From Capitalism and theory: Selected Writings of Michael Kidron, Haymarket: Chicago, IL, 2018.
Transcribed by Richard Kuper.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive
Mike Kidron ... was probably the most important Marxist economist of his generation ... No adequate analysis of world capitalism in the 21st century can succeed without building on [his contributions to Marxist theory].
– Chris Harman, Socialist Review, April 2003
[W]ithout theory no organisation can do more than ride the tides of working class consciousness, which might be exhilarating as sport but is irrelevant as revolutionary politics.
– Michael Kidron, 1977
Michael Kidron (20 September 1930–25 March 2003) was for many years a leading activist and theorist in the British International Socialism group. He contributed significantly to its development during the two decades in which it moved from being an isolated few dozen members on the fringes of the left, to becoming the largest revolutionary formation on the British left by the mid-1970s. A forceful, freethinking, and warm personality combined with acute economic and political insight to make Kidron one of the most important figures of his generation of socialist activists. In a world changed almost beyond recognition since he came to political awareness in the 1950s, his approach to political analysis and activity can still inform and inspire a rigorous but non-dogmatic, critical enquiry today.
Kidron was born in Cape Town into an ardently Zionist family. The youngest of seven children, he was an adored but sickly child, further weakened by rheumatic fever at the age of 13. He left South Africa just after the war to join his parents, who had already emigrated to Palestine. There he went to the Tichon Hadash progressive school in Tel Aviv – where he rejected Zionism almost immediately – and afterwards to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to study economics.
He clearly enjoyed the heady days of early 1950s Jerusalem immensely. But Israel was a backwater for anyone not tied in to the Zionist project. So, in 1953 Kidron came to England, going to Oxford as a postgraduate student in 1954. Knowing nothing of Oxford colleges, the story goes that he applied to the two colleges at the top of the alphabet and was accepted by Balliol.
In England, after a period of intense debate with his brother-in-law Ygael Gluckstein (who was married to Michael’s older sister Chanie Rosenberg), they developed a close working relationship. Gluckstein (universally known by the pseudonym Tony Cliff) was trying to chart an independent Marxist course to the left of the Communist Party and the Bevanites in the Labour Party with the tiny Socialist Review group. [1] Kidron combined work in this milieu with his studies at Oxford. He thrived in the political world there, carving out a role as oppositionist within the opposition, becoming a fiercely independent libertarian Marxist, clashing vigorously with Communist Party hard-liners, Raphael Samuel in particular (before the 1956 Hungarian revolt had shattered their certainties).
When Kidron arrived in Britain, postwar stultification and complacency were pervasive. Cold War lines dominated political debate, and the Communist Party was a dominant presence on the far left of British politics. A handful of Trotskyist dissidents, often at odds with each other as well as with the wider left, still defended the Soviet Union, seen as a ‘degenerated’ workers’ state, against western imperialism. It was here that the Socialist Review group stood out. This group was one of the fragments to emerge from the implosion of British Trotskyism in the late 1940s. [2] Avowedly Marxist but with a state capitalist analysis of the Soviet Union and a belief that a revolutionary approach should therefore be based on a “neither Washington nor Moscow” line, the Socialist Review group led a tenuous existence on the fringes of the left. It was this group that Kidron threw himself into, as agitator, organiser, writer, and sometime editor of its journal Socialist Review, which appeared on roughly a monthly basis.
In late February 1956 came the revelations contained in Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Its attack on Stalinism caused convulsions in the Communist Party of Great Britain [CPGB]. The already simmering discontent was expressed in E.P. Thompson and John Saville’s internal but unofficial journal The Reasoner, which they were instructed to cease publishing after two issues. It came to a head with the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the CPGB leadership’s refusal to condemn it, leading to the rapid exodus of around 7,000 party members (including many industrial workers and trade union officials). [3]
This upheaval on the left, and the emergence of what was called the New Left, was accompanied by the growth of a strong anti-war movement in the shape of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament [CND]. By the early 1960s, CND was mobilising marches of a hundred thousand and more. [4] A political world had opened up in which revolutionary socialists could hope their ideas would find resonance.
