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.footnote1 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’.footnote2 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’.
For reasons explained elsewhere, we follow Lukács and Althusser in using the term ‘overdetermination’ to (1) criticize the many different kinds of determinist arguments within Marxist theories, and (2) offer an alternative, non-determinist kind of Marxism. Notwithstanding the problems it raises (as, indeed, basic theoretical terms always do), we find ‘overdetermination’ to be far more precise, useful and suggestive than the ‘everythingism’ it displaces. In a sense, our reply to Carling involves explaining how and why overdetermination is not subject to the dismissive critique he offers of everythingism.
Because everything is related to everything else, because the conditions of the existence of any event are infinite in number and variety, and because each of those conditions have in turn their conditions of existence, it is, as Carling sees, quite impossible to produce complete or exhaustive explanations of anything. There are, broadly speaking, three ways to handle what is an epistemological as well as a practical problem.