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Ideology, political economy and the crisis of the capitalist state

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Ideology, political 1­–6

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DOI: 10.1177/03098168231171789
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Peter Burnham
University of Birmingham, UK

Werner Bonefeld
University of York, UK

Peter Fairbrother
University of Tasmania, Australia

Abstract
Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State is perhaps Simon’s greatest
intellectual and political contribution. This article sets the book in the context of
his teaching at Warwick and the development of his thought through Marx,
Marginalism and Modern Sociology to the publication of Keynesianism. Building
on his analysis of the ideological dimensions of classical political economy,
Simon set himself the ambitious task of grasping the coherence and complexity
of the relationship between economics, politics and ideology in the crisis-ridden
development of capitalism. In so doing, he developed a work of immense
significance fusing conceptual and empirical analysis to produce a devastating
critique of social democracy, neoliberalism and reformism. Although read widely
within Conference of Socialist Economists circles, Keynesianism has not achieved
the recognition it clearly deserves. Post-Keynesianism, Simon extended his analysis
to worker organisation in Russia and beyond. His theoretical and empirical work
on capitalism in all its forms offers a unique and enduring contribution to everyone
interested in socialism and the limits of reform.

Corresponding author:
Peter Burnham, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Birmingham,
Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
Email:[email protected]
2 Capital & Class 00(0)

Keywords
capital, class struggle, money, state

Introduction
Simon Clarke made a unique and enduring contribution to the academic world and the
international socialist movement. A man of genuine charisma, committed to the highest
standards of intellectual enquiry, Simon embodied a lifelong commitment to socialism
in both theory and practice. His approach to understanding capitalism, in all its contem-
porary manifestations, could be summed up in one clear, simple and powerful injunc-
tion: read Marx. Not the Marx of sociology textbooks or even that of other Marxists, but
Marx in the original form tracing the development of his thought through classical
political economy to the ultimate critique of that tradition in Capital.
For decades at Warwick, Simon’s foundational 2-hour seminar, Marx’s Social Theory,
provided a unique opportunity for a sophisticated guided reading of Capital, chapter by
chapter over 25 weeks. It was an intellectually transformative process revealing not only
the immense significance of Marx but also the superficiality of most critics of Marx.
Simon, of course, was past master at dismissing such critics secure in the knowledge that
very few had read Marx in the original and even fewer had understood the unity of
Marx’s early and later work. The problem, Simon would carefully explain, with socio-
logical and other so-called post-Marxist critiques is that they see the ‘economy’/‘production
relations’ and ‘civil society’ at the same level of abstraction. However, the point of Marx’s
analysis is that it is an abstract analysis of the ‘anatomy of civil society’. The relations of
production are not an autonomous ‘sphere’, but the skeleton of civil society (i.e. the most
fundamental relations). However, they appear in diverse concrete forms such as civil
society and the state. The historically specific social relations on which capitalism is built
assume the form of ‘economic’ relations (the commodity form), ‘political’ relations (the
state form) and ‘ideological’ relations (the form of thought and culture). The ‘economy’
does not determine other ‘spheres’, rather social reproduction is inserted within, and
subordinate to, the reproduction of the social relations of production not as external
constraint but as internal necessity articulated concretely through particular social rela-
tions/social institutions and imposed through crisis (in the broadest sense). As Simon
would later detail in Marx’s Theory of Crisis (1994), the root of all capitalist crises remains
the fundamental contradiction on which capitalist social relations are based, that between
the production of things and the production of value and the subordination of the for-
mer to the latter. Simon’s careful, detailed and intellectually rigorous understanding of
Marx laid the basis for countless new empirical studies under his supervision demon-
strating the power of a conceptual framework that increased in relevance and significance
with each new crisis of capitalism.
Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (1982) was produced as an offshoot of
Simon’s course on Marx’s Social Theory, initially under the manuscript title, Marx’s
Critique of Political Economy. It is a devastating appraisal of the ideological foundations
of classical political economy and of the relationship between the marginalist revolution
and the development of modern sociology. In summary, Simon suggests that Weberian
Burnham et al. 3

