The professor and his legacy: Introducing the Forum

Forum

Introduction

I think the principal responsibility of the social sciences today is to challenge and undermine the scientific pretensions of neoclassical economics to show it up as the vacuous and pernicious ideology that it is.

– Simon Clarke ¹

This Forum commemorates Emeritus Professor Simon Clarke’s life and work. It celebrates the imprint that his theoretical and methodological revolutions have left on the personal lives and work of his former Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) comrades, colleagues, co-researchers, PhD students and people he and his work have influenced. As contributors to this Forum, they bring Clarke’s original Marxism and his theoretical, empirical and methodological revolutions to light. Their articles reveal in detail how Clarke has enriched Marxism, critical sociological theory, sociology of labour and our understanding of the transformation of the Former Soviet Union (FSU), and how he enhanced the work and study experience of his colleagues and students at the CSE, in the Sociology Department at Warwick University, at the Institute of Comparative Labour Relations Research (ISITO) and elsewhere. Simon Clarke’s intellectual journey seems divided into two discrete and disconnected periods: the Marxist moment (1970–1990) and the labour sociologist of the FSU moment (1991–2009). However, the distinction is misleading, for these are ‘two different stages of the same project’, an expression Clarke himself used to describe Marx’s early and mature work (Clarke 1982: 74). We must admit that the division between these two stages persists because we have yet to do much to establish a dialectical connection between Clarke’s contributions. I hope this Forum, the first to focus on his contributions throughout his career, can fix this disconnect by finding dialectical associations between different aspects of his inspiring work. ²

The CSE years and Clarke’s Marxism

In the mid-1970s, and after writing a solid critique of Althusserian Structuralism (Clarke 1980; Charnock and Starosta, in this Forum), Clarke joined the CSE by participating in the Warwick Study Group (see Picciotto, in this Forum). Created in 1969 in the United Kingdom because of the necessity of advancing a socialist critique of Marxist orthodoxy and neoliberalism, the CSE became a platform for theoretically informed political debate among various groupings of the British Left. They aimed to comprehend the relation between domestic policy and international developments and the character of the capitalist state within the context of a so-called globalising economy. The first piece of this Forum is an interview conducted by Edith González Cruz, Panagiotis Doulos and Milena Rodríguez Aza with Hugo Radice, one of the co-founders of the CSE, and two early members, John Holloway and Sol Picciotto. The interview tells us about the history of the CSE and also discusses the contemporary relevance of the CSE questions and debates during the 1970s and 1980s and how to approach the current crisis and forms of emancipation with the CSE critical tools. The political aim of the CSE was to empower the Marxist critique of capital. As the interview with Radice, Picciotto and Holloway denotes, Clarke raised ‘the question of the relation between class struggle and the restructuring of capital’ (Clarke 1992c: 23) and the need to reintroduce class struggle as intrinsic to the latter, mediated by the capitalist state. This repositioning of the centrality of class struggle to understand capitalism established clear distinctions between bourgeois and Marxist categories (Clarke 1979) and between revolutionary change and reformism. Above all, CSE fellows tell us what it meant to share the CSE platform with Simon Clarke.

On this basis, Clarke and others in the CSE (notably Holloway and Picciotto) offered a twofold critique of ‘neo-Ricardianism’ (Holloway & Picciotto 1976: 56) within the Conference, which had (and still has) significant implications for Left politics. First, they moved away from David Ricardo’s ‘labour theory of value’, proposing a ‘value theory of labour’ (Elson 1979). Ricardo’s embodied theory of labour could not explain the abstract aspects of the capitalist mode of production or value as a totality. Late Mike Neary correctly highlighted that Marx’s critique was in fact ‘an exposition of the very developed totality of relations . . . through a value theory of labour . . . where value is not merely an economic category but is the social substance out of which capitalist society is derived’ (Neary 2002: 163–164). Unlike Ricardo, Marx emphasises the abstract aspect of the capital relation as the dominant capitalist form (Elson 1979: 149), and this emphasis brings about the role of the critique of money for a critique of political economy (see Copley 2023: 6). To Clarke (1988),

[t]he distinctiveness of Marx’s theory lay not so much in the idea of labour as the source of value and surplus value as in the idea of money as the most abstract form of capitalist property and so as the supreme social power through which social reproduction is subordinated to the power of capital (pp. 13–14).

