From Fundamentalisms to Overdetermination

From Fatalisms, Determinisms and Fundamentalisms to Overdetermination:

Concerning Richard D. Wolff’s lecture on

Global Capitalism: Capitalist Decline in Historical Perspective

            If there is a single thread that runs through my life story, from the beginning, it is fundamentalism, and as I turn from the past to the present and future, it’s as if that thread, or, more precisely, that current, that energy, that singular, fundamentalized “determinant,” is demanding my attention now in 2026, determined not to be left out. Starting from my birth in 1939 and fundamentalism’s taken-for-granted presence in my boyhood in Africa, to my shocked discovery on arriving in the States as a fifteen-year-old that I was expected to become a fundamentalist “soul-winner,” (I have never forgotten sitting in the back of a car with four other teen-age “soul-winners” as the young, enthusiastic leader cheerfully drove us home while the pitch black night reflected the pitch black feeling that I didn’t belong here filled me) to my encounter with Eloise a year later, I have told the story of my realization, over thirty years later, in the course of my 1992 experience, that there is no such thing as a single all-determining, all-dominant, all controlling fundamentalism. Today in 2026, 34 more years later, I take the liberty of interpreting that ’92 experience as an implicit or felt sense that we are each of us, individually, and communally, are “determinants,” in what I am learning to describe as an over-determined world.

            As my archive bio makes clear my struggle began with fundamentalized forms of religion, Christian religion. One such extreme Christian vision of religious fundamentalism calls itself “Dispensationalism.” All time, all reality, is displayed in a chart that stretches “from eternity to eternity, and divides up all time into seven periods or “dispensations,” or laws or rules, with specific dates. Another very different Christian example is Calvinism in its purest, or most extreme, “five-point” form.

Today there are equally dangerous secular forms of fundamentalism. The extreme form of Darwinian evolution, “Social Darwinism” for example, which holds that the emergence of all life can be explained by the one and only principle of “survival of the fittest,” is one example. Others include the totalitarianism of Communism under Stalin and National Socialism under Hitler. Still another, I contend, is America’s deterministic, or fully fundamentalized, crusading free market capitalism.

On the other hand, I have been pointing out the self-evident commonsense fact that the urge or impulse to “fundamentalize,” in the sense of pay attention to, or focus on the “fundamentals” in any given situation, is not only natural and valuable, but also, I contend, essential to life. This, however, is not the place to elaborate further on what I have begun, as a further step, to refer to as a “theory” of the fundamentalizing dynamic. Rather, I want to turn to my discovery, in 2018, of the concept of “over-determination,” and my rediscovery of it in the last several months in the course of my search for sources that could make sense of our world gone mad today.

In 2018 I discovered the term “overedetermination” being used by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff in their 1987 book Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Resnick and Wolff were professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Overdetermination, as they make crystal clear in the first pages of that book, rules out any form of determinism, including economic determinism or “essentialism,” whether Marxist or overwise. In fact, as self-identified Marxian theorists, their use of the concept of overdetermination is especially directed against Marxist theories, “such as economic determinism that has figured so prominently in the Marxian tradition” to quote them (p. 4).

I drew on Resnick and Wolff explicitly in the training script I wrote for The Peoples’ Lobby, entitled “Organizing for Democracy and Our Common Inheritance” (See set 4, Document #13 in the Archive).

My rediscovery of overdetermination took place, as I said, in the last few months, when I learned that Richard D. Wolff has been giving talks and interviews online. As I listened to him, I became more and more impressed with the power of his vision. Rather than say more about that vision, I want to refer the reader to one example of Wolff’s capacity to make sense of global affairs today, a talk he gave two weeks ago, entitled, “Global Capitalism: Capitalist Decline in Historical Perspective.” (May 13, 2026). The lecture also exemplifies the interpretive power of “overdetermination,” the theoretical stance towards Marxian socialism he and Stephen Resnick spell out in their book, Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (1987).

Here let me give you a sense of the scope and immediacy Wolff’s practical, down to earth sense-making by identifying the seven main points he makes in his hour and a half presentation.

