By MATTHEW OF ALBUQUERQUE*

Considerations on a “Marxist political scientist”.

1.

Yesterday, January 7, 2025, marked the 101st anniversary of the birth of the Belgian-English sociologist Ralph Miliband. “101” is a rather unusual date. It was chosen precisely because I was surprised by the lack of proper tributes to Ralph Miliband on his centenary last year. Not even the Socialist Register, important Marxist periodical founded by Ralph Miliband, made any mention of the date.

Interestingly, his death also had a “closed” date last year: Ralph Miliband died in May 1994, making 2024 the centenary of his birth and 30 years since his departure. I found no mention of either of these two closed dates in decades.

Perhaps the low number of citations given to Ralph Miliband is due to the fact that, unlike other great Marxist intellectuals, he was not exactly recognized for his direct involvement in the class struggle. In the early 1950s, he joined the Labour Party alongside Aneurin Bevan, who advocated greater economic nationalization and the strengthening of trade unions.

As soon as the Bevanites (as they were called) began to split, Ralph Miliband's role in the party was weakened and, consequently, strengthened in academia. His first book, Parliamentary Socialism (1961), condenses his frustration with party life: it is an analysis of how parliamentarism dredge the radicalism of the Labour Party, making it very similar to its rivals on the British right. Together with EP Thompson and John Saville, he formed the group of intellectuals who would found the so-called New Left, subsequently responsible for New Left Review, perhaps the most influential magazine of the Western left in the second half of the 20th century.

With John Saville, he would also found the aforementioned Socialist Register. After that, Ralph Miliband's extra-academic political activity would be limited to his strong stance against the Vietnam War and the anti-nuclear bomb movement.

As already mentioned, it is in academic discussions that the fundamentals of Ralph Miliband's work shine. The son of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he was born in Belgium and arrived in England in the 1940s with his father to escape the Nazi persecution of Jews. His father Samuel, in fact, had been an active member of the Socialist Party in Warsaw and remained active in Belgium.

In the Breton country, as an adult, he received funding from the Belgian government to study at the prestigious London School of Economics, in an academic career that was interrupted by his time of military service in the Second World War, in the British Navy. Upon his return, he was supervised, in his doctorate, by Harold Laski, perhaps Ralph Miliband's main academic influence, in a thesis on the different political thoughts circulating in the French Revolution.

2.

Harold Laski, a rather heterodox Marxist, had among his theoretical concerns the maintenance of democratic societies in the midst of socialism. His formulation drew attention to the fact, typically Leninist, that it would not be the classes as a whole that would take power, but rather groups within these classes. This elaboration led him to consider that these groups could easily become autonomous in antidemocratic processes.

The anti-bureaucratic fear made Hatold Laski an intellectual concerned with the necessary maintenance of the “liberal” aspects dialectically absorbed by the Marxist tradition, such as the unconditional defense of freedom and the view of democracy as a value, foundations sometimes sidelined by Marxists. Laski would gradually move towards pluralism, while Ralph Miliband, upon assuming his master’s chair at the LSE, would undertake efforts to reconcile these concerns with a harsh and coherent critique of the capitalist State.[I]

The State would then become his main analytical concern. In 1965, he published in Socialist Register the text “Marx and the State".[ii] In this article, Ralph Miliband rescues fundamental aspects of Marxist analyses of the State that, as Miliband himself suggests, were not systematized by Marx: the idea of ​​separation between civil society and the State, with the former being the determining entity in this relationship; the false standardization caused by the capitalist State; the role of democracy as the most complete form of capitalist State; and, above all, a highlight of the anthological phrase from the Manifesto: “The modern capitalist State is nothing more than the management committee of the communal affairs of the bourgeoisie”.

This notion, which would later become controversial, that capitalists can use the State as they wish to obtain advantages would be the guiding thread of his Magnum opus, The State in the capitalist society,[iii] released in January 1969. The book empirically examines the relationships between state structures and capitalists. With a sociologically sharp eye, Ralph Miliband observes how objective and subjective relationships create very strong connections between state agents and market agents. Thus, even if the bourgeoisie does not govern directly, it has cultural and sociological ties with those who govern.

To define this, Ralph Miliband relies on two concepts. The first is the “state system”. In contrast to the “political system” of the pluralist David Easton, who sought to relegate the role of the State to secondary importance, the state system is a set of institutional interactions whose cohesion is limited by the class character of the State. However, these institutions have a certain degree of autonomy among themselves, making it extremely difficult for external groups to control “the State as a whole” through elections. This control, on the part of the ruling class, does not occur through victory in elections, but rather through the aforementioned connections. Civil society, as in Marx, determines.

The other concept is the most controversial in the work: Ralph Miliband appropriates the idea of ​​“elite”, typical of anti-Marxist literature.[iv]. Ralph Miliband presents two elites. The “state elites” are those who occupy different spheres of command in the state system. The “economic elites” are the group formed by the bourgeoisie, which owns the means of production, and the directors of large companies.

