He wrote: ‘I understand it to involve two fundamental and intertwined objectives – democratisation far beyond anything which capitalist society can afford, and egalitarianism, that is to say the radical attenuation of the immense inequalities of every kind, which are part of capitalist democracy; and essential to the implementation of these two, the socialisation of a predominant part of the means of economic activity.’

If this socialism is to be advanced, socialists need to know what they are up against, what opportunities there are and what tools they have available to them. The body of Ralph’s work is a systematic description and analysis of the institutional arrangements of capitalist society that operate to preserve the existing order by managing class conflict, while at the same time he explores the potential to promote a socialist revolution.

His The State in Capitalist Society effectively shredded the liberal pluralist view of the state being the independent arbiter of conflicts within society and exposed its true class nature.

Capitalist Democracy in Britain updated Laski’s seminal work Parliamentary Government in Britain, describing how ruthlessly the state in all its forms – parliamentarism, the courts and local government, alongside the trade unions – plays its role in the containment of pressure for change.

His major difference with Laski was the latter’s belief in the potential of the Labour Party as a vehicle for bringing about socialist change. It is the perennial debate that has bedevilled the left since Labour’s inception.

Ralph Miliband’s devastating critique of the Labour Party in Parliamentary Socialism portrays the party as being so integrated into parliamentary politics that while the Labour left may ‘mount episodic revolts’ and ‘its leaders may have to respond with radical sounding noises to the pressures and demands of their activists, the Labour Party remains in practice a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system within whose confines it is even more firmly and irrevocably rooted.’

Decades on, all attempts to create a party to the left of Labour have failed. But in his last work surveying the potential across the left, both in Labour and beyond to the emerging social movements, Ralph remained optimistic that, though the prospect may seem remote at present, the ‘accumulation of grievances’ under capitalism will bring about the election of a left government. His last chapter even sets out the details of a strategy a left government would have to pursue to stay in power to advance socialism.

As we move into a period where grievances are already accumulating the left may well have an opportunity to seize if it has the ability and creativity to bring together that broadest alliance, sharing Ralph Miliband’s socialist vision.

It was not just Ralph Miliband’s ideas but also his approach that persuaded me: a notable modesty, refusal of sectarianism and a combination of deep socialist conviction with constant interrogation of established views, including his own. Such characteristics meant, incidentally, that the only kind of leadership in which he was ever interested was teaching and encouraging others, in every possible form.

The ideas of Miliband senior are of central importance for thinking about political strategy today. They have been developed, modified and practised by many influenced by him. But the profile of these ideas is not always as high as it should be, since no organisation, quite appropriately, has ever been formed around them, beyond open, non-bounded, eclectic projects such as the international annual journal Socialist Register since 1964, the Socialist Society in the 1980s, the Socialist Conferences and Movement in the 1990s and Red Pepper over the past decade and a half.

An ironic side effect of the distinctly tarnished campaign for the Labour throne (tarnished by the toxic record of New Labour – a group of privatisers, torturers and warmongers as far removed from the founders of the Labour Party as fire from water) is that Ralph’s thinking has once again been able to shine.

Ralph Miliband was a lifelong socialist. This fact shaped his intellectual biography and his analysis of the Labour Party came through the prism of envisaging a political strategy for socialists in the UK. As far as the Labour Party is concerned, Ralph developed a distinctively complex and nuanced position – in a context where much of the British left has been bogged down in endless wrangles on simplistic dichotomies of whether to work inside or outside the Labour Party, whether to set up/declare a new party immediately or not, and so on.

Labour and socialism

His classic analysis of the Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism, analysed the ways that the party’s deep attachment to parliament, and with it to the British state, overrides episodic and largely rhetorical commitments to socialist change, and leads to an under-valuation, and indeed often an outlawing, of extra-parliamentary, social and industrial struggle and politically oriented civic organisation.

In the first edition, Ralph left open the possibility of transforming Labour into a party able to lead a process of socialist change. But after observing Labour in government in 1964-70 he concluded that the DNA of the British state – the reliance on the financial interests of the City and the primacy of the relationship with the US in shaping foreign policy – had become the DNA of the dominant institutions of the Labour Party too. But that was not the end of the Labour Party for socialist strategy.

His analysis of the party’s history, in particular its relationship with the unions, led him to understand that large numbers of socialists were active in it as the only means of working class political expression. They believed, however misguidedly, that through the complex and often opaque institutions of party democracy they could make it their own. He was also realistic about public opinion. Since he clearly recognised that the mass of working class people were not socialists, he rejected the idea that the workers were merely betrayed by its leadership; the main defect of the leadership, in his view, was how little it contributed and how much it got in the way of helping people understand the relevance of socialist policies to their needs.