Second, Clarke and his CSE fellows rejected the neo-Ricardian view of the State as an institution crisscrossed by class struggle only at the point of distributing wealth in favour of the workers. Holloway and Picciotto’s (1976, 1977) critique of Ian Gough’s mistaken view of the State exemplifies how the group clarified their anti-Ricardian and Marxist position within the CSE. The problem with Gough and others was that they liberated the State from the constraints imposed on it by capital accumulation, and therefore ‘the determinants and limits of state action arise not from the contradictions of the capital relation’ (Holloway and Picciotto 1976: 83, 1977) but from external factors that trigger the class struggle over resources. To neo-Ricardians, ‘class struggle [still] is a process extraneous to capital accumulation’ (Holloway & Picciotto 1976: 83). According to the CSE group, neo-Ricardians were not challenging the political and economic separation, and missed the fact that wealth distribution via policy reforms was limited by capitalist accumulation. The reformist Left could not see that the problem was not how to find an efficient way to distribute money enabling the transference of resources from the capitalists to the working class mediated by the state. The problem was and still is ‘the human dependence on money for existence’ (Dinerstein & Pitts 2021: 97) and the reluctance of some groupings of the Left to discuss money instead of proposing magical solutions such as the implementation of a universal basic income as the project of the Left (Dinerstein 2019; Dinerstein & Pitts 2018, 2021).

Clarke and his CSE fellows also engaged in the ‘German State Derivation’ debate (GD) over the conceptualisation of the State. Like Joachim Hirsch and Heide Gerstenberger, they conceived the State as the political form of capitalist social relations. However, in distinction to Hirsch, they disallowed the ‘logical derivation’ of the State from capital, arguing instead that as a political form of capitalist social relations, the State was a product of class struggle (Clarke 1992a, 1992b).

As this, in no way, comprehensive account suggests, Clarke’s theoretical contributions made a personal imprint on Marxism. His was ‘Simon Clarke’s Marxism’. The following four contributions explain why we can comfortably speak of ‘Simon Clarke’s Marxism’ and why Clarke’s Marxism is so important. In ‘If “Marxists” Would Only Read Marx’ The Significance of Simon Clarke’s Marxism, Greig Charnock and Guido Starosta bring back Clarke’s early critique of the structuralist Marxist philosophy of Louis Althusser (written in 1970 at 24 years of age). Despite a long gap between 1970 and 2023, Clarke’s original critique stands against present predominant tendencies that reject any Marxist humanist content. By exploring the enduring features of Clarke’s work since the 1970s, they advise that to discover the relevance of Clarke’s work, we must avoid pigeonholing him into general labels like open Marxism and the CSE tradition: he was unique.

In Clarke’s Critique of Political Economy, Money and the State, Peter Burnham, Werner Bonefeld and Peter Fairbrother point to the importance of Clarke’s critique of economism and his analysis of the ideological dimensions of classical political economy concerning economics and politics in the crisis-ridden development of capitalism. Through a brief consideration of Clarke’s main books Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State, in which ‘Simon’s aim is essentially political’, and Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, which is ‘an intellectual tour de force’, the authors reveal how Clarke blended conceptual and empirical inquiry to produce a devastating critique of social democracy, neoliberalism and reformism.

In The Value of Simon Clarke, Chris O’Kane reminds us of how the mainstream Marxism of the 1970s–1990 and the post-2007 Marx revival have overlooked Clarke’s work. O’Kane finds that one of the most robust explanations for the mainstream Marxist lack of engagement with Clarke’s work at the time is Clarke’s deliberate positioning with his CSE group proposing form analysis, critique of classical political economy and critique of reformism, all of which was at odds with the type of Marxism of neo-Ricardians. O’Kane argues that Clarke nonetheless developed a specific interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy as a critical social theory and a critique of crisis, the state and periodisation that are all too relevant today.

Rodrigo Pascual and Luciana Ghiotto agree with the above characterisation of Clarke’s work. In Simon Clarke’s Marxism and Latin America, they highlight that ‘Simon Clarke’s Marxism’ has enduring relevance for Latin American (open) Marxists, although regrettably only a small part of his prolific production has been translated into Spanish. The relevance of Clarke’s work lies, mainly, in his understanding of social relations of production and the centrality of class struggle for the development of political, economic and social forms of the capitalist mode of production. They appreciate Clarke’s rejection of reformism, associated with the notion of the ‘relative autonomy of the State’ which prevails in Latin America, and posits instead that the state is subordinated to money, and its form is shaped by class struggle and the limits imposed by capital. Moreover, Clarke argues that

the class struggle does not simply take place within these forms. The forms of capitalist domination are themselves the object of class struggle, as capital and the working class confront them as barriers to their own reproduction (. . .) their development is the outcome of a history of struggle in and against the institutional forms of the capitalist mode of production (Clarke 1988: 16).

‘We must’, Clarke writes, ‘look behind the institutional separation between economics, law and politics to see money, law and the state as complementary economic, legal and political forms of the power of capital’ (Clarke 1988: 15).

