No Easy Outs: The Revolutionary Reformism of Ralph Miliband

A new collection of essays by the seminal Marxist thinker highlights his simultaneously hopeful and clear-eyed vision, fiercely principled but always tethered to reality.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/17915/no-easy-outs-the-revolutionary-reformism-of-ralph-miliband

The joke almost writes itself. Ralph Miliband, the socialist intellectual, devoted an entire book to cataloging the British Labour Party’s history of tepidity and a good chunk of his career warning leftists that the party was an incrementalist jalopy rather than a ready-made vehicle for winning socialism—then raised two sons who rose to the party’s highest echelons and endorsed its rightward drift.

Ralph died in 1994, 16 years before David and Ed Miliband faced off for the Labour Party leadership. Ed won, and is running for prime minister in today's UK elections. But while another centrist helming the party may be taken as an indication of the Left’s irrelevance—and an occasion for a wisecrack, perhaps to ease the sting—Ralph wouldn’t have conceded as much.

Class exploitation and inequality in advanced capitalist countries didn’t disappear with the advent of labor laws or the welfare state or the Internet; it is a constitutive feature of those countries’ underlying economic structure. And as long as capitalism continues—a system characterized by “the subordination of the many to the few, on the basis of property and privilege,” Miliband argued—it would generate opposition.

As the British socialist contends in the title essay of an excellent new collection, Class War Conservatism and Other Essays, Margaret Thatcher’s brutal assault from above may have destroyed the livelihoods and rights of workers, but resistance from below, however inchoate, won’t vanish. Similarly, capitalism’s flaws create an inextinguishable desire for a more secure, dignified existence.