23: Industrial capitalism has developed to become state capitalism. This hardly, however, negates the fact that they are powerful, that they do wield vast political influence, and that they are able to engage in an effort of ideological indoctrination which is altogether beyond the scope of any other interest in society.’Provided the economic basis of the social order is not called into question, criticism of it, however sharp, can be very useful to it, since it makes for vigorous but safe controversy and debate, and for the advancement of ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ which obscure and deflect attention from the greatest of all ‘problems’, namely that here is a social order governed by the search for private profit. In such a system, governmental functions and public services are often organized as corporations, companies or business enterprises. Conditions in Russia were ripe for its abolition but they were not ripe for the abolition of capitalism. They use select privately owned companies to dominate certain economic sectors.They use so-called sovereign wealth funds to invest their extra cash in ways that maximize the state's profits. On the contrary, Miliband already discerned the significance of what he would later analyse more fully as a widespread ‘state of desubordination’ that was spreading through advanced capitalist societies by the late 1960s.One reason these new governments of the left seek to provide such reassurances to these forces is that they have normally come to office in conditions of great economic, financial and social difficulty and crisis, which they have feared to see greatly aggravated by the suspicion and hostility of the ‘business community.’ The State in Capitalist Society: ‘Reply to Nicos Poulantzas’, New Left Review 59, January-February 1970; ‘Analysing the Bourgeois State’, New Left Review 82, November-December 1972; ‘Debates on the Slate’, New Left Review 138, March-April 1983. The ideological assault they launched on the ‘state’ was all about reducing the expectations of the no longer fully-subordinate classes. Here was where ‘the special functions of conservative political parties’ came in, above and beyond that of corporate think tanks and lobby groups, and this was the case not only in terms of their indispensable role in the fashioning of ‘a unified, class-conscious policy offensive’, but also in terms of fashioning the ‘ideological clothing suitable for political competition in the age of mass politics.’In order to fulfil their human potentialities, advanced industrial societies require a high degree of planning, economic coordination, the premeditated and rational use of material resources, not only on a national but on an international scale.
Miliband pledged himself to the socialist cause at Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery as a 16-year-old, shortly after fleeing the Nazis in Belgium. It is in the formulation of a radicalism without teeth and in the articulation of a critique without dangerous consequences, as well as in terms of straightforward apologetics, that many intellectuals have played an exceedingly ‘functional’ role. But at the same time, he argued, both sides of the debate ‘have always conceived their proposals and policies as a means, not of eroding – let alone supplanting – the capitalist system, but of ensuring its greater strength and stability.’Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. It examines each part of the state, including the government, civil service, legal system and armed forces and their relationships with business, the media, religion and trade unions. The attention he paid to this in the book was explicitly designed to ‘serve as a necessary corrective to the notion that interests such as these are by virtue of their resources all-powerful. Scopri The State in Capitalist Society di Miliband, Ralph: spedizione gratuita per i clienti Prime e per ordini a partire da 29€ spediti da Amazon. Marxist academic Ralph Miliband's extensive and detailed analysis and critique of the role played by the state in advanced capitalist society. Whenever necessary and possible, private capital shall be encouraged to develop in the direction of state capitalism.It is only the old feudal large landed property which exists no longer. It was in the reaction to this pressure that neoliberalism struck its roots among the capitalist classes; in good part because capitalists had grown stronger during the post-war era, they refused to put up with such insubordination. Miliband’s argument is that in advanced capitalist societies there exists a “private and ever more concentrated economic power” and that the men who hold this power have a decisive degree of political power “in society, in the political system, and in the determination of the state’s policies and actions”.