Abstract
This short special section of Capital & Class emerged from discussions at a meeting of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) Trans-Pennine Working Group (TPWG). The TPWG was set up by Werner Bonefeld, Greig Charnock, Hugo Radice and Stuart Shields in the autumn of 2007. The idea for the working group had taken shape the previous summer as we journeyed back on the train from a conference. The four of us engaged in what might best be described as an animated post-conference discussion concerning what was being proffered to us as critical political economy [sic]. That discussion on the Trans-Pennine Express evolved into a commitment to regular meetings devoted to exploring what we might have to say about a critical political economy developed along CSE lines: a materialist critique of capitalism unconstrained by conventional academic divisions between subjects.
Since that summer train journey, 43 papers have been discussed in robust but comradely fashion at TPWG meetings. At least 19 of the papers have subsequently been published, one paper was awarded the Daniel Singer Prize, and we have held two larger workshops. The first of these workshops, at the University of York, focused on the continuing crisis of the Eurozone, while the second, in Manchester, was dedicated to a critical assessment of Thatcherism following Thatcher’s death in April 2013.
The three papers in this short special section of Capital & Class were part of that University of Manchester workshop. All three have been through the journal’s usual refereeing process, and I am grateful to the referees for their timely and thoughtful reviews.
Of the three papers, Hugo Radice’s is the slight anomaly. It is not new research as such. Instead, Radice’s paper was written for a conference of the Québec-based Association d’Économie Politique, held in Montreal in October 1985, on the theme of ‘Neoconservatism and the Restructuring of the State’. That conference sought to make sense of the turn to the right spearheaded by Reagan and Thatcher that was then spreading across the world. The reason for its appearance here is that part of the discussion in Manchester in 2013 revolved around the historical question of how effectively the left had initially made sense of what was just starting to be called ‘neoliberalism’ at the time of Radice’s paper in 1985. What Radice identified then, which remains apposite today, was that Britain’s integration into the world economy was crucial to any evaluation of Thatcherism, when viewed as a strategy for reasserting the power of capital. It followed that the left had to abandon the illusory hope of an alliance with a ‘national capital’ that in reality scarcely existed. Instead, an alternative had to be based on radical internationalism and the robust pursuit of domestic alternatives based on replace with trades unions and progressive social movements.
Chris Rogers’ paper picks up this criticism of potential dalliances with ‘national capital’. Decrying the prominence lent to Thatcher(ism) following her death, Rogers’ paper emphasises the significance of continuities over exceptionalisms in thinking critically about the relations between capital, state and labour in Britain. He notes that the careless demonisation of Thatcher since her death undermines our efforts to move towards a more meaningful identification of the exploitative and crisis-prone nature of capitalist social relations. If Rogers’ paper urges us to carefully historicise Thatcherism, Alex Nunn’s paper reinforces this excoriating critique by drawing out the legacies of Thatcherism that are still evident in the contemporary period. Nunn identifies five significant outcomes that Thatcherism bequeathed the UK: dependence on the financial sector; neoliberal dominance of the party political system; the emergence of the neoliberal subject; the fracturing of the working class; and crucially, the fact that the neoliberal project remains crisis-ridden. While carefully noting Thatcher’s significance as an agent of the first phase of neoliberalisation in the UK, Nunn’s five legacies imply much pessimism of the intellect. Crucially, though, he also identifies some optimism of the will as we seek to confront and dismantle the disciplines of capital in the 21st century. And that, surely, is the rationale for any working group associated with the CSE.