Some notes on some essays by Simon Clarke

Sharp friends have told me for a while now to read through Simon Clarke’s work at length. For various reasons I’ve not gotten around to doing so. I’d read some of Clarke’s work around 2002 or so, along with other people I associate with the Open Marxism book series, which emerged out of corners of the Conference of Socialist Economists and the CSE’s journal, Capital and Class. I’ve dipped back in to that work only a little and infrequently since. I’m recently getting back to this work and it’s really great stuff. For one thing I can see how much what I read of this work shaped how I read Marx in the first place, and there’s just such a wealth of ideas in this work, it’s all very thought provoking. Having forgotten a good deal of what I’ve read, and failed to really take in a lot of as well due to not doing anything with it - if I just set ideas on the top of my head, so to speak, they fall off; I need to use them to work them into my brain - I decided I’d write up some notes on some bits in various essay of Clarke's that I've been reading. My notes are below, marked by a line break and asterisk. I think it’d do me some good to try to summarize the key points now, having written the notes, so here goes.

In a 1979 essay Clarke surveyed developments within the milieus he was part of regarding how to read Marx and how to understand then-contemporary capitalism. In another essay he wrote about what he called socialist humanism, referring to both history writing by EP Thompson and others and to the politics that animated that history writing. He defended socialist humanism and called for its renewal; in doing so he briefly discussed the version of Marx’s thought that he had come to hold to. The resonances between these two pieces interests me, as it suggests that, first, the avenue Clarke followed, at least up to 1979, can be characterized as a version of socialist humanism; second, that the kind of history writing Clarke talked about can be understood as theoretically sophisticated despite the charge (often made by wrongheaded and defensive Althusserians, IMHO) that this work was atheoretical; third, for Clarke, the projects of renewing socialist humanism and extending the understanding of Marx and capitalism were mutually enriching. I also note at the end some hints in works of a few years later by Clarke of what strikes me as a surprising union and labor movement focused politics, which I think fits with his remarks on socialist humanism. I don’t get into this in these notes, but I suspect that such a politics is out of step with a lot of left politics in the US today, unfortunately, and that something like a renewal of socialist humanism of the sort Clarke sketches, enlivened by the kind of marxism and grasp of contemporary capitalism he talks about, could theoretically articulate some of the good to be had by the greater development and spread of that kind of union-focused politics. (I’ll add that I think the main problems with developing and spreading such a politics are not theoretical.) I talk some at the end, speculating briefly on what to my mind this socialist humanist union-focused politics might look like. There I'm not articulating points Clarke makes explicitly so much as speculating in ways that seem to me compatible with what Clarke says. *

In “The Value of Value,” a 1979 review of Rereading Capital by Ben Fine and Laurence Harris, Clarke gave a brief overview of the intellectual history of the CSE. (https://files.warwick.ac.uk/simonclarke/files/pubs/ValueofValue.pdf Clarke’s web site includes links to many of his publications, here https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/Publications.html.) As someone a bit jealous - and probably overly romantic and nostalgic - about the early days of the CSE, I’d love to read an institutional and social history of it as well. What were the conjunctural factors that helped produce and sustain this vigorous intellectual ferment? In an essay two year prior, Clarke argued that from about 1967-1977, there had been a great deal of interest in Marxism, including efforts to criticize both Stalinism and "post-Stalinist revisionism." (Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas’s Theory of the State, https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/xpoul.pdf, 1) That wave of interest was shaped in large part by "the end of the long wave of post-war capitalist expansion and the reappearance of capitalist crisis, on the one hand, and the development of working class resistance" outside the Communist Parties of the world.

In “The Value of Value,” Clarke noted the development of a few tendencies in the CSE. Arguments within and among those tendencies formed some of the backdrop for the development of the approach to Marx and marxism that Clarke and others would formulate. One such tendency Clarke labeled neo-Ricardians, who treated Marx as a valuable forerunner to left wing economics but one who had been surpassed, and they discarded Marx’s concept of value. In his 1977 article Clarke had argued that new Marxist thought of the time was “taking place in conditions which make it extremely vulnerable to absorption into the frame of reference of bourgeois ideology.” (Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas’s Theory of the State, 1.) I suspect that some of the people he summarized in “The Value of Value” could be considered as closer to that absorption.

