Robin Murray

Socialist Seminar

The Socialist Seminar, 1979 

 
 

We would like to pay tribute to all four organisers of this seminal event at IDS in 1979. Three no longer with us (Christine White, Gordon White, Robin Murray) and Aboo Ameruddy from Mauritius, a key figure in Robin’s intellectual life at the time of the seminar and later when he was an advisor for the Seychelles Government, now seriously ill (at the time of writing in 2020). Following on from the seminar, a book entitled Revolutionary Socialist Development in the Third World was published in 1983. 

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For Robin this six week long seminar, ‘Socialist Strategies of Development’ was an important moment in his work at IDS. The subject matter was both ambitious and politically sensitive and, at the time, the teaching method new and risky.

Detailed preparations made over a year included the assembling of 21 Topic Dossiers (see one example: ‘Force and Socialism’) and Country Dossiers on Angola, China, Cuba, Mozambique among 13 others. The preparatory thinking, debate and substance was influenced in large part by IDS colleagues (see Memo 3) and by the intellectual work of the Brighton Labour Process Group (BLPG).

The Seminar was organised into the following weekly topics: socialist strategies and the experience of transformation; labour and production; beyond the market; socialism and the other working day; the party and the state; transition and beyond.

 
 
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The teaching ran on a conference model with participants, teachers, doctors, public sector officials and others, from 15 different countries more as delegates contributing written papers rather than the usual teacher- taught distinction.  Thirty-three speakers from IDS and all over the UK were key to the input, which included a study visit to the Northern College. Minutes were taken and circulated, alongside audio tape recordings of daily discussion (63 were made), role play was a key feature (see tribute by Maureen Mackintosh) as was the use of cinema as a common visual text for debate (films on Chinese land reform and the Eritrean Liberation Army were shown, for example). The case study and dossier method came from Robin’s teaching at the London Business School (see for example, teaching note and case study on North Sea Gas).

On the last weekend some of the participants created a much talked about newspaper - Liberation - with a print run of 1000 aimed at making the intellectual debate accessible. Because the seminar did not argue a particular line but focussed on analysing the experience, achievements and difficulties of countries that followed ‘a socialist path’ the outcome was both long remembered and influential (see for example the tributes from Dong Nguyen Huu and Olivier Le Brun).