Basically, Ralph Miliband's challenge in “The State…” was to prove the sociological links between these three groups: state leaders, managers and owners. In one fell swoop, Miliband confronted both the pluralist theses of the mainstream of political science, which inferred that it was impossible to speak of a “ruling class” given the multiplicity of actors competing in the political arena; as well as the theses of managerialism, which relativized the role of the bourgeoisie in capitalist society in a business world in which the most fundamental decisions are taken by CEOs, who are, in practice, employees.

3.

The context for this import of the concept of elite comes from debates in American sociology. In 1956, Wright Mills released his classic The Power Elite,[v] also a critique of pluralism, demonstrating that state relations in the United States are controlled by elites, but without assimilating the Marxist class character. In fact, in many ways, the book can be seen as a critique of Marxism.

Its publication provoked diverse reactions, including from the great American Marxist Paul Sweezy, who wrote an essay that is, at the same time, a scathing critique of Mills' model, as well as an elegy to the advances it brings to the debate on the State.[vi] Ralph Miliband's book is a kind of attempt to reconcile these two tensions, assimilating the category of “elite”, increasingly useful in societies that are becoming more complex in multiple branches of domination, with the class character of political power. Not surprisingly, The State in the capitalist society It would be dedicated to the memory of Wright Mills, who died prematurely in 1962, aged just 45.[vii]

The main controversy surrounding the work came from the Greek thinker, based in France, Nicos Poulantzas. Poulantzas, upon reading the translation of the book into French, submitted a critical review, quite scathing, to New Left Review English. That was in 1969. From then on, until 1973, Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas would star in memorable replies and rejoinders in that magazine, in what has become known as the “Miliband-Poulantzas Debate”, one of the most relevant clashes about the nature of the capitalist State.[viii]

At stake was the elitist (for many, “instrumentalist”) model of Ralph Miliband against the structuralist model, with a strong Althusserian influence, that Nicos Poulantzas presented in his Pouvoir politique et social classes.[ix] The debate has several nuances, but perhaps one of its most striking aspects, which still challenges many of those interested in the relations between class and the State, can be summarized as follows: is the State capitalist because the capitalists are in power? This simple question has a strong methodological impact, after all, it deals with the relevance or not of observing the sociological ties of those who occupy the State as proof of its capitalist character.

Although this issue can be overcome with methodological approaches that consider both the structural and instrumental aspects of the State, some marks of the debate remain, such as irreconcilable differences. Here I would like to highlight an aspect that we brought up previously: Ralph Miliband adopts a perspective typical of the young Marx of separation between State and civil society, with civil society being the determining force behind State actions.

To make this separation, Ralph Miliband, unlike Poulantzas, gives the State autonomous power, a power that emanates from the state system and that is used by the bourgeoisie itself when it penetrates it. This seems to be an inescapable limit of difference between the two, even more so if we remember that Nicos Poulantzas of Political Power… is influenced by the Althusserian epistemological approach, which analytically discards the Young Marx and his Hegelian influences.

This aspect will be better worked on theoretically in your work. Marxism and politics[X], from 1977, a return to theory heavily influenced by Poulantzas' good provocations.[xi] In this book, Ralph Miliband further highlights the Gramscian nature of his work by demonstrating that the ruling class disputes the State, through various cohesion devices, in order to use it to produce its own notion of universality, of representation of society. In this dispute, the classes do not present themselves as a whole, but through public representations that will direct this dispute. Here, it is clear that the way in which Miliband adopts the term “elite” is very similar to Gramsci’s “intellectual”, a category that was, in fact, a response by the Sardinian thinker to the classical elitists of Italy.

4.

Another noteworthy debate Ralph Miliband had was with intellectuals from Committee on States and Social Structures, young researchers influenced by Weber who had as their main objective to give primacy to the state debate without transforming it into an epiphenomenon, giving the State its own “voice”. In State power and class interests (1983)[xii] Ralph Miliband debates with Theda Skocpol, the main representative of this movement. Miliband rejects Skocpol's arguments that Marxism necessarily determines the class nature of state attitudes, demonstrating that the concept of autonomy is present in Marx and is, above all, fundamental to the establishment of modern capitalism.

The difference of what the Committee presents what Ralph Miliband defends is the fact that they sideline the fact that societal asymmetries produce specific State relations and that in these relations class would be a fundamental element. In addition, the State, endowed with its own powers, would need to constantly establish partnerships with the dominant class, which would endorse the class relations of the status quo. This debate is interesting because, for a long time, the literature on the State in the social sciences supported the notion that researchers of the Committee those responsible for the return of the State to sociology and political science when, in fact, Marxists such as Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas preceded them in this endeavor [xiii]. The text cited here presents a clash between these two generations and visions.

In his latest book, Socialist for a skeptical age, published posthumously in 1995, Ralph Miliband makes a forceful defense of socialism in a post-Berlin Wall world, which says a lot: even with an academic career marked by a constant effort at conciliation, from Laskian anti-bureaucratism to Wright Mills' elitism, Ralph Miliband died a Marxist. Discreet in his militancy, he would still cause a great deal of noise in England in 2013, almost 20 years after his death.