One set of opponents to this view Clarke called Ricardians, who retained a concept of value, though one Clarke reject - “value as a quantity of embodied labour.” (3. Clarke adds that whether or not Marx himself held to a Ricardian notion of value was a matter of controversy.) Another tendency, “the Fundamentalists”, a term that Clarke suggested had some currency within the CSE itself rather than being only retroactively applied, argued for the important of value as a category and did so largely through emphasis on Marx’s writings. Clarke seemed to have had more sympathy for this group than the former, but only some. He called this tendency dogmatic, uninterested in demonstrating the actual validity of Marx’s points, and “unable to take any account of the need to develop Marx’s analysis to make it relevant to the analysis of contemporary capitalism.” (3.) Instead, this tendency applied Marx’s idea in what Clarke saw as a mechanical way. Clarke framed the crux of the matter between these tendencies as one of how to understand crisis, as the result of decline in profitability due to wage rises, or as a matter of a fundamental tendency for profit rates to fall in capitalism.

The debate between these tendencies opened onto some deep waters, about how to make sense of Marx and also economics as a discipline. People in the CSE engaged these issue via engaging Marx’s concept of value but it was more a matter of opening up lines of inquiry, rather than fully following those avenues, let alone resolving them.

Clarke identified with neither tendency but instead with another, “more diffuse and less assertive,” who saw Marx’s thought as vitally important but also as needing a) naunced interpretation and application and b) further development in light of underdeveloped conceptual aspects or historical changes in actually existing capitalism. There was, then, a mix of theoretical/methodological/marxological concerns - how craft a better marxism - and at least partially empirical and conjunctural concerns - how to understand “the nature of contemporary capitalism,” with the two kinds of concerns of course closely interrelated and having massive implications for one another. My impression is that this diffuse view consisted largely of people who were interested in the avenues of inquiry opened up by the debates discussed above, and who were dissatisfied with any of the answers produced by the tendencies mentioned.

Clarke offered (page 4) an interesting summary of a developing view of Marx’s category of value - tied to a notion of abstract labor and social validation through circulation, which meant that “the concept of value [could] only be considered in relation to the entire circuit of capital” rather than to the immediate point of production. (4. There’s more in the passage on that page, I recommend reading it all.) This concept of value seemed to have had little use for practicing economists, at least for the economists in the CSE, and instead pointed to areas of inquiry less at home in the disciplinary bounded of economics, inquiry into social life as a set of processes that economics often misapprehended.

On Clarke’s account, lack of compatibility of that concept of value (and the lines of inquiry that drew on it) with the discipline of economics meant at first that this concept found little reception in the CSE. As reception grew within the CSE, correspondingly more non-economists entered the organization, professional economists became more sidelined, often leaving and when remaining becoming something of a niche group within the CSE and one that that did not engage the rest of the CSE much. Clarke stressed that the relative loss of economists to the CSE was at best intellectually double-edged, as some kinds of issues became harder to address (6). At the same time the implication seems to be that this shift - Clarke calls it the CSE’s second phase of development (4) created more space for his diffuse tendency to grow and perhaps to become more assertive.

By 1979, the CSE had arrived, in Clarke’s view, at a grasp of Marx that was ultimately still “tentative and fragmentary.” That grasp had cleared the ground somewhat and created an awareness of the challenges and the high bar involved. People in the CSE had begun to see the need for applying Marx to contemporary capitalism, and to understand at a methodological level that this would be “a dual process (...) of confronting Marx’s categories with the everyday experience of contemporary capitalism” and above all the lessons of struggle.

