Resnick and Wolff Unhelpful

I finished Wolff and Resnick tonight. As I started to get at last night, they aren’t as helpful as I’d hoped they’d be. They do acknowledge that their approach differs considerably from that of others in the Marxian tradition, and their strong antiessentialist stance gives them some serious methodological rigor, but their careful definition of class processes doesn’t easily lend itself to thinking about class in the wired composition classroom. Following are a couple examples that might help to demonstrate why.

I think I can work with their assertion that “Class is an adjective, not a noun; it serves to demarcate two particular economic processes from all the others. . . that comprise the social totality. Human beings are understood and defined according to the myriad social processes they directly participate in. Stated differently, human beings are sites of specific subsets of social processes” (159). But they then say that “Individuals and groups are never constituted merely by class processes. The particular class positions they occupy define them no more or less than all the non-class positions they occupy within the myriad nonclass processes of society. Thus there is no entity, no group of persons, that can be properly designated as a class. For to do so is to reduce a complexity to one of its many components and determinants, an essentialist mode of analysis that is anathema to Marxian theory. Classes, then, do not struggle or do anything else for that matter. The term class struggle must refer to the object of groups struggling, not to the subjects doing the struggling” (161), and the statement seems to effectively close off any way I might try to use their concepts in the context of education.

They do helpfully clear up my questions about their perception of cultural markers of class, by making a direct connection between culture and consumption. “Surplus value is distributed to individuals for the more or less conspicuous display of personal consumption. A considerable amount of training, education, and labor time may be devoted to learning the proper way to display clothes, automobiles, jewelry, homes and their furnishings, art objects, books, wines, food, and so forth. Such costly display by industrial capitalists and top managers functions as a lure, an incentive to induce productive laborers to work harder and longer. This amounts to their performing more surplus labor for the appropriating capitalist. Such display also helps justify this performance of labor. Display produces as well as symbolizes significant conceptual and physical differences between performers and appropriators of surplus labor. These differences are personified in styles of dress, eating habits, manners, speech, and so forth. Such differences work to establish a kind of superiority of appropriators over performers of surplus labor. This in turn can serve to rationalize and justify the capitalist fundamental class position. The process of displaying personal consumption can also effect the relationship between industrial capitalists and their lenders of capital. Display can impress the latter group so that they provide credit at a lower cost than they might otherwise have offered. Marx refers to this as ‘luxury, which is now itself a means of credit.’ In these and other ways, display can become a condition of existence of the capitalist fundamental class process” (179). For these reasons, “Displayers must strive continually to display conspicuous personal consumption. Any interruption in this process could jeopardize the fundamental class position of the capitalist. Performers of surplus labor might consider appropriators to be insignificantly different from themselves and thus not to warrant their receipt of surplus labor. Creditors might charge significantly higher interest rates. As the development of capitalism in the United States demonstrates, conspicuous display can become a very significant condition of existence of surplus value appropriation” (180). Notice that they fail to explain the leap from consumption to “manners, speech, and so forth”, and this is emblematic of their general shortcoming: Resnick and Wolff’s analysis relies on a sort of economic hermeneutics that — despite what they have to say about economic determinism — constructs economic factors as the hidden originary essential cause to which everything else in the world can be connected. Notice the contempt held for the perspective of the performers of surplus labor, who are blind enough not to see through the appropriators’ veil of consumptive practices: basically, Wolff and Resnick are offering in the passage above is a tarted-up version of the concept of false consciousness connected to economic determinism, as much as they might profess otherwise. I’m not buying it.