In these stirring times, Kidron became editor of the journal International Socialism [IS], on whose editorial board he remained until late 1968. Influenced in style by E.P. Thompson and John Saville’s New Reasoner (the open successor to The Reasoner), IS broke new ground. It tried under Kidron’s editorship to draw in writers and members of the editorial collective who were not necessarily members of the Socialist Review group. Kidron was always looking beyond, wanting any organisation he was part of to be bigger, better, more influential while remaining at once committed, rigorous, and open-minded. IS was also imaginative in its appearance: Kidron drew in his close friend and eccentrically innovative designer, Robin Fior, as art editor and gave him a free hand. [5]
What characterised Socialist Review and then the International Socialism group was a series of interlinked analyses and propositions. These concerned the nature of the Soviet Union and the states of Eastern Europe as well as China and North Korea; an explanation of capitalist stability in the post-war period (in contrast to orthodox Trotskyism, which took Trotsky’s pre-war prognostications very seriously and was waiting, impatiently, for capitalism’s final crisis); and an account of the vibrancy of reformism within the working-class movement. I will return to these below.
Alongside these major themes, topics explored by Kidron ranged widely and commendably. In 1954 he wrote 15 short articles for Socialist Review, 10 of which were contributions spelling out the significance of the demands in the Socialist Review programme. [6] Articles were published under his own name but also appeared from K. Michael and David Breen, no doubt in order to suggest a broader contributors’ base than reality could provide. Further contributions showed the breadth of his critiques, from the previous Labour government’s record to Kenya, from Egypt to China, from Jamaicans in Britain (and racist responses in the labour movement) to labour unrest in the docks and on the railways, from Rhodesia to the Gold Coast, from Cyprus to automation and redundancy, from the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Tories, from shop-floor action to the decline of British capitalism.
Some aspects of these short contributions are bound to be dated (who knows today if £200 million of British capital invested in Egypt is an astronomically large sum or not?) or cause the occasional blush (“the worker and his wife”). But they still bear rereading both because of Kidron’s ability to pass a swift and effective judgement and his consistent effort to situate the detail of any topic in some wider, more significant conceptual framework.
A long discussion of the mixed economy, full of empirical detail, concludes simply:
As used today, the slogan of a mixed economy is nothing other than a rehash of the old system, private capitalism aided by nationalized industries that are run by a capitalist state on capitalist lines in the interests of capitalism – very much the mixture as before. [7]
Or a look at Khrushchev takes a sharp swipe at the local Communist Party leader:
Harry Pollitt speaking at a Moscow rubber plant in February said that he had been to Moscow fifty times since 1921 (Daily Worker, February 27, 1956). This Harry Pollitt saw no sign of the “cult of the individual” for forty-nine of these fifty times and on his fiftieth visit, after the leader had been dead three years, saw what he had missed all the time only after Khrushchev had told him to look. And yet this Harry Pollitt and the rest of the leadership of the British C.P. have gone through their own “Congress” and emerged unscathed. [8]
Or on the conflict in Cyprus:
The Cypriot people can attain real independence only if they find an ally in their struggle against British Imperialism. An ally without ulterior motive. That ally should be the British working class. By weakening Capitalism at home we weaken Imperialism abroad. [9]
Underpinning Kidron’s – and Socialist Review’s – political beliefs was a firm insistence that ordinary people could run their own lives, that workers were the exploited and effectively disenfranchised vast majority of society, and that an alternative to capitalism was possible via workers’ self-organisation and self-liberation.
