IDS Bienefeld

By Manfred Bienefeld

Lives intersect, usually unexpectedly, often unremarkably but sometimes with profound consequences. And when we are lucky, the deepest and most meaningful intersections occur more than once, and at many different levels of our lives. And so it was with my and my family’s encounters with Robin and his family.

While I am both glad and honoured to have been asked to contribute to this tribute to his remarkable life, I do so with some diffidence because I am all too aware that after almost 50 years, memories are always shrouded in the gentle mists of time. But they are what they are.

For me it all began when I arrived at the IDS, fresh from three years of participating in Julius Nyerere’s valiant efforts to build “African socialism” in Tanzania. After having completed a historically based thesis at LSE on “Working Hours in British Industry during the Industrial Revolution,” those three years had taught me that if we were ever to understand the challenges facing the world, and the developing world in particular, the discipline of economics would have to yield to political economy since all economic phenomena are inextricably linked to their political, social, institutional and cultural dimensions. And, to my delight, that view was widely shared at the IDS, though from a variety of theoretical perspectives.

Upon my arrival at IDS in 1972, it did not take long for me to be drawn to Robin’s profound, effervescent and pragmatic Marxism, which I worked hard to reconcile with the radical dependency theory perspective that I had brought with me from my engagement with Tanzania. This was a time of intense intellectual ferment in which the IDS was emerging as a significant centre of opposition to the neoliberal tide then beginning to engulf the development debate; a tide that would soon lock most developing countries – and ultimately most of the world – into the particularly raw, and unbalanced, version of capitalism that is, by now, so regularly deplored, even in the pages of the Financial Times.

Robin and the MPhil

At IDS my life intersected with Robin’s in four different orbits, each reinforcing and enriching the other. The first, and maybe the most intense, was that of our two-year MPhil program, which provided an almost ideal learning experience for students and faculty alike. A rich and rigorous interdisciplinary exercise in critical thinking, each new student cohort (of around 20) was entrusted to two co-directors who shaped its detailed curriculum, within a broadly agreed framework, and who led a significant proportion of the individual lectures and seminars. But pedagogically, the most innovative feature, at least of the three cohorts that I co-directed, was the fact that both co-directors tried to attend all of the sessions, thereby creating a remarkable esprit de corps among students and co-directors in that it created a vibrant intellectual environment in which every lecturer’s presentation would be critically evaluated by the students and by one or both of the two co-directors. While it is sometimes said that nothing focuses the mind so effectively as the need to present complex arguments to a collection of sharp, inquiring minds, this experience taught me that, almost equally effective, is the need to find a way of reconciling the apparent contradictions between the arguments presented in various seminars and lectures. To this day I am convinced that the resulting joint efforts by students and faculty to pinpoint the underlying assumptions, alternative definitions and/or different interpretations of evidence that can lead people to different conclusions from what appears to be the same evidence, allowed everyone to gain a deeper understanding of the fact that it is not the conclusions that count, but how one reaches one’s “on balance” conclusions, which must always remain subject to revision when new evidence demands it. In this sense, the MPhil that I experienced at the IDS, and especially the discussions generated by Robin’s guest lectures, fully lived up to Bertrand Russell’s profoundly appropriate definition of education as “a process of becoming confused at a higher level.”  

While I never had the pleasure of co-directing an MPhil cohort with Robin, I encountered him often in the many lectures and seminars that he was invited to give in the three MPhils that I co-directed between 1975 and 1986. Invariably these sessions became occasions for lively and constructive dialogue, partly because Robin was such an engaging and persuasive lecturer, partly because he did not pull his punches and partly because he challenged everyone to think deeply and to confront the contradictions lurking beneath the surface of every policy debate. And while there was often a broad measure of agreement on many fundamental issues, there always remained significant differences in the “on balance” judgments on many important issues that students and other faculty brought with them on any particular day.

In my case, certain points of agreement remained relatively constant: political economy trumps “economics;” the power of capitalism to drive technical change is almost unlimited; the inner logic of capitalism will tend to generate periodic crises, whose resolution will impose heavy economic, human and social costs, but will “normally” usher in new periods of rapid growth and accumulation - during which many wage earners are likely to enjoy limited, but usually temporary, gains in wages and in standards of living (i.e. Marx’s “golden chains”); and finally, those periodic crises may, one day, deepen to the point where labour, whose long-term interests are ultimately diametrically opposed to those of capital, might be capable of ushering in an alternative system in which resources would be allocated according to a very different set of priorities and through very different mechanisms. Even today, I would argue that these basic “truths” continue to be repeatedly confirmed by history, even as the hoped-for transformation to a humane, democratic socialism still remains an elusive, but widely shared, objective.