Around the time he wrote “The Value of Value,” Clarke also wrote an essay for History Workshop Journal called “Socialist Humanism and the Critique of Economism.” (https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/SocialistHumanism.pdf) In the essay, Clarke argued a defense of EP Thompson and similar historians, while also disagree with Thompson about Maurice Dobb. Thompson praised Dobb but Clarke saw Dobb as economistic. Against economism, and against Althusserians, Clarke praised socialist humanism. His remarks recalled his points in his One Dimensional Marxism, attacking Althusser and praising the qualities - or rather, the specific versions - of empiricism, humanism, and historicism in Thompson’s work, qualities Clarke saw as among the best of Marxism. (One Dimensional Marxism was published shortly after the essay on socialist humanism, but Clarke’s work in that book was several years old, developing across multiple drafts. Thompson cited it in draft form in his own polemic against Althusser. https://files.warwick.ac.uk/simonclarke/files/pubs/AlthusserianMarxism.pdf)

In the socialist humanism essay, against Dobb, Clarke briefly laid out some of his own reading of Marx and understanding of capitalism. (This is on page 3 of the Clarke essay, worth reading independent of the issues about Dobb and humanism.) Clarke argues that the class relationships which capitalism consists in are not economic, but rather "relation[s] of class power (...) sustained and reproduced by 'economic', 'political' and 'ideological' means" and which pervade "every institution of capitalist society for the simple reason that within a class society people enter social relations as members of particular social classes. Class power therefore appears in a series of different institutional forms." (3.) These forms interrelate and taken together compose class relationships over all, which can not be reduced to power within enterprises - i.e., employer-employee relationships. Furthermore, all of these institutional instantiations of class power are in flux over time. Clarke went on to criticize the base-superstructure distinction and to argue that the historians he was interested in - in addition to Thompson, Clarke named Hill, Hilton, and Hobsbawm - had rejected the conceptual framework of base/superstructure in favor of "a unitary conception of relations of production.” This conceptual emphasized social relations “as relations between people who, in a class society, relate to one another as members of antagonistic social classes. These relations have political and cultural, as well as economic, dimensions, the unity of which consists in their human character. The fetishised fragmentation of capitalist social relations is criticised from the standpoint of the experience of those who live within those social relations, for it is only from that standpoint that the unity of capitalist social relations can be understood, and only from that standpoint that the fragmentation of those social relations can be overcome." (5.) Clarke added that “class experience, the collective experience of oppression in all its forms” had a “unity” that was “realised and expressed through the culture of the class. This culture is not some 'relatively' autonomous level, it is the way in which the oppression of the class is lived and experienced. It is not simply an inert mental structure, it is created in the course of class struggle, in the course of the struggle against economic, political and cultural oppression, and it expresses not only the fragmentation of that oppression, not only the divisions within the class, not only the mystifications imposed by the exploiting class, but also the unity, the hopes and the aspirations of the class that are forged in struggle.” (5) Socialist humanist history’s “project” was the study of that culture and experience, something which Clarke saw as having both political an intellectual stakes. He wrote that “it is the study of the unitary, revolutionary and creative character of the struggle of the exploited class that provides the basis both for a political critique of the fragmented and fetishised character of the social relations of capitalist society, and for a historiographical critique of the static and ahistorical categories provided by a theory that does not penetrate that fetishistic fragmentation.” Socialist humanism as a project did have its pitfalls, Clarke added, but he stressed that “these do not arise because it has gone too far, but because there is further yet to go.” (5.)

Later in the essay, Clarke underlined the politics of socialist humanism further, in part contextualizing it: “What 'socialist-humanism' emphasises above all is the unitary, revolutionary, and creative character of the struggle of the exploited class. What the socialist-humanists are trying to do is to recapture through their historiographical work the irrepressible spirit of resistance to class exploitation, to tell the heroic, if often tragic, story of the constant attempt of the exploited class to realise its vision of an alternative society. It is not therefore a 'culturalist' response to theoretical 'economism', it is a revolutionary response to the politics of economism. It is a revolutionary response whose significance is twofold: it is a response to the politics of a bureaucratised and authoritarian Communist Party that suppresses and deflects the revolutionary aspirations of the working class, and thus a response that emerges historically out of the political struggleto democratise the Party. It is also a response to the reformist politics of Social Democracy that seeks to deny the very existence of such revolutionary aspirations.” (9.)

