Interview with Ralph Miliband
RALPH MILIBAND is one of
the best known Marxist writers in Britain" and has recently
been a fierce critic of what he
calls 'the new revisionism' -
the abandonment of socialist
positions by many in the labour
movement. KATHY LOWE and PHIL HEARSE talked to him about the problems facing socialists today. It is widely held that there is a 'crisis of Marxism'. Do you think this is so? I think it is much more a crisis of socialist conviction and socialist confidence. Obviously ever since the beginning of Marxism you have had questions, controversies, probings about it. From this point of view there is nothing very new about the controversies going on, m theoretical terms. What I think is much more significant now is the attack on certain fundamental categories which relate to the nature of the socialist project. Take for example the category class'. This is a critical category. What is happening now is a rejection of the notion that the working class remains the indispensable agener for socialist change. Most of the grounds for this rejection are exceedingly questionable, or simply lalse, encapsulated in the formula 'goodbye to the working class'. By this people mean cither the working class has failed to carry out the revolutionary project assigned to it by Marx, which is true as far as the last 100 years is concerned. But is this a terminal, final thing? This has to be questioned and I don't believe it's truc
So if people mean by crisis of Marxism a collapse of it, then I disagree. I they mean the need to probe, discuss, to go further, well then l've no objection. What has given rise to the new revisionism', the abandonment of socialist ideas by a spectrum of people and publications on the left? It's a number of things. We are at a difficult and important historical momen insofar as the two major forces which have dominated the labour movement of the capitalist countries social democracy and orthodox communism' have shown signs of degeneration and collapse. Plus a whole series of events have contributed to this loss of confidence. INTERNARONA Do.
In the British case where the collapse is a social democratic one, I think a good deal has to do with the performance of social democracy in the sixties and seventies and the failure of the Labour left to 'capture' the party between 1979 and 1981/2.
This has contributed to a loss of confidence, an absence of perspective, and people are falling back on a whole series of gimmicks, looking for new agencies of social change, trying to resurrect