Abstract
In this interview with Hugo Radice, John Holloway and Sol Picciotto (early Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) members) conducted by Edith González, Panagiotis Doulos and Milena Rodríguez Aza (postdoctoral and PhD students from the Benemérita Autonomous University of Puebla, Mexico), we find a reflection on the CSE early days and a recalling of significant debates among CSE members exploring their relevance today. Above all, Clarke’s CSE fellows tell us what it meant to be a socialist economist working together with Simon Clarke.
Keywords
Introduction
The following questions were designed as a tribute to Simon Clarke’s legacy, who together with Sol Picciotto, Hugo Radice and John Holloway participated in the debates on the state in the 1970s as members of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE). The aim of this interview is not to remain in the debates of the past, as if they were an intellectual relic, but to reflect on the questions of that debate within the context of the current capitalist crisis, its relationship with class struggles and the state.
Interview
Edith González Cruz, Panagiotis Doulos and Milena Rodríguez Aza: What was the CSE and what did it mean to you? Can you tell us something about your involvement at that time and the role played by Simon Clarke in those debates?
The CSE was launched in 1969 by a group of socialist economists with the aim of developing a better understanding of what was happening to postwar capitalism as the postwar Keynesian consensus broke down. I was involved from the outset and was Secretary of the CSE from 1970 until the end of 1974. Within a few years, we found that our conferences and workshops were attracting a much wider set of socialists, some like Simon from related fields of scholarship such as sociology, but others who found that the critique of political economy was relevant to topics such as technological change, public policy, labour relations and above all, the state and its wide-ranging activities. Working groups proliferated, such as those on housing and on the political economy of women, as well as local CSE groups based in over a dozen cities and regions; by 1975, we had over 500 members and were ready to launch Capital & Class and a book series. My recollection is that Simon became involved through the Warwick CSE group, which formed in 1971–1972. He was central particularly to the debates on the state from 1977 and through the 1980s, and also contributed a lot to the organisational work that accompanied the CSE’s expanding activities.
Although, as Hugo explains, the CSE was originally started by economists, it quickly attracted people with a background in many disciplines – in my case, law. This was part of a wider wave of reviving Marx and rescuing historical materialism from both the dead-weight of Stalinism and the accommodations of social democracy. For myself, I had come back to the United Kingdom after four exciting years in Dar es Salaam, during the brief flowering of Nyerere’s attempt at a radical socialism (Shivji et al. 2020). This political context brought together a group at the university, all also rediscovering Marx, including Walter Rodney and Giovanni Arrighi. With the university in the political spotlight, I had steered the inclusion of a common foundation course, initiated in the law school as ‘Social and Economic Problems of East Africa’, with contributors from across the university, mainly with a Marxisant perspective. I came back from Africa, having managed to get a junior lectureship in the new law school at Warwick (despite the concerns of the founding professor that I had ‘kicked over the traces’ in my previous job), keen to continue with this broad intellectual and political agenda. A few of like mind also came to Warwick, including Simon Clarke and Veronica Beechey in sociology, as well as Hugo who, like Simon, had been at Cambridge. I was drawn to the CSE mainly by Robin Murray and his work on the internationalisation of capital. He focused on the importance of transnational corporations, which for me was self-evidently the dominant form of capital accumulation, as we had debated in Dar es Salaam (Arrighi 1973). Robin’s seminal article in New Left Review (Murray 1971) brought out the key question of the interrelationship between the internationalisation of capital and of the state, which we pursued in CSE working groups and conferences.