Clarke saw socialist humanist history as having been defeated politically. A renewed socialist humanism, he argued, could help “resist the strong tendencies to a polarisation between what can only be described as a resurgent Stalinism, on the one hand, and a nihilistic liberal pessimism on the other.” (12.) A renewal of socialist humanism would need theory, specifically Marx’s theory, and it’s clear in context that Clarke meant specifically the version of Marx’s theory that was developing within the CSE. “It is important to breathe new life into the project [of socialist humanism, to criticise it constructively, to develop it,to draw it out of its defensives hell and capitalise on changed political circumstances by launching a counteroffensive that does not merely hold political and theoretical absolutism at bay, but which attacks it in its lair. To do this it is not sufficient to abandon the ground of 'theory' to economism. It is necessary to combat the economists' monopoly of theory by offering a theoretical interpretation that challenges economism both in its form and in its content. In doing this it is essential that the political impetus of the 'socialist-humanist' project is not lost. Marxism must be developed as a theory of liberation, a theory that embraces and does not suppress the revolutionary aspirations expressed in the experience of struggle.' Socialist-humanism has recovered that experience for us, and any theory that is developed henceforth must be adequate to that experience.” (10)

I will admit that part of why respond to this is simply that I am habitually an overly-identified fan. (This artist I like also likes this other artist that I like! Clarke likes Thompson! Wow!) Beyond that, however, I find the following highly suggestive. Clarke saw his version of marxism as, strongly resonant with the historical investigations by Thompson et al, both in conceptual orientation and political orientation. (And he saw Thompson’s Poverty of Theory as a serious work similar to but not reducible to Clarke’s own take on Althusseriansm; this is clear as well in One Dimensional Marxism.) Clarke also believed that a version of marxism like his had resources for historical investigation and for politics in the present. Clarke also came very close to saying that his own politics was a version of socialist humanism - certainly he said that socialist humanism should have new life breathed into it. That implies that at least one strand of the “diffuse” third tendency that emerged in the CSE over the course of the 1970s might be considered a type of - or at least a forerunner to - renewed socialist humanism.

In an essay in 1988 Clarke concluded on what can be read as a socialist humanist note, and arguable a Thompsonian one: there are internationalist tendencies in the labour movement, and there are strong internationalist sentiments in the women’s movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement, solidarity movements, and the world development movement, which provide a political basis on which to build an internationalist alternative to social imperialism.” This potential politics was deeply radical, Clarke argued, because it was “based on the subordination of capital not to the illusory community of the nation embodied in the national form of the capitalist state, but to the expression of human needs and aspirations, which alone point the way forward to socialism. ("Class Struggle, Overaccumulation and the Regulation Approach", https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/cc.pdf, 27)

It’s also notable to me that the socialist humanist history that Clarke emphasized was labor history in a fairly straightforward way. That emphasis labor history makes sense given Clarke points in a critical response to John Holloway published in 2002 in The Labour Debate. In his response, Clarke stated clearly what he saw as the vital political role specifically of unions and the labor movement, with the latter understood in a relatively straightforward way as basically the movement consisting of unions and union members and people “integrated into a broader labour movement.” (https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/LabourDebate.pdf, 5.) Without that connection to the labor movement, he argued, struggles tended to “remain fragmented, isolated and ephemeral,” as demonstrated by “repeated experience.” (5.) Clarke included struggles of the 1960 and 1970s under these experiences. It’s unclear from the text is this emphasis on the labor movement is one he had all along or one he arrived at later. Given his remarks on socialist humanism and peace movements, my hunch is that his view was something like the following: human liberation will be the work of a constellation of movements, with the labor movement being a necessary but not sufficient condition for that constellation’s success, and that over time the embattled character of the labor movement made him emphasize it further. That’s speculation on my part. I will note that Clarke added that he meant specifically “union organisation that develops out of the struggle over the terms and conditions of wage labour, which cannot by any means be reduced to organisation on the basis of the sectional interests of particular groups of wage labourers.” (6) Clarke pressed the point about the important of the labour movement in the conclusion to his reply to Holloway, writing that “the labour movement (...) for all its faults, is the only collective expression of the interests and aspirations of labour” and that “progressive intellectuals have a responsibility to supplement the intellectual resources of the labour movement, to help to broaden its understanding and its horizons.” (14.) It seems reasonable to me to say that for Clarke what a progressive intellectual should do as part of supplementing the labor movement and broadening its horizons is a kind of socialist humanist practice, whether or not Clarke retained that term. In a short text in 1989 Clarke argued that capitalist society consisted in forms of alienation in which human beings’ (and humanity, collectively) social character manifest, largely in negative fasion as external forces that dominate people. Sounding socialist humanist notes again, Clarke wrote that “individuals do not passively submit to the alienation of their humanity, but attempt to reconstitute their humanity ideologically and politically. The attempt to reappropriate their humanity draws individuals into the alienated forms of religious and political consciousness, in which the absence of real community is compensated by the construction of illusory spiritual and political communities, and the struggle to reappropriate their humanity appears in the alienated form of a struggle for political rights and for access to state power. (...) The struggle to restore humanity must be a struggle to overcome the alienated spiritual and political forms in which it appears, to develop new forms of social organisation and social consciousness through which humanity can bring its social powers under self-conscious control.” (1-2.) Clarke added that the “development of the social consciousness of the working class has often taken place within, if in tension with, forms of religious and political consciousness.” (2.) Clarke here echoed EP Thompson’s famous remark about avoiding the enormous condescension of posterity. Presumably the work of socialist humanist history is to analyze this attempted reconstitution and reappropriation of humanity, and how those attempts occur within limited and tension-laden forms of consciousness. Clarke ended the essay (3) with a series of questions about future directions for socialism, questions resonant with the spirit of his earlier calls to breathe new life into socialist humanism and with the reality that this renewal of socialism might not succeed. In these questions, Clarke argued that socialists needed to find ways to criticize limited forms of expressing human aspirations while also recognizing the aspirations expressed via those forms, and making room for those aspirations within the socialist movement. This has bearing on what it means for a social struggled to be integrated with the labor movement, in the terms of Clarke’s reply to Holloway. (“Money, the State and the Illusory Community " https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/CAVTAT.pdf)

