New Left Review I/195, September-October 1992

Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff

Everythingism, or Better Still, Overdetermination

While pleased to be associated with Ellen Meiksins Wood’s position against Alan Carling and ‘Rational Choice’ or ‘Analytical’ Marxism, we believe that Carling’s caricature of Wood’s Marxism and ours as ‘everythingism’ requires a rebuttal. [1] Wood’s own reply to Carling does not confront all that is at stake here, especially the refusal to deal seriously with the basic philosophical and methodological challenge posed for Marxism by Marxists working with this ‘everythingism’. [2] But first, the term ‘everythingism’ itself needs to be set aside in favour of what we actually argue. Calling it an ‘unfortunate strain of Marxian thought’, Carling defines everythingism (p. 98) as the view that ‘you need a complete explanation of something before you can have any explanation of something’. He rejects this caricature in favour of a practical approach which, not ‘aiming for an utterly exhaustive explanation’, gets ‘along as best we can—one bit of explanation at a time’.

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