social theory abstracts the individual from the social relations within which alone he or
she exists as a social individual and seeks to explain social relations as the product of the
subjective orientation of action. As such, it presupposes the very social relations which it
seeks to explain. By contrast, Marx’s critique of the naturalisation of capitalist social rela-
tions reveals how the production and reproduction of material things is subordinated to
the production and accumulation of surplus value and how the participation of the
individual in society is conditional on the individual’s insertion into the social relations
of production. In this way, Marx offers an alternative foundation on which to build a
theory of capitalist society rooted in the concepts of value, surplus value and class. Marx,
Marginalism and Modern Sociology is an intellectual tour de force. It is the only sustained
analysis which links the development of modern economics to the emergence of sociol-
ogy and Simon’s analysis of the ideological dimensions of political economy and modern
social science opens up invaluable space for an alternative understanding which tran-
scends the limitations of those disciplines.
Simon, of course, had many great strengths – one being the supreme confidence he
would bring to drawing on the widest possible field of knowledge unconstrained by the
compartmentalisation which characterises modern academic social science. This self-
confidence is illustrated perfectly in perhaps his greatest intellectual and political contri-
bution, Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State (1988). Keynesianism is
iconoclastic, intellectually challenging and full of Simon’s typical mix of irony and genu-
inely perceptive insight. Disregarding the pedantry of the formal academic review pro-
cess, Simon (Clarke 1988: 19) states early on that he has not ‘cluttered the book with
extensive bibliographical references to give the account a spurious scholarly authority
. . . those familiar with the literature will recognise the iconoclastic elements of my inter-
pretation’. This reveals much about how Simon viewed genuine scholarship – intellectu-
ally rigorous, brave, creative, collective, open and of course political. Keynesianism is
rooted squarely within the analysis of money and the state developed collectively through
the work of the Conference of Socialist Economists. Although it focuses in large part on
the historical development of the power of money and the state in Britain, it is also a
work of comparative significance embodying contemporary relevance and theoretical
originality.
Set in the context of the crisis of Keynesianism and the rise of monetarism, Simon
took on the ambitious task of grasping the coherence and complexity of the relationship
between economics, politics and ideology in the crisis-ridden development of capitalism.
His argument in brief is that Keynesianism and monetarism are not populist ideologies
as much as ideologies of the state, giving ideological coherence to the institutional frame-
work and policy decisions of the state. The collapse of Keynesianism did not express a
popular ideological conversion to monetarism but rather a crisis of the policies and insti-
tutions of the Keynesian state which in turn was the expression of a more fundamental
crisis in the accumulation of capital. One of the key contradictions inherent in the
Keynesian interventionist strategy was that it sought to restore the capitalist valorisation
of living labour, re-establishing the profitability of capital, by developing institutional
forms of regulation of the working class which at the same time strengthened and unified
the representatives of labour. The success of the strategy depended crucially on the ability
of capital and the state to accommodate rising wages and public expenditure by
4 Capital & Class 00(0)

transforming methods of production to meet the challenge of international competition.

This shift happened to a limited extent in post-war Austria, Sweden and Germany where
the working class exchanged the intensification of labour and structural changes in
employment for collaborative incomes policies and welfare benefits built on the relative
strength of national economies in relation to world market conditions. In Britain, how-
ever, the Keynesian class compromise increasingly appeared as a barrier to both capital
(institutionalising labour militancy and increasing pressure on profits) and the working
class whose aspirations were increasingly confined within the limits of capital. Thus, the
class struggle quickly moved from conflict within the Keynesian state to struggle over the
form of the state itself as the pressure of overaccumulation undermined the post-war set-
tlement. In short, the attempt to contain these conflicts within the Keynesian framework
led to the progressive disintegration of Keynesianism through the 1970s opening the
door to the rise of the New Right and the adoption by the state of the doctrine of mon-
etarism. The strength of monetarism was not intellectual or analytical but purely ideo-
logical inasmuch as it could articulate (in mystified form) growing popular opposition to
the bureaucratic and authoritarian forms of the capitalist state while reasserting naïve
classical faith in the efficiency of the market. Monetarism could not of course remove the
tendency to the overaccumulation of capital. On the contrary, it intensified the overac-
cumulation and uneven development of capital which by the 1980s was accommodated
by the expansion of domestic credit and international debt.
Within this powerful and persuasive theoretically informed empirical analysis, Simon
develops a distinctive conceptualisation of the state based on Marx’s early discussion of
the formal separation of the capitalist state from civil society. The historical process
through which the capitalist state emerged represented a change in the form of the state
underlying which was a change in the social relations of production. In Simon’s analysis,
the capitalist state is the political form of capitalist social relations. The state secures the
general interest of capital not by overriding the rule of the market, but by enforcing the
rule of money and the law, which are the alienated forms through which the rule of the
market is imposed not only on the working class but also on all particular capitals. This
however does not resolve the contradiction between the individual and social interests of
particular capitals, but gives rise to periodic crises which call for the intervention of the
state. The class character of the state does not therefore lie in it expressing the interests of
capitalists, but in its form as the concentrated power of capitalist society. In this reading,
the liberal form of the capitalist state is the most appropriate form to secure the political
power of the bourgeoisie as their social power is embodied in the abstract form of money.
However, as Simon perceptively clarifies, the substance of state power, as the power of a
particular class, contradicts its form, as expression of the general interest. It is this con-
tradiction at the heart of the liberal form that governments constantly seek to resolve
through universalistic claims to be the embodiment of the general interest, the neutral
arbiter of all particularistic interests. In the liberal form of the state, the working class is
the object of state power. The historical development of the capitalist state can thus be
analysed as a response to the development of the class struggle. The state attempts to
channel that struggle into arenas such as ‘industrial relations’, ‘electoral representation’,
‘social welfare’ and ‘economic policy’. However, this attempt to institutionalise class
Burnham et al. 5