This analysis led his strategic thinking and engagement in three complementary directions. First, while not remaining a member of the Labour Party, he argued for socialists inside and outside it to collaborate closely, including on broad, non-electoral, political projects. After all, he insisted, they agreed on more than they disagreed. And he put this into practice, working through the Socialist Society with Tony Benn and others in the Campaign group.

At the same time, and without contradiction, he argued that a new party of the left was needed. It couldn’t be simply declared, he made clear, and it would be the result of political processes that we could only in part control, including a change in the electoral system and political collaboration across party divides.

Third, what was needed in the meantime, he argued, were persistent projects of socialist education and consciousness-raising through every possible means, reaching to the grassroots of the trade unions and other social movements. Here again he worked to put these ideas into practice, collaborating at times with Ken Coates (see page 21), among others who shared the same view. He talked frequently about making socialism the ‘common sense of the age’.

Useful compass

This creative strategic thinking provides a useful compass. It needs to be updated to take account of three distinctive features of today’s context.

First, the things that for so much of the 20th century kept socialists active in the Labour Party – more or less democratic policy-making structures at the constituency and conference level, along with the party’s explicit commitment to socialising the means of production (the original Clause Four) – have been destroyed. They have been replaced by weak consultation processes and by vague pledges of fairness and opportunity amidst a culture that discourages debate, dissent and disagreement – the lifeblood of an active party. Would-be Labour leaders court votes by referring to ‘this great party’ but in many localities the Labour Party, as an organisation, has, under New Labour, become a rump.

Second, we are now surrounded by the carcasses and fading memories of numerous attempts to create new parties of the left. They have foundered on familiar rocks of sectarianism, narrow mindedness and impatience with regard to the conditions under which a party to the left of Labour would be feasible.

These failures have been costly in terms of energies and resources. They have discredited an idea that needs a long period of preparation through collaboration of a non-electoral kind, experimenting and building trust and a common political culture.

Third, the defining issue for the coming years will be the defence (which must also mean imaginative strategies for improvement) of public services and decisive steps towards public control over finance and investment in a green recovery. This has significant strategic implications. More than 60 per cent of TUC affiliates are now public sector unions. Where Thatcher sought, in good part successfully, to destroy the mining and manufacturing unions, the present right intends to destroy these public service unions.

A majority of these are not affiliated to the Labour Party (only around 400,000 of Unison’s 1.2 million members are affiliated to the Labour Party; neither the civil service nor teachers unions have political affiliations). This means that on a highly political issue – the future of public services – these unions have to create ways of having a political impact other than through direct influence in the Labour Party.

Thus material and political imperatives converge for all those broadly on the left to collaborate outside of electoral politics. The need presents itself in a more acute way than ever it did in Ralph Miliband’s lifetime to create an independent political force far wider than the Labour Party – and reaching out to social liberals (see page 16), as well as to environmental, feminist and community activists – whose leadership and primary political orientation must be rooted not in Westminster but in communities and workplaces in every city, town and village.

There is nothing inevitable about such a new dynamic. People are still dazed at the scale of the threat to our social well being. But there are signs, to be interpreted cautiously, of bold and strategic public sector alliances (for example in the north east) addressing the wider economic strategy necessary to sustain public services.

Ed Miliband talks of ‘renewing the movement’. Movements are never abstract. What leads people to move is a cause affecting their daily life. What better way of building a movement than for leadership candidates to throw themselves into the political movement emerging for the future of public services and a green and socialised economy that could sustain them?

This would mean breaking from the parliamentarism that Ralph Miliband so rigorously anatomised. It would also mean breaking from a culture that has become so self-referential under New Labour that if parties had arses the obvious metaphor would apply. (And so far, the leadership campaign shows few signs of widening the perspective.)

There is no shortage of intellectuals who have the same limitations of vision. The distinctive feature of Ralph’s work came from his absolute determination to demystify the ideas that made inequality ‘normal’, to uncover the reality, to clarify and to explain and to reach out to those who had the material power to transform that reality. It is for this reason that I am convinced that in the years to come, it is his books and ideas that will come to the fore when the name Miliband is mentioned.

There are a number of obvious reasons for this decline. The voting system itself is grossly unfair. The number of votes cast for a particular party is not reflected in the number of seats obtained. The present Labour government only secured 35 per cent of the votes but gained 55 per cent of the seats. According to a survey of 36 democracies cited by Professor Paul Whiteley of Essex University, the UK is second to bottom of the league in terms of this electoral non-correlation or distortion. It undermines the legitimacy of any government’s claim to have a popular mandate.

