Marxisms failure to explore the limits */and not just the hopes*/of our transformative desires. Sidestepping what might be construed as a capitalocentric bias regarding limits to worker and indigenous subjectivities, Charusheela focuses her criticism on the inadvertent linking of transformative desires to the inscriptions of modernism (especially rights-based, redistributive imaginaries). It is the limited content of the transformative imagination that produces impoverishment, she argues, particularly by a disregard for nonmodernist experiments in nonredistributive transformation and by a reluctance to explore the boundaries of community produced by the we that is the internal order of [the] communist/communal imagination. To our way of thinking, the surplus analysis offered by the class entry point is one that prefigures a form of distributive class politics , quite different in scope from the redistributive strategies pursued by rights-based and/or social

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democratic politics (a politics that the Left has usually represented as opposed to production-oriented politics). To push for distributions toward, for example, traditional landowners and the environment from the surplus appropriated by corporations is to develop legitimacy for claims on what is then resignified as a social surplus. In the case we discuss, it was through legal mechanisms that this claim was exacted but it was not via the language of universal right and state-mediated redistribution. What might prevent us from seeing this as a different kind of class politics, a very different initiative, one that could be read as non-re distributive? Perhaps an attachment to reading for limits and not possibilities? Our recent research on the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation comes to mind in connection with Charusheelas searching questions about the limits of communal, collective, and communist subjectivities (Gibson-Graham 2003). She points to the double-edged nature of [the] subjective constitution of collectivities and to the need for more politically rich, if less Utopian understandings of communist spaces. Inevitably, when concepts genealogically linked to notions of community are operationalized, the issue of boundaries*/the outside of the collective */emerges as a fraught and potentially undermining theme. In all the decisions made regarding wages (necessary labor payments) and surplus distributions, the Mondragon cooperators confront the ethical dilemmas of how the collective relates to its others in the wider Basque region of Spain and in its international production sites. The decision to peg owner-workers wages to regional averages for the Basque labor force reinforces a sense of solidarity across the cooperator/noncooperator divide that ensures that the space of collectivity does not become an island of privilege or poverty shored up by empty ideals. A counterpoint to this action is the decision, one that has drawn the criticism of many on the Left, to locate plants in Africa, Asia, and Europe run by waged employees and not owner-workers. The Mondragon cooperators are clear that their first priority is toward maintaining and growing cooperative employment opportunities in the Basque region. To safeguard the jobs of cooperators, the corporation has located noncooperative enterprises outside the region as a means of expanding markets and ensuring that costs are competitive. For many, Mondragons transformative success is fatally compromised by this move. A taint of [the] negative arises, fanned by the distinctly Utopian expectation that cooperative membership should be infinitely expandable. Yet here we see Mondragon cooperators involved in an open discussion of the inevitable limits of a cooperative community, ones that are theorized as moments in a (still, for us, transformative) process of building alternative economies. We agree with Charusheela that postmodern Marxism helps us to further explore the possibilities of a surplus-oriented economic politics that does not shy away from the difficult choices regarding insides and outsides to collectivity and the fullness or emptiness of categories. Our attachment to theory building as potential-making rather than limit-identifying has been strengthened by the inspirational contributions contained in these two collections and clarified by the generous and serious commentaries offered here in response.

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References
Cameron, J. 2001. Domesticating class: Femininity, heterosexuality, and household politics. In Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2001a, 47/68. Chakrabarti, A., and S. Cullenberg. 2001. Development and class transition in India: A new perspective. In Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2001b, 182/205. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2003. Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism and class. Critical Sociology 29 (2): 123/61. Gibson-Graham, J. K., and P. ONeill. 2001. Exploring a new class politics of the enterprise. In Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2001b, 56/80. Gibson-Graham, J. K., S. Resnick, and R. D. Wolff, eds. 2001a. Class and its others. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ///, eds. 2001b. Re/Presenting class: Essays in postmodern Marxism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Kayatekin, S. A. 2001. Sharecropping and feudal class processes in the postbellum Mississippi Delta. In Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff 2001b, 227/46.

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