“All I know is that I am not a Marxist”

Daniel Little wants to have it both ways: on one hand, he wants to argue that the work of Karl Marx, after being buried for the umpteenth time, is relevant once again; on the other hand, his interpretation of Marx’s theoretical framework is so deterministic it’s a wonder Marx is relevant at all.

If this is Marxist theory, “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.”*

I don’t have the time to go through Little’s interpretation in detail. So, let me choose just his first point: materialism.

Social change is driven by material circumstances, the forces and relations of production. This encompasses the property system and the ensemble of technologies present in a given level of society. Materialism denies that ideas and thought drive social change; so religion, patriotism, nationalism, and ideologies of patriarchy are epiphenomena rather than originating causes.

Here, Little defines materialism as a kind of economic determinism, specifically property ownership and technology. And adds that, in his version of Marxian materialism, ideas and thought play no role.

That certainly is not my interpretation of materialism, which emphasizes historical and social explanation: the idea both that social phenomena emerge historically (and therefore change and develop over time, in a complex and contradictory fashion) and that each and every social event is the conjunctural result of all aspects of society (cultural as well as economic and political). Materialism is therefore counterposed to idealism, which means that social explanation cannot be reduced to an ideal or rational order (such as you get by focusing on the causal primacy of any one order of society like the economy).

In my view, it comes down to a distinction between discursive and causal priority. Marx focuses on the economy—and, within the economy, on class (which, to make a further distinction, is not the same as property)—not as a claim that the economy is the cause of everything else, but instead as a discursive entry point, a way of focusing attention and making a particularly Marxian sense of what is happening in society.

So, there’s a determinist Marx and a nondeterminist Marx, two very different interpretations of Marx’s writings. And Little and I clearly disagree in our interpretations. But that raises a second issue: anyone who puts forward a particular understanding of Marx also has to explain that there’s a large scholarly debate concerning Marx’s method, including a debate between more or less deterministic versions of Marx. Unfortunately, we don’t get any sense of that debate from Little’s list of “key theoretical frameworks.”

All of which leads me to say, if Marxism is reduced without debate to economic determinism, I am not a Marxist.

 

*According to Friedrich Engels, “Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French “Marxists” of the late [18]70s: ‘All I know is that I am not a Marxist’.”

“Offbeat” economics department—really?!

 

Given the awful track record of the economics departments at Harvard and elsewhere, it’s a bit strange that the economics department at the University of Massachussetts Amherst is referred to as “offbeat” [ht: ke].

Not to mention the fact that the fundamental errors in the now-infamous Reinhart-Rogoff study were first identified by Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at UMass.

It used to be called a radical economics department. In more recent times, it’s often referred to as heterodox economics. Yet, even after the “radical package” was hired back in 1973, the department only ever included a minority of nonmainstream economists. (In the video above, Don Katzner, Sam Bowles, and the late Stephen Resnick discuss some of that history. Matthews’s article also includes links to two other sources: Katzner’s book and a 2007 Nation piece by Chris Hayes.)

But that’s how it is in economics, even now five years into the Second Great Depression, which of course was precipitated by following the policies advocated by mainstream economists: having even a smattering of non-believers is enough to identify the department as something out of the ordinary—whether radical, heterodox, or simply offbeat.

Capitalism and history

I can’t say I was aware I was participating in an intellectual fad, the history of capitalism, when I decided to teach Seth Rockman’s Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore this semester.

I chose Rockman’s book for my Commodities: The Making of Market Society course because I needed a good study of the commodification of labor, as an alternative to Bruce Laurie’s classic Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America. There’s always the danger of assigning books we haven’t yet read (alongside the excitement, of course, of exploring new material). However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Rockman’s attempt to tell “the story of the chronically impoverished, often unfree, and generally unequal Americans whose work made the United States arguably the most wealthy, free, and egalitarian society in the Western world” (3). I’m curious to see how the students react over the next couple of weeks.