A lot of time and energy was spent talking to anyone who would listen and the potential audience, especially of young people, expanded after the Suez invasion of 1956, with the emergence of the New Left, and the growth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in particular. East End youngster Roger Cox, subsequently for many years a shop steward in the engineering industry in London, was attracted by Kidron’s humour, warmth, sincerity:
Then arrived on the scene two contrasting characters and the impact they had was quite unimaginable really. One was Robin Fiore [actually Fior] and the other was Mike Kidron. These two toffs, gents, spoke very posh. They came and had these arguments with us, do you know this, and they were incredibly unpatronising and quite funny, and again they were from this different world, a world which was more sophisticated, and again there was this opportunity to actually have a better understanding of the world, and they used to go round various groups of youngsters talking to them to lure them into Tony Cliff’s front room where he gave these lectures on Marxism. [10]
David Widgery writes:
Kidron was also one of the organisation’s main orators, traipsing round pub meetings in Scotland and the North. I asked Jim Nichol ... [at the time] a young Geordie bus conductor [and National Secretary of the Socialist Workers’ Party in the late 1970s], if he was good: “He was marvellous. I hitched from Newcastle to York just to hear him talk. He was bloody irresistible.” [11]
All the while, too, Kidron and Cliff were a compelling partnership. Cliff, the more narrowly focused, single-minded, compulsive enticer of possible recruits, and Kidron, the more expansive, open, and wide-ranging in his interests. They would spend hours on the phone to each other every day in conversations which were conducted in Hebrew! It must have caused consternation to the security forces at Special Branch, but the reason for it was simply that Cliff’s spoken English was nowhere near as good as Kidron’s fluent Hebrew. [12]
Kidron – and the Socialist Review group – were not blind to reality. They knew that social democracy had very largely made its peace with capitalism, and reformism looked like a viable option for improving working lives. Keynesian planning seemed to have smoothed out the workings of the capitalist system, and many were arguing that all socialists could – or should – aspire to was running the system better, more fairly, and in an egalitarian fashion, in the interests of working people. [xiii13]
Socialist Review was having none of this. Capitalist growth and stability was a fact, but it needed to be explained, not taken for granted, and the social democratic explanation would not wash. Capitalism was characterised by the need to accumulate and thus by compulsive competition. In the past the private ownership of the means of production had led this accumulation process into unplanned overinvestment and periodic crises of overproduction. Somehow these had been avoided in the post-war period, and Kidron set out to develop an explanation for this over the next decade and a half, via the theory of the permanent arms economy. This, Kidron argued, provided a mechanism for preventing overproduction by the production of waste goods in the arms industry, which leached value out of the system, value that would otherwise have had to be invested productively. [14]
The compulsive nature of capital accumulation was combined in this theory with another aspect of Socialist Review politics: its critique of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as state capitalist. This was the theory that Tony Cliff had first formulated and published as an internal bulletin in the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1948 as The Nature of Stalinist Russia. This was reworked for publication for a somewhat wider audience in Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis (1955). It was elaborated and complemented by On the Class Nature of the “People’s Democracies” (1950) and by Stalin’s Satellites in Europe (1952), extending the analysis to the so-called People’s Democracies, and further in Mao’s China: Economic and Political Survey (1957). It argued, essentially, that a wonderful but thwarted revolution in Russia had, by 1929, suffered a counter-revolution under Stalin. The result in Russia, and by extension in those countries in Eastern Europe as well as China (none of which had had working-class revolutions, unlike Russia), needed to be understood as a variant form of capitalism (“state capitalism”) without liberatory potential. It was this analysis that came to define the Socialist Review group as “state caps.”
It was enormously liberating to be able to hold a revolutionary Marxist position that didn’t require any apologetics for the twists and turns of Soviet policy or any need to deny the existence of or justify by turn the forced labour camps in the USSR. Central to the state capitalist analysis was the emphasis it placed not on the formal or putative power of workers in the so-called workers’ states, but rather on their effective lack of power, deprived as they were of any effective control over planning and the means of production. Workers’ uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1967–68 were seen as the effective vindication of the theory.
