Thirty years after Roemer’s General Theory
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629814563137 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| Author | Gilbert Skillman |
| Subject Matter | Introduction |
Introduction
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2015, Vol.27(1) 3–7
ÓThe Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629814563137
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Thirty years after Roemer’s
General Theory
Gilbert Skillman
WesleyanUniversity, USA
This symposium is an outgrowth of a session organized for the 2012 Allied Social
Sciences Convention in recognition of the 30th anniversary of the publication of
John Roemer’s landmark work, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class
(Roemer, 1982, hereafter cited as GTEC). While the papers by Skillman, Veneziani
and Yoshihara, and Fleurbaey explore issues raised by GTEC, Roemer’s own con-
tribution looks beyond the questions motivating his earlier work.
Those questions, as described by Roemer in the introductory chapter of GTEC,
were prompted by the failure of Marxian theory to explain the political behavior and
uneven economic progress of modern self-identified socialist economies, such as
China, the Soviet Union, Cuba and Vietnam. He contended that this failure funda-
mentally compromised Marxism’s effort to provide a complete account of the ‘laws
of motion’ governing modern societies and its intended role as a guiding doctrine for
revolutionary practice. Roemer saw the need to construct a comprehensive theory of
exploitation and class that addressed the emergent case of socialist exploitation.
Although the primary motivation underlying GTEC was thus to provide
grounds for a historical materialist explanation of contemporary socialist experi-
ence, most of the ‘general theory’ developed in the work has to do with defining
and characterizing the phenomena of exploitation and class as manifested in
abstractly defined pre-capitalist and capitalist economies. Part I of GTEC estab-
lished the framework of analysis while studying these phenomena in the context of
subsistence economies with simple linear (‘Leontief’) production technologies and
homogeneous labor. Part II extended this analytical framework to the investigation
of accumulating economies with more general production possibility sets and
Corresponding author:
Gilbert Skillman, Departmentof Economics, Wesleyan University, 238 Church St., Middletown,CT 06459,
USA.
Email: gskillman@wesleyan.edu
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