Re/Presenting Class is a timely and evocative collection of essays devoted to exploring the contribution postmodern Marxist class theory can make to the contemporary study of political economy. This multifaceted exploration marks a refreshing departure from the conventional focus of the political economic tradition on classical Marxist analysis of the capitalist system as a total system or mode of production. On this conventional approach, class functions merely as an instrument of the dominant mode of capital accumulation. By contrast, the essays in Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff's collection employ various forms of class analysis as an independent means to illuminate contemporary and historical political economies. Here class is understood not simply as an instrumentality of capitalist accumulation, but as a set of independent “processes of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labor” (17, 169). In essence, the essays attempt, in various ways, to extricate class analysis from general “theory of the capitalist totality,” (1) and to examine what kinds of insight it can offer as an independent framework in its own right. In general, the project repays the investment just as the book rewards reading.

The essays, however, suggest rather than realize the potential of contemporary postmodern Marxist class analysis. While all are interesting and provocative (if sometimes unevenly so), they are also highly eclectic. They cover a strikingly diverse range of subjects from the economics of contemporary liberal arts colleges to the main rival models of postindependence Indian economic development, from the analysis of pre-Columbian social dynamics to the contemporary Western experience of nature, from the organization of sharecropping in the postbellum Mississippi Delta to the causes of the 1979 Iranian Revolution to the internal financial dynamics of the contemporary commercial enterprise.

Moreover, while the essays do share “certain characteristic predilections/orientations,” (20) they also deploy very different approaches to class analysis. While some concentrate, for example, on the familiar capital-labor nexus, albeit often in unconventional contexts (such as administration and faculty at liberal arts colleges), others attempt to decenter such conflicts and focus on more unconventional class relations, such as those between the executives of major commercial enterprises (such as Australia's Broken Hill Proprietary Limited) and communities affected by their activities (such as those living downstream from Broken Hill Propriety's Ok Tedi copper and gold mines).

The result is that while the essays generally succeed in their announced intention of “destabilizing” the dominant discourses around class with “antiessentialist” insights, they can hardly be said to offer a substantial alternative to them. What they do offer is what the editors characterize as “a field of openness and experimentation” (18) that reveals some of the limitations of the dominant approaches as currently practiced. In pursuing this project of opening and experimenting, however, postmodern Marxist class analysis remains in a sense parasitic on the very dominant discourses it seeks to challenge, that is, the essays add critical insights where they are typically masked or overlooked on the conventional, neoliberal and Marxist approaches which predominate in the literature of political economy, and thus add dimensions missing on these approaches, without offering a clear and cohesive alternative framework of their own. In essence then the postmodern Marxist approach remains reliant on other dominant discourses on which it can do its work of opening and experimenting. The collection then does not seriously undertake the work of developing a cohesive postmodernist Marxism based on analysis of class, but limits itself mainly to clearing the ground of some prominent essentialist distortions by showing what they miss in a wide variety of realms, typically, subtle forms of exploitation.

Indeed, the project of drawing attention to hitherto unperceived (or neglected) forms of exploitation constitutes the most important “common predilection/orientation” of the essays. From commercial firms' exploitation of the environment and public subsidization to states' exploitation of the discourses of development to advance their own parochial agendas, all of the essays reveal subtle but insidious forms of exploitation. In some cases, the author is content to simply draw our attention to these forms of exploitation, while others explicitly advance normative arguments in favor of what Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff term “nonexploitative class relations,” (9) or what Adriana Vlachou calls “green capitalism” (125). In other words, while some postmodern Marxist class analysis exhibits something of the value-free, descriptive orientation of modern quantitative human studies, others follow Marx's famous complaint that ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.' Even in the latter case, however, the distance traveled from Marx's own work is well captured in the very expression “nonexploitative class relations” (or “green capitalism”). Marx of course held that class relations (like capitalism) were inherently exploitative, and the hope of eliminating such exploitation without eliminating class (or capitalism) was yet another seductive but dangerous bourgeois fantasy.

Indeed, more conventional Marxists are bound to have difficulty with the whole underlying notion of “Reading Marx for Class” alone (23). They will likely object, and not without reason, to the whole project of distinguishing a Marx the class theorist from a Marx the deterministic economist, (24) and in particular with the attempt to emphasize the former at the cost of the latter. There is only one Marx, they will say, and this kind of selective reading does violence to the essential unity and coherence of his work.

However, while there is much to be said for such objections from the perspective of the best or most adequate reading of Marx, the ultimate criteria according to which such a collection must be judged is not whether it is fair (or fairest) to Marx, but what it adds to understanding of political economy. On those latter criteria, there can be little doubt that Re/Presenting Class constitutes an important contribution, worthy of careful study and progressive elaboration. If it falls short of yet offering a cohesive new approach to political economy, it may nonetheless be opening up the way towards one. In the meantime, the neglect of insidious forms of exploitation it reveals in the predominant approaches to political economy is more than sufficient to recommend it to our attention. Re/Presenting Class then is certainly a good book, and if the promise of class analysis it reveals is effectively pursued, it may turn out to be a particularly important one as well.