Once elected, the party of government is largely determined by one person, the prime minister. The constitutional position is quite indefensible given the range of prerogative powers that can be exercised without the need for parliamentary consent. If any lessons are to be learnt from the Chilcot inquiry, it has become clear that Blair, supported by a coterie of spin doctors, conducted what has been termed ‘sofa politics’. This enabled him to keep a very tight control on all major decisions, and in the case of the Iraq war he managed to foist his decision upon a subservient Cabinet and a cowed House of Commons.

He misled both, not only about the nature and quality of the intelligence surrounding WMD, but also about the evolving nature of the legal advice. Both he and Jack Straw marginalised or dismissed legal opinions to the contrary in a high-handed and cavalier manner. Nothing can be more serious for our so-called developed and sophisticated democracy than the fact that, when the chips were down, there were only a few lone voices that could penetrate the blanket of obfuscation. Worse still, there has subsequently been a dogged unwillingness to recognise these shortcomings. The position of the Tories on all these matters has been no better, and has only got more critical with the benefit of hindsight. In any event, let us not forget the Conservative government’s machinations over Suez and the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war.

The overarching theme running through these events is a ‘lamentable’ lack of accountability (to adopt an epithet used by Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office lawyer who had the courage of her convictions to resign). Public opinion has been regularly disregarded or brushed aside. The anger engendered by this is tangible. Having spoken at a large number of public meetings throughout the autumn of 2009, I became acutely aware of this constant refrain. People do not feel that their views, let alone votes, matter.

Hot on the heels of this feeling, there comes an even greater anger compounded by the MPs’ expenses scandal. Both the major parties are caught up in this and the public rightly regard it as nothing short of corruption. Of course it is not the first time that we have been treated to such a spectacle. John Major’s government faced the ‘cash for questions’ debacle; Tony Blair squirmed his way around the Bernie Ecclestone £1 million donation to the Labour Party.

It is instructive to note the history of the present revelations. Initially there was an attempt to deny access to the relevant information by a challenge in the courts. This failed and thereafter publication was deferred and delayed, no doubt while minions were running round in small circles attempting to redact embarrassing material. Fortunately they were pre-empted by the timely intervention of the Daily Telegraph. Now the latest suggestion is that MPs might escape liability by invoking parliamentary privilege.

For me, not only as a long term Labour supporter but also as a lawyer, the most reprehensible aspects have concerned the way in which the human rights agenda has been manipulated and undermined, both here and abroad, first by the government and then by the opposition. The decision to go to war was itself a serious affront to the rule of law and the authority of the United Nations. But it does not end there. The UK colluded on an array of thoroughly unlawful activities: Guantanamo Bay, rendition, torture, and within the UK the quite untenable regime of foreign nationals detained in Belmarsh followed by draconian control orders, in addition to proposals for 90-day pre-charge detention.

Besides scathing judgements from the House of Lords on the detention and control order regimes, Mr Justice Sullivan handed down a searing attack on the unlawful decision-making process undertaken by a succession of Labour home secretaries in relation to asylum claims. The catalogue of the erosions is immense. Fundamental protections have been watered down relating to the onus and standard of proof, the role of the jury and the quality of evidence. At the same time, the power of information gathering and intrusion has been extended, right through to an extraordinarily pernicious initiative – the Prevent Agenda.

Indeed, the basic right of a citizen to participate in collective and mass peaceful protest has become a risky and fragile exercise. The ultimate insult to all this injury is the demise of legal aid across a whole range of important areas where vulnerability for ordinary people is at its greatest. The response of the opposition has been virtually non-existent on these issues and equally bad when the Tories were in power, such as their abolition of the right to silence. It reached a nadir at the time of the Conservative Party conference last autumn, when David Cameron mooted, as one of his priorities, the abolition of the Human Rights Act. Somehow he felt it would be necessary to withdraw from the Lisbon Treaty. This was about as flaky as his recent volte farce over the economy.

It took other, more knowledgeable members of his party to point out that some of the most significant contributions in the post-war years to the construction of human rights legislation had come from Tory statesmen.

For all these reasons the stranglehold of the two established parties has to be broken. The old order has to be well and truly booted out to enable fresh minds to take stock of the crisis in confidence and political bankruptcy that has occurred. They have to discover the hard way that they do not enjoy a divine right to rule. This is a lesson they will only begin to appreciate once they realise they have not been elected.