Apparently, Rockman has changed the name of his course from Capitalism, Slavery and the Economy of Early America to simply Capitalism, which next fall will become Brown’s introductory American history survey.

It shouldn’t really surprise us this area has taken off after the crash of 2007-08.

“Earlier, a lot of these topics would’ve been greeted with a yawn,” said Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States.” “But then the crisis hit, and people started asking, ‘Oh my God, what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?’ ”

What’s interesting about Rockman’s and Mihm’s research and teaching and the growth of this entire area of inquiry, not to mention Harvard’s new Program on the Study of U.S. Capitalism, is the fact that they’re located within history and not economics. As I’ve explained before, the mainstream wing of the discipline of economics has mostly eliminated any consideration of economic history (and, with it, of the history of economic thought), and thus has created an intellectual vacuum concerning the history of capitalist development, classes, and institutions. So, historians have stepped in to fill the gap, thereby demonstrating there’s nothing natural or inevitable about the emergence of capitalism.

Markets and financial institutions “were created by people making particular choices at particular historical moments,” said Julia Ott, an assistant professor in the history of capitalism at the New School (the first person, several scholars said, to be hired under such a title).

The real question, of course, is, will this new work contribute to the project of making capitalism history?

Chart of the day

As Colin Gordon [ht: gh] explains,

If pressed to reduce the last century of economic history into one graphic, I would go with something like this. The blue line traces the rise and decline of organized labor since the end of the First World War. The red line, in an uncanny reflection, traces the income share of the richest 10 percent of Americans. The drop-down menus, offering other union density and income-share metrics, serve up variations on the same theme: as union power has declined, so too has the share of national income going to wages and salaries, and to the bottom and middle of the income spectrum. . .

union decline is—for a number of reasons—a pretty good marker for the broader dismantling of the New Deal. First, the policies driving and shaping inequality across the last generation—steep cuts in social spending, the political abandonment of organized labor, deregulation and privatization, tax cuts, and punitive cycles of unemployment—shared a common goal: to redistribute income upward by eroding the hard-fought bargaining power of ordinary Americans. Union losses account for a large chunk of rising inequality, especially for men and especially in the 1970s and 1980s.

Second, union losses have also shaped the political environment. The “right-to-work” push of the 1940s, the business offensive of the 1970s (captured in Lewis Powell’s infamous 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce), and the attack on public sector unions in recent years all shared the conviction that union power needed to be checked at the bargaining table and at the ballot box. Representing a third of the private workforce, mid-century unions fought and won battles over trade, workplace safety, social policy, and civil rights. With union membership at 6.6 percent of the private labor force in 2012 and falling, those battles are no longer even taking place.

And third, union decline has fed broader inequality because, in the American context, so much is at stake at the bargaining table. In settings where workers (and employers) can count on a decent minimum wage, universal health care, and expansive public retirement accounts, the stakes of private employment (and collective bargaining) are not that high. In the United States, economic security remains shackled to private job-based benefits that are increasingly elusive (or expensive), and public policies are crafted and calibrated as supplements—or as reluctant and lean alternatives.

That’s one side of the equation. The other side, of course, is the growth in gross corporate profits, some of which are in turn distributed to the members of the top 10 percent.

Capitalism and slavery

In Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams argued that the British abolition of their Atlantic slave trade in 1807 was motivated primarily by profit—rather than, as previous historians had suggested, by altruism or humanitarianism.

But, Walter Johnson reminds us, the history of the relationship between capitalism and slavery is even more complex.

What was the role of slavery in American economic development?

The most familiar answer to that question is: not much. By most accounts, the triumph of freedom and the birth of capitalism are seen as the same thing. The victory of the North over the South in the Civil War represents the victory of capitalism over slavery, of the future over the past, of the factory over the plantation. In actual fact, however, in the years before the Civil War, there was no capitalism without slavery. The two were, in many ways, one and the same. . .

Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called “soul drivers.” The first wave cleared the region for cultivation. “Forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” the former slave John Parker remembered in “His Promised Land.” Those who followed planted the fields in cotton, which they then protected, picked, packed and shipped — from “sunup to sundown” every day for the rest of their lives.

