イギリスの民主政治

by Ralph Miliband

Miliband, Ralph

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

Tankobon Hardcover

First published December 23, 1982

Reviews

[Harry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gets a bit of a bad rep in Miliband's wider writings. Generally seen as 'unoriginal' insofar as it merely summarised ideas in his Parliamentary Socialism and the The State in Capitalist Society - the book has been widely neglected since. I would argue this is rather wrong.

Certainly it is marked, as all Miliband's writing is, by a certain kind of LSE-Laskian empiricism. But, as with the crude misreadings of the Miliband-Poulantzas debates (not helped by his style of intervention), there is an underestimation of the contribution. If one of Poulantzas' key contributions is the importance of the 'institutional materiality' of the state, the ways in which the relations of capitalist production have inscribed state structures with a certain class nature, this is Miliband attempting to analyse how that looks in Britain.

Particularly his final sections on local government, its relationship with the wider state, and the possible paths for capitalist democracy in Britain seem prescient at a moment where the British state is growing its repressive capabilities, whilst it also has pushed local democracy to a death spiral from its post-war limited peak.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is quite remarkable that a book published over forty years ago and now out of print should be such a perfect description of the conditions that underlay the utter mess that is twenty first century Britain. It is from a Marxist perspective but you can strip that out if you want to enjoy the analysis.

Only today I found another bit of prescience in the Introduction to Noam Chomsky's 'Deterring Democracy' (1991) where, quoting Lawrence Eagleburger, the old anarchist strips bare current American foreign policy to its consistent basics with brutal precision.

In other words, no one can say that they were not warned about our current condition by intelligent intellectuals (are there any intelligent intellectuals left nowadays?) well on the other side of the Millennium. The facts were all there. The interpretation available.

Miliband, whose two sons have achieved a weird prominence riding the very system that the father excoriated in a political example of one half of the Oedipus story sustaining its own momentum after no less than 2,500 years, takes no prisoners in his analysis.

A current reader will have to cast themselves back to the story of the British Left of the 1970s and early 1980s forf the right ambience. That context means that some of the specific 'predictive' aspects do not stand up but the core analysis of how Britain was and is (notionally) managed still stands.

Well, except in one respect - the formal analysis is correct but what Miliband cannot have predicted would be that the Left's 'sotto voce' connivance in an essentially conservative structure would go into over-drive in the wake of Thatcher and become almost a parody of itself under Starmer.

The book tells us how the system actually worked in the last century and how the fools in government still think it does work even though it neither works functionally to deliver stability and prosperity nor works as it is supposed to do in keeping the population from asking for their 'share of the action'.

The bulk of the book is a systematic account of the way power has operated (and is intended now to operate) within the United Kingdom - as a liberal capitalist democracy that carefully manages the working class interest through the agency of a supine centre-left party (Labour).

That Party, once with millions of members embedded in the workplace and the community, has degenerated into a sort of nut club of activists managed by an opportunistic and not phenomenally bright self-reinforcing clique of professionals.

Although the liberal constitutionalist forms are different and there is much talk of 'freedom' (which can be quickly abrogated in war or in an 'emergency'), this system is not that much different from Bismarck's social militarism, maintained with the pacifying support of revisionist Marxists.

The system is a total system (persuading us that this is so is the most successful element of the book) structured around all levels of government from national to local, judiciary, state-business relations, trades unions, security apparat and media (not excluding the sinister BBC).

It is also not averse to hiding an iron fist inside its moth-eaten glove. Although of its period, Miliband evidences the contingent attitude of the propertied towards democracy in the age of Allende and the very idea of Left governance by a former chief prosecutor should cause tremors of the soul.

The purpose is to effect only the changes that will sustain the system and to ensure that any emergent social force is integrated into that system in order to protect it and 'capitalist relations' - that is, private property, not excluding land ownership (an inheritance from the eighteenth century).

