Ralph Miliband: a public intellectual - Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left - Book Review

Monthly Review, Jan, 2004 by Richard Kuper

One of Miliband's most important contributions, as Newman rightly points out, lay in his concentration on the political sphere. Marxists had so often regarded politics as epiphenomenal. For Miliband the relations of political power and social class were central, and not just for understanding the dynamics of capitalist society. As he put it in Marxism and Politics, failing to look at these questions led to "an extraordinarily complacent view of the ease with which political problems ... would be resolved in post-revolutionary societies" (p. 233). Miliband's emphasis on civic freedoms was his own corrective to this.

This clarity and strength, however, could sometimes hide weaknesses. This was nowhere more clear than in his commitment to a new socialist party. Who was it for? Who was it supposed to attract? And why? Newman comments on Miliband in the mid-seventies: "Because he had believed that all the existing parties of the Left were defective he had seen a new socialist party as necessary: and because he thought it necessary he believed that it could be brought into being. But there was a curious political naivete about all this" (p. 247). I wouldn't disagree. Fortunately for Miliband this "political naivete" neither disabled him, nor led him to dogmatism of any kind. And anyway, it was shared by many of those Ralph worked with and was rooted in the peculiar nature of the British political system. British socialists have long been faced with a labor movement and a Labour Party which put great store on "unity" (which generally meant stilling the expression of socialist ideas because otherwise the right might desert, and then "we" would never win "power"). This was reinforced by a first-past-the-post electoral system which well-nigh squeezed out the possibility of independent socialist representation. Because of this the question of how to orient to the Labour Party was posed and reposed. When Miliband effectively resolved the dilemma by concluding the Labour Party could never be the socialist party he believed was needed, what alternative was there but to strive for another? Other socialists were driven, time and again, to return to the Labour Party, invariably ending up feeling betrayed and disillusioned.

I think Miliband's particular problem lay elsewhere. He wanted a class party, but the nature of class was changing dramatically and its relevance contested. He approved wholeheartedly of many of the issues the new social movements--women's liberation, antiracism, environmentalism--were taking up. He even proposed the wonderful concept of "desubordination" (the rejection of being subordinated, at work, home, or elsewhere) to capture people's widespread, diffuse, grumbling rejection of the multiple forms of oppression found under capitalism. But he could not really conceive of this leading anywhere. In his theoretical analysis he could never get beyond an abstract Marxism, in which "point of production" exploitation was the only conceivable authentic source of anticapitalist rebellion, to integrate successfully the oppressions and nonclass cleavages which so fuelled the growth of new social movements.