Ralph Miliband was my colleage at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Over the years that he taught there, he also became my friend. I relied on our talks in the corridor and the cafeteria, or sometimes at my home. Ralph was always warm and generous, often stubborn and always smart.

Ralph had divided his time between England and the United States for many years, teaching at Brandeis University in Boston before he came to New York. City University was a good place for him. The Graduate School sits smack in the middle of Manhattan, on 42nd Street, and it attracts lots of students who are working-class adults, many of them broadly on the Left, although more likely on the cultural Left, and preoccupied with varieties of identity politics. No matter, the students flocked to Miliband’s classes, took them enormously seriously, and he for his part found himself the mentor of some very smart gay and feminist activists, for example. Still, for him, the months spent in furnished sublets, away from the family that was dear to him, must have been a little gloomy, and I think grew increasingly so when illness became a presence in his life.

The most important thing about Ralph Miliband is that he was always a socialist, a term about which he remained entirely unapologetic, and which he never felt the need to qualify, as in ‘democratic socialist’ or ‘market socialist’. He understood socialism after all as essentially an extension of democratic arrangements to economic spheres, without which political democracy could not be realized. As for markets, they were in fact the problem, and a socialist society would necessarily have to sharply curtail them.

Most of Ralph’s work was concerned with understanding the capitalist state, and the politics of capitalist societies. For a time in the 1970s these preoccupations virtually described Left intellectual life. Now the great debates they generated seem to belong to a very remote past, and to reflect on them provokes in me a strange sense of hurtling backwards through time. In intellectual terms, so much has happened, so many words have been spoken or written. Consider the explosion of varieties of postmodernist theorizing, preoccupied with the evanescences of difference and text and totally dismissive, indeed disdainful, of Marxist categories of class. Or consider that even those who remain on the terrain of class and politics confine their arguments to reformist strategies narrowly delimited by international markets and the electoral calculations of social-democratic parties, largely giving up dialectical understanding of social change as conflict and upheaval. Indeed, not only has attention to class and class conflict faded, but the very idea of a capitalist state has evaporated.