My disagreements with Robin revolved primarily around the vexed, and unresolved, question of agency, which for Marx was the key distinction between “utopian socialism,” which he derided, and “scientific socialism,” whose virtues he extolled. Although we agreed that history had not been kind to Marx’s hope – and fervent political objective – that the proletariat would be the agent of change that would lead the world to democratic socialism, after passing through a dark valley described by Marx as “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” we, like the left in general, and indeed like Marx himself, so many years earlier, were left to confront the challenge of dealing with Marx’s fundamental insight, namely that capitalism has, at its core, a fatal flaw that does not allow it to serve the true interests of working people, or of society as a whole; the challenge of finding, or helping to create, a historical agent capable of harnessing capitalism’s spectacular technological dynamism in the service of humanity, of developed and developing societies and of the earth’s ultimate sustainability.

And so these were the issues at the heart of the discussions that flourished in that beautiful circular room that was the home of the MPhil from its inception, which is where I encountered Robin’s amazing capacity to enthuse our students and to challenge his colleagues with his relentlessly coherent view of a world in which international corporate capitalism was capturing and narrowing the power of nation states, while continually turning the screws on labour, both at home and abroad. But Robin’s account of these broad developments was always enlivened by a keen desire to understand how concurrent changes in technology, in industrial organisation, in global regulations, in forms of ownership and in the relationship between capitalist firms and their surrounding communities would – or could – affect the balance of power between capital and labour, as it had so clearly done in his beloved Emilia Romagna. In this sense, Robin’s Marxism was never teleological, in that nothing was foreordained, even though capitalism’s powerful inner logic was always clearly recognised as the challenge that ultimately had to be met. And this was, in large part, what made his arguments so powerful, and so engaging to so many. In the end, despite their intellectual rigour, his arguments were always simultaneously meant to educate, to stimulate and to mobilise, which is why he was such a catalyst and leader.

On one occasion I teased Robin by suggesting that a careless listener might conclude that his account of Emilia Romagna’s remarkable success bore a striking resemblance to the Horatio Alger myth, which suggested that any individual who was frugal, intelligent and decisive enough could become wealthy and successful in a capitalist system, except that in his case the “actor” was not an individual but an entire region. Robin’s reply, delivered with his trademark wry smile, was to remind me that most myths contain a kernel of truth, and that Emilia Romagna’s success was never inevitable and was achieved against enormous odds.

In contrast to Robin, my own thinking on these points tended to focus more on the key role that had to be played by nation states in determining the balance of power between capital, labour and other social interests. Although I agreed that globalisation was steadily shifting power from nation states to global corporations, I judged that there were still many places where powerful national constituencies, and interests, could hope to expand the scope for collective action in the public interest, largely by moderating, or even reversing, the impact of those insidious global trends. And there were, indeed, a few countries that managed to do just that.

Ultimately, I believe that our two arguments were largely complementary, in that there were some cases where strong state policies in defence of capital controls and of national industrial development were able to improve socio-economic outcomes, just as there were instances where grass roots activism on the shop floor, or at the local or regional level, were able to achieve better outcomes while also helping to lay stronger foundations for more effective state intervention in support of successful long-term development.

There were several reasons why I tended to give primary emphasis to the role of the nation state. First, my Tanzanian experience had persuaded me that in most of the developing world local initiatives could not develop or strengthen unless they were protected to some degree by the state; second, I had come to accept Keynes’ insight that unless the rate of interest is nationally determined, no society is free to pursue its own favourite social experiments; third, national capital controls were still widely used at the time that we were debating these issues; and fourth, the post-WWII East European experience with socialism had persuaded me that no modern economy could hope to do away with markets altogether, so that the task was not to abolish market relations altogether, but to force them to operate within politically and socially defined frameworks that would allow their dynamism to be harnessed in the public interest. And for me those frameworks had to be established, validated and administered at the national level since a meaningful democratic process at a global level is not only unimaginable, but also undesirable since different societies should be allowed to retain differing values and priorities.

In retrospect, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from, and with, Robin. There is no doubt that our interactions within the IDS’s MPhil program helped to shape our, and our students’, understanding of a rapidly changing world. Nor can there be any doubt that, despite certain differences of emphasis, our shared skepticism of the unfounded, ideologically rooted promises made by the purveyors of neoliberal reform, has been soundly validated by history, both with respect to the developed and the developing world. Moreover, then as now, the challenge was to find a way in which progressive state policies could mesh with grass roots activism to open the door to a society in which resource allocation, and ownership, could give first priority to human welfare, to social harmony and to ecological sustainability.

