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Ralph Miliband in this classic text raises pertinent questions like: How and why does capitalism limit democracy and the meaning of citizenship? What is class and class conflict? What is the relationship between the capitalist system and the state apparatus? What is the interconnection between classes and their agencies or parties? What are the instruments through which the dominant class exercises hegemony? Why did post-revolutionary regimes, like the Soviet Union, fail to establish a system of socialist democracy? Miliband put forward a non-traditional approach to the subject a combination of a theoretical analysis with a passionate commitment to alternative left politics.  He analyses limits of bourgeois democracy, which is "crippled by its class limitations, and under constant threat of further and drastic impairment, never more so than in an epoch of permanent and severe crisis.  But the civic freedoms are the product of centuries of unremitting popular struggles. The task of Marxist politics is to defend these freedoms and to make possible their extension and enlargement by the removal of their class boundaries.