The cover of the last edition of Red Pepper posed the question ‘Can the people take back power?’ The individual voter at this election has a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make a real difference and drive home a clear message. Do not vote for candidates from either of the two major parties unless there are exceptional reasons.

This is not quite the Australian ballot paper option -’none of the above’. There are plenty of respectable alternatives without engaging with the mad fringe.

A parliament in which neither of the two usual suspects is given the run of the mill will provide one of the most salutary and educative experiences it is possible to deliver. It will need courage to do this, and old habits die hard, but there is no need to take fright. The roof will not fall in any further than it has already.

Other democracies survive quite healthily while having to forge coalitions and take account of diversity. I vote for an interregnum while they all go back to the drawing board, examine their consciences, and begin to act like principled human beings.

MELISSA BENN Long ago, as an A-level student of 19th-century European history, I had to answer an exam question: ‘France is bored. Discuss.’ A few weeks ago it looked as if Britain was bored with New Labour. Like a play that has gone on too long, the nation seemed impatient of the central characters in the drama, their apparently fatal compromises and stale dilemmas.

This is not just politics as soap opera, although there are alarming soap opera elements in the pre-election scene. But now opinion is shifting once again: the lead between the two main parties is closing and there is widespread anticipation of a hung parliament.

Of course, there are very good reasons for the public’s ennui and apparent electoral paralysis. The continuing fall out over the disastrous Iraq war, the bail out to bankers without due consequences and recent research pointing up the growth of income inequalities constitute some of the more pressing reasons why people now want a change.

So, to paraphrase the journalist John Harris’s question of 2005, who do we, on the broad left, vote for now?

It feels too easy, in every way, to answer, as Mike Mansfield does, nobody. Or, not Labour. Mike advocates a form of grand refusal, sparking a brief period of chaos from which a new radicalism, and possibly a new electoral system, can emerge.

I tend to think somewhat more prosaically in my middle age. Chaos will only benefit the forces of conservatism. Do what Mike says and we risk a Tory government.

I will return to the very real dangers of Cameron’s Tories, and the forces they will unleash, in a moment.

First, let me say, there is much in Mike’s critique that I agree with. Under both real and imagined threats, Labour has dangerously curtailed our civil liberties. The Iraq war remains a massive, tragic mistake. I too dislike the predominance of ‘sofa government’, a rather disingenuous label for essentially undemocratic rule by a macho cabal, and the corresponding decline of genuine cabinet government.

Incidentally (although it is not incidental at all), women in politics have lost most from this inner sanctum approach to power. Never ‘one of us’, always overlooked and too easily derided, the gaudy promise of ‘Blair’s Babes’ has given way to the seedy reality of male business as usual, at least at the top of politics.

However, I would question whether the expenses scandal is on a par with the outright corruption of the cash-for-questions of the Neil Hamilton era. Certainly, it revealed some MPs to be greedy, but many of them operated within the rules as then existed (lax and misguided as these may have been). There has been a distinctly sanctimonious tone to the never-ending press and public outrage. The now widespread view that our democratic representatives can’t be trusted, by definition, is dangerous for us all and for the future health of our democracy.

At the same time, I sense a kind of displacement in the unending public fury at MPs. It’s as if anger at widespread inequality in income and life chances has become directed at those who have not tackled it (Labour) or those who blithely benefit from privilege (the Tories). The parliamentary expenses system is not to blame for that; it is the politics, or lack of it, that guide our parliamentary system that needs tackling.

But let’s also acknowledge, Mike, the many admirable things that Labour has achieved since 1997 – from tax credits for poorer families to the giant leaps in the infrastructure of child care, from massive investment in our public services to the dismantling of section 28 and the introduction of civil partnerships.

I was speaking to an MP from the north east the other day and he said, ‘I only have to walk round my constituency to see the changes that a Labour government has made.’ And let’s at least credit Brown and Darling with the vision and nerve to lead us, and most of Europe, out of a potentially terrifying economic collapse, even if governments everywhere were unable to hold capitalism to greater account in the ensuing months and years.

Yes, there have been failures, notably the over-enthusiastic embrace of the choice/market agenda in health and education.

Even here, however, if you look at recent policy on education, the move towards fairer school admissions and the emphasis on collaboration rather than competition between schools, it is obvious that Brown is more willing to use the power of the state to promote fairness than Blair was.

So why vote Labour? First, we desperately need to keep out the Tories. Should Cameron be elected, the difference between the parties, including the rather nasty rightist hinterland that always emerges with a Tory victory, already evident in the party’s European ties, will become obvious within months.