Eighty-five percent of the cotton Southern slaves picked was shipped to Britain. The mills that have come to symbolize the Industrial Revolution and the slave-tilled fields of the South were mutually dependent. Every year, British merchant banks advanced millions of pounds to American planters in anticipation of the sale of the cotton crop. Planters then traded credit in pounds for the goods they needed to get through the year, many of them produced in the North. “From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South, to the shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes to us from the North,” said one Southerner.

As slaveholders supplied themselves (and, much more meanly, their slaves) with Northern goods, the credit originally advanced against cotton made its way north, into the hands of New York and New England merchants who used it to purchase British goods. Thus were Indian land, African-American labor, Atlantic finance and British industry synthesized into racial domination, profit and economic development on a national and a global scale.

When the cotton crop came in short and sales failed to meet advanced payments, planters found themselves indebted to merchants and bankers. Slaves were sold to make up the difference. The mobility and salability of slaves meant they functioned as the primary form of collateral in the credit-and-cotton economy of the 19th century.

It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.

Note: The photo above is from the Old Slave Mart Museum, located at 6 Chalmers Street, Charleston, South Carolina. The 1808 ban on the United States’ participation in the international slave trade led to a renewed demand for slave labor, which was satisfied, in part, by the creation of a domestic slave-trading system in which Charleston functioned as a major slave collecting and reselling center.

History, utopia, and full employment

Yes, history is important. But not only for the reasons given by Brad DeLong. In my view, history gives us the sense that things have not always been what they are, and therefore don’t have to be in the future what they are today. It offers us, in other words, the space not only for interpreting the world but for changing it.

Which brings me to the question of utopia. I’ve already had my say about Erik Olin Wright’s book, Envisioning Real Utopias. But I do want to comment on John Quiggin’s review. Yes, the Left—including Marx—does have a “long tradition of suspicion of utopianism.” But it’s not how Quiggin sees it. The Marxian critique of utopian thinking was less about imagining a different way of organizing society (since there is much to be admired in the ideas of people like Charles Fourier) and more about how to get there. That was Marx’s critique: the utopian socialists sought merely to encourage the elite to think about a different set of economic and social institutions instead of believing that real people, in their collective struggles, would make real changes in the existing order in order to create real steps toward something that today would be considered only a utopia.

And, as it turns out, it’s not just libertarians and reactionaries who have a utopian streak. All economic theories—on both the Left and the Right—are based on some kind of utopia. For example, neoclassical economists imagine a world of private property and free markets that lead to Pareto efficiency, in which no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. And then the debate, among neoclassical economists, is about how close to or far away the real economy is from such a utopia—and, of course, what policies need to be adopted to get there.

Marxists, for their part, imagine a radically different utopia, one in which exploitation is eliminated, and the direct producers are not excluded from the act of appropriating the surplus labor they perform. That’s a very different kind of utopia, with a very different set of policy options and demands on the current system.

What then would be the appropriate real utopian demand today? This is how Fredric Jameson sees it:

if I ask myself what would today be the most radical demand to make on our own system—that demand which could not be fulfilled or satisfied without transforming the system beyond recognition, and which would at once usher in a society structurally distinct from this one in every conceivable way, from the psychological to the sociological, from the cultural to the political—it would be the demand for full employment, universal full employment around the globe. As the economic apologists for the system today have tirelessly instructed us, capitalism cannot flourish under full employment; it requires a reserve army of the unemployed in order to function and to avoid inflation. That first monkey-wrench of full employment would then be compounded by the universality of the requirement, inasmuch as capitalism also requires a frontier, and perpetual expansion, in order to sustain its inner dynamic. But at this point the utopianism of the demand becomes circular, for it is also clear, not only that the establishment of full employment would transform the system, but also that the system would have to be already transformed, in advance, in order for full employment to be established. I would not call this a vicious circle, exactly; but it certainly reveals the space of the utopian leap, the gap between our empirical present and the utopian arrangements of this imaginary future.