So succour could not be found in the Second World (the world of the Communist countries), and socialism was not to be brought about by an expansion of the Soviet system. Nor, argued Socialist Review, was it to be found in Third World [15] revolutions to which so many of the left turned in hope in this period. Enthusiasm about colonial revolution – “national liberation” – dominated the left for some 30 years after India and Pakistan’s independence in 1947. In particular, Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) fuelled a powerful current of “third worldism.” Outrage at colonial atrocities and sympathy for the poverty-stricken colonised or ex-colonised were for many transmuted into an identification with the immense array of continuing armed national liberation struggles (especially in the 1960s in Asia and Latin America). Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution was particularly seductive, as was Che Guevara’s subsequent mission to spread the success story. For many, Third World revolution became the means to overthrow world capitalism and complete the task that the working classes of Europe and North America had failed to accomplish.
Socialist Review and the International Socialists (as the International Socialism group was increasingly referred to from the late sixties onwards) stood out strongly against this current. Kidron himself was deeply involved in the analysis of so-called developing countries. His initial research at Oxford had been on the creation of Indonesia out of the former Netherlands East Indies. Later he published Foreign Investment in India (1965) and, in 1972, a work on the foreign trade of Pakistan. [16] The edited papers of a conference on economic development in South Asia [17] made Kidron a leading specialist in the field.
This manifested itself in the politics of Socialist Review/International Socialism in a total absence of any illusion about the socialist nature of the emerging regimes. Anti-colonial struggles were supported against imperialism, but with no illusions that they were also steps on the road to socialism. Instead, the emphasis was cast back to the role of the working class in the advanced capitalist economies.
Here, the permanent arms economy helped make sense of the reality of an industrial working class that was increasingly combative but non-revolutionary in aspiration. An expanding capitalism was able to deliver reforms, and workers’ living standards were generally improving in the 1950s and 1960s. But the relief from economic boom and bust and from the real crisis and contradiction that capitalism was prone to could not be staved off forever by arms spending. Shop-floor workers were acquiring power and self-confidence, and this would stand them in good stead in the rocky days ahead. [18]
This emphasis on workers’ self-activity had always been at the heart of Kidron’s own thinking. He wrote a scathing critique of Ken Alexander’s 1959 proposal for a socialist wages plan that envisaged a (Labour) government–trade union alliance working loosely with the employers to provide stable prices, income redistribution via taxation, and more. [19] Of course reforms were possible, affirmed Kidron: “But they do not derive from abstract planning of alliances between Party and Union machines, nor from slick attempts to inveigle an enemy state into part-expropriating its rulers. The matrix of reform is workers’ strength in pursuing the class struggle.” [20] And Kidron displayed a lively feel both for the nitty-gritty of the daily life circumstances that threw workers into conflict and for the role of socialists in it:
Working-class consciousness, working-class action is the philosophers’ stone that transmutes favourable circumstances into better conditions; it is, equally, the sole agent in seizing power to change society, in building a workers’ state to smash the capitalist one.
The socialist’s job is to work with and on this consciousness, to deepen it, make it more inclusive; to make, in other words, working-class action contradict the system more directly and unambiguously. [21]
Or, as John Palmer recalls Kidron saying: “The revolutionary is a reformer – but one who means it!” [22]
This approach to shop-floor conflict complemented perfectly the insights of the theory of the permanent arms economy. A prelude to this theory is provided in Kidron’s Rejoinder to Left Reformism, where he argued against Henry Collins, a staff tutor with the University of Oxford extramural department whose Left Reformism Restated was published in International Socialism in 1962, that “the problem presented by the absence of major slumps these last twenty years boils down to an enquiry into the factors that have fractured the compulsive accumulation-overproduction sequence. Is it planning, as Collins would have it, or something else?” And he answered his own question with a discourse on the importance of the issue of military spending and investment. [23]
This was now spelled out in a series of essays by Kidron, the most significant of which was an important ground-clearing piece of work: Kidron’s critique of Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Imperialism: Highest Stage but One [24] was a bold and iconoclastic intervention, taking one of the sacred cows of Marxist theory, widely and reverentially read particularly by members of the Third World intelligentsia [25], and saying it was no longer up to the job. The permanent arms economy rather than imperialism was argued to be the “highest stage.”
