Abstract
Simon Clarke played an unrivalled role in the intellectual trajectory of his former students and significantly shaped the research and the field of sociology in post-Soviet Russia. While his work appears comprised of two distinct lines of inquiry, the essential unity of Simon’s intellectual project may be appreciated by zooming in on the factors that motivated the entirety of his work, such as ethical orientation and a desire to understand the mediations of social relations and tensions between capitalism and freedom, autonomy, self-determination and dignity. Whether studying the political economy of ‘post-Fordist’ global capitalism, the class composition of post-colonial South Africa, the development of workers’ movements in post-socialist states, or the relationship between capital as a social relation and the state as a form of contradictory expression of its class character constituted through struggle, there is a unity of purpose in Simon’s work. In this article, I reflect on the above through a personal reflection of a former doctoral student.
Simon Clarke played an unrivalled role in the intellectual trajectory of his former students, many of whom have made a mark on the social sciences in the last four decades. These have usually been of two sorts: those who have researched social problems in conversation with and pursuing the development of Marxist theory, and those who have pursued the study of labour and social transformations in post-socialist societies. Few in the English-speaking world may realise the vital role Simon played in shaping the individual research agendas and the development of sociology in post-Soviet Russia. While this apparent division of Simon’s work into Marxist theory and analysis, on the one hand, and empirical studies of post-socialist labour, on the other hand, may be taken for granted by casual observers, there has always been a vigorous intellectual connection between his theoretical concerns and empirical studies. Crucially, they all have been underpinned by a constant ethical orientation and a desire to understand the mediations of social relations and tensions between capitalism and freedom, autonomy, self-determination and dignity. To that extent, the careful analyses of the contradictory relationship between capital and state policy in post-1970s Europe (Clarke 1987, 1988), capital and class in postcolonial South Africa (Clarke 1978), and labour and industry in post-socialist Russia (Clarke 1992, 1999, 2006) capture a sincere engagement with Marxist dialectics (Clarke 1991a, 1994) and a unity of purpose that define Simon’s intellectual pursuit.
I initially came across Simon’s scholarship in 1998, as a Masters’ student in the Department of Politics at York University in Toronto. The department fostered lively Marxist debates and teaching by the likes of Ellen Meiksins Wood, Leo Panitch, George Comninel, David McNally, Greg Albo and Robert Albritton. Exposure to Marxist theory and historical materialist method allowed me to overcome the disciplinary boundedness of North American political. All along, however, I was consumed by a curiosity about the capitalist transformation across Eastern Europe. Having emigrated to Canada from Ukraine in the 1980s, I observed from a distance Perestroika and Solidarność, the collapse of state socialist regimes and wars across the post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav space. I took every possible undergraduate elective in arts and humanities on the region to understand the social and cultural aspects of its people, their lived experiences, and their desire for freedom and self-determination. As a budding student of Marx, I became ever more interested in how these social processes related to the Soviet-type system of production, slowly making an intellectual journey from social and political theory to the critique of political economy as a means to understand society.
It was while researching for an essay in the seminar in ‘Political Sociology and Political Economy in Comparative Perspective’ that I came across a Capital & Class article by Holloway and Picciotto (1977), followed by their volume introducing the German ‘derivation debate’ (Holloway & Picciotto 1978), which presented the state in terms of its legal, economic and social facets, deriving from the specific relationship between the economic and political categories structured by capitalist production. Though highly abstract and at times producing more questions than answers, the German Marxists challenged what seemed like a hegemonic Miliband–Poulantzas debate (Panitch 1999). However, it was the discovery of an article by another British Marxist, Simon Clarke (1977), which took both of these ‘debates’ to task while concretising the abstractions implied by the idea of the state’s derivation as a necessity of the capitalist mode of production that captured my imagination. Establishing the centrality of the social, without falling for the trappings of sociology, an article in a little-known San Francisco-based Marxist journal Kapitalistate (Clarke 1983) showed in great clarity how the social is underpinned by production relations and class struggle as the latter’s instrument. Previous discussions of capital and labour, political economy and political sociology, the state and class society all began for me to take a hue of Simon’s work, which with its straightforwardness and clarity was able to sort complex ideas and critique while maintaining the methodological tuning fork pitched to Marx’s method.