There is another hint as to what socialist humanism might mean politically in the 1977 article criticizing Poulantzas. There Clarke argued that a widespread error was to treat production as merely technical or narrowly economic rather than as historically specific social relations. Treating production in this way meant “eternising” capitalist social relations (9). In this conception, union activity was limited to distributive conflicts, with politics limited to distributive efforts via the state. Clarke criticizes Althusser for seeing union struggles as “necessarily defensive” and limited to moderating “the rate of exploitation.” (9, note 13.) These remarks are underdeveloped as it’s not entirely clear for Clarke why the limits of unions to distribution and defense are wrong, nor what the alternative is, but the points are highly suggestive in the context of his other remarks I’ve discussed. Speculating - and, admittedly, reading in my own proclivities - it could be that Clarke has in mind something like struggles via unions to reconstitute and reappopriate humanity, against the power relations workers confront in production. This implies union activity as a form of politicization in two senses. First, conceptually or epistemically, union activity would involve trying to convey to people that aspects of life in capitalist society are in fact political even if they are treated as apolitical and “eternised,” in Clarke’s term. Second, this activity would be an attempt - admittedly at a scale much smaller than society as a whole - to rearrange power relationships and wrest back some collective control and to instantiate, albeit in highly mediated and limited ways, aspects of liberated humanity. (I hope to eventually write up some notes on depoliticization as a concept, and the concept of politicization implied in that term. At present I’ve got about 1000 words toward that and I am lost in the middle somewhere. Clarke’s reply to Holloway, in the discussion of fetishism, seems to have articulated part of what I’d been fumbling for.)

Again this is me speculating about what Clarke meant; I don't want to ventriloquize here. Still it seems to me that this is a reasonable speculation and in keeping with the principle of interpretive charity. To understand Clarke’s emphasis on unions and the labor movement through the ‘unions are distributive and defensive only’ would be to imply a politics that Clarke seems pretty clearly to have repudiated. While the alternative conception of unions and their activity is not as fleshed out as I would like in anything I’ve read so far by Clarke, it seems reasonable to say that he must have some alternative conception in mind given what he says. I assume this alternative include some notion of union activity as political, politicizing, and/or in some other way more expansive. To put it another way, it seems a safe assumption that Clarke has in mind some conception of union activity as socialist humanist practice (whether or not he articulated in those terms explicitly, the implication here seems to be of a practice equivalent to socialist humanism vis a vis union activity).