Simon: a loved friend lost. Not just CSE, but holidays together, children of the same age, fun and laughter and dancing, and always intelligence and kindness. And yes, as you suggest, more than that, a centrepiece in a time of excitement and intensity and debate and learning. For me, the CSE was a sort of coming-into-the-world after years of being locked in my PhD thesis on European law. It was getting involved with the CSE Bulletin and then Capital & Class and the monthly meetings of the CSE State Group in London. It was reading Capital collectively and creating the Edinburgh CSE Group, which later became one wing of the London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group which wrote In and Against the State, which apparently had some influence in the Greater London Council. It was meeting people like Robin Murray and Sol and Hugo and Simon and lots and lots of others (Ben Fine, Sue Himmelweit, Simon Mohun, Ian Gough, Diane Elson, Ian Steedman, Bob Jessop, Ed Emery, Lawrence Harris, Bob Fine, David Yaffe, the list could go on and on) and learning enormously from them, from their knowledge and intelligence and political-theoretical commitment and, perhaps above all, their openness to debate. Debates that were sharp but not sectarian: against neo-Ricardianism, structuralism, fractionalism and then, more and more, against the idea of Marxist economics, rather than the Marxist critique of economics, evidenced by our attempt at one point to change the name to just CSE and drop any reference to Socialist Economists (a contradiction in terms). And Simon was always there, at the very peak of intelligent, knowledgeable, thoughtful, sharp yet non-sectarian and never unkind debate: a real inspiration. We were all young, in our late 20s and early 30s, so the crisis of Stalinism and of the communist parties was a thing of the past. It was a time for rethinking Marxism. For those of us who were not economists (Sol and myself and some others in the State Group – Simon, of course, had studied both economics and sociology, which gave him a special richness of insight), the fact that we came into the CSE meant that our understanding of Marxism and revolutionary thought was focused on Capital, not as a work of Marxist economics but as a critique of political economy. A break, I think, from the previous generation of British Marxists, people like Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Ralph Miliband, Christopher Hill (names I write with some awe).
You and others participated in a meaningful debate with Simon Clarke on the concept of the State at a historical moment: the crisis of the Keynesian model as a crisis of capitalist relations. The violence that characterises the current context is again related to a crisis of the neoliberal accumulation model that became evident with the global crisis of 2008 and, especially, with the Covid-19 pandemic. All this has revitalised the debate on the functions of the State to face the so-called ‘poly-crisis’ of capitalism, which is how a fragmented reality is named in different spheres, such as economy and politics, nature and society, production and reproduction. Have we returned to the questions that triggered the debate on the State a few decades ago, or are we facing a different reality?
Yes, there is a change, of course, but the monster is still there. I feel a new urgency and a new anguish. It is clearer than ever that capitalism is not just an unjust, exploitative system, but a dynamic of destruction. But the question of the state has not gone away: it is still just as important for thinking how the system functions and how we break the dynamic. If we look back at the debates of that time, I think we were looking more at the question of the functioning of the state in how the system works, not so much at the implications for political action of saying that the state is a capitalist state. For me, I think it was only later that the question of ‘if not through the state, then how?’ came to the fore. If the state is a capitalist state, then clearly we cannot use the state to get rid of capitalism, although perhaps we can make certain improvements within capitalism through the state. The issue of the meaning of the state is there all the time. The enormously powerful ‘state illusion’ recurs over and over again: Corbyn, Sanders, Tsipras, Evo, Lula, AMLO and so on. So yes, I think the debates on the state remain very relevant indeed.
Today we cannot talk about class struggle like you did during the 1970s and 1980s. The capitalist attack on the collective power of labour and its modes of organisation fragmented working-class struggles and intensified the rule of money through individualisation. At the same time, the emergence of the ‘new social movements’ erased the centrality that the class struggle had had until then, as Simon Clarke mentioned. However, we see the emergence of other forms of struggle globally that are failing to articulate a collective force against the attack of capital. How can we relate these struggles to the capitalist crisis?
Looking back, we did indeed see class struggle as central, but in a crude and reductive way: we assumed that class was a given feature that automatically took the simple binary form of capital versus labour, both treated as collective social actors. As the crisis developed from a primarily economic phenomenon to a crisis of politics and ideas, we began to experience the interweaving of what the academy (both right and left) had treated as distinct domains of society. But it also became clear, in Mrs Thatcher’s string of election victories, that while the capitalists were largely united in supporting her, the workers were divided. This was evident in her 1982 Malvinas (Falkland) War election victory, in the failure of the TUC (Trade Union Congress) to unite behind the miners and in the alacrity with which very many workers preferred the ‘jam today’ of the sell-off of council housing and public utilities. But it took us a very long while to realise that what was going on was actually a concerted effort by the intellectual forces of the right to destroy the postwar consensus and restore the unimpeded rule of capital.