Keeping my eyes trained on post-socialist transformations, I started thinking about approaching them from the perspective of the social forces making the post-Soviet state. Alongside Simon’s chapters in The State Debate (Clarke, 1991b, 1991c) and his Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State (1988), I read Marx’s Theory of Crisis (1994) side-by-side with Hillel Ticktin’s Origins of the Crisis in the USSR (1992) (which influenced Simon’s analysis of the Soviet and post-Soviet systems) to discover a non-deterministic way of understanding the process by which politics and ideology were shaped by struggles over the social constitution of the economic forms, that is, by the reproduction of social relations proceeding through conflict over the social organisation of the labour process and surplus appropriation. Just as capital is a social relation between people appearing as a material relation between things whose outcome in alienated social forms is given historical shape by class conflict that betrays its temporariness (Clarke 1991a), so the social organisation of production of Soviet-type systems contained antagonisms that appeared in social forms which disguised their alienated character. But how was this antagonism sustained and who were its agents in the post-socialist era? To answer these questions, I searched for empirical studies of Soviet and post-Soviet labour, coming across historical accounts (Arnot 1988; Filtzer 1994) which led me, to my surprise, to Simon’s early work on post-socialist transformations (Clarke 1992; Clarke et al. 1993).
The large volume of work by Simon and his collaborators from the Institute of Comparative Labour Relations Research (ISITO) in Russia (Clarke 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c) persuaded me to pursue a PhD at Warwick under his supervision. One year in, after an arduous discussion with Simon trying to pin down empirically my theoretical concern to reveal the social forces in the making of the post-Soviet state, I remember being told: ‘then why don’t you study the workers in their workplaces, their social organisation and the conflicts over what they understood as autonomy, self-determination and social reproduction needs?’ For him, it seemed, the study of labour in Russia, (Ashwin and Clarke, 2002) and later in China and Vietnam, (Pringle & Clarke 2010) simply furnished a unique opportunity to capture the abstract problems he worked out in his earlier contributions while underscoring the uniqueness of capitalism as a world-historical formation and of Marx’s method as the key to its study. What had been unique and liberating in Simon’s non-dogmatic Marxism was that it shored up the power of critique as a dialectical method for turning studies of capital, labour and class from disembodied objects of isolated study into the studies of living relationships between people, underscoring capitalism’s alienated but, nonetheless, human social constitution. Simon’s ideas of the alienated reproduction of the social world as a world of things and the production of forms of thought that sustain these relations not only draw on Marx’s Grundrisse (1993) but, just as the latter does, establish the critique of political economy as a critical theory of society, an idea echoed in novel ways in Negri (1992) and more consistently in Bonefeld (2014). More importantly, by focusing on the social relations of production as constitutive of social forms (see Pascual and Ghiotto, in this Forum), positing class struggle as the root of social change, and capturing class as a lived process, Simon’s approach aligns with Marx’s epistemology, his unique dialectic and ethics, serving to establish the unity of purpose between his own ‘early’ and ‘later’ work (see Dinerstein, in this Forum).
Whether examining Marx’s critique in relation to classical political economy or modern sociology (Clarke 1991a) or studying the social organisation of labour during Russia’s integration into the world market (Clarke 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c), or analysing contemporary crises tendencies of global capital, labour relations and class struggles (Clarke, 2001, 2005, 2008), Simon’s work has pivoted to the contradictions in the social relations that give rise to class conflict. Social conflict, for its part, is not only central in defining politics but acts as a means for workers to become the protagonists of locally shaping a differentiated but combined global processes of accumulation that can, in turn, change the character of antagonisms, redefine social problems and reshape workers’ subjectivities. Simon leaves students of Marx, Marxism, labour and workers’ movements with a rich intellectual legacy, for which we are forever grateful.