struggle into alienated political forms requires constant surveillance and is always provi-
sional as the class struggle constantly tends to overflow these forms (Clarke 1991: 53).
The overall aim of Keynesianism is not simply to articulate a sophisticated theory of
the state – rather Simon’s aim is essentially political. By theorising the capitalist state
form and showing its historical development in terms of the British experience, he devel-
ops a thorough-going critique of social democracy, liberal market theory and all variants
of reformism. Social democracy fetishizes the democratic form of the state, and ignores
its class character, which leads it to confront the social struggles of the working class as a
barrier to socialism rather than its social foundation. Working class struggles within
Keynesian projects reproduce the contradictory form of the capitalist state inasmuch as
struggle is divided into trades unionism and electoral politics. Far from overcoming the
contradictory form of the capitalist state – which dictates that the class struggle is neces-
sarily a struggle ‘in and against the state’ – social democracy reproduces that contradic-
tion within its own ranks, dividing and fragmenting the social and political struggles of
the working class. The failure of the Left to confront this theoretical and practical issue
underlies the polarisation of social and political struggle, exacerbating divisions within
the working-class movement. In perhaps his greatest and most enduring contribution,
Simon’s insightful analysis reveals with perfect clarity both the limits of pursuing change
through the liberal form of the state and the necessity of socialism.
Simon did not of course restrict his focus to an analysis of the ‘liberal democratic’
state. Post-Keynesianism, he extended his critical insights to the emerging post-Soviet
state opening up questions relating to worker agency and mobilisation in Russia in the
1990s and early 2000s (Borisov et al. 1994; Clarke 2009). Reflecting his long-standing
commitment to collaborative research, he addressed transition topics as they unfolded in
many of the so-called former state socialist societies (Clarke & Pringle 2009; Clarke et al.
1993). Simon made an immense contribution not only to the academic world but also
to everyone interested in true progressive social change. His unique and sophisticated
fusion of conceptual and empirical analysis, above all, emphasised the limits of reform
within capitalism and clarified that

the task of socialism is not to mimic the alienated forms of capitalist power by imposing unity
on fragmented struggles from above, but to challenge the division between civil society and the
state by giving the emerging unity of working class struggles a political form which will express
not the illusory community of the liberal state but the real community of human social life.
(Clarke 1988: 365)

References
Borisov V, Fairbrother P and Clarke S (1994) Is there room for an independent trade union-
ism in Russia? Trade unionism in the Russian aviation industry. British Journal of Industrial
Relations 32: 359–378.
Clarke S (1982) Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Clarke S (1988) Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State. Aldershot: Edward Elgar
Publishing.
Clarke S (1991) The state debate. In: Clarke S (ed.) The State Debate. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 1–69.
6 Capital & Class 00(0)

Clarke S (1994) Marx’s Theory of Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Clarke S (2009) The Development of Capitalism in Russia. London: Routledge.
Clarke S and Pringle T (2009) Can party-led trade unions represent their members? Post-
Communist Economies 21: 185–101.
Clarke S, Fairbrother P, Burawoy M, et al. (1993) What about the Workers? Workers and the
Transition to Capitalism in Russia. London: Verso Books.

Author biographies
Peter Burnham is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Birmingham.
He completed a PhD under Simon Clarke’s supervision in the 1980s and has sought, through
teaching and research, to develop Simon’s distinctive approach to understanding capitalism.
Werner Bonefeld is a Professor of Politics at the University of York. His latest publication is
A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion.
Peter Fairbrother is a Professor, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, University of
Tasmania, and Affiliated Professor, HEC, Montréal. In the 1990s with Simon Clarke, he initiated
a long-term collaborative research initially focusing on the restructuring of industrial management
and industrial relations in the repositioned Russian state. They worked with 25 researchers,
enhanced research capacities and published widely. His long-standing research focus is on work
and employment, and collective forms of worker resistance.

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