As the economy has worsened, Cameron’s pseudo-progressive sheen has faded fast. In his own words, about education, a Tory government will be ‘unashamedly elitist’. From fox hunting to marriage, it will aim to restore the traditional established order. One of the reasons the Tories can so easily propose draconian cuts in public services is their visceral disconnection from the lives of millions of public sector workers. This is indeed the party of unabashed privilege.

Second, arguing for a fourth term for Labour does not constitute a passive acceptance or sanctioning of all that has gone before. It is not a call for more of the New Labour same. It is both a recognition of the fundamentally different traditions, ties, and values that historically define and still motivate Labour, that require our support at an important moment, and a demand for change as the recently announced Compass group initiative ‘Transforming Labour’ suggests.

Income inequalities must be reduced, public services protected and improved, and imaginative schemes put in place for new, pressing social problems, such as long term care for the elderly. Indeed, Brown’s ‘death tax’ scheme is already putting the Tories on the defensive.

We need not just new principles but a new political language for the post-Blairite age. Ed Miliband has sensibly spoken of modern Labour values embracing both self interest and shared interest. Whether it is re-elected or consigned to the wilderness, Labour now needs leaders who bring fresh purpose, real imagination and unquestioned human decency to the national political conversation.

MICHAEL MANSFIELD You’re right, Melissa, about what Labour needs now. The same applies to the Tories. Why is this? It’s down to the demise of our moribund democracy due to the manipulation of power by those who have crafted personalised cabinet government for their own ends over the last 30 years. Fresh purpose, real imagination and human decency, along with courage and diversity have been relegated to a few on the back benches where they can be readily contained.

Melissa, I think you may have missed or misunderstood the thrust of my argument. I did not suggest voting for nobody, nor did I give a simple blanket ‘no’ to all Labour MPs anymore than Tory ones. There will be no serious debate about the necessary changes to the electoral system, to the constitutional arrangements concerning prerogative powers and the second chamber (overdue since Henry VIII), or to the role of the cabinet and political preferment, until individual MPs recognise this need.

It certainly won’t happen by voting the same Labour/Tory culprits back in because there’s nothing in it for them. Perpetuating the status quo is the name of their game.

Instead, I am advocating a breathing space to enable a radical overhaul. For this reason I raised the possibility of voting for perfectly respectable third parties, and even for the usual two party suspects where, exceptionally, they have demonstrated a conspicuously principled stand on all fronts. This is not voting for chaos. You cannot mean a vote for the Lib Dems, an honest independent, Respect, socialist candidates or the Greens is a vote for some kind of anarchy. To do so would amount to a denial of the very essence of democracy.

There is an urgency to re-engage with the electorate, to open up new opportunities, to inspire fresh talent and to encourage vision. You misjudge the public mood, which is well beyond the banality of boredom and the frustration of fatigue. It has become actively hostile, rightly indignant and justly distrustful. There is a real hunger for change, not a slight switch of channels to more of the same, to yet another soap opera with different characters but a similar theme. It’s time to transform the transmission.

MELISSA BENN Unfortunately, our democracy doesn’t allow for ‘breathing spaces’ between elections. Yes, the public mood is one of frustration and anger but your strategy still risks the return of a Tory government.

Take a look, Mike, at recent surveys of the opinions of Tory candidates likely to be elected in 2010. More tolerant on questions of private behaviour such as civil partnerships – the big ideological shift of the past decade or so – but nine out of ten want a cap on immigration and to slash public spending rather than raise taxes in order to deal with the deficit. Cameron’s ‘One Nation’ concerns will soon crumble under the combined pressure of the economy and his own backbenchers.

In contrast, many in the Labour party, the wider labour movement and enough of the party’s elected representatives are now moving in the other direction, towards what one Labour blogger has memorably called a ‘preferential option for the poor’.

When the Hills report was published, Harriet Harman said that class would be the defining issue of this election. Too little, too late, many would say, especially coming from a leading member of a government that has presided over rising income inequalities. But Harman’s statement is also a clear sign of the pressure that the public mood, and democracy itself, rightfully exerts. Failure to address class-related issues has been an important factor in the rise of the BNP, one minority party we have failed to discuss here.

Whoever wins the election, the task is now clear: to exert consistent public and campaigning pressure on our politicians, be it for publicly accountable and truly excellent schools, a living wage for all, protection of the NHS, true gender equality or the provision of more affordable housing. As for Labour, it can no longer afford to be covert in its plans for change, too clever by half in its public presentation. As the gap between the parties narrows, Labour should become bolder, not more cautious.

As the election approaches the voters are entitled to ask: after three terms in government, what do you now stand for, what change do you now want to make – and how precisely are you going to achieve it?

