In the 1960s, Louis Althusser imported the concept of 'overdetermination' from Sigmund Freud into the domain of Marxian analysis. In the 1980s, Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick developed this idea into a Marxian Critique of Political Economy in their seminal book Knowledge and Class. Yet, many of the premises of the concept and its applications remain fuzzy to people, even students of Marxian theory.
This week, the dialectic goes to work with Professor Richard Wolff to explore this important idea. What is overdetermination? How does it liberate analyses from determinism and essentialism? How can we use this idea in the 21st century to make sense of the world?