Notes on Robin Murray
During the 1970s, Robin Murray and I taught a course on Marxist Economics. It was a very exciting course that included both graduates and undergraduates, and students from disciplines including economics, philosophy, sociology and development studies. Everyone was reading Marx in the 1970s; at one point, there were 17 Capital reading groups on the Sussex campus.
Robin had a very concrete interpretation of Marxist economics. Like many others, we were preoccupied with the transformation problem, whether labour values can be translated into prices, and the falling rate of profit that is the consequence of the rising ratio of dead labour (fixed capital) to living labour. Critics of the falling rate of profit argument -central to the assumption of the crisis of capitalism- argue that this ratio does not necessarily rise because productivity can be capital saving as well as labour saving. For Robin, these problems had to be understood in terms of real production processes. Thus the rising ratio of dead to living labour, for example, expressed the way in which bricks and mortar and machines suppressed the creativity of living labour.
Every week we would have lectures on theory in the morning (usually Wednesday) and then we would do something to illustrate practice in the afternoons. We might have people like Mike Cooley of Lucas Aerospace come and talk to the students about their plans for alternatives to military production. In the week, we studied the theory of exploitation, we would take the students to visit a factory. I remember organising a factory visit and not daring to say it was a Marxist economics course – I said vaguely ‘its one of those typically Sussex interdisciplinary courses about technology and economics’ and then of course one student left her copy of Capital behind and the company rang the university to complain!
One year, we visited a factory in Brighton that manufactured teleprinters for the Post Office. The local company had just been bought up by a big multinational corporation, IT&T I think, and was shifting production from mechanical teleprinters to electronic teleprinters. It illustrated all our themes. In one section of the factory the mechanical teleprinters were still being built by semi-skilled white male workers, who had negotiated a leisurely pace of work with lots of tea breaks. In the other section, the new electronic teleprinters were being produced on an assembly line and the anxious looking workers were mainly women and immigrants. As a consequence of our visit, the shop stewards invited us to help them negotiate the transition; somewhere I have a fat file of the reams of papers we wrote together with the students.
Much more recently Robin became a fellow of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, directed by Meghnad Desai and later by me, which subsequently became the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit. Robin was wonderfully supportive; he always came to our summer picnics and Christmas parties and he was always kind to and interested in all the people in the centre but especially the younger members of staff. His work during this period focussed on the social or civic economy -the changing social relations of production that are neither statist (administrative) nor market led. It involves a combination of coeval developments -the growth of co-operative or municipal enterprise, fair trade, political and environmental consumerism, ethical investment, and so on. He wrote a brilliant essay on the civic economy in our Global Civil Society yearbook Global Civil Society 2012: Ten Years of Critical Reflection. He also worked with Carlota Perez on long surges of development and the transition to an IT based green, global development paradigm. For a while, CISCO funded a dining club, which we called the Carlota club, where we had exciting and productive discussions on these issues and where Robin encouraged and stimulated us all.
In my life, Robin has been hugely important as both an intellectual mentor and an empathetic and empowering friend -moving seamlessly from political discussions to personal reflections and concerns. A day I will never forget was a walk in bluebell woods in West Sussex where Robin’s brother Sandy played the flute and Robin read poetry and then, to my children’s delight, we made a fire and cooked our supper.
As a postscript, I would like to mention that I had a Skype call this morning with a group of Syrian economists to discuss some research we are doing together. By pure coincidence, not knowing that I knew Robin or that he had died, one of them said he had read the essay on the civil economy and that it resonated with the way that they themselves were thinking about economics.
1 June 2017