Harold Pinter provided us with a key to understand these parallel worlds in the lecture he gave accepting the Nobel Prize for literature: ‘The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power … What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies.’

The world of street protests reaching far beyond ‘the left’ is influenced by a process of unravelling the tapestry of lies woven around Iraq in the past eight years. The presence on demonstrations across Europe and the US of a new generation of activists and truth seekers, the generation of the Iraq war, is testament to this.

Across the Arab world too, a learning process has fuelled unprecedented mobilisations. Here is a generation that has been radicalised by the incompetence and indifference of Arab elites towards the sufferings of the Palestinians and their own people. Jamil Halil sees a new political scenario opening up in the Middle East.

Four days before Barack Obama took over the US presidency from the disastrous George Bush, one of the actors in the second political world, UK foreign secretary David Miliband, finally admitted what those of us in the rest of the world have long known. Bush was wrong. The ‘war against terror’ was ‘misleading and mistaken’. Far from defeating terrorism it has fed it.
So how does Miliband apply his new perception to the specific case of Palestine, where the ‘war against terror’ is effectively a cover for mass murder?

On 13 January, two days before his public rejection of Bush’s strategy, Miliband made his statement to the House of Commons after helping to steer resolution 1860 through the UN security council. The resolution asserts that both sides should cease military action. Above all it implies negotiations.

Did the foreign secretary’s statement to parliament challenge Israel’s refusal to meet this fundamental condition for peace? Miliband reported the reason for the Israeli refusal to negotiate. ‘Their argument,’ he said, ‘is that there can be no equivalence between a democratic state and a terrorist organisation.’

At no point did Miliband question this application of the George Bush manual of the war on terror. Nor did he draw on the diplomatic expertise of, for example, Jeremy Greenstock, the former British ambassador to the UN, who recently advised that Hamas ‘is not a terror organisation … it’s a bitterly angry grievance-based organisation wanting to end Israel’s occupation, preferably through negotiations … It has got a long way to go, but it’s capable of getting there; why has this not been explored?’

Instead, simultaneously with declaring the ‘war on terror’ to be a mistake, Miliband emphatically concurs with the Israeli government on its black-and-white view of the world: good versus evil, democracy versus terror. He contrasts Hamas’s ‘use of terrorism’ with Israel as ‘a thriving, democratic state with an independent judiciary’. Yet he makes no mention of Israel’s killing machine and its use of terror on a captive population – its state terrorism.

Miliband’s only challenge to Israel has been that as a ‘beacon of democracy’ it must be judged by the ‘standards of democracy and comply with the standards of international humanitarian law’. But with the basic premise of Israel’s war having been accepted and no attempt made to apply international law, these words have little meaning.

There is an immediate way Miliband could make a difference. He inherited the fatal refusal of the UK, along with the EU, the US and the UN, to recognise Hamas as the democratic choice of the people of Gaza. This effectively put Israel beyond international law, allowing it to treat the people of Gaza as mere obstacles to killing ‘legitimate’ targets. Miliband should break with this, as his parliamentary colleague Gerald Kaufman urges. Only then might we begin to accept that he is learning from George Bush’s ‘mistakes’.

The key difference between the situation today and the aftermath of the great crisis of 1929 is the absence of any identifiable constituency or agency capable of acting as a countervailing force to finance capital. The willingness of governments to throw 30 years of neoliberal economic doctrine out of the window in the past couple of months attests to their absolute terror at the thought that finance might lose its hegemonic position. It seems clear that no other force is currently capable of exercising that role: of organising, ordering and stabilising a sufficient range of social spaces, actors and institutions to preserve some semblance of civilised order.

At local, national, and global levels, institutions that could even potentially act as democratic counterweights to the power of speculative capital are hard to discern. Contrast this with the middle decades of the last century, when communism, organised labour, and the strength and autonomy of municipal governments all posed serious challenges to capital and made it possible for governments to implement the very high levels of regulation and socialisation typical of ‘Fordist’ capitalism.

The weakness of the state

The importance of this observation is that it draws our attention to one always-salient fact: the relative weakness of all governments when faced with the dynamic and relentless force of capitalism. Capital’s capacity to innovate, to reinvent and reorganise itself, to circumvent regulation and to disaggregate opposition has been well understood at least since Marx. Unfortunately, many political actors, commentators and citizens seem even yet to underestimate it.

The experience of the mid-20th century has left a powerful residual memory of a time when great power was in the hands of the state. During that time, a particular configuration of late-industrial technologies (electrical grids, advanced railway systems, motorway networks, early broadcast networks, pre-nuclear advanced munitions) required unprecedented levels of centralised co-ordination and gave national governments historically unique capacities to control flows of resources, people and ideas.

