Robin Murray

Robin Murray as Radical Economist

 

  Post-Fordism and Radical Economics

 

 By Michael Rustin

 Robin Murray’s role as an economist was that of a practitioner, a doer and an adviser, as well as a thinker, researcher and writer.  It was his insistent interest in and contact with the  “facts of economic life”  -  those people who were engaged in production and trade in their different forms – which made his role so unusual, and made him so admired by those he worked with, and who heard him.  Even though he was associated with universities for much of his career, in his longest association of 20 years with the Institute of Development  Studies at Sussex he worked mainly as a consultant researcher, travelling the world to advise governments and enterprises on how to better their economic activities. He was Chief Economic Adviser at the GLC between 1982 and its abolition by the Thatcher Government in 1986, had a similar role after that with the Government of Ontario in Canada, and he was a founder of the South East Economic Development Strategy (SEEDS).   Later he took a leading role in the Fair Trade movement, and in the campaign for Zero Waste, guiding local practices as well as becoming adviser to the London Mayor’s office on its waste strategy. This was the career of an economic activist, which is not the usual mode of work of  economists.

Robin did a post-graduate economics degree at the LSE, after studying history as an undergraduate at Balliol College, where the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill was one of his teachers.  He did a further degree in Business Studies at the European University at Bruges, and worked for the London Business School, where one learned in part through conducting case-studies. He had found at the LSE a Department committed to neo-classical economics, to abstract model-building and to econometrics. He learned to understand and make use of these orthodox economic theories and methods – he retained a deep respect for the “law of value” -  but detested them, almost from the first. He found a parallel alternative education in Marxist economics, in part through his membership of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) in the 1970s, and in the 1960s through his involvement with the May Day Manifesto Group (Williams 1968), whose members included Michael Barratt Brown, his lifelong friend.  The central  lesson he learned from Marx’s ideas concerned the priority that should be given to the sphere of production, and the labour process on which it was based, over those of circulation and distribution, on which “marginalist” economic theory was  based.  The “labour process” had been a key theme of the CSE’s work, and Robin was at the centre of a strong CSE Labour Process Group in Brighton.  He saw that social democratic policy-making was deeply flawed by its belief that the sphere of production could be broadly left to the market, while the state focused its efforts on the sphere of distribution, to enhance social justice and welfare – the position set out in Anthony Crosland’s influential Future of Socialism in 1956.

His first major impact on public debates came with the articles he wrote on “Post-Fordism”  in Marxism Today (MT) between  1985 and 1991. These papers were central to Marxism Today’s project to remake the socialist agenda in Britain, in line with the broader “Eurocommunist” tendency to which it belonged. Their purpose, taking up ideas of the French Regulation School of Marxist economics (Aglietta), was to recognise deep changes that were taking  place in contemporary capitalism. “Flexibly specialised” forms of production had  been developed by companies such as Toyota and Benetton, responding to and shaping diversified consumer demands. Their systems of both production and distribution were coordinated through the newly available information technologies. Changes in consumer preference registered at the supermarket checkout or at Benetton’s stores worldwide were now being conveyed to their centres of command and control, and thence to their production lines, overnight.

The assumptions of “mass production” and “mass consumption”, and their equivalent practices in the spheres of state welfare, were becoming obsolete. Robin saw an enhanced role for workers in this new productive system, contradicting the degradation of the labour process which had been theorised by Braverman (1976). This was because these systems required a continuous commitment to quality and innovation by members of their workforce.  The Post-Fordist model being promoted by MT saw the possibility of a new politics emerging in which systems of production, distribution and welfare would all be redefined in terms of enhanced agency and choice.  These ideas had some influence on New Labour when it came to power in 1997. However they interpreted the argument for the superiority of “flexible” over “mass” provision largely as a reason for preferring markets to state provision, not as an argument for reforming the system of production in participatory and democratic ways as Robin had hoped, and as he had tried to encourage (with limited time and resources) at the GLC.

Robin’s work both as an economic adviser and consultant, and as a leading participant in movements such as Fair Trade and Zero Waste, continued to make use of the ideas he had developed in his Post-Fordist critique. He sought to bring agricultural producers in developing countries together in co-operative networks and to help them to find more “specialised” markets for their products, higher up their  value-chains.  His project of Zero Waste rejected the “mass” solutions of waste incineration, advocating instead the participation of citizens in kerbside recycling, with the support of their local councils.  These movements did not wholly transform their economic environments, but they have had a significant impact.

In the last decade or so of Robin’s life, there were diminishing opportunities to work with or influence governments. Labour’s period of office had been a disappointment, as it made so many compromises with neoliberalism, leaving Gordon Brown apparently bereft of ideas when he became Prime Minister in 2007.  Labour lost office in 2010, and was confused in Opposition, failing to challenge the Coalition Government’s austerity programme.  Robin remained keenly interested in developments in the economy, and their social significance, discussing the new “Platform Economy” as a new mode of production and distribution (Murray 2015).  But its domination by the “tech giants” - oligopolies at least as powerful as those of the Fordist days – made it difficult to be as hopeful about this development, as a new mode of production, as Robin had been about Post-Fordism in the 1980s.

In this context, Karl Polanyi’s fundamentally ethical critique of capitalism, in The Great Transformation (1944)  became important to Robin’s thinking.  It was clear that the Fair Trade and Zero Waste movements depended substantially on the moral and even aesthetic outlooks  of citizens, and their commitments to public goods. Fair Trade products in effect asked their purchasers to pay an ethical premium for them; kerbside recycling needs voluntary work by householders.  Robin became involved in attempting to reinvigorate the co-operative movement, seeking to bring together its communitarian and altruistic ethos, with new technologies, a project which however encountered some institutional resistance. 

Robin and those working with him saw the potential emergence of a new “social economy”,  in which human services would be produced and exchanged outside of the market, in households and communities. Social and health care, education and cultural activity can all be envisaged as fields of growth for such an economy.  But whether this development constitutes a new economic future, or is rather something of a retreat to idealism and voluntarism at the margin of present-day capitalism seems to me uncertain.

One would love to have been able to explore with Robin the nature of these new developments. He would have been an immense resource for such discussions, providing torrents of instances and readings to be taken note of.  His absence from them is greatly missed.

September 2020

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