Abstract
In the academic fashion parade that overlaps with, but more often masquerades as, cutting edge scholarship, Ralph Miliband has never been regarded as sufficiently worthy of inclusion. This was underlined by the popularity within academia of structuralist Marxism during the 1970s, and the related outcome of the famous debate between Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas, around which the consensus now is that it was indecisive and even pointless, but back then was that it was decisive enough to relegate consideration of Miliband’s work to other, supposedly less serious or “bourgeois,” scholars.
This volume of essays comes at a propitious time for a consideration of the themes that preoccupied Miliband: a global financial crisis founded upon an unsustainable accumulation of debt that must now be repaid, and the consequent struggle over who gets to pay for it. As Leo Panitch says in his rollicking preface, “After a quarter of a century of neoliberalism, the gloss is definitely off this reactionary capitalist project” (xiii). Naturally there are plenty more reactionary projects where these came from, including the financial sector’s fierce rearguard aimed at preserving precisely that institutional configuration that led to crisis (Plender 2009). But the moment is perhaps uniquely opportune for a reappraisal of Miliband’s work, given the bankruptcy of social democracy’s accommodation of neoliberalism. There is an added irony in that the current leadership of the British Labour Party was fought over by Miliband’s two sons, David and Ed, who in many ways have amply demonstrated the wisdom contained in their father’s Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (1961); namely, that in its commitment to parliamentarism, the British Labour Party could not be the vehicle for a genuine socialist transformation. Quite what that would be today, of course, remains an open question.
Interest in Poulantzas has certainly revived in recent years (highlighted by Jessop 2008: 139). This has stimulated extended reconsideration of the debate with Miliband (Aronowitz and Bratsis 2002). Of course, a significant part of Milband’s intellectual legacy is the annual publication of the Socialist Register, overseen since Miliband’s death in 1994 by Panitch and various collaborators including Colin Leys. But the chief value of this particular volume is its specific and comprehensive engagement with Miliband’s work, of which the debate with Poulantzas is of only minor and decreasing significance.
The editors open with a brief intellectual biography of Miliband before setting the scene with a summary of the chapters to follow. Thereafter Michael Newman, author of a separate monograph on Miliband’s relationship with the New Left (Newman 2002), analyzes Miliband’s semi-detachment from the main currents of the New Left: he was in it but not of it. Originally on the editorial board of the New Reasoner journal set up by E. P. Thompson and other former Communist Party members who had resigned in protest over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Miliband opposed its eventual merger into what became and still is the New Left Review. Meanwhile, following his departure from the Labour Party over its frustrating adherence to the norms of the British electoral system, Miliband also stayed aloof from the New Left, plowing an independent path whilst both developing his theory of the state in capitalist society and seeking a viable political path between the reformism of social democracy and insurrectionary Leninism.
Peter Burnham offers an appreciation of Parliamentary Socialism as arguably Miliband’s most profound contribution, both for its penetrating dissection of the limits of social democracy and its argument for the necessity of an alternative route to a socialist society. Echoing other critics, however, Burnham highlights Miliband’s neglect of the capitalist state’s inherent class character, leaving him vulnerable to charges of explaining social democracy’s failures as the result of personalities rather than due to its inability to confront the division between the state and civil society. This was, and remains, a recurring theme among critics.
In the following chapter Paul Blackledge focuses on especially Marxism and Politics (1977) and takes Miliband to task for his rejection of the Leninist strategy, attributing Miliband’s “error” to his conflation of revolutionary socialism with Stalin’s caricature of Leninism. Miliband’s more sympathetic treatment of the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s and his recurrent attraction to working within or through the Labour Party draw the fire of Blackledge, whose own defence of the Trotskyist tradition allows him to distinguish between Stalinist ideology and an alternative reading of history that restores, according to this view, the validity of a revolutionary strategy. Miliband’s “confusion” on this issue is attributed by Blackledge to his “refusal to outline a detailed model of the Soviet regime” (72), a charge that rather misses the point of what Miliband was trying to achieve, however true it might be. And in similar fashion, Blackledge charges Miliband with another conflation: this time, the defeats of European revolutions in the 1920s with the Popular Front of the 1930s (75). For Blackledge the latter did not necessarily confirm the inevitability of the former, a key ex post rationalization of the Popular Front strategy. “On the contrary, any assessment of the revolutionary potential of the Western working class in this period must necessarily start from a detailed study of the mass movement of 1917 to 1923” (75). Once again, this was hardly an immediate priority for Miliband, given his effort to develop a viable political strategy in the 1970s. And in any case – perhaps for some too horrible to contemplate but nevertheless possible – Stalin, on this question (and maybe others), could have been correct. But Miliband’s troublingly indeterminate “middle way” between the parliamentary route and insurrection earns him criticism in a later chapter by John Hoffman for precisely the opposite reason: he is too Leninist! Here Miliband’s fundamental flaw is taken to be his insufficient attention to the withering away of the state, and his inadequate usage of the distinction between state and government, with all the democratic potential of the latter in what Hoffman describes as a “post-liberal” society (159); namely, a society in which liberal values are extended fully to cover all and where the state is completely democratized.