There is, of course, an alternative conservative opinion on this - that stability requires such a system and that human nature dictates that prosperity is best served by markets protected by such a system - and this should not be dismissed out of hand. If this is so, let it be stated without the lies!

Whichever is the true opinion, it is important to understand the facts of the case much as Trump is forcing us to see the facts of the case of American foreign policy as outlined by Chomsky. It is the unholy guff (like the Crown) that surrounds these systems that insults our intelligence.

So what has happened since the book. Well, self-evidently, the British Left crashed and burned in its attempt to change the system, largely in an excess of narcissism, idiot utopianism and utterly asinine Trotskyist ideology. If 'Jeremy' is the best it could do in its last gasp, well ...

Indeed, what is perhaps most depressing is that the 1970s generation of intellectuals that failed the working class (or rather the 'people') sidled their way into the establishment in perfect confirmation of Miliband pere's analysis. Thus it was and perhaps thus it will always be.

But more fundamental changes were taking place. The trades unions lost their strong position in the corporatist team as Britain de-industralised. Their place was taken by a huge parasitical class of lower level administrators, academics and NGOcrats building identity politics on critical theory.

If once conservatives made efforts to build Labour as manager of the working class through trades unions, now conservatives (from businesses to governance) appropriated reasonable social demands by the marginalised and repurposed them into green and diversity agendas that got out of hand.

Just as the old corporatism smashed by Thatcher was grossly inefficient because of lack of decisive and effective central planning so the new liberal-left communitarianism was even more inefficient through emphasising coalitional baksheesh instead of productive capitalist or public investment.

The state of British public finances has declined (since the cataclysms of 2008-2010, COVID and the absurdities of economic war with Russia) to a point that is quite definitely very scary with everyone making ever greater demands on a shrinking pie. Where Birmingham goes, others will follow.

And, of course, this was compounded by the effects of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution which smashed the economic balance of the old order in which national capital and trades unions maintained a slow but possibly manageable post-imperial decline.

National capital got eviscerated in favour of international capital. This plundered social and public capital (the water utilities and energy pricing being the thin end of a huge wedge). Working class self-organisation (always inadequate protection in any case) as trades unions became NGOs.

In other words, Miliband's system still exists but it is a socio-economic 'Potemkin Village' in which a simulacrum of a morally corrupt but vaguely workable system has become influence without power in the world, a doomed cover for what is a province of international capital with almost no way out.

The book is still very much worth reading for two reasons. The ghost of that system is still what many of its office-holders still think is working. That is worth understanding. Second, the illusions of the honest Left of the early 1980s are a base line for understanding the Left's consequent degradation.

As to the author's two sons, one in global NGO management and once a 'king across the water' in New York for the neo-liberal Blairites and the other lost in the ideology of Net Zero fantasies, they must be given the benefit of some doubt.

If they had read their old man's book with any care, they would have known that there were only two conclusions - an unspoken despair at the solidity of a system that would never let a genuine Left politician a place at the table or an existential 'revolutionary' determination to fight and fight again.

The last serious fighter on the inside was actually an aristocrat - Anthony Wedgewood Benn. Since then, the realistic fighting for the street has been done not on the Left but on the Right by populists They are about as trustworthy as rattle snakes.

A whole generation of the Left watched the sclerotic Soviet Union collapse and never saw the rise of China. They gave up and became American-style left-liberals. In a fit of absence of mind, they gifted their nation to Tony Blair, commodity traders, private equity, bankers and hedge funds.

They may have been unconsciously depressed but perhaps they were not wrong. Perhaps the United Kingdom was doomed once it lost its ability to exploit an empire. Perhaps it will end up like Venice after its empire disappeared - a glorious tourist trap living off its heritage. Game over!?

[Steven R]

Good introduction to how the state works within Britain. Really useful insight on Labour being unable to put forward or deliver a socialist program. Also on the unpopularity of insurrectionary politics due to democracy allowing reforms