Robin Murray (economist)

Robin Murray
Born	14 September 1940 (1940-09-14) Cumbria, England
Died	29 May 2017(2017-05-29) (aged 76) Hackney, London, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Economist

Robin Murray (14 September 1940 – 29 May 2017) was an industrial and environmental economist. As a social entrepreneur, he advocated and implemented new forms of production and organization, based on principles of ecological sustainability, social justice, and democracy. He developed his thought through practical projects and experiments. A common thread throughout his work was how collaboration, rather than competition, could be a driving force behind economic development and provide the foundation for non-exploitative and egalitarian societies.

Robin Murray influenced how people eat, shop, and work, how we create and handle waste. He was an influential member of the democratic-socialist movement in Britain, playing a role in setting up organizations such as Twin and Twin Trading (an alternative trading and development organization from which emerged farmer-owned Fairtrade companies Cafédirect, Divine Chocolate and Liberation Nuts), the London Food Commission and The London Climate Change Agency. He also played a role as a policymaker, first as Chief Economic Advisor to the Greater London Council in the early 1980s and later in the 1990s in shaping London's waste strategy. While working on these practical initiatives he taught at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, and later at the London School of Economics and Schumacher College. Over the years he published articles including those describing the concepts of post-Fordism, zero-waste and social innovation. He was awarded posthumously the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in October 2017, for "pioneering work in social innovation".

Early life and education

Both parents joined the Communist Party of Great Britain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, their reason being that the CPGB was the only political party that understood and was taking action against the rise of fascism in Europe. They both left the Party at the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. Thereafter they both became members of the Labour Party, Stephen particularly active in the League of Labour Lawyers and later the Haldane Society. In early 1939 he was sent to Lithuania to represent Jewish citizens subjected to Nazi oppression. Stephen was heavily involved in the events of 1948 leading to the split of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers from the Labour Party, over the question of communist membership.

The third of four sons, Robin's older brothers were Gilbert (1931-1963) a physicist and alpinist who died in a rockfall on Fox Glacier, New Zealand; and Alexander (1934-) who is a medieval historian. Hubert (1946-) is an architect living and working in Boston, Massachusetts.

The Murray family moved from Hampstead to Hallbankgate in Cumberland in 1951, Stephen Murray giving up his legal career to farm. Greenside Farm, Hallbankgate, a hill-farm in and around Coalfell, was in a mining area, and a family property of Lady Mary Murray (1865–1956), Stephen's mother and daughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle; she passed it on to Stephen and his sister Rosalind Toynbee, wife of Arnold J. Toynbee.

Career

1960s

On finishing his studies, Murray became a lecturer in economics at the London Business School between 1966 and 1970. He was part of the group that helped bring the May Day Manifesto into being, and then contributed with Michael Barrett Brown to the economics section of the 1968 Penguin edition which was edited by Raymond Williams. The original 1967 edition was edited by Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams. Thereafter he joined the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (IDS) as a Fellow in Economics where he stayed until 1993.

1970s

During the 1970s Murray played a critical role in the Brighton Labour Process Group which provided a series of papers for the inaugural Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) in the 1970s. He was also involved in the CSE's evolution, namely the Bulletin of the CSE and later the peer-reviewed academic journal Capital and Class in which he contributed two articles in its first two years, and several articles thereafter. The journal continues to be published. During this period, Murray was involved in setting up and leading the Marxist Capital Reading Group in Brighton and was active in the Brighton local community organization QueenSpark. For two decades at the IDS, Murray's academic work focused on industrial strategy, trade policy, Marxist theory, flexible specialization, and international corporate taxation. As a teacher, he was noted for his use of the Socratic method and metaphor.

2010s

After this, Murray undertook a strategic review of the future of co-operation in the UK for Co-operatives UK (2010-2011). He continued his work on the social economy as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance and then a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit at the LSE (2011-2017). He also taught at Schumacher College.

Interests

Murray's interests as economist included: Marxian theory; transfer pricing, globalisation and transnational corporations; industrial policy and cooperatives; fair trade, local economic development, international development, the environment, waste and recycling, social innovation and the social economy and the circular economy.

Marxism

In Internationalization of Capital and the Nation State (1971) Murray argued that the internationalization of capital weakened the political power of the nation state. His theses in this article were criticized at the time by Bill Warren, who found in particular Murray's discussion of "territorial non-coincidence" unconvincing. With Murray advocating the view that ultra-imperialism was displacing national capitalisms, and Warren instead claiming that imperialism was being replaced by those capitalisms, Robert Rowthorn took an intermediate view, predicting a future of nationalist rivalries.

In two papers from 1977 on Value and Theory of Rent, Murray worked with the assumption that Karl Marx's theory of differential and absolute ground rent applies generally to landed property, of whatever kind. His phrase "founder's rent" has been called "muddled".