This is because his son, Ed Miliband, then leader of the Labour Party (ironically, part of the more moderate wing of the party) could become Prime Minister if Labour obtained a majority in the parliamentary elections.[xiv] This caused the conservative artillery to target Ed's father's communist past heavily. Daily Mail then published the infamous article “The man who hated Britain”, signed by columnist Geoffrey Levy[xv], arguing that Ralph Miliband's entire trajectory represented a latent and dangerous anti-patriotism.

The British left was divided between those who claimed that Ralph Miliband, a former sailor who fought alongside the Allies, was a great patriot (his candidate son was obviously in this camp), and those who pointed out that yes, Ralph Miliband was a harsh critic of the imperialist role played by England and that there would be no problem with that.

5.

41 years after his death, Ralph Miliband's legacy remains, in my opinion, underrated. The few works that have dedicated themselves to detailing his impact, and here I highly recommend Class, power and the State in capitalist society: essays on Ralph Miliband, organized by Clyde W. Barrow, Paul Wetherly and Peter Burnham, demonstrate how fundamental their elaborations are for those who wish to produce a strongly empirical Marxist sociology.

The great Canadian Marxist Leo Panitch, one of the founders of so-called “institutional Marxism,” was inspired to research Marx after seeing a lecture by Ralph Miliband in Canada.[xvi] Later, Leo Panitch himself was supervised for his doctorate by Ralph Miliband.

In Brazil, the book Marxism as a social science, by Adriano Codato and Renato Perissinotto, winner of the 2012 Anpocs Prize, is, in many ways, a rescue of the epistemological and methodological importance of Ralph Miliband for studies of class and State.

And it is for this reason, because of these intellectual contributions, that I chose, as a subtitle for this text, to call Ralph Miliband a “Marxist political scientist”. The very existence of this epithet could sound like a contradiction to those who see it as something analogous to water and oil. But I believe that Ralph Miliband presents an interesting way to use Marxism in political science as something beyond a “force of tension”, as Luis Felipe Miguel proposes in his excellent and recent article Marxism and politics.

These are footprints of an insufficient empirical path, which it is up to us, today's researchers, with today's tools, to complete. In the aforementioned Marxism and politics, a book with a curiously similar name to that of Luis Felipe Miguel, Ralph Miliband proposes that the foundation of politics in Marxism is in understanding the existence of irreconcilable conflicts.

In other words, even the fluidity of the negotiating capacity inherent in politics finds a barrier in materiality, when viewed at its fundamental core. This is an important lesson for those who want to study political science and Marxism: to carefully observe the plots of the political and institutional scene, without disregarding what it cannot achieve.

*Matthew of Albuquerque holds a PhD in Political Science from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR).

Notes

[I] NEWMAN, Michael. Class, state and democracy: Laski, Miliband and the search for a synthesis. Political Studies, v. 54, no. 2, p. 328-348, 2006.

[ii] The text was translated into Portuguese in 1981. MILIBAND, Ralph. Marx and the State. In BOTTOMORE, Tom. Karl Marx. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1981.

[iii] The work was translated in Brazil, in two editions by Zahar. MILIBAND, Ralph. The State in Capitalist Society. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1982 (2nd Edition).

[iv] Miliband was not the first author with Marxist aspirations to do so. Bottomore had already done so in his “Elites and Society”, with one relevant difference: in this book, Bottomore defends elites and classes as separate categories, inferring that there are “class” societies and “elite” societies. Quite different from Miliband. BOTTOMORE, Tom. The elites and society. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1974.

[v] WRIGHT MILLS, C. the power elite. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1968 (2nd Edition).

[vi] SWEEZY, Paul. “Power Elite or Ruling Class?” In: DOMHOFF, G. William; BALLARD, Hoyt B. (Org.). W. Wright Mills and the Power Elite. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1968.

[vii] In the final book “The Marxists" (1962), Wright Mills reconciles himself with Marxism, presenting a cleavage between the "simple" and the "sophisticated" Marxists, praising the former and avoiding mixing them with criticism of the latter. MILLS, C. Wright. the marxists. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1968.

[viii] TARCUS, Horacio (Org.). Debates about the capitalist state. Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 1991.

[ix] POULANTZAS, Nicos. Political power and social classes. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2019.

[X] MILIBAND, Ralph. Marxism and politics. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1979.

[xi] BIANCHI, Alvaro. Bringing the State back to theory: the Poulantzas-Miliband debate revisited. In: Paulino José Orso and Isaura Monica Souza Zanardini. (Org.). State, education and capitalist society. Cascavel: Edunioeste, 2008, p. 39-56.

[xii] MILIBAND, Ralph. Class Power and State Power: Political Essays. London: Verso Editions, 1984. (Chapter 4)

[xiii] About this: KHACHATURIAN, Rafael. Bringing what state back in? Neo-Marxism and the origin of the committee on states and social structures. Political Research Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 3, p. 714-726, 2019.

[xiv] Miliband's other son, David, has also served as a Labour MP. David was environment secretary and later foreign secretary in Tony Blair's cabinet. His closeness to Tony Blair, who is seen as a symbol of the "third way", shows that David, like Ed, is far removed from his father's radicalism.

[xv] The text can be read here.

[xvi] This story is narrated in this interview for Jacobin, on Youtube.

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