Yet such a future, imaginary or not, also returns upon our present to play a diagnostic and a critical-substantive role. To foreground full employment in this way, as the fundamental utopian requirement, allows us, indeed, to return to concrete circumstances and situations, to read their dark spots and pathological dimensions as so many symptoms and effects of this particular root of all evil identified as unemployment. Crime, war, degraded mass culture, drugs, violence, boredom, the lust for power, the lust for distraction, the lust for nirvana, sexism, racism—all can be diagnosed as so many results of a society unable to accommodate the productiveness of all its citizens. At this point, then, utopian circularity becomes both a political vision and programme, and a critical and diagnostic instrument.

Quality vs. accessibility of higher education

The debate between accessibility and quality of higher education has a long history in the United States, as John Cumbler [ht: mfa] explains.

Now, in the midst of the new austerity, states are abandoning one model—combining excellence with accessibility for many—and retreating to an older model—of quality and accessibility for a few and accessibility without quality for the rest.

States have cut their contribution to public universities, and public universities have raised tuition to make up the shortfall. More and more students are being left behind. To fill this gap some states are looking to the manufacturing model, standardization, mass production, economies of scale and de-skilling of the professorship. This model has already been adapted by for-profit universities, which provide a degree but very little else. State universities have been urged to either abandon excellence for accessibility, or continue the trend of higher tuition and limited accessibility.

This is a world we know about. At its best it is the old bifurcated world of normal colleges and exclusive elite universities. At its worst it is mass-produced diploma mills. It is a world where the best and the brightest elites will get the best education in the world. It is also a world in which the best and the brightest of everyone else will find limited challenge and limited opportunity. But although the world of quality education for the few and second-rate education for the many is not new, the world for those reaching maturity has changed.

Quality education may have been limited in the 19th century, but there existed alternatives to a university degree in on-the-job training for skilled labor or in opening a small business. But that is a lost world. Well-paid, non-college-trained skilled labor is a declining proportion of the labor force, and despite the rhetoric about small businesses, the reality is that few mom and pop businesses survive. The world we are moving toward is one where a great deal of potential will be lost. In the short term states will save money. In the long term it is a strategy for stagnation and loss.

Stephen Resnick—author

The last time, I wrote about Stephen Resnick’s approach to teaching. Here, I want to consider his written work.

I’m not going to attempt to cover everything listed on his long curriculum vitae.  What I want to do is pick out and comment on a few pieces that, to my mind, are emblematic of his pioneering contributions to extending and reconceptualizing the Marxian critique of political economy.

Let me start with two quick observations. First, much of what Resnick wrote and published over the years, he did so with his long-time friend and comrade Richard Wolff. What I write then about Resnick’s work, especially from 1979 onward, should be understood as an appreciation of the writings of both Resnick and Wolff.

Second, there is a gap of about four years in his curriculum vitae, from 1975 to 1979, which is absolutely crucial—and admirable. That’s the period during which Resnick stopped publishing, in order to focus on two other projects: the building of the new Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and a rethinking of Marxian theory. The first project took up a great deal of time and energy, and Resnick dedicated himself to working with others (not only Wolff but also Sam Bowles, Herb Gintis, Jim Crotty, and Donald Katzner, among others) to create a department where Marxian economics would, after a long hiatus, have a home in the United States.* The second project was born out of a frustration with the received tradition of Marxian economics, and the only way to move beyond it was to sit down with the texts of that tradition, both classic and new, and to initiate a project of rethinking Marxian theory. That involved identifying the distinguishing characteristics of Marxism (what made it different not only from mainstream economics but also from other radical traditions) and then pushing it in new directions (of which more below).

