‘If “Marxists” would only read Marx’: The significance of Simon Clarke’s Marxism

Abstract

Simon Clarke was an original and consistent Marxist thinker. From an early stage in his career, he independently developed a cogent, non-dogmatic reading of Marx’s work that ran against the grain of the dominant variants of Marx of his day. In this piece, we delineate the main features of Clarke’s Marxism through a reading of an early essay, first drafted in 1970. We highlight his critique of ideology, his focus on the forms through which the social relations of production appear and his insistence on the unity of theory and history – the conviction that the class struggle is expressed in the concrete movement of history. These features would form the bedrock of his truly significant contribution over five decades.