AIMING AT WORKERS
Ralph Miliband: Capitalist Democracy in Britain, Oxford, 1982, £8.95.
Capitalist Democracy in Britain tells the story of the integration and containment of the working class within the institutions of bourgeois rule. It is an important story and one, as Andrew Gamble argues in Britain in Decline, that has decisive consequences for all aspects of economic and social life. But despite his usual talent for the telling comparison and the revealing quotation, Ralph Miliband's long-awaited follow up to his influential State in Capitalist Society is a disappointing book in several crucial respects.
First, and very much in the tradition of his earlier book, Miliband consistently overstates the sociological constraints of the state on the possibility of radicalism in government. True, the shared backgrounds and attitudes of the senior civil servants and judges have a conservative effect. True, the social isolation of Labour politicians from their supporters, the social aspirations and integration into bourgeois circles of the bureaucracy of labour have led to many sell-outs. But ultimately it is a question of politics that the labour movement has not created leaders committed to sufficiently clear and radical policies to challenge the class basis of the state.
What Miliband consistently ignores in his writing is that the state has a class basis in its economic underpinning quite independently of the class origins of its officers. Any government which embarks on policies which break with the interests of the dominant social classes in any state will first of all create chaos (collapse of commerce, sterling crises etc.). It is only by building a firm base of support for clear and intransigent policies to see this crisis through that fundamental social change can be achieved.
Second, while the British state has proved extremely efficient in [illegible] the working class, this has not been its only function. It is truly remarkable that writing in 1982 Miliband should [illegible] analyse the development of the British state without serious consideration of its relationship to different sections of capital and the ruling establishment after all parliament before mass suffrage was designed as a forum for resolving disputes among the ruling class. And while he restricts his account to the period since the passage of the Second Reform Act in 1867, it seems curious that no reference should be made at all to the pre-history of bourgeois democracy, the settlement between the pre-capitalist ruling classes and the emerging bourgeoisie analysed by John Ross in the last issue of International, whose character has been so important for the specificity of capitalist democracy in Britain.
Despite all these reservations, however, on balance the book can be recommended as an introduction, though a flawed one, to the particular terrain it surveys. It is readable, at times entertaining and will no doubt provide a useful starting point for many educational discussions.
PLASTIC PEOPLE?
Marx and Human Nature, Verso, 1983, £2.95.
'Marx did not reject the idea of a human nature. He was right not to do so.' Norman Geras' conclusion, backed up by detailed analysis of Marx's writings, which have often been interpreted as arguing against any fixed concept of human nature, is of decisive importance for Marxist analysis.
Most arguments about human actions starting from a conception of fixed human nature are profoundly reactionary, denying the possibility of change and assuming the general attributes of the present generation within its determinate social relations to be characteristic of humankind throughout [illegible] this kind of conception. The actual state of human nature at any time, for Marx, could only be gauged from the totality of the social relations within which the essential and un[illegible] (as good as [illegible] on the timescale of human evolution) natural attributes of humankind are constrained.
Geras' detailed and painstaking demolition job on [illegible] is of great validity in arguing against biological determinism. Such theories provide the basis for Walden2, the authoritarian utopia of BF Skinner, not the self-determining Marxist utopia of the associated producers. Marxism is scientific because its utopia corresponds to an unalienated human nature no longer contradicted by its containing social relations.
At 116 pages, the book is too short, especially as 30 of them are devoted to detailed textual analysis of Marx's sixth thesis on Feuerbach. The book ends just where the really interesting questions begin. So we know humans are not plastic; what are they?
100 YEARS ON
Martin Eve and David Musson (eds): The Socialist Register 1982, Merlin, 1982, £4.50.
This is the nineteenth Socialist Register and the first not to be edited by its founders, Ralph Miliband and John Saville, who we are assured in the preface [illegible] for the 20th anniversary issue in [illegible]. It contains much the usual mixture with, if anything, more that is of interest than in recent years. Stuart Hall is in fine form on the battle for socialist ideas [in the] 1980s; [illegible] thought-provoking though the substance of his argument on the solidity of the Thatcherite ideological ascendancy seems unnecessarily pessimistic [illegible] coverage of Eastern Europe — Bill Lomax's updating of his book Hungary 1956, Dennis MacShane's useful account of Solidarity since the Jaruzelski coup, and a reprinted interview with Isaac Deutscher on the history of Polish communism. Ernest Mandel contributes a useful (though slightly dated) account of the Chinese economic crisis and David Ruben and Paul Kelemen provide trenchant though controversial critiques respectively of Marxist writing on the Jewish question (in particular that of Abram Leon) and of Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux's study of the Ethiopian revolution.