To conclude this section, I have one final story of my experience of Robin in the MPhil program. In 1984, when I returned from a two year EU financed mission to the Fiji Islands (with Dudley Seers as Deputy Director), I was invited to co-direct the next round of the MPhil (1985/87) with Hubert Schmitz, one of my former PhD students. As we sat down to prepare our detailed curriculum, we discovered that the previous round, which had been co-directed by Robin, had included a reading group on Das Kapital: Vol 1. After some discussion, and faced with the “usual” problem of trying to fit an infinitely large literature into a single curriculum, we decided not to incorporate that feature into our program. I even remember saying that if we did so, then we really should also find time for a similarly close reading of The Wealth of Nations, and maybe of other seminal texts. But we would soon learn that life is not so simple when one is following in Robin’s footsteps.

Our first surprise came when we discovered, soon after our program had begun, that “our” students had organised their own Capital reading group, based on the enthusiastic reports of students from the previous cohort. So, of course, we asked for permission to join their reading group, and the rest is history. It’s called learning with – and from – Robin!

The second surprise came some years later, after I had left the IDS, when I discovered some truly startling passages buried deep in Bks III and V of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which reminded me of a wise teacher who had once told me that “properly understood,” the differences between Smith and Marx were “surprisingly small.” In fact, these passages, which are very rarely cited or referenced in the vast literature on that book, show unambiguously that Smith basically agreed with Marx on the fate awaiting labour in a capitalist economy, a fact that fundamentally alters the meaning of that much misused book.

The first such passage appears in Bk III where Smith is at pains to emphasise that in a capitalist society wages will always eventually come to approximate the cost of reproduction of labour, irrespective of the wealth, or productivity, of the economy in question, though wages can rise above this level during periods of rapid growth and accumulation. Moreover, he categorically rejects the idea that trade unions might be able to change that outcome significantly because he firmly believes that capitalist employers will always have the upper hand in that struggle. Marx could not have said it better.

The second, even more surprising passage occurs in BK V, when Smith suddenly reveals his understanding of capitalism’s total impact on wage labour. At the time he is explaining why he has reluctantly concluded that, in a capitalist society, the state must establish schools to instruct the children of working people in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic “before they enter the factories.” Incredibly, the explanation that he offers is indistinguishable from Marx’s writing on wages and alienation. And, as such, it is, of course, totally inconsistent with any claim that The Wealth of Nations makes a case for the idea that capitalism promotes public, or social, welfare, or that it serves the interests of labour. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth.

What Smith reveals in this incredible passage even raises the question of whether he consciously set out to mislead the reader when, in Bk I, he concluded his celebration of the enormous productivity increases made possible by the division of labour in his hypothetical pin factory, with the suggestion that these productivity increases “could” allow capitalist wage earners to live better than “the potentates of old.” If he did mean to mislead, it seems that he was successful, since this is one of the most frequently cited passages from the book, and almost none of those citations note the significance of the fact that he said “could,” and not “would.” But that distinction turns out to be critical, once Smith reveals his actual view of the fate awaiting wage earners under capitalism, which turns out to be that he was actually absolutely convinced that they would end up living far worse than “people in a barbarous state.” His categorical language and his repeated use of the word “inevitably,” leaves no doubt that this is what Smith believed to be true when he wrote The Wealth of Nations.  

The passage in question is categorical, but also quite straight-forward. It turns out that Smith believed that the very same division of labour that he had celebrated so enthusiastically earlier in the book, required working people to perform effectively meaningless and repetitive tasks at such high speed and intensity all through the day, that they – by which he means “the great body of the people” – will “inevitably” (also repeated several times) be reduced to “a state that is barely human.”

What he does not explain is how this devastating “systemic” problem would be moderated, let alone resolved, by the children being instructed in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic before entering the factories. Surely this must be one of history’s most blatant non-sequiturs, since there is almost no connection between the problem as stated, and the solution being offered.

But the congruence between Smith and Marx does not end there. Smith actually goes on from the above passage, to compare capitalism’s “barely human” wretches very unfavourably to people:

“in the barbarous societies … which precede the improvement of manufactures. … In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity which, in a civilised society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people.” (A. Smith (1776) Bk V)

And so, the second lesson that I learned, albeit many years later, was that I should have trusted Robin’s instinct that sometimes it pays to read the most seminal books in the original. Indeed, had we read both Marx and Smith in this way, the two readings would have powerfully reinforced each other. 