There are two main points to observe here. One is that the kinds of control and regulation that could be exercised by national governments during that epoch were specific to an industrial-technological context that has long been superseded in the cybernetic age, when punitive tax regimes or stringent labour laws can be evaded at the click of a mouse. The other is that even under those favourable technological circumstances, governments were only ever able to discipline capital effectively in situations where capitalism itself was still relatively underdeveloped, or where powerful social coalitions could be consolidated and mobilised against it (such as the alliance of unions, government institutions and manufacturers that made Roosevelt’s New Deal possible).

Today, globalisation and the difficulty of effective labour organisation leave left-wing governments in a comparatively much-weakened position. Despite this, the great Fabian fantasy – the dream of benign and omniscient government re-ordering social relationships from the centre of administrative power – maintains a grip on the imagination of both ‘left’ and ‘centre-left’ that is crippling in its consequences.

The weakness of the left

Radical critics have consistently and correctly pointed to New Labour’s enthusiastic embrace of most of the neoliberal programme, and suggested possible alternative directions. But they rarely, if ever, do so with any attention to this fundamental question: what might have to happen first in order to make it politically possible for governments to pursue such progressive agendas?

For example, can anyone really doubt that if New Labour had attempted to resist the international imperative towards privatisation, as many wish they had, then the press and the City would have turned on them savagely? Does anyone believe that New Labour in 1997 had the kind of movement behind them that has enabled Hugo Chávez et al to stand up to the ‘Washington Consensus’? Even with regard to such a controversial policy as the Private Finance Initiative, New Labour is entitled to ask how else its critics would have funded a massive wave of capital investment in the public sector without drawing on non-existent treasury resources – resources which could in turn only be replenished by means of politically intolerable tax rises.

This is not to say that the Labour government first elected in 1997 could not have pursued a progressive agenda as an alternative to its uncritical implementation of neoliberalism. But it is to raise the question of what exactly it is that critics on the left think that ‘progressive’ governments ought to do under conditions that are clearly unfavourable to the pursuit of democratic objectives. Leftist criticism far too often falls into the same trap as centrist Fabianism: imagining, or implying, that governments simply act on the world in a vacuum, making things happen just because they want them to. A more sophisticated approach would be to ask why the government has done so little to act to change the broader political conditions themselves, and to think about what it would have looked like had it tried to do so.

The Fabian fantasy is generally a delusion of the left and the technocratic ‘centre’, while the right normally suffers from it only during periods of desperation. The recurring fantasies that ‘traditional’ values can be re-asserted by government diktat, or that building prisons will somehow reduce crime, regularly grip the Tories when they are presiding over a major recession or mired deep in long-term opposition, but are usually abandoned whenever actual policy programmes have to be implemented.

The Conservative tradition proper has always understood that political success was not just about government making the right decisions, but about the mobilisation and selective empowerment of multiple constituencies. Today, we are living with the consequences of one of the most brilliant strategic realisations of this insight in British history. Central to the consequences of the credit crunch in the UK is the recruitment of a large section of the population into the speculative economy over the past 25 years.

Securing (and deploying) cheap credit against rising asset values is not merely a typical behaviour of contemporary capitalists: it is, as Braudel showed, arguably the constitutive practice of capitalism as such, ever since its beginnings in medieval mercantile Italy. The transfer of vast quantities of social housing stock to the private sector (at below-market prices) in the 1980s, the attendant policy of restricting its replenishment by denying local councils the right to build, and the deregulation of the financial services industry, all had the long-term effect of both restricting the supply of housing in this decade and enabling large numbers of new homeowners to benefit in cash terms by borrowing against the rising market values of their homes.

The decade 1997-2007 saw an orgy of consumer spending and rising household debts fuelled by mass participation in the consequent bubble. The result is that a falling property market has potentially devastating political implications. But the long-term socio-political consequences are even more dramatic. In effect, a large section of the British public has, for the first time, seen its spending-power derived from assets exceed (if only for a short time) that derived from wages. The result is that for the first time, a large section of the public has had very good economic and emotional reasons to think of themselves as, in effect, capitalists: concerned more with interest rates than wage levels and benefiting from rising asset prices.