Clyde Barrow makes a spirited defense of Miliband as not the “instrumentalist” of caricature, but firmly and consciously grounded in the work of Marx and Engels, and committed to historically and empirically informed study of actual states. Barrow’s careful reading of Miliband’s work reveals important foreshadowings and anticipations of theoretical developments associated with later authors. Because Poulantzas had charged him with adherence to a simplistic instrumentalism – that the state is “only a simple tool or instrument manipulated at will by the ruling class” (quoted on 94) – for many this was sufficient to consign Miliband’s work to the sidelines. Barrow shows that Fred Block’s “ruling class does not rule” thesis was in fact also Miliband’s, and that Miliband himself had cited Karl Kautsky’s 1910 (!) The Social Revolution to that effect in his own 1969 book The State in Capitalist Society. Nevertheless the charge stayed, despite repeated efforts by G. William Domhoff to demonstrate otherwise. John Wetherly further defends Miliband more generally against Poulantzas-inspired structuralist critique, and more specifically against Bob Jessop’s treatment of his work, which hitherto is shown to have made criticisms without apparently sufficient supporting evidence.
Thereafter Jessop provides the most convincing qualification of the structuralist critique of Miliband’s work in what appears to be Jessop’s most sustained effort to engage specifically with Miliband to date (Jessop 1990 is more concerned to establish the foundations of what has since become his “strategic-relational” approach). Jessop depicts the Poulantzas-Miliband debate as a “dialogue of the deaf” that produced a misleading dualistic reading of state theory. Required today is a synthesis of the two approaches rather than a continuation of the tired and largely pointless false opposition. According to Jessop, “Poulantzas was essentially concerned with the formal adequacy of the capitalist type of state and Miliband with the functional adequacy of the state in a capitalist society” (150). Jessop acknowledges that Barrow (in Aronowitz and Bratsis 2002) has offered a very different reading of the debate as one in which different methodological positions were used to outflank the other; indeed, Poulantzas attempted to invalidate Miliband’s work as resting upon bourgeois idealist misconceptions, a familiar rhetorical strategy of the time that has thankfully gone out of fashion. Instead, the editors close the book by stating that
It was a strength, rather than a weakness of Miliband’s approach that he was able to demonstrate the superiority of Marxism over a pluralist model empirically, and without appeal to a supposedly superior distinctive Marxist method. (236)
Jessop’s treatment of the dispute does not in fact differ from Barrow’s in essence; he sees it as grounded in incommensurable methodological positions (155) and sympathizes with Poulantzas to the extent that he claims that Miliband “tends to reproduce some of the instrumentalist fallacies of parliamentary socialism even as he seeks to show the limits of a simply instrumentalist analysis of the state” (148). This would appear to be chiefly his basic definition of the state as a “special institution, whose main purpose is to defend the predominance … of a particular class” (quoted on 148); there is no further example provided. One must go back to Jessop (1990: 30) for the clearer explanation that Miliband “actually reproduces the liberal tendency to discuss politics in isolation from its complex articulation with economic forces.” Poulantzas meanwhile regarded the state as structurally integral to capitalism. As Jessop later highlights, there were areas of convergence that might have borne greater fruit had Poulantzas not died in 1979. And for Jessop himself, a potentially fruitful reconciliation of both approaches might best be achieved through the sort of contingency-focused theorizing that would unite the more abstract, structuralist approach with its more empirically based counterpart.
Following Barrow, the chapters of John F. Manley and George A. Gonzalez bring further U.S. perspective to bear on what might otherwise be assumed to be of primarily British interest. While Manley details class struggles during the approximate period 1870-1930 in order to demonstrate the responses of the progressive bourgeoisie via the state, Gonzalez analyzes the development of the much more recent Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan in Florida. Both authors cite inspiration from Miliband’s theoretical work, demonstrating in their own ways the decisiveness of a mobilized labor movement in challenging capitalist prerogatives. The absence of organized labor in the case of contemporary Florida is taken by Gonzalez to confirm Miliband’s pessimism concerning the ability of new social movements to mount effective opposition. Interestingly this contrasts with the later Poulantzas, whose recognition of the importance of cross-class movements paralleled that of Miliband, but who instead emphasized their democratizing potential without underestimating the dangers of populism (Jessop 1991: 99).
This is a fine collection that deserves wide reading. It is successful in its effort to revitalize interest in the legacy of Ralph Miliband, and, a significant plus, maintains a very respectful tone throughout. To Jessop’s research agenda could be added the fuller engagement with Miliband’s work of scholars and activists outside of the North Atlantic anglosphere. It is to be hoped that this book will act as a significant aid to both.