J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, Richard D. Wolff. Class and Its Others Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2000
Class is an adjective, not a noun Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class
Desire to produce a politically enabling discourse of the economy
Marx produced in volume 1 of Capital a history of the capitalist’s exploitative relation to the labourer/producer
producing, appropriating, distributing surplus labour
Fundamental Class Process
The moment of exploitation, surplus labour is produced and appropriated in value form.
Subsumed Class Process
The distribution of appropriated surplus value to a range of recipients: into wider society –> financiers, merchants, landlords, advertising agents, governments, charitable organizations, organized crime, who all provide conditions of existence of surplus labour production, and also withing the enterprise, into the accumulation of productive capital or management salaries and benefits or compensation for non-producing workers in marketing and sales.
Range of class processes: primitive communist, slave, ancient, communal/communist.
What distinguishes each of these is the way that surplus labour is produced, appropriated and distributed.
– feudal rent
– surplus value
This language of class opens up a “range of identity positions that could potentially be inhabited, providing a rudimentary typology of forms of surplus appropriation that might provided imaginative extension and normative valencing.
To invigorate economic innovations centered on exploitation and distribution, we are interested in generating a dicourse of class that offers a range of subject positions that might prompt identificaton (9).
Our task is to open up new discursive spaces where a language of class can articulate with other aspects of social existence that are themselves potential sources of identity. The emphasis we place on language of process rather than of social structure suggests the possibility of energetic and undefined class identities where the compelling question is not “What is my class belonging?” but “What is my class becoming?” (11).
We are keen to enlarge the domain of class narrative and widen the affective register of class politics (15).