The theory was further refined in two essays, International Capitalism and A Permanent Arms Economy, and in his book Western Capitalism since the War (1968). Slightly reworked it reached its most developed exposition in Capitalism – The Latest Stage, as part of a collection of International Socialism essays published by a mainstream publisher Hutchinson in 1971. [26]
The theory was much debated in a series of contestations, which Kidron himself later described in characteristically wry fashion: “There was a confused debate in the IS Bulletin in the Spring and Summer of 1972, a series of intemperate attacks by some of the principals in that debate once they had constituted an independent political grouping and some censorious chalking of blackboards from new entrants into academe via the Communist Party.” [27]
Around the same period Kidron produced other essays, all of which contain interesting and provocative ideas about how capitalism was developing. An extended review of Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory shows Kidron at both his analytical and blisteringly polemical best:
Mandel’s Economics is a Marxist failure. It is unsure of the central capitalist dynamic. It evades the essentials of the system as it operates today. It is more concerned with defending Marx’s categories of analysis than with applying them. In consequence, it does little damage to the system intellectually or, by derivation, in practice.
His short essay Memories of Development painted a profoundly pessimistic [and spectacularly inaccurate!] view of the possibility of underdeveloped countries developing without revolution in the heartlands. [28] Another, entitled Black Reformism, was an analysis and critique of theories of unequal exchange (popularised notably by Arghiri Emmanuel in his book on the topic) and was similarly pessimistic. [29] The immense capitals accumulated in the North were such that no country in the South could hope to attain them on their own, Kidron argued. The key to development lay not in a fairer deal for the Third World, but once again in revolution at the centre. Finally, Kidron produced a contribution to the debate about productive and unproductive labour under capitalism, involving an original empirical analysis of waste in the US economy in 1970. [30]
But over this period Kidron’s dissatisfaction was growing, both with the direction that International Socialism was taking as an organisation, and also with the state of its theory. Interim conclusions were finally expressed in 1977 in a self-critique, Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory, which he was asked to write to coincide with the 100th edition of International Socialism. Here he started by arguing that while he – and the International Socialists – had been right about the general thrust of Marx’s argument, he now believed that “the model of capitalism we were using was the wrong one – we were working with a model of private capitalism in a period of consolidating state capitalism.” Among the conclusions he drew from this was that “it was despite the arms economy, not because of it” that we had seen “an unprecedented expansion of capital.” He tentatively suggested other changes “that attended the consolidation of the state capitalist system” to explain the expansion that had taken place. And he ended this partial self-critique by clawing back somewhat, affirming that, while there were “a disturbing number of loose ends left by IS’s originally illuminating but unconnected insights into contemporary capitalism ... [t]hey need not remain loose ends. They can be woven into a general theory; and they need to be.” [31]
The intellectual disagreement with the International Socialists, and indeed with his own contribution, was in reality the culmination of an almost decade-long process of disenchantment. In 1968, responding particularly to growing challenges to the system expressed in the burgeoning student movement, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the mass strike in France in May 1968, the charismatic leader of the International Socialism group, Tony Cliff, launched a debate on the need for the group to transform itself organisationally, arguing that in the new context we faced, the need for a revolutionary party was firmly on the agenda. Kidron made a number of contributions to the debate in 1968 [32] ]about what he termed “the transition from a propaganda-and-protest organisation to a political one,” a change which he certainly endorsed in principle. [33] But he was uneasy about the arguments used, spoke against the changes at the two International Socialism conferences held in 1968 on this question, and feared that the organisational proposals adopted (and justified as the adoption of “democratic centralism”) were ill-judged and ill-justified. [34]
By the time of Kidron’s Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory, the International Socialism group had transformed itself into the Socialist Workers’ Party and was not happy to have its fundamental tenets challenged. A spirited defence of the theory of the permanent arms economy and an attack on the abstractness of Kidron’s model of state capitalism was mounted by its leading theorist, Chris Harman. [35] ]Kidron did not respond and the debate was not continued. With hindsight we can see that everyone’s analyses were in trouble: Keynesian social democracy was entering a deep crisis, with neoliberal alternatives making a tentative appearance on the horizon as global capital began yet another enormous leap forward beyond the confines of the national state. And un(der)developed countries like China, India, South Korea, and Brazil were indeed able to emerge as economic giants in the 1980s and continue to be so.