But before I get to that work, I want to go back in time a bit and focus on two articles that, in my view, represent the most interesting dimensions of Resnick’s work before UMass. They are:

“A Model of an Agrarian Economy with Non-Agricultural Activities” (with Stephen Hymer), American Economic Review (September 1969): 493-506

“The State of Development Economics,” American Economic Review, Proceedings (May 1975): 317-22

In the first, Resnick and Stephen Hymer went beyond the usual neoclassical labor-leisure tradeoff model by incorporating, for an agrarian economy, a third possibility: “Z activities.” These were meant to represent a wide variety of nonagricultural nonleisure activities such as processing, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and service activities to satisfy the needs for food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, and ceremony. This allowed them to argue against the neoclassical proposition that the course of capitalist development could simply be reduced to the replacing of leisure by work. Instead, by paying attention to the “complex mosaic of agrarian life,” they could emphasize the effects of the growth of markets and increased exchange between town and country—not only with increased specialization and production (of both food and manufactured goods, at the expense of Z goods) but also the economic and social costs of the disruption of the economic and social structure of rural areas, including the immiseration of important parts of the population. My sense is, even though a certain language is largely absent, and the analytical tools they use are pretty standard neoclassical ones, Resnick and Hymer are drawing on many of the themes of a Marxian analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Resnick put those issues up front in his 1975 critique of bourgeois development economics. He notes, at the start, the differences between the “underlying theories of value” informing neoclassical and Marxian approaches to development and identifies, in language that would be familiar to mainstream economists, the problems inherent in their method:

Simply put, the neoclassical approach is misspecified because of the omission of production relations and thus yields biased policy conclusions and unreliable predictions. Further, although this approach has recently appended to its analysis the more obvious social and political issues, they are added as unexamined external givens never seen as the direct outgrowth of the underlying structure of production, i.e., the value relation between labor and labor power. Neoclassical development cannot analyze anything outside of a framework of market or exchange relationships because that is the theory upon which it is based; it is trapped not by inadequate data or lack of “better” models, but rather by its narrow focus on supply and demand and its total neglect of those historic forces that have produced international relations of production and technology based upon an exploitive system of one class over another.

Resnick then proceeds to tell a radically different story, albeit a pretty traditional Marxian story (replete with a falling rate of profit and the exploitation of some countries by others), of the history of capitalism and imperialism in the Third World.

And that was the last time Resnick would be permitted to publish his research in a mainstream economics journal. After that—after his publicly becoming identified as a Marxist—the doors of the mainstream wing of the profession were closed to him.

Once the new department was up and running, and considerable progress had been made in the project of rethinking Marxism (with Wolff and in discussion with some of the doctoral students at UMass), Resnick published the results in three key articles:

“The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition From Feudalism to Capitalism in Western Europe” (with Richard Wolff), Review of Radical Political Economics (Fall 1979): 3-22

“Marxist Epistemology” (with Richard Wolff), Social Text (November) 1982: 31-72**

“Classes in Marxian Theory” (with Richard Wolff), Review of Radical Political Economics (Winter 1982), 1-18**

In the theory of “Theory of Transitional Conjunctures,” Resnick and Wolff announced their new understanding of “Marxist social science” and then illustrated their approach with an intervention into the discussion of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western Europe. They rely heavily on the work of Louis Althusser to argue that Marx inaugurated a radical break from other social sciences—based on a different epistemology (an alternative to both rationalism and empiricism), a different methodology (based on overdetermination, and thus a rejection of all forms of essentialism, including theoretical humanism and economic determinism), and a specific definition of class (focused on the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor). They then use their rethinking of Marxian theory to identify various ways Marx’s “simple sketch” of the transition from feudalism to capitalism had been interpreted by other Marxists—from Paul Sweezy-Maurice Dobb through Immanuel Wallerstein—and to produce their own interpretation of that transition. Their view is that it is necessary to focus on the contradictions between the feudal class relation (specified in terms of what they refer to as fundamental and subsumed classes) and its social conditions of existence, out of which the conditions of existence of a different class relation—that of capitalism—were produced, which in turn undermined what remained of the feudal class process.

