Socialism for a Sceptical Age
By Ralph Miliband
Polity Press, 1994. 211 pp., $37.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
The death in 1994 of Ralph Miliband was a sad loss to the left. His last book, fortunately completed just before his death, leaves us with a taste of Miliband at his best as a critic of capitalism and defender of socialism. It also gives us, however, a Miliband with his fundamental ambivalence between revolutionary and reformist socialism.
In sprightly opposition to those ex-radicals and faint-hearts who argue that socialism is an irrelevant eccentricity in an age of globalisation and the "fall of communism", Miliband sails confidently through the socialist case against capitalism — "capitalism is above all about private profit" in which the "micro-rationality" of corporate profitability displaces, by economic logic and state muscle, the "macro-rationality" of human and environmental well-being.
Miliband debunks the great swindle equating capitalism with democracy. Capitalism has resisted every democratic advance, from voting and trade union rights to women's rights, throughout its history. Working people have no real decision-making power in the boardrooms, in their jobs or over the shape of society.
For Miliband, socialism is about the elimination of inequality, and a radical extension of democracy into previously sacrosanct areas such as economic life.
Essential to these outcomes, he argues, is socialisation of the means of production, not simply the old-style nationalisation which Australian public servants and workers in the former Stalinist states can tell you is hardly a socialist heaven. He wants a genuine socialisation that involves democratic control of enterprises by working people.
Parliament
Miliband's concept of socialism, and his strategy for getting there, however, are flawed by his scepticism about the merits and feasibility of revolution.
Miliband's socialist society retains a significant private economic sector and "allows firms an adequate rate of profit", indeed "helps them achieve it". Trade unions under socialism are to exercise "restraint on wages and other demands". The coercive organs of the capitalist state (army, police, courts, prisons) remain, with just the top personnel changed. Private individuals can own (no more than one) media, so multi-millionaire media magnates will give way to just millionaire magnates. The socialist government will still make the major political decisions.
These political and economic features of capitalism survive because of Miliband's strategy of transition, in which a socialist government is elected to parliament and has to pay some mind to the needs of all classes in society.
This process is counterposed to what Miliband sees as the failed 1917 Soviet model of socialist revolution, in which working-class organs of power, based in the workplace, exercise direct economic and political power, electing delegates to local, regional, national (and ultimately international) decision-making bodies. Delegates are accountable through frequent elections, subject to instant recall and paid no more than a skilled worker — all within a context of a workers' state which defends the revolution through armed workers' militias, popular justice systems etc.
Fear of Leninism
Miliband argues that this conception of socialism as workers' power leads inevitably to dictatorial rule by an elite within the dominant revolutionary party. For Miliband, gulag is just a Leninist vanguard party away.
Workers' power is "wholly incompatible with any notion of socialist democracy" because "socialist democracy involves constraints on all forms of power including popular power". Working-class rule, argues Miliband, will surely end in tears and disillusion.
This is all very disappointing from one of the left's veterans. The conservative argument that the Stalinisation of the Bolshevik Party was inherent in Leninist strategies for working-class power can be credibly challenged by the inverse argument that it was the decimation of the working class through war, hunger, blockade and international isolation that led to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party.
The material foundations for working-class power are better now than they were in backward Russia. The wealth of capitalism, and the numerical dominance of the modern working class, should make it easier to build a socialism without scarcity, the queue and the bureaucrat to police the queue, thus allowing working-class democracy and all human rights to flourish in an environment free from the mistakes, excesses and necessary evils that come with siege conditions.
Counter-revolution
It is workers in absolute control of the economy and the state who can ensure that socialism survives the inevitable counter-revolution from capital. Without organs of popular democratic power (which Miliband curtly dismisses), the old capitalist power centres will endure and triumph.
Whilst it is abundantly clear that parliament is a capitalist institution, should a truly socialist ALP be elected, as Miliband desires, the military, police and intelligence agencies from the still extant capitalist state would move to crush the grassroots workers' movement and reinstall capitalism.
To be sure, Miliband's socialism is a political universe away from anything dreamed up by the ALP, but this does not mean that he has discovered the mythical parliamentary road to socialism. If we haven't seen the true face of revolution in Australia yet, neither have we seen the true face of counter-revolution, but there have been enough clues sprinkled throughout the history of class struggle in Australia to give us a good idea.
The shrinkage of hope and narrowing of expectation amongst the left have not spared Miliband. Strategically, he winds up riding shotgun for parties like the ALP, concluding that "the best that the Left can hope for in the relevant future ... is the strengthening of left reformism as a current of thought and policy in social democratic parties".
But what sort of political life is there in the party of Keating, Goss and Carr? The long history of the ALP changing those who attempt to change it should sound a note of caution. Life on the left does exist, but it is outside parliament.
Miliband's book presents the strong version of reformism, but his is one in which the capitalist monster has only been flimsily shackled. As the French revolutionary Saint-Just said — those who only half make a revolution dig their own graves. For all its unfashionableness, workers' power is still the only sword that can slay the monster. Miliband takes us to the threshold of socialism but not over it.