The Overdetermination of Our Collaboration

Abstract

The concept of “overdetermination”—developed by Freud, Lukács, and Althusser, among others—shook the received wisdom of Marxists who engaged with it (rather than ignoring or dismissing it). Engagement forced a rethinking of the philosophical foundations of modern Marxism: both its notion of what theory is and does and its notion of what society is and how it changes. Steve Resnick and Rick Wolff together undertook that engagement and that rethinking subject to all the influences stemming from their time’s particular phase of capitalist development: from the Cold War, from the ideologically servile structures of U.S. academia, from their personal and family lives. In short they used the concept of overdetermination to rethink Marxism and especially Marxist economics. This essay likewise uses overdetermination to explain something about their collaboration, including its importance in and to their lives and works from 1973 to 2013.