In the Social Text article, Resnick and Wolff explain in more detail what they mean by a specifically Marxist epistemology. They explain how rethinking dialectical materialism in terms of overdetermination rules out the various essentialisms that have characterized the pendulum swings within debates in the Marxist tradition (back and forth between various forms of empiricism and rationalism, and between economic and  humanist determinisms). They then trace the effects of those debates through various key theoreticians, including Marx and Engels, Lenin, Lukács, and Althusser. Their conclusion is that Marxian theory comprises a particular way of “thinking about society, history, and the process of thinking itself: dialectically materialist, anti-essentialist, and with class as its conceptual entry and goal point.”

Then, in “Classes in Marxian Theory,” Resnick and Wolff present the concepts of class they think are central to Marxian theory—concepts that are different both from the traditional Marxist “two-class model” and from more recent efforts to update that model by considering various other classes and class fractions (e.g., peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and the so-called professional-managerial class). Their solution takes the form of fundamental and subsumed classes, which is their way of bringing together the class analyses Marx carries out in volume 1 of Capital with those elaborated in volumes 2 and 3. In their view, Marxian class analysis is based on a double complexity: first, a difference between the production of surplus labor and its distribution; and second, the idea that individuals often occupy multiple, different class positions, both fundamental and subsumed. One of the results is that the “working class” is reconceptualized as a variable alliance of distinct classes, including both laborers who occupy both fundamental and subsumed class positions. Class struggles are similarly rethought: Resnick and Wolff shift the focus from the subject to the object of such conflicts. Thus, class struggles are redefined as collective efforts to change, either quantitatively or qualitatively, the extraction or distribution of surplus labor.

Five years later, Resnick and Wolff published two extraordinary books:

 Economics: Marxism vs. Neoclassical (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)

 Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

The first was a product of and a testament to their commitment and skill as teachers. In it, Resnick and Wolff not only compared neoclassical and Marxian economic theories; they set forth a nondeterministic way of comparing the two theories, based on their entry points and logics, and their different consequences for analyzing economic events and institutions.***

The second has to be counted among the most significant books of twentieth-century Marxian theory. Resnick and Wolff accomplish nothing less than a wholesale rethinking of the basic concepts of the Marxian tradition, from the theory of knowledge through its methodological orientation to class analysis. They start with the basic proposition that “Marxian theory has a distinctive concept of what theory is” and then proceed to elaborate that distinctiveness in terms of both contemporary philosophy (through the work of such figures as Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty) and the Marxian tradition itself (from Marx and Engels through Althusser to Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst). Next, they discuss how Marxists can “construct a knowledge of an ever-changing overdetermined social totality.” During the remainder of the book, they present their rethinking of the concepts of Marxian class analysis, apply those concepts to some of the major arguments in Marx’s Capital, and produce specifically Marxian theories of capitalist enterprises and the state.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance for contemporary Marxism of Knowledge and Class. There is simply no major topic in our understanding and use of Marxian theory today that is not affected by the theoretical self-consciousness and thorough-going antiessentialism demonstrated in Resnick and Wolff’s reinterpretation of Marxian theory.

The tremendous impact of Resnick’s written work can be seen in his own later work as well as in the articles and books published by his former students and colleagues and in the pages of the journal Rethinking Marxism. I know that I could not have made my own modest contributions to the rethinking of Marxian theory without the theoretical inspiration and comradely encouragement provided by Resnick over the years.

 

*The story of those early years at UMass has been told by Donald W. Katzner in At the Edge of Camelot: Debating Economics in Turbulent Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). My review of Katzner’s book can be found here.

**These articles were reprinted in New Departures in Marxian Theory, ed. S. A. Resnick and R. D. Wolff (New York: Routledge, 2008).

***A new edition of that book, Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, with additional chapters on Keynesian theory and recent developments in neoclassical theory (coauthored with Yahya Madra), has been published by MIT Press.

Map of the day

According to Susan Schulten, Edward Atkinson’s map of King Cotton represented his capitalist case for emancipation.