In this way, as Charnock and Starosta; Burnham, Bonefeld and Fairbrother; O’Kane and Pascual and Ghiotto indicate, Clarke’s contribution was not only academic but also simultaneously political. As Pascual and Ghiotto highlight, Clarke argues that a revolutionary transformation of society in and through the State is impossible due to the subordination of the State to money, which distances him from both state-centred revolutionary strategies and reformism. Clarke does not see the state as the focus of the left. Rather, he argues that one of the tasks of socialists is ‘to challenge the division between civil society and the state by giving the emerging unity of working class struggles a political form which will express not the illusory community of the liberal state but the real community of human social life’ (Clarke 1988: 365).

As these academic and political contributions indicate, Clarke practised the unity between theory and practice (see Charnock and Starosta, in this Forum; Schwartz, in this Forum). According to Clarke, the attainment of the unity between theory and practice motivated the CSE working groups, which ‘brought together people from different backgrounds with different experiences and different intellectual formations in order to develop concrete Marxist analyses’ (Clarke 1979: 5–6). Therefore, the critical issue was not to fall for a raw ‘application’ of Marx’s categories without confronting them with the ‘everyday experience of contemporary capitalisms, and especially with the lessons learned through struggles against capital in all its forms’ (Clarke 1979: 6). This is what he did by grabbing the one in a lifetime opportunity to investigate one of the most significant and misunderstood processes of socioeconomic and political transformation of the 20th century: the FSU’s transition to capitalism.

Research in FSU

During the 1990s, Clarke gained an academic reputation in the field of economic sociology, sociology of labour and industrial sociology for his research leadership in the study of the transformation of labour relations, collective enterprises, trade unions and labour law in the FSU. Clarke later extended these studies to China and Vietnam until he retired in 2009 when he became an Emeritus professor. The ‘Russian Research Programme’ was hosted by the Department of Sociology (Warwick) and produced case studies featuring various aspects of labour and employment relations in Russia and other areas of the FSU in collaboration with teams of Russian researchers associated with the ISITO (Russian Institute, Moscow), and PhD students at the Centre for Comparative Labour Studies (CCLS) Warwick. In an interview with Simon Clarke conducted by Sarah Ashwin and Valery Yakubovich, titled An Inspired Collaboration with Russian Sociologists, ³ he gives a firsthand account of his unique research experience in Russia, revealing what he found at the start, how he established and led the research, the difficulties he confronted and his research findings. Sarah Ashwin well characterises this period as a moment when ‘Clarke took a fateful journey to the Soviet Union, inaugurating two decades of research through a rare international collaboration’ (Ashwin, in this Forum).

In the same way that Clarke offered an original Marxism, his approach and method to investigate the FSU’s transition were also unique. In Sociology, Labour, and Transition in Post-Soviet Russia: A View from Within, Claudio Morrison, Petr Bizyukov, Vladimir Ilyin, Irina Kozina and Larisa Petrova speak of their experiences working with Clarke and how his research programme challenged mainstream approaches and existing Western analyses of the FSU’s transition. The authors also discuss how Clarke empowered them with new tools and critical ideas. The impact of Clarke’s research achievements was such that they argue they ‘are now inscribed in the history of Russian sociology’. Furthermore, Clarke’s critical vision and alternative approach have continued to have an influence even after his retirement through the networks of Russian researchers working at ISITO.

Two different stages of the same project

I began this introduction by arguing that to grasp Clarke’s critique of political economy, bourgeois sociology and capitalism, his non-dogmatic Marxism and his contributions to studying the former Soviet Union, we must approach his work holistically and dialectically. The CSE Marxist and the labour sociologist worked together to produce a critical and unorthodox Marxist analysis of the FSU’s transition. With the Russian Research Programme and his relationship with Russian researchers and PhD students (1991–2009), Clarke was able to tackle similar concerns regarding the form of the state, the law of value, social relations of production and class struggle that had underpinned and inspired his theoretical production at the CSE since 1970s until then. The analysis of how the ‘contradictions of state Socialism’ (Clarke 1993) played out in the transition of the FSU to a ‘capitalistic’ form was a challenge and a test case of his theoretical insights. In a chapter included in What about the Workers: Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia, a book co-edited with Peter Fairbrother, Michael Burawoy and Pavel Krotov, Clarke addresses the debates surrounding the characterisation, fall and transition of the Soviet system, and repositions class struggle and the uncertainty of the fate of the FSU at the centre of the debate around the USSR and its crisis:

Although the crisis of the Soviet system was provoked by the attempt to reform the system from above, it was determined by the specific character of the social relations of production on which the system rested and could only be resolved by the transformation of those social relations. While the political and ideological forms of the old system of class rule have largely disintegrated, the social relations of production on which it rests have barely been touched. The working class remains on the historical stage now, as it was at the beginning of the crisis, not yet as an historical actor, but as the fundamental barrier to the consolidation of the rule of the exploiting class. The implication is that we cannot presume the outcome of the historical process by assuming that the former Soviet Union is in transition to capitalism. While such a transition is a possibility, it can only be as a result of struggles that lie ahead. Far from the fate of the Soviet system having been resolved, all is yet to play for (Clarke 1993: 11).

