Robin Murray - an obituary

Robin Murray, who died last month, was a socialist economist who was inspired by the potential for achieving a radically different society tomorrow in concrete initiatives taken by civil society and cooperative movements today. He saw a vast, largely untapped political potential in a synergy of action taken together by socialist local, national and international authorities together with grassroots labour and civil society movements on the ground.

I first met Robin during the struggle against the American war in Vietnam in the 1960s. We were part of a generation inspired by the broad New Left movements after the Suez/Hungary crisis in 1956. We went our separate ways subsequently but I always found Robin’s clear headed analysis of socio-economic change compelling.

Having taught Marxist economics at Sussex University, Robin Murray was one of the first economists on the left to identify the transition from the “Fordist” model of national capitalism – symbolised by standardised forms of mass production – to an essentially global, flexible production focussed system exploiting new information technologies.

He bitterly opposed all variations of neo-liberal, ultra-free market ideologies with the massively greater inequalities and injustice they necessarily generated. But he recognised that the structural changes in capitalism required new strategic answers to new questions.

I worked closely with Robin when Ken Livingstone’s GLC took a series of innovative economic and social initiatives in the 1980s. Robin – as the GLC’s Director of Industry – launched the Greater London Enterprise Board. He also worked there with some remarkable figures such as Mike Cooley – of the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards initiative

The related movement advocating workers’ alternative plans for socially useful production in plants and industries facing mass redundancies, inspired GLEB projects around human-centred technologies, as well as worker coops, green investment initiatives as well as black and ethnic minority job creating projects. Little wonder Thatcher promptly closed it down along with the GLC.

Robin’s subsequent work with governments and regional authorities in developing economic enterprises from the re-cycling of waste won international praise. He wrote about the immense possibilities of this approach in his book “Zero Waste” published by the Greenpeace Environmental Trust. He also helped pioneer the influential radical new Twin Trading strategy to empower farmer cooperatives in poor, developing countries.

Robin never obsessed about a purely ‘national’ focus for a socialist challenge to the system: for him, local, national, European and global were part of a seamless web. It is tragic that the left has been deprived of Robin Murray’s insight and vision about what might be called a “transitional socialist politics” at a time when popular support for challenging a sclerotic and dying neo-liberal capitalist system is greater than ever.

June 2017