Abstract
Discourse on class has been doubly repressed in the United States for many decades. In the first place, there is a widespread taboo on acknowledging the existence, let alone social significance, of class differences and conflicts. Second, when “class” is sometimes used analytically, its meaning is treated as known, singular, and universally agreed. Yet the history of class analyses over the millennia shows the profound social insights that such analyses have often achieved and their frequently far-reaching effects on politics, economics, and culture. The basic definitions of “class” have not been singular, but rather usually multiple, different, and contested, sometimes with great intensity. Indeed, the particular concept of class stressed in this chapter differs from those favored in several other chapters in this volume. The richness and diversity of class analyses applied to contemporary society and religion contradict today’s mainstream aversion to and superficial grasp of class analysis.
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Notes
Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Chapter 3.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vols. 1–3 (New York: International, 1967);
Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vols. 1–3 (Moscow: Progress, 1963–1971).
A large literature has arisen that elaborates, extends, and applies Marx’s new definition of class. Much of that has appeared since 1988 in the pages of the scholarly quarterly, Rethinking Marxism (which publishes all other varieties of Marxian theory and analysis). A few representative volumes include Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class; Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR (New York and London: Routledge, 2002);
Stephen Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, New Departures in Marxian Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 2006);
J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff, eds., Class and Its Others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
J. K. Gibson-Graham et al., eds., Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001);
Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenberg, Transition and Development in India (New York: Routledge, 2003);
Richard D. Wolff and Stephen A. Resnick, Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian (Cambridge and London: MIT University Press, 2012);
Graham Cassano, Class Struggle on the Home Front: Work, Conflict and Exploitation in the Household (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009);
J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Post-Capitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006);
Catherine P. Mulder, Unions and Class Transformation: The Case of the Broadway Musicians (New York and London: Routledge. 2009).
Fritz Pappenheim, The Alienation of Modern Man: An Interpretation Based on Marx and Tonnies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959).
See also Berteli Oilman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, second revised edition (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949), 228–240.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1969).
Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Aliber, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, fifth edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005).
See also Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism, 1500–2000, new edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).
Ulrich Duchrow and Franz J. Hinkelammert, Property for People, Not for Profit: Alternatives to the Global Tyranny of Capital (London: Zed Books, 2004).
An ever-expanding collection of resources concerned with those alternatives is available at www.democracyatwork.info. For substantial introductions to such alternative, noncapitalist production systems, see Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012);
Resnick and Wolff, Class Theory and History; Resnick and Wolff, New Departures in Marxian Theory; Gibson-Graham, A Post-Capitalist Politics; and Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our liberty, and Our Democracy (Takoma ParK, MD: Democracy Collaborative Press, 2011). An ever-expanding collection of resources concerned with those alternatives is available at www.democracyatwork.info.
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© 2013 Joerg Rieger
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Wolff, R.D. (2013). Religion and Class. In: Rieger, J. (eds) Religion, Theology, and Class. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339249_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339249_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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