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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 177 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
While I do not dissent from Colin Barker’s obituary to Ralph Miliband in any point, I think the central contradiction of his politics needs to be brought out more fully.
His two most influential books, Parliamentary Socialism and The State in Capitalist Society, can both be faulted from a Marxist perspective. But their enormous influence on two ideas about which all Marxists should be happy, the non-socialist nature of the Labour Party and the essentially capitalist nature of the state, should not be denied.
The real puzzle is where this led Miliband politically. It was not just a question of the Socialist Register which looking back seems ever more like a new left odyssey. I first came across Miliband when an undergraduate at Teesside where he had enormous influence, not just on the lecturers but also on some of the more left wing figures of the 1974–79 Labour government. Twenty years later I heard him speak in praise of Lenin’s State and Revolution. It was this contradiction between theory and Labour politics which Miliband could never resolve. He despaired of the Labour Party but felt unable to help in the task of building an alternative to it.
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Keith Flett |
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