Ralph Miliband begins his classic book, Marxism and Politics, with the striking observation that no major figure in the Marxist tradition, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels themselves, offered a systematic elaboration of Marxist political theory. For Miliband, this glaring absence could be explained by the ambivalent position Marxists typically assigned to politics in their conceptions of social life in class societies. Paradoxically, the pervasiveness of conflict, and hence politics, in Marxist thought tended to drain the formal political sphere of its specificity and autonomy from other areas of social life.

“This very pervasiveness of politics,” Miliband argues, “seems to make it less susceptible to particular treatment, save in the purely formal description of processes and institutions which Marxists have precisely wanted to avoid.”

In its most extreme forms, this tendency can collapse the distinction between politics and economics, as in the idea that political actors are simply bearers of objective, preexisting interests, without any autonomy of their own — an idea which, in turn, requires a questionable concept like “false consciousness” to explain why working people often fail to fight for their own interests in the real world.