As to the new ‘new social movements’, I look on them as part of a huge ideological defeat, which fragmented the left at precisely the time when we needed a unity of purpose and practice. But their isolation from each other also weakened many of the causes they were fighting for. Today, the cost-of-living crisis, the climate crisis and the return of the threat of nuclear annihilation all affect our entire society and require ever more urgently a collective response.
My view is that the nature of class struggle has changed because of the enormous changes in class composition. In the 1970s, I worked with shop stewards in the car industry in Coventry, providing practical support for their struggles as the various plants became absorbed into British Leyland, then Chrysler and Peugeot-Citroen (Picciotto 1984). There were 25,000 workers at the Leyland plant in Canley, next to the university, and they held mass meetings in the car park to vote on strike action. To me, both the strengths and the limitations of this form of organised labour were evident, and we had to build on this militancy but reach beyond these mostly male manual workers and trade union politics to build a wider class movement. In reality, class was already fragmented, although many on the left fell for the illusions of workerism. In the CSE, we tried to analyse the restructuring taking place of both capital and the state, for example, in the debate over the United Kingdom’s joining what was then the EEC (European Economic Community) (Radice & Picciotto 1971). Simon Clarke himself showed that the CSE work pointed to the need to broaden class politics and develop new forms of struggle, going ‘beyond the fragments’ in response to the recomposition of class, and he argued that the setbacks of the 1980s were due to the failures of the left to take this sufficiently seriously and because ‘the left could not choose the ground on which it fought’ (Clarke 1991: 68). I think this analysis remains equally relevant today, if not more so.
I find it helpful to think of class struggle as coming from above. The existence of capital is exploitation, in the direct sense of compelling workers to produce surplus value and in the indirect sense of subordinating all aspects of human and non-human life to the logic of its self-expansion. This is constant attack, a constant struggle to channel our activity into abstract labour and its different forms of support. This is not an automatic process, its outcome is always at issue. It is constant struggle, struggle to impose the patterns of value upon us, struggle to classify us. Without this struggle, capital would not exist. Capital is an aggression, and inevitably, we resist sometimes ineffectively, sometimes without being aware that we are resisting, always contradictorily because the capital relation reproduces itself within us.
Class struggle, then, is not a question of choice. It is not something that is sometimes there and sometimes not. Capital is class struggle, and we are born into and live in that constant antagonism. Capital is attack, and we-who-are-attacked are non-subordination, insubordination, resistance, a resistance that often overflows into rebellion. There is a movement of attack-resistance that is always there and always moving, changing in its configuration. So, to come back to your question, yes, there have been important changes in the patterns of attack-and-resistance since the 1970s and 1980s. The attack that is exploitation is still in the centre of capitalist reproduction, and the resistance is still there, always, and inevitably, but it is less organised and in more unfavourable conditions than before. The other face of the capitalist attack, the subordination of all aspects of life to its logic, is now more obvious than before and we are more aware of its terrible consequences, and it is here that the more striking movements of resistance-and-rebellion (what sociologists like to call ‘new social movements’) are taking pace. These movements are no less ‘class struggle’, no less movements of resistance-and-rebellion against capital than the great labour movement struggles of before.