Facing the question of whether the FSU was socialist at all or had remained ‘capitalist’ as many Marxists and bourgeois analysts sustained based on the permanence of the exploitation of one class by another and the separation of producers from the means of production, Clarke argues that it was neither. His Marxist analysis suggests that the ‘Soviet Union was neither capitalist nor socialist, but a distinctive form of class society the path of whose development was determined by a distinctive contradiction between the forces and the social relations of production’ (Clarke 1993: 33). He characterised the capitalist mode of production mainly as the ‘subordination of social production to the expanded reproduction of capital’, considering capital as the CSE group did, that is, as a social relation. Capitalism

is not simply money, it is ‘value in motion’. The expanded reproduction of capital is the expanded reproduction of value through the production and appropriation of surplus value. This presupposes, on the one hand, that production is conducted on the basis of the private appropriation of the forces of social production and, on the other, that the social character of production is imposed on the individual producer through the subordination of production to the law of value. The decisive question in the case of the Soviet Union is whether social production was subordinated to the law of value (Clarke 1993: 12, italics added).

Was the social production subordinated to the law of value in the Soviet Union? His answer is no, at least not completely:

While the system as a whole may have been subject to the international operation of the law of value, Soviet enterprises most certainly were not subjected to the law of value, and so to the production and appropriation of surplus value (Clarke 1993: 14).

To understand the distinctive character of the social relations of production in the Soviet system, as the basis for understanding the dynamics of change, it is not enough to remain at the level of abstract generalities. We have to penetrate the ‘hidden abode’ of production by looking at the distinctive characteristics of the Soviet enterprise, and in particular the forms through which the subordination of labour to the production of a surplus was maintained – what Michael Burawoy refers to as the ‘social relations in production’ (Burawoy 1985). (Clarke 1993: 16; italics added)

Fourteen years later, in The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Clarke 2007), the Marxist intellectual observes that class struggle in the FSU asserted itself as the ‘lack of class conflict’. The explanation for the relative absence of class conflict in Russia at the time was neither Russian culture of fatalism nor other ideological factors (Ioannou, 2023). The reason was that in the FSU there was an ‘incomplete subsumption of labour under capital’ (see Morrison et al., in this Forum), which diffused class conflict – quoting Clarke ‘through the structure of management appearing primarily in divisions within the management apparatus rather than in a direct confrontation between capital and labour’ (Clarke 2007: 242). As the FSU was moving into a new global order, the collective enterprise continued mediating between the market and the workers (see Schwartz 2004), increasing the confrontation of workers with the new workplace managers and with growing labour protests as a result of labour degradation and restructuring, with the strong state becoming the arbiter in the impasse between the ‘market forces and workers’ resistance.

Unity of purpose

With the last contribution of this Forum, we come to a full circle. In Simon Clarke’s Practical-Theoretical Dialectic and the Unity of Purpose: A Personal Reflection, Greg Schwartz offers an intimate consideration of Clarke’s dialectical unity between the Marxist and the labour sociologist through his personal experience. His decision to pursue a PhD in Warwick under Clarke’s supervision was inspired by the texts that Simon and Russian researchers published at the ISITO. More importantly, his experience captures how Simon Clarke’s ‘non-deterministic way’ understood the social constitution of economic forms through class struggle and how he developed the same critique in his study of the FSU at the ISITO. To Schwartz, previously a student in the Politics Department (York University), the discovery of Clarke’s work was epiphanic: there was clarity as well as sharpness in his treatment of class, class struggle, capital, labour, value and the state. Schwartz found these qualities and ideas underpinning Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology and his empirical studies in the Series Management and Industry in Russia. Schwartz reveals the imprint Clarke left on him as a former PhD student. Interestingly, when Schwartz, the PhD candidate, presented his potential topic of research to the professor, that is, the ‘social forces in the making of the post-Soviet state’, Clarke asked him why don’t you study the workers, in their places of work; their social organisation, their conflicts, their struggle for what they understood as autonomy and self-determination, as it relates to their social reproduction? (Schwartz, in this Forum). It made sense theoretically and methodologically, so Schwartz did. His piece provides the clue to addressing my initial concern about the lack of work done to connect Clarke’s ‘two different stages of the same project’:

The essential unity of Simon’s intellectual project may be appreciated by zooming in on the factors that motivated the entirety of his work, such as ethical orientation and a desire to understand the mediations of social relations and tensions between capitalism and freedom, autonomy, self-determination, and dignity (Schwartz, in this Forum).