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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 the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Colin Barker was unnecessarily harsh in his obituary of Ralph Miliband. Miliband’s legacy stretches far wider than his first book Parliamentary Socialism. His subsequent books continued to influence later generations of socialists.
Miliband wrote one of the best introductions to Marxism, Marxism and Politics, a lucid and well argued affirmation of Marxism. To argue that Miliband never had a ‘concrete sense ... of working people in struggle’ is simply inaccurate. Indeed it was central to his work. He wrote at the end of Marxism and Politics how bourgeois democracy was ‘the product of centuries of unremitting popular struggle’. Then he explained the task for Marxists: ‘to defend these freedoms and to make possible their extension and enlargement by the removal of their class boundaries’. I know of no clearer statement of our task as socialists.
Later he wrote a book devoted to the class struggle, Divided Societies. He reasserted class conflict as being absolutely central in advanced capitalism. Miliband did this in the 1980s, when other so called Marxists were repudiating the class struggle.
After these omissions, Barker then suggests Miliband could have been a better Marxist if he had served time in the Communist Party. The class struggle was central to Miliband’s politics and I would argue that it was because of this that he decided not to join the Communist Party, unlike so many others of his generation. It is because of this emphasis that Miliband will continue to inspire future socialists.
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