Ralph Miliband Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Ralph Miliband (1924–1994) was a Marxist political theorist. Born in Belgium of Polish-Jewish parentage, he fled the Nazis to England in 1940. There, at the graveside of philosopher, social scientist, historian, and revolutionary Karl Marx, he pledged what became a lifelong allegiance to the “workers’ cause.” A year later Miliband began his studies at the London School of Economics, which, though interrupted by a three-year stint in the Royal Navy, led eventually to a PhD on popular thought in the French Revolution (1789–1799) under the supervision of political theorist Harold Laski.

Although Miliband considered himself a Marxist during this period, he never joined the Communist Party. He did, however, become a key intellectual voice within the British new left after 1956. If the new left aimed to trace a socialist path independent of both Stalinism and Social Democracy, Miliband’s first contribution to this project was through his classic study of the British Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism (1961). In this, arguably his most important book, he claimed that the Labour Party was amongst the most dogmatic of workers’ parties, “not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system.” It is interesting that whereas the book was originally intended to underpin a call to transform the Labour Party into a socialist organization, in its second edition Miliband concluded that this was a hopeless task, as the party was “irrevocably rooted” in the capitalist system.

In the 1970s Miliband’s attention turned from social democracy to communism. In the wake of a 1976 essay that linked these themes—“Moving On,” published in The Socialist Register annual that he coedited with historian and new left comrade John Saville—Miliband published one of the most important critical surveys of Marxist political theory and practice: Marxism and Politics (1977). Subsequently, he extended both his critique of capitalism and his interpretation of Marxism in books such as Capitalist Democracy in Britain (1984) and Divided Societies (1991) and through powerful essays, for instance those collected in Class Power and State Power (1983), in which he fraternally but critically engaged with others on the left.

The 1983 collection includes his contributions to one of the most important disputes on the academic left in the 1970s, the Miliband-Poulantzas debate on the nature of the capitalist state. Opened by Greek Marxist theorist Nicos Poulantzas’s review of Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969), the debate continued with Miliband’s review of Poulantzas’s Political Power and Social Classes (1973). Between them, these two books and the subsequent debate on the pages of New Left Review were undeniably the most important contributions to Marxist state theory in this period.

Later, in important essays such as “The New Revisionism in Britain” (1985), Miliband countered what he took to be a mistaken shift away from class-based politics by sections of the academic left in the 1980s. And although toward the end of his life he softened his criticisms of the reforming strategy embraced by those socialists who continued to work within the Labour Party, he reiterated his commitment to socialism in the posthumously published Socialism for a Sceptical Age (1994).

Bibliography:

Miliband, Ralph. Class Power and State Power. London: Verso, 1983.
Divided Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Marxism and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Parliamentary Socialism. 2nd ed. London: Merlin, 1972.
The State in Capitalist Society. London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1969.
Newman, Michael. Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left. London: Merlin, 2002.
Wetherly, Paul, et al., eds. Class, Power and the State in Capitalist Society: Essays on Ralph Miliband. London: Palgrave, 2008.

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