While working in Hull, Kidron had remained a member of the International Socialists’ National Committee for some years. But from 1972, when he moved back to London, he became less involved in branch work or day-to-day engagement with the organisation, though he continued to be invited to give talks until the mid-1970s. But he found himself watching the organisation he had contributed so much to building in its earlier years becoming less tolerant in style, more and more focused on recruiting, on loyalty and “the line,” and obsessively concerned with “building the party.”
He decided to leave sometime in the mid-1970s. It was a painful decision and he agonised over it, feeling bereft without it. He had been associated with and indeed a key part of Socialist Review/International Socialism almost his entire adult life. David Widgery, a great admirer of Kidron, said he shared Kidron’s criticisms (and admired Mike’s strength in leaving), but that he (David) couldn’t make the break, because the organization was his home and family and he couldn’t conceive of turning his back on it or living without it. [36]
In 1972 Kidron and his wife Nina joined Pluto Press, which had been founded at the end of 1969 by Richard Kuper as a semi-autonomous publishing house for the International Socialism group. With their arrival, the ambition of Pluto was transformed and its relationship with the organisation, never easy, was to become increasingly tense. Pluto Press and socialist publishing was to be Kidron’s main arena of political engagement for the next decade and more, as editor and then in the 1980s as author once again.
It was this period that saw Pluto Press flourish as an engaged publisher, indeed the most engaged and politically successful of the United Kingdom’s left publishing houses in this period. In 1973 the first Big Red Diary, inspired by Kidron, was published. Small in size (A6 – 5.8 x 4.1 ins) to belie its name, graphically innovative, crammed with information about British and world capitalism and tips on how to organise and how to find out what revolutionaries needed to know, it proved a great success. It was liberally illustrated with images across the diary pages, and virtually every day had some bit of information from movement history:
Feb: Sa 23: 1917 St Petersburg. Ignoring the Bolsheviks, women textile workers come out on strike. The Bolshevik revolution begins.
Mar: Tu 12: 1955 New York. “Bird Flown”: Charlie Parker, Be-Bop revolutionary, dies at 35.
Nov: We 20: 1970 London. 5 members of women’s liberation arrested for throwing smoke bombs and shaking rattles during “Miss World” contest. “The competition will soon be over. We’re not beautiful. We’re not ugly. We’re angry.”
A Workers’ Handbook series was launched in 1974 with a very successful volume by Patrick Kinnersly, The Hazards of Work: How to Fight Them, which Kidron edited. Many books followed, ranging widely over issues such as Marxist theory, socialist feminism, the politics of race and immigration, industrial relations and class struggle, and movement history. A Pluto Plays series was launched, initiating the idea of having playscripts on sale on the opening night of new performances; and in the 1980s a Pluto crime series was introduced. Pluto Press went from strength to strength over this period, though its economic viability was always a little close to the edge, as its Ten Years in the Red celebration (actually held in 1982) attested. As independent left commentator Paul Anderson testified: “In the 1970s and 1980s, Kidron played a key role in Pluto Press, the radical publisher that was for a dozen or more years the jewel in the British intellectual left's crown.” [37]
Pluto continued to publish a number of key texts by Tony Cliff, from his The Crisis: Social Contract or Socialism (a wild misreading of the situation in 1976), to the four volumes of his political biography of Lenin (1975–79). But many of its publications were, from an International Socialism/Socialist Workers Party point of view, far too eclectic, not at all concerned to follow any “line.” The tension was finally resolved when the party set up its own publishing house, Bookmarks, which became the natural home for its political output.