The Brighton Labour Process Group

The second place where I experienced the dynamism, and enthusiasm, generated by Robin’s activist scholarship was when I joined the Brighton Labour Process Group (BLPG) which focused precisely on that most critical interface between capital and labour, the one that, it turns out that both Smith and Marx saw as the place where labour was likely to be dehumanised, and turned into a pure commodity.

Our group was right to focus on this question since these were turbulent times; times when the “social capitalism” of the post-WWII “Golden Age” was being challenged by a neoliberal counter-attack that was determined to reverse the falling rates of profit of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the developed world this counter-attack focused on the war against trade unions, the promotion of technical changes that would undercut the leverage of working people and an endless repetition of the intellectually vapid mantra of free trade and the free movement of capital. By the late 1980s, an unnamed trader in the City of London, summed it all up very neatly when, in response to a question of how he felt about Sweden’s recently enacted first austerity budget, he said that he felt that this was a small step in the right direction, but that much more would be needed, since “people must understand that the financial markets have declared war on the welfare state.”

The lively and fruitful discussions of the BLPG focused on the various ways in which technical change, changing production structures, new forms of ownership and new linkages between working people and the communities in which they lived were creating new threats and opportunities potentially capable of altering the balance of power between capital and labour. But those discussions also opened up a significant rift between different members of the group as regards the degree to which this crisis was primarily technology driven, meaning that falling rates of profit primarily reflected flagging productivity growth rates due to the exhaustion of the “Fordist model” – or of the petroleum/automobile age – in which case solutions had to be sought in speeding up technical change, or, in the case of some Fordist/Regulation School literature, even in demands to moderate wage increases; on the other side of this debate were those who believed that this was primarily a political crisis, reflecting capital’s determination to roll back the gains that labour had been able to make during the “Golden Age” between 1948 and 1974, in which case the primary responses should have been to protect wages and to force capital to live with lower rates of return. While those differences were never fully resolved, the group ultimately chose to focus primarily on new forms of industrial organisation associated with newly emerging technologies – and in this work Robin was always instrumental in ensuring that our discussions would not remain purely academic, but would also include activist links with trade unionists, and even with some ‘progressive’ firms.

For my part, these discussions were enormously important for allowing me to better understand and appreciate the forces driving the widespread relocation of industrial activity from the centre to the periphery over the next three decades. Whereas even many progressives were misled, for a time, into thinking that this industrialisation of the developing world was opening the door to their long term “development,” because in the past industrialisation had been so closely associated with higher wages, more stable employment and greater social protection, a clearer understanding of the intensity of the shop-floor struggles that were engulfing the developed world’s industries at this time, made it much easier to see – and to predict – that this global relocation of production would only provide a basis for the emergence of “developed high-wage societies” such as those associated with the “social capitalism” of the Golden Age, in those countries that were capable of managing their insertion into the global economy so as to retain sufficient sovereignty to build strong national industrial foundations that could eventually allow them to generate and appropriate technology rents. As for the others, they ended up trapped in what came to be known as the low wage manufacturing trap, but that should better be known as the low cost manufacturing trap, because their ability to attract, and retain, the necessary foreign investments depended not only on low cost, reliable labour, but also on major subsidies and concessions on the cost of capital, essential services and infrastructure.

Meanwhile the relentless logic of capital continues to reduce the state of working people to “a state that is barely human.” And so, almost 50 years after those BLPG discussions, minimum wage earners in the US are earning far less, in real terms, than they did way back then, even as the intensity of work has increased to the point where some workers have almost been turned into cyborgs. Indeed, for Amazon’s warehouse workers, all that is now left is for their GPS controlled chips to be implanted into their bodies – naturally for reasons of efficiency and reliability. The trends are as relentless as they are ominous, as recently discussed in an article on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived. The robots are here, they’re working in management, and they’re grinding workers into the ground.

The robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and scrolls and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to call centre workers, telling them what to say, how to say it, and keeping them constantly, maximally busy. While we’ve been watching the horizon for the self-driving trucks, perpetually five years away, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor, the foreman, the middle manager.

These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isn’t that robots might come for their jobs: it’s that robots have already become their boss.”

When I read such horror stories today, I am often reminded of those BLPG discussions. We were clearly focusing on the right issues, but we ultimately had no way of influencing the course of history. While we were right to track, to encourage, to analyse and to celebrate instances where technical change, or patterns of labour and community organisation, allowed labour’s power on the shop floor to be protected, or even extended, in certain firms, industries and regions, we were all eventually condemned to see those gains swept aside by the rising tide of neoliberalism as it weakened, or even severed, the ties between firms and their surrounding communities, between citizens and their governments and between workers and their supervisors (AI robots?), their managers and later, the faceless hedge fund owners of their firms.