Whatever the outcomes of the current crisis, the point to take from this situation is that the Thatcher government knew very well what it was doing in the early 1980s. Despite the obvious potential dangers, it was creating a new constituency of speculative asset-owners drawn predominantly from the social group who had previously been the mainstay of the labour movement: skilled manual workers. In doing this, it was creating a new locus of power, which could be expected to pressure any government to pursue particular policy objectives – low interest rates, easy credit, low inflation, low levels of financial regulation – irrespective of that government’s nominal political identity. We are still living with the consequences.

An alternative strategy

The question is: what might a progressive government’s equivalent strategy be? What would be our equivalent of council house sales: a policy that would be relatively easy to effect, but whose long-term consequences would permanently alter the power dynamics of British political culture? It is to this question, and not to a shopping list of fantasy policies, that the left should turn its attention in the coming years.

From this point of view, there are several key areas in which no effective action has been taken by New Labour and which could have provided the basis for a sustained and strategic route out of the current crisis if they had been attended to earlier.

First, for example, it is only in the past three years that the government has made even insignificant moves towards encouraging a revival of organised labour, and its record on pushing for flexible working across Europe more than offsets this gesture. Yet there cannot be any meaningful democracy in a society in which the entire field of work is depoliticised. It may be that the trade union movement as it currently exists needs to be reinvented beyond all recognition, but this is the kind of process in which governments can take a co-ordinating role, and politically it would have been quite possible for government to promote the idea that trade union membership is a social good (encouraging social solidarity, a meaningful engagement between employers and employees, and so on), and to facilitate the full-scale modernisation of British trade unionism. This has not happened to any significant degree: if it had, then a revived labour movement could now be proving an invaluable ally to a government faced with financial crisis and Tory revival.

Second, the distorting effect of media monopolies on our political culture is very well known. The rise of blogging, social networking and alternative web-journalism offers unprecedented opportunities for the growth of a new media culture that is far more democratic in its structures and organising ideologies than the one that has prevailed for the past few decades.

Yet government has not even begun to think about the possibilities of strategically encouraging such a development. Instead it cowers before Murdoch on a regular basis and even makes threatening gestures at the BBC (that great relic of the late industrial age, and of its hierarchical but collectivist values) when it thinks that is what he requires of them.

Third, it is widely acknowledged that government has made no serious moves – outside of the special case of national devolution – to reverse the Thatcherite trend towards the evisceration of local government. Even the Greater London Authority has no serious power, and that of the London mayor is strictly limited. However, the prevailing critiques of this situation only reflect the persistence and ubiquity of the Fabian fantasy.

Almost invariably, the ‘new localism’ speaks the language of decentralisation, of Whitehall ‘giving up power’. What this discourse fails to grasp is the extent to which local government has not simply been weakened by centralisation to Whitehall, but by the same global processes that have weakened Whitehall itself. Local government is not weak simply because Thatcher and Blair took some of its powers away, but because the mobility and fragility of local communities makes it increasingly impossible to mobilise constituencies against the actions or wishes of international corporations, which work tirelessly to acquire the rights to develop land, take over public services and speculate on property in their localities.

The point is that Whitehall does not actually have the power the ‘new localists’ imagine it to have accrued at the expense of localities. Rather, the UK government has largely acted as a conduit through which the international neoliberal programme to dismantle layers of potential opposition to capital has been implemented.

This is not to say that government could play no role in enabling new, localised democratic communities to come into being. It could do a great deal to encourage and facilitate the development of new and more participatory forms of local politics from which new centres of democratic power might emerge.

But, as in the case of the labour movement and the media, it would be a mistake to imagine such developments in terms of central government ‘handing down’ power from a position of prior omnipotence. It would be much more useful to conceptualise the process in terms of government actively facilitating the growth of alternative centres of power which might (or might not: this is always a danger) prove useful allies in the struggle to contain, direct and re-organise the creative/destructive force of capital.

Could any of this happen? Maybe, maybe not. What is clear is that the left will be wasting its time, and will never recover any credibility, if it merely harps on about all that the government has done wrong without proposing a viable alternative strategy. This is a moment when the crisis of neoliberalism may well prove terminal, but we will achieve very little by crowing or by proposing unworkable returns to the policy strategies of the 20th century.

The question that will soon emerge is whether the route out of the crisis will involve some revival and reinvention of democratic forces, which might help to stabilise the world economy without concentrating still more power in the hands of unaccountable institutions like the WTO or the great investment banks; or whether a new phase of capital accumulation will simply see state institutions take on an increasingly authoritarian role in securing conditions for profitability and social stability, with Singapore – or even China – replacing the US as the world’s hegemonic model. Those who hope for the former outcome would do well to think carefully about exactly what to demand of beleaguered governments, at a time when still-powerful voices will be calling loudly for the latter course to be followed.