Kidron’s fascination with capitalism and its workings remained undimmed. What it could accomplish never ceased to amaze him, as it had Marx in the Communist Manifesto. He became an author again, chronicling changes in the world system graphically in the highly innovative The State of the World Atlas, co-authored with Ronald Segal (1981) and in The War Atlas, co-authored with Dan Smith (1983). [38] ]The two continued their collaboration with The Book of Business, Money, Power, in which rich graphic forms of presentation, innovative in their day, were used to illustrate the nature of capitalism, together with a series of playable games, of which they said in the Preface:
[W]e believe that the technique itself says something about the essential nature of the business system. For much of business is conducted as a game with rules – if only there to be broken – and where winning is all that matters. That the counters may well be people is of little consequence. Cruelty is as irrelevant as compassion. The game is its own morality. [39]
It was a book that earned an accolade from world-renowned historian of economic thought, Robert Heilbroner: “This will teach you more about the modern day capitalism than you would learn by reading all the books of its Nobel Prizewinners.”
And all the while, through years of personal upheaval and illness, Kidron laboured away at a more theoretical understanding of the system as a whole. With an ambition reminiscent of Marx in his early manuscripts, Kidron now tried to link the economic underpinnings of the system to its disastrous environmental impacts on the one hand, and its effects on the individual psyche on the other. Vast accumulations of data, and enormously wide-ranging reading on history, psychology, war, and personal life, fed into the outline of a new synthesis and major work entitled provisionally Presence of the Future: The Costs of Capitalism and the Transition to Ecological Society.
The book was to remain unfinished – radically unfinished in many ways – though two small sections were carved out for publication. The Injured Self (2001), which dealt with the harm done to humans under modern capitalism, and Failing Growth and Rampant Costs: Two Ghosts in the Machine of Modern Capitalism (2002), made their way into print in 2001 and 2002, shortly before Kidron died. These essays, included in this collection, show that Kidron had lost nothing of his razor-sharp insight, humour, and drive to grasp the essence of the topic in hand.
Kidron’s legacy is important today. His essays and agitational writings bear re-reading, time and again. You can almost see Kidron at work, attempting to distil the essence of a situation into clear, accessible propositions that can be weighed and assessed and that can give direction to political action. Kidron gave people insight, he gave them hope, he gave them energy and enthusiasm. Above all, he sought clarity. And where this clarity was inadequate, he was eager to rethink and try again. For Kidron, Marxism was an orientation, a method, an analytical framework – not a set of holy texts, dogmas, and associated rituals. To change the world in a self-consciously socialist direction, it needed first to be understood. And if the insights and provisional understandings did not stand the test of time, it was time to think again. To repeat Kidron’s words in his 1977 (self-)critique: “[W]ithout theory no organisation can do more than ride the tides of working class consciousness, which might be exhilarating as sport but is irrelevant as revolutionary politics.” [40] What gave his contributions their value was, for him, their potential contribution to the only cause that mattered – that of human liberation.
15 December 2017
1. Ian Birchall’s biography of Tony Cliff (Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time) is invaluable for understanding the development of the Socialist Review group in the context of the wider politics of the left in the period. His obituary of Michael Kidron [Michael Kidron (1930–2003)] is also very helpful.
2. Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist for his Time, 128ff.; see also Higgins, Ten Years for the Locust.
3. Saville, Edward Thompson, the Communist Party and 1956.
4. Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, The History of CND.