Transfer pricing

In his editor's introduction to Multinationals Beyond the Market (1981), Murray wrote of the international trade theory of neoclassical economics as faced with challenges on two sides: from the theories around unequal exchange, and also, the focus of the book, from institutional critique. His paper in the volume stated that the arm's length principle for transfer pricing had become problematic for international trade, referring to customs literature for issues on how to carry out the accounting. He mentioned two other public policy approaches: anti-monopoly legislation, and bilateral bargaining to correct the asymmetry present in trading relationships, with state intervention. He had already argued in a 1970 conference paper for a descriptive framework of the bargaining process between international companies and nation states, given that these negotiations often were asymmetric. Murray's widely used teaching case study on bargaining over access to North Sea oil deposits showed how the choice of the discount rate affected the distribution of rents between the state and the private sector. Building on this case-study and drawing on the work of Constantine Vaitsos on the pharmaceutical industry, Murray convened an influential conference on transfer pricing at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex in 1975. This made an important contribution to foregrounding the control of transfer pricing in development policy, particularly in the operational work of the United National Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Fair trade

Co-founder in 1985 with Michael Barratt Brown of Twin Trading, a fair trade company, Murray played a part in the creation of the brands Cafédirect and Divine Chocolate. Barratt Brown, a personal friend, had retired from Northern College for Residential and Community Adult Education in 1983 and come to work with Murray at the GLC. There he contributed to the London Industrial Strategy. The British government Department for International Development commissioned a report Understanding and Expanding Fair Trade from Barratt Brown, Murray and Pauline Tiffen.

Twin Trading moved after the International Coffee Agreement broke down in 1989, to market a popular coffee. To that end it went into partnership with Equal Exchange, Oxfam and Traidcraft to set up the Cafédirect brand.

Fordism and Post-Fordism

Murray has been credited with the introduction to British debate of ‘Post-Fordism’ – and in particular its application to building a progressive, socially democratic state. Although the genesis of the concept is credited to the regulation school of French economists, Murray primarily drew upon the ideas of the American economists Michael J. Piore and Charles Sabel, who saw a ‘Second Industrial Divide as flexible specialization began to replace mass production, as well as upon the work of Michael Best on Japan and the industrial districts in Northern Italy. Writing on the subject in the 1980s, at a time when Keynesian macro-economic policies appeared to have run their course, Murray viewed both the Thatcherite imposition of rational choice models onto the British public sector and the Soviet system as outdated expressions of Fordism – characterised by centralised but fragmented organisation, standardised processes, hierarchical management, deskilled labour and passive end users. Furthermore, building upon his practical experience at the Greater London council (GLC), he observed that dynamic and innovative businesses had moved on: car factories in Japan, industrial districts of Italy and the new high tech enterprises of Silicon Valley were all adopting more nimble and flexible strategies, focusing on skills, innovation and participation.  

This analysis informed Murray’s work as a hands-on policy consultant, in the UK, in Canada and also in developing economies. For example, he led a multi-year programme of support for industrial policy in Cyprus in the late 1980s, promoting the development of clusters of small and medium-sized firms serving niche markets. He viewed both his own team-leadership and the role of government as being akin to conducting an orchestra, helping the ‘players’ to perform effectively and in harmony. However, it is his theoretical work on the development of a post-Fordist state for the information age that now seems most prescient, echoed in current political debates for a Green New Deal. Murray viewed those innovative industries abandoning classical Fordism as harbingers of future competitiveness in a post-Fordist economy and as potential carriers of new progressive social relations. He wrote of the need to restructure both industry and the state ‘from the bottom up’ and to direct new technologies in the service of social and environmental needs rather than only the pursuit of private profit. He saw the potential of information technology as a tool for the coordinated differentiation and devolution of public services, applying the ‘just-in-time’ data flows, production and distribution of clothing giants such as Benetton. ‘Front-line operative autonomy’ could be restored to the public sector, building an ‘integrative culture’ that included the replacement of utilitarian economics ‘with a concerned sociology’ in university education for public service. Essentially, the state was to move from regulator to coordinator, strategist, and supporter of initiatives, with the deep involvement of the end user.

The Social Economy

The Social Economy

The incorporation of a strong civil society with public and private initiatives was key to Murray's vision of an environmentally and socially-sustainable world derived from post-Fordist principles. The term that he preferred was the social economy; not a separate ‘third sector’, but a shared space existing at the intersection of state, household, market and ‘the grant economy’, whose defining feature is the provision of services driven by the imperative of social values rather than financial accumulation. Murray's social economy was populated not by passive consumers but active users, or ‘prosumers’. He developed this vision through existing case studies, drawing on his work with cooperatives and environmental advocacy groups, healthcare coalitions and social entrepreneurs. Equipped with the coordination capabilities offered by ICT, communities, municipalities and nation states could thus build links, reign in global corporate power and design a flexible polity rooted in what Murray profoundly believed to be the creative power of all human beings.

External links

• The Robin Murray Living Library
• Robin Murray: Selected Writings. Edited by Michael Rustin
• https://www.francesmurray.co.uk/