Basically, Atkinson argued (as neoclassical economists have done in our own times) that slavery was “inefficient” and therefore should be abolished.

This was an utter violation of capitalism, Atkinson argued. Not only had slave labor hampered Southern agriculture, but it had driven away countless potential immigrants. Northern cotton manufacturers had not just the right, but the obligation to demand the introduction of free labor. He proudly noted that free white labor in Tennessee and Texas already produced nearly one-ninth of the region’s cotton output. He even attempted to implement his ideas in late 1863 by supporting the cultivation of cotton with free black labor behind Union lines.

I wonder if, someday, we will look back at maps of our own time and realize how inefficient and outmoded our current forms of production are.

Stephen Resnick—teacher

Back in January, I noted that I expected to be writing more about Stephen Resnick’s gifts and his great legacy to the world. Well, it’s taken me a while to begin to confront the loss and to finally return to that task.

Here, I want to focus on two things: his teaching (in this post) and his writing (in another post).

Resnick was, by all accounts, a great teacher. And I was fortunate to witness that first hand: as one of his teaching assistants (for Introduction to Microeconomics) and as a graduate student (in his course on European Economic History)—not to mention many conversations, seminars, and conferences over the years. (For readers who did not have the opportunity to sit in one of Resnick’s courses or to hear him present at conferences, you can get a sense of his commitment to teaching in his on-line Marx course).

The first thing that struck me was that, at least on certain levels, Resnick didn’t distinguish between undergraduate and graduate students. He treated them equally. I remember as if it were yesterday that, in both undergraduate Microeconomics and graduate European Economic History (and I was in both during my first semester at UMass), he started in the same way: with history and epistemology. He taught both groups of students (1) that capitalism had a history (and therefore a beginning and an end) and (2) that different economic theories produced different conceptions of capitalism (and, of course, had different consequences for that system). So, I literally went from his undergraduate lectures to 250 students to his graduate course with 25 students and heard the same thing. Yes, the language was somewhat different but the lesson was the same: history and theories mattered.

And that’s one of the reasons Resnick took teaching so seriously. History and theories matter. And if undergraduate students were only going to take one course in economics, and if they took it from Resnick, they learned that capitalism had a history (and thus was not the only way of organizing economic and social life) and that economic theories were important (since they affected everything, from individual decisions about whether or not to go to college to economic policies enacted in national and international institutions). Graduate students learned the same lessons, which meant that we were taught from the very beginning that history was important (studying the transition to capitalism implied the possibility of a transition beyond capitalism) and so were different theories (which gave us a reason to study both neoclassical economics and the Marxian critique of political economy).

The other major reason Resnick was so successful as a teacher was because he took the students seriously—again, both undergraduate and graduate. He treated them/us as subjects, capable of both thinking and acting. And therefore of changing the world. In other words, he didn’t teach economics as a dismal science, and therefore as a set of laws that needed to be mastered and obeyed. Instead, economics was alive, both useful and problematic, and therefore important for students to know well and critically. He taught the students to understand how and why different groups of economists told the stories they did and arrived at particular conclusions, because that was the only way they were going to be able to understand the role that economics plays in the world—and then to do something about it.

Back in 1998, I was asked to provide a letter of reference when Resnick was nominated for a Distinguished Teaching Award (which he then won). Here’s what I wrote:

Steve is fond of saying that the only thing he has learned during thirty-five years of teaching is that he hasn’t learned anything. Such statements are, I think, a testament to his humility: he neither accepts all the credit for the many successes he has achieved as a teacher nor is he willing to assume the position of the many merchants of educational “snake oil” who are quick to sell to frustrated teachers the elixir for solving any and all problems they encounter in the classroom.

That was a position that Resnick maintained right to the end. He was proud to be a teacher, and humble about how and why he was so successful. “Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t,” he often said. “And I have no idea why.” But that never stopped him from walking into the classroom, each and every time, with the idea that history and theories matter and with a fundamental respect for the students sitting before him.