How to relate all this to the capitalist crisis? (What nice, simple questions you ask!) I think a crisis of capital is always a crisis of domination, an indication that capital is not dominating us sufficiently. What is difficult for the poor capitalists is that they cannot stand still, like their feudal grandparents and slave-owning great-grandparents could. To survive, they are forced to constantly intensify their exploitation and their subordination of life to the logic of value (socially necessary labour, rising organic composition, tendency of the rate of profit to fall and so on). A crisis indicates that they are not succeeding in doing so, that, however strong they appear to be and however weak our resistance-and-rebellion seems, their attack is inadequate, they are not subordinating us sufficiently. This can be glossed over by the expansion of debt, and this has been a central feature of capitalism over the last 40 years or so, but they really need to get their act together and impose more discipline. A war might help, a bit of fascism, tighter algorithmic control, conversion of universities into edufactories and so on, but it is not clear that they can achieve it. We should never assume that crisis leads inevitably to restructuring. And the force of non-subordination, insubordination, resistance and rebellion should never be underestimated. Perhaps capital’s need to constantly intensify subordination and the effectiveness-and-yet-inadequacy of its attempt to do so mean that it is not exceptional for both sides of the class struggle to be losing at the same time. Until death us do part. Or, better, until revolution and the creation of another world.
After the 2008 crisis, we have an increasingly clear picture of the institutional left worldwide: the abandonment of the Marxist critique and the adoption of a Keynesian language that reproduces the separation between the political and the economic, which both Simon Clarke and you severely criticised. The left debate revolves more around the redistribution of wealth through state intervention. However, it lacks a critique of capital as a mode of social organisation (this was the case of Syriza and the case of the so-called second pink tide in Latin America). Why did this turn of events occur?
The use of the term ‘institutional left’ in this context implies a simple answer to the question: that the supposed ‘real’ Marxist left preferred intellectual debate and social investigation to a political practice of actual engagement in bourgeois institutions. But between 1970 and the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1985, many CSE members were indeed actively engaged in initiatives that arose from the resistance of the labour movement and of working-class communities to the rise of what we came to know as neoliberalism: struggles not just over trade union rights, but over the deliberate running-down of industry, over urban redevelopment, over access to the law, over the continuance of selective and private schooling, and so on.
Such activities also generated the pamphlet In and Against the State, collectively authored by the CSE’s ad hoc London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group. The authors, all of whom were involved in such ‘sectoral’ struggles, addressed the common problem: in order to transform the bourgeois forms and methods of the public sector, they had to engage with its practices. But this ended when the public sector was radically reorganised on neoliberal principles: between 1985 and 1997, many activities were transferred to the private sector through privatisation or outsourcing, while the internal management of those that remained under central and local government ownership were obliged to adopt the principles and practices of private-sector management under the ‘new public management’ model. It became very hard to make space for any sort of ‘guerrilla activism’ within what remained in the state domain.
I don’t share the premises of this question, it seems to me that, especially following the great financial crash, Marxian critiques are shown to be increasingly relevant, while neo-classical and Keynesian perspectives were thoroughly discredited, although it’s true that this is not clearly reflected in mainstream media. Where we have failed is in formulating a cogent set of alternative policies that adequately respond to the enormous changes in the nature of both the state and capital. I think this is largely due to the recomposition of class, and the failure of most of the left to understand this adequately, not just in theoretical but in practical political terms. My own work now is with the tax justice movement and focuses on taxation of transnational corporations, which I think goes far beyond questions of redistribution, as even Thomas Piketty (2020) has shown, particularly in Capital and Ideology. In this, like most of my work, I have engaged with the politics first and then relied on Marx’s approach to help understand how to develop this into a broader transformative movement. I found that progressive taxation runs like a golden thread through Marxian politics and theory of the state and of capital, particularly in the key concept of the fiscal state, sadly neglected by Marxists, although originating with Goldscheid and the key debates among Marx’s followers about corporate capitalism and the state in 1890–1920 (Picciotto 2022).
I take the key phrase of your question to be ‘the institutional left’. I don’t remember that we made such a clear distinction between the ‘institutional left’ and ‘anti-institutional struggle’ in those days as I would want to today, or indeed between the ‘progressive left’ and anti-progressive anti-capitalism, or between the ‘labour movement’ and the movement against labour. This distinction is now much clearer, certainly here in Latin America. The simple answer to your question would be to say that institutionalisation of the left led to the turn of events you describe. The challenge now is to strengthen the myriad anti-institutional moving.
