Introduction: Capital & Class at 100

Abstract

The publication of the hundredth edition of Capital & Class provides us with an opportunity to discuss and debate some of the key issues that have been central to the development of the journal since the first issue was published in 1977. Since then, the world has seen a transformation both in terms of production and political society. We have seen the demise of 'actually existing socialism' and the rise of a neoliberal culture that was initially synonymous with the Thatcher--Reagan years of the 1980s, and later with the subsequent rise of the 'globalization' discourse of the following decades. During this period, the relevance of Marx and Marxism has also fluctuated, with the 'legitimation crisis' of the 1970s providing Marxist analysis with a favourable setting in which to flourish, whilst the 'triumph of capitalism' that was proclaimed in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet system claimed to have sidelined Marxism as a theoretical project in all but in its most abstract form (Giddens, 1994). In recent years, the work of Marx (if not the influence of Marxism in practical political circles) has certainly made something of a comeback, with both the academic and the popular press attributing new importance to his forms of critique. Capital & Class has retained its status as a forum in which such developments have been documented and debated within and across a variety of academic disciplines. In adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, the journal has opened up and stimulated debate across a wide variety of subject areas. The purpose of this anniversary special issue is to open up some of the ongoing debates that have developed within the context of the journal. This is not to say that these were initiated solely by Capital & Class, but to note that the journal has facilitated such discussions at different points in its history. The first issue of Capital & Class included an article written by the Brighton Labour Process Group, one of the many focus groups that the CSE sponsored in its earlier years (the most notable here perhaps being the London CSE group and its work on the alternative economic strategy, which appeared in Issue 8 in an article entitled 'Crisis, labour movement and the alternative economic strategy'). The Brighton Labour Process Group article, 'The capitalist labour process', provided Capital & Class with its first piece geared towards developing labour process theory (LPT). In this hundredth issue, Paul Thompson provides us with a critical outline of the evolution of LPT and highlights not only its achievements, but also its shortcomings and in particular a lack of engagement with some of the innovations made in the field of political economy. Thompson's suggestion that LPT might have looked towards some of the regulationist schools arguments, of the sort espoused by Bob Jessop, is interesting in a number of ways and also leads us into the next section, 'The State and the Global Economy'. Regulation theory itself provided a Marxist conception of post-Fordism--the condition of which LPT was conceived to contest--that understood the transformation of production that emerged in the 1970s in terms of a change in the regime of accumulation. It was articles by prominent regulationist theorists such as Lipietz and particularly Jessop that led to another significant set of discussions that focused on the nature of the state. The second issue of Capital & Class saw the publication of two articles published that would each invite debates from those rooted in regulationist or Gramscian-inspired theories, and also inspire a separate Marxist school of thought that would become loosely referred to as 'Open Marxism' (Clarke, 1977; Holloway & Picciotto, 1977). Moving beyond the Poulantzas/ Miliband debates that were prevalent in Marxist debate at the time, Clarke argued in 1977 that relations of production should always be the starting point for Marxist analysis (Clarke, 1977: 11), and subsequently called for a move away from 'structural-functional' accounts of the capitalist state and towards understanding the state through the sum of class struggle and the expression of its production. …