Class Power and State Power

Ralph Miliband is one of the major Marxist sociologists working today. His books, The State in Capitalist Society and Parliamentary Socialism, are standard reference points in all debates on the nature of the state.Less widely known, and never before collected in one volume, are Miliband's contributions to the development of socialist politics. As an essayist, he deploys a wide political culture and clarity of argument with a sustained commitment to socialist values. The topics of the essays gathered here were sparked by the key occasions of socialist debate in the past twenty years. They include socialist democracy; the relation between class power and state power in the transition to socialism; the role of human agency in history, and the character of the Soviet Union. Kolakowski, Bahro, Medvedev and Bettelheim are among the figures whose contributions are soberly and constructively assessed. The lessons of the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile are drawn in a tour de fo