ABSTRACT
The Marxian economics Steve Resnick and Richard Wolff encountered as emerging practitioners was diverse in specifics but for the most part consistent in general approach. Marxian economics was committed not only to teleological and economic determinist analysis, but also to the related labor necessary to construct an origin. Marxian economists' origins turn on abstractly set conceptions of the firm or of the pressures of inter-firm competition. Karl Marx's critique of capitalism is then not congealed in a hypothesis. It takes the form of a conceptual framework, a general way to think about economic aspects of life that identifies class exploitation and cares about class justice. Departing from the twentieth-century accumulation-theoretic traditions they inherited, Wolff and Resnick produced a new conception of what Marxian economics can entail. They have used it to focus on big issues of historical interpretation, contributing to the critique of contemporary high-income country capitalism from a class-theoretic perspective and rethinking the history of the Soviet Union.
