Thirty years after Roemer’s General Theory

Abstract

This symposium is an outgrowth of a session organized for the 2012 Allied Social Sciences Convention in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the publication of John Roemer’s landmark work, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (Roemer, 1982, hereafter cited as GTEC). While the papers by Skillman, Veneziani and Yoshihara, and Fleurbaey explore issues raised by GTEC, Roemer’s own contribution looks beyond the questions motivating his earlier work. Those questions, as described by Roemer in the introductory chapter of GTEC, were prompted by the failure of Marxian theory to explain the political behavior and uneven economic progress of modern self-identified socialist economies, such as China, the Soviet Union, Cuba and Vietnam. He contended that this failure fundamentally compromised Marxism’s effort to provide a complete account of the ‘laws of motion’ governing modern societies and its intended role as a guiding doctrine for revolutionary practice. Roemer saw the need to construct a comprehensive theory of exploitation and class that addressed the emergent case of socialist exploitation. Although the primary motivation underlying GTEC was thus to provide grounds for a historical materialist explanation of contemporary socialist experience, most of the ‘general theory’ developed in the work has to do with defining and characterizing the phenomena of exploitation and class as manifested in abstractly defined pre-capitalist and capitalist economies. Part I of GTEC established the framework of analysis while studying these phenomena in the context of subsistence economies with simple linear (‘Leontief’) production technologies and homogeneous labor. Part II extended this analytical framework to the investigation of accumulating economies with more general production possibility sets and