5 The covers and contents of the early issues are available online at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/. The contents unfortunately are reformatted, so the sometimes quirky layout of the journal is lost, but thumbnail images of the covers, in all their glory, are there to view. There is a warm obituary of Fior by his long-time associate and friend Richard Hollis (Robin Fior Obituary, published in 2011).
6. As John Rudge has pointed out to me, Kidron produced 65 signed articles between 1954 and 1962 plus any number of unsigned editorials. Personal communication.
7. Kidron, Capitalism, Socialism and the ‘Mixed Economy’, 3–4.
8. Breen, Have K and B Really Been Slain? 5–6.
9. Kidron, The Choice before the People of Cyprus: Colony, Enosis or Independence.
10. Hughes, Young Lives on the Left: Sixties Activism and the Liberation of the Self, 90.
11. Widgery, The Revolutionary (reproduced in Appendix C in this volume).
12. N. Kidron, Cliff and Mike Kidron.
13. This was the position of former Labour Party minister, Anthony Crosland, in what became the central revisionist text of its time; see his The Future of Socialism.
14. Kidron’s own view of how the theory developed acknowledges the role of insights elaborated by T.N. Vance in the US journal The New International in 1950–51 and brought first by Cliff to Socialist Review in 1957. See Kidron, Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory (see Chapter 11, this volume).
15. The popular description of the nonaligned countries that were neither developed capitalist ones, nor Communist ones – often used as a synonym for underdeveloped countries.
16. Kidron, Pakistan’s Trade with Eastern Bloc Countries.
17. Robinson and Kidron, Economic Development in South Asia.
18. See Cliff and Barker, Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards.
19. Kidron, The Limits of Reform: A Reply to Ken Alexander.
20. Kidron, Reform and Revolution: Rejoinder to Left Reformism II.
21. Ibid.
22. John Palmer, personal communication.
23. Kidron, Reform and Revolution: Rejoinder to Left Reformism II.
24. Kidron, Imperialism: Highest Stage but One.
25. Nigel Harris, personal communication.
26. Kidron, Capitalism – the Latest Stage.
27. Kidron, Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory.
28. Kidron, Memories of Development.
29. Arghiri, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade.
30. These essays (Black Reformism: The Theory of Unequal Exchange and [with Elana Gluckstein] Waste: US 1970) appeared in Kidron, Capitalism and Theory. Perhaps because they were not published in International Socialism, they evoked little debate.
31. Kidron, Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory.
32. These can be found in Appendix B in this volume.
33. Kidron, Where Are We Rushing to?
34. Kidron’s contribution to the organisational debate included an internal document We Are Not Peasants: A Note – and Proposals – on IS Organisation (October 1968), which is commented on very favourably by Jim Higgins in his gloriously jaundiced appraisal of the IS experience: “Paradoxically, and despite its opposition to the ‘Leninist’ forms, this was the most Leninist of the contributions to the debate, it started from an appreciation of the importance of looking outward, it assessed the forces available to us, their strengths and weaknesses, and then formulated a plan to get the best from everyone. It was serious politics and it was totally unsuccessful, because nobody was really paying attention.” Higgins, More Years for the Locust, Ch. 9.
35. Harman, Better a Valid Insight than a Wrong Theory.
36. Nina Kidron, personal communication. David Widgery wrote a warm, personal appreciation of Kidron in the weekly magazine Time Out (The Revolutionary). Thanks to Juliet Ash for permission to reproduce it in this volume as Appendix C.
37. Anderson, Michael Kidron 1931–2003.
38. The State of the World Atlas has remained in print since 1981, periodically revised and updated. It is now edited by Dan Smith, co-author of The War Atlas. A selection of maps from the original State of the World Atlas will be made available in the Marxist Internet Archive.
39. Kidron and Segal, The Book of Business, Money and Power, Preface. The Heilbroner quote in the next sentence is cited on the front cover.
40. Kidron, Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory.
Last updated on 10 May 2022