Seven Key Points

1. In 1945 the US is the center of the economic universe, celebrating its exceptionalism, high wages with high profits. The US dollar had become the global currency
2. Dollar, Gold, and Oil: By 1970 to 1975 the US is no longer the king of the hill, but demand for oil had exploded and in 1971 US and Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer agreed to peg oil to the dollar, creating the petrodollar, preserving the dollar’s global value despite Nixon taking the US off the gold standard.(Think Strait of Hormuz.
3. Technology enables capitalists to leave high-wage US for low-wage Global South: Computers, Internet, and jet speed international travel. Enabling American corporations to leave the US en mass to go where wages were low. In 1975 the population of Detroit was nearly 2 million people. The jobs of the auto industry. Today the population of Detroit is six or seven hundred thousand. Weakening the US Empire
4. The Rise of the Global South [29:33]. Decolonization. “Third World” Asia, Africa and Latin America. One more force undermining the US Empire.
5. China: One country roaring back from a subordinate colonized position to be the number two economy in the world, rapidly catching up to the U.S. and challenging the American empire.
   1. China’s formula or combination of factors Partly private capitalist enterprises, both Chinese and foreign. And partly government enterprises owned and operated by Chinese, managed by a powerful government, which in turn is managed by a Communist Party. This formula, this hybrid, of state and private, has turned out to be the way to get this extraordinary economic development going.
   1. The U.S. is a place as they will point out to you, in the last few years, hundreds of colleges and universities have been closed, during which time in China that many have been opened.
6. Signs of an Empire in Decline
   1. GM sells more cars in China than it does in the US. Its over. The American Empire is over. It is declining.
   1. That’s why we have the bitterness of our politics.
   1. Trump’s boast the he can make America great again is a sign that we’re in decline. Not explicitly. Not honestly, but indirectly,
   1. Its something the American working -class knows. They’re the ones suffering. Bad jobs, not enough jobs. Poor jobs, badly paid jobs, – those are all signs, friend!
   1. The war in Iran is a sign. Look, the war in Vietnam back in 1970s should have told us. Vietnam was one of the poorer countries on this planet. Fighting a war against the U.S., the American Empire at its peak, in the 1970s, fighting against a poor country led by the Communist Party of North Vietnam. Who has been running Vietnam, North and South over the last 50 years? The answer is, the Communist Party of North Vietnam. They won. We lost. It could have been, it should have been, a wake up call. No, we fought again in Afghanistan. Who was the enemy then? The Taliban. Who runs Afghanistan today? The Taliban. They won, we lost. And now in Iran. A country of 90 million people. We’re a nation of 335 million. We’re one of the richest in the world. Iran nowhere close. We’re highly industrially developed. Iran nowhere close. Are we winning? No. we are basically losing. We can’t admit it, anymore than we could admit that we lost Vietnam or Afghanistan. That too, that refusal to admit, that insistence on denying is a sign of a declining Empire.
   1. The classic sign of a declining empire.The rich and the powerful, in each empire, as it declines, it’s the rich and the powerful who have the ability to hold on to the wealth they acquired as the Empire grew, As our economy declines, our stock market keeps doing lovely. Why? The 10% richest Americans own 80% of the shares.
7. Socialism (versus capitalist empire in decline)
   1. Focus on the working class winning control of the government.  For example, the most successful economy in Europe is Spain. Its leader, Mr. Sanchez, a lifelong socialist. And he has a socialist government. And they are doing quite nicely. Its all about the government. If you listen to Bernie and Ocasio-Cortez, they’re talking about the things governments can do for working people.
   1. Focus on the Enterprise: Employer gets profit. Worker gets wage. That’s the problem, Profit maximization is the appropriate target for capitalist enterprises. Quite true. They focus on what the employer gets. They don’t focus on what the worker lives off of.
   1. So Marx concluded, if you want a system that puts the workers first because they are the democratic majority then you can’t have capitalism, because in capitalism the capitalist is the #1 priority, profit the bottom line, profit the point and purpose of the enterprise. “We’re in the business to make money.” And that’s what they do, make money for the capitalist. If that’s good for the workers, nice. If not, tough.
   1. Marx said, if you want a democratic system, you have to overcome the employer-employee relationship. Notice, Marx didn’t say you have to get rid of private enterprise to have government enterprise.
   1. Once the workers have the government then they have before them the next part of the task, which is to change the organization of production, inside the factory, inside the office inside the school, inside the store from one in which a few people run the show to a democratic arrangement. Look, we got rid of the kings, because we didn’t want monarchies. But the kings came inside the enterprise where they are the CEO and they shouldn’t have that power inside the enterprise any more than their counterparts had outside it. Socialism remains on the agenda, as much in China as anywhere else. The real question, which the Chinese people are already presenting to their leaders is, will you take us to the next stage? Will you lead us in that way? Or won’t you.