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Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff's recent book, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR, goes beyond an "application" of their class analysis to change our understanding of fundamental class concepts. In their analysis of the former Soviet Union's class processes, especially the existence of a distinct form of the capitalist class process in which value is administered, they destabilize long held assumptions about the necessary conditions of existence of capitalist appropriation of surplus labor time. They also continue to provide elements of new historical conceptions of collectivity that are sorely needed. This book is crucial for all who care about how categories of thought intersect with readings of history.
Key Words: Class Analysis, Capitalism, Commmunism, Appropriation
Readers interested in the possibility of a large-scale noncapitalist future should pick up Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff's recent book, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR (2002). In this text the authors produce a systematic and imaginative reading of the class processes that characterized the former Soviet Union-a reading that traces the forms of the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor time that is the hallmark of their Marxian conception of class. It would be hard to imagine a more stimulating introduction to both the theoretical and concrete aspects of their work for those not familiar with it. Yet readers already familiar with Resnick and Wolff's work, even their essays on communism and the Soviet Union, skip this book at their peril. This sustained encounter between the theoretical categories of class and the complex and concrete forms of life in the Soviet Union generates theoretical sparks as the friction between well-developed theoretical categories and the evidence of historical interpretation collide.
While this book at times presents itself as an application of established categories to a crucial case, it is much more than that. In some ways it becomes a sustained examination of the meaning of appropriation; its systematic examination of new forms of capitalism and communism raises questions about exploitation and collectivity that spill beyond the structures of the text. Resnick and Wolff note that "the Marxian theory we use here is driven to investigate its own conceptual limits, the boundary that defines it" (2002, 71), and indeed their analysis...