In the ‘Introduction’ to The State Debate, Simon Clarke left some open questions relevant to the current context. On the one hand, he argued that the left intellectuals were defenceless in the face of the neoliberal onslaught. On the other hand, he strongly criticised those who were busy saying ‘you see? I had told you we were going to lose’ because they never considered that this defeat was primarily the result of their withdrawal from the struggle in the name of the historical inevitability of the ‘new Realism’. In this sense, Clarke wondered whether we could still talk about social emancipation or whether we were trapped in political realism. What do you think about it?
After a fourth successive election loss in 1992, as the Labour Party made itself electable by moving steadily to the right, a degree of despair seemed unavoidable. But part of the problem was a lack of acceptance of the extent to which globalisation had become a central feature of capital’s ongoing war on labour. Along with Sol Picciotto, Robin Murray and others, I had been drawing attention to the consequences of this for domestic politics ever since the early 1970s. We argued that fighting for socialism had of necessity to be transnational, but even in the mid-1990s – and even in a no-longer-divided Europe – it seemed impossible to make this a reality. But in making our case, we also benefited enormously from a key consequence of the state debate, namely that the nature of the relation between capital and the state was not predestined to follow an automatic historical sequence but was constantly subject to social reconstitution.
What we are trapped in is emphatically not ‘political realism’, but a lack of basic common sense. In 2023, the looming climate catastrophe and the horrors of the Covid pandemic make it even more obvious that a global, collective political purpose is the only way that humanity and our home can survive. At the same time, we are up against a ruling class that has presided over not only the dissolution of class politics into ‘identitarianism’, but also a staggering transfer of wealth – the only mark of success for capital – to the plutocracy from the rest of society. This explains why I and many other socialists took the decision, at whatever point after 2008 was nationally appropriate, to engage in ‘radical bourgeois’ politics.
However, that does not mean that we cannot at the same time continue to argue for socialism. I remain very grateful to Simon Clarke for his remarkable work, largely undertaken in the CSE, that helped to lay the foundation for a Marxism that was fully emancipated from the shackles of Leninism. For my part, this has led me to consider and reject those schools of thought within Marxism that in their different ways remained fundamentally tied to that ideology, including the traditions of Luxemburg, Lukacs, Trotsky and Gramsci. I turned instead to libertarian strands in socialism and to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, with the crucial addition of the Open Marxism approach that was closely linked to the CSE’s state debate. At the same time, if we are going to continue to talk about social emancipation, can we please begin by consigning to history the ridiculous embargo that Marxism has decreed on actually talking about what we mean by socialism, what sort of society we believe could emancipate us from class rule altogether?
As I said in my previous answer, I think the analyses we developed in the 1970s were very relevant to trying to develop a socialist response to the restructurings of capital and the state in the 1980s. What Simon Clarke pointed out was that the left became defensive because neoliberalism chose to fight by attacking the state, while capital was restructured through the forces of competition. This made it very hard to respond with cogent policies for a socialist restructuring of both the state and capital. The left fell back into defending existing forms of the state, which were very evidently outmoded. Our critique of the state form became dissipated in essentially rear-guard actions, although we had some impact at city level, notably in the Greater London Council. At the same time, the recompositions of class have made it increasingly difficult to develop the new forms of class struggle which our analysis showed were needed in the 1980s, and this remains our greatest challenge. Today, I think the struggle for socialism is waged across all fronts, and Marxian analyses are relevant and influential everywhere. The biggest task for us is to translate those analyses into practical policies that can command wide political support.
We have to talk of social emancipation, don’t we? There is no choice: that or extinction. I don’t think the ‘new Realism’ can hold, simply because capital is a constant goading, a constant prodding that does not let us take refuge in any sort of ‘realism’. As a child, I stayed on my cousin’s pig farm in Tipperary and was horrified (city child that I was) by the way in which they used electric prodders to get the pigs to move. That’s what capitalism is: an electric prodder.