Family and Friendship

Fortunately for us, the rich intellectual adventures described above, were deeply embedded in, and reinforced by, a deep friendship that our two families came to share over the years, as well as by our shared enjoyment of the wonderful esprit de corps generated by successive cohorts of our MPhil program. With each year’s social calendar firmly anchored in “The Christmas Pantomime,” under Gordon White’s brilliant direction, the years were filled with many other social events, ranging from occasional summer visits to the University’s “White House” resort, impromptu sporting events – including hotly contested soccer and volleyball matches, the annual New Year’s party at 48 Prince Edwards Road, Easter Weekend getaways on the Isle of Wight by the Murray and Bienefeld families, and numerous Guy Fawkes evenings in Lewes, when we tried, usually unsuccessfully, to allow our students to make sense of scenes of dour, impossibly politically incorrect ‘revellers’ marching doggedly through horizontal rain, with hardly anyone – marchers or spectators - as much as tapping their toes, even when our lively local jazz band was playing. Fortunately, this was in sharp contrast to our occasional social evenings in the Institute, when spirits often ran high and when Robin’s ready repertoire of poetry and song made deep impressions on many of us. It was a good time to be alive.

A Wonderfully Serendipitous Postscript

In 1986 I left the IDS to take up a professorship at Carleton University in Ottawa, where I directed a Master’s degree program in Public Policy and Administration for students from around the world. Life was busy, there was lots of travel and, apart from an annual postcard or two, and an occasional brief visit to Falmer, I all but lost contact with the IDS community.

But all that changed, quite “out of the blue,” on one day in1993. I had been seconded by a rare Social Democratic Ontario Government, to lead a “Green Industry Strategy,” and, as such, I was spending three or four days in Toronto every week, leading a team promoting energy conservation via home and industry retrofits, investment in “green” technologies and support for “green” regulations that would promote the diffusion of those same technologies.

One day, I was sitting at my desk in Toronto, and the phone rang. It was Robin! “Hurray! How nice to hear from you! Where are you calling from?” To my absolute delight, the answer was that he was calling from a hotel directly across the street from me! He had been seconded by another part of the Government to promote community involvement in various areas, including the environment. I could not have been more amazed or pleased.

What followed was like a dream, a reprieve, a “second chance,” all made even more enjoyable because soon Frances soon came to Toronto to join Robin. There followed weeks and weeks of brainstorming sessions, strategy sessions, drafting sessions as we tried to find common ground, and synergies, between our two sets of activities. And after that, all four of us (now including my wife Mary Lou) were reunited in Ottawa where Robin spent a term as visiting professor at Carleton University’s Institute of Political Economy.

Unfortunately, soon after this, Ontario’s Social Democratic government was ousted by Mike Harris’s Conservatives, an early harbinger of the extreme neoliberalism that now afflicts so many places around the world. Almost overnight this new government swept away much of what we had worked so hard to build, though here there was another lesson for me to learn from Robin. Whereas almost all of my GIS initiatives were canceled with a stroke of the pen, the destruction of Robin’s legacy was less immediate, and less complete, because he had mobilised supportive communities more effectively with his unquenchable and infectious enthusiasm.

But the hardest lesson was yet to come. Soon after this remarkable rediscovery and regeneration of our friendship, contact was again largely lost apart from occasional postcards and messages. On one occasion Mary Lou found a marvellous book celebrating – and richly detailing the various occasions in history when the river Thames had frozen over and, realising instantly that this was a treasure to be shared with Robin and Frances, it was sent as a “just because” present.

After some time, we received a letter written in Robin’s exquisitely crafted hand. It began “Such a beautiful gift can only be acknowledged by a hand-written letter,” a sentiment with which we heartily agreed – even after spending several hours decoding Robin’s exquisite – but challenging – script. But this truly was a labour of love.

And then, before we managed to send the reply that this letter so richly deserved, we received the tragic news of Robin’s untimely death. And for us, as for so many, the world has never been quite the same again. What I have found especially hard, is the realisation that there can never be another phone call - “out of the blue” – that would give us another reprieve, give us a third chance.

But I am grateful to have been asked to write this note ‘in memoriam,’ because that has allowed me to revisit Robin, and to tell him – and Frances – some things I wanted him – and her - to hear. It seems that time travel is possible after all. And it can be so enjoyable!

August 2020