Ralph Miliband: a public intellectual - Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left - Book Review

Monthly Review, Jan, 2004 by Richard Kuper

Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (London: Merlin Press, & New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002) 368 pages, paper $24.95.

Ralph Miliband (1924-1994) was an independent Marxist, writer, lecturer, and tireless campaigner for socialism. He earned a worldwide reputation for his work on the state in capitalist society and devoted much of his life to trying to get the left to take the politics, as opposed to the economics, of capitalism seriously. Committed and indefatigable, Miliband made a unique contribution to the left in Britain and had a significant influence on socialist debates in North America and elsewhere. He combined a passion for democratic socialism with a mental rigor, commitment to hard intellectual work, and an unwillingness to shirk difficult questions. As a public intellectual his life was exemplary.

The first of two children of Polish Jewish parents, Miliband grew up in the working-class Jewish community in Saint-Gilles in Brussels. Forced to flee with his father to London in May 1940 just before the Nazi invasion, Miliband was separated from his mother and sister throughout the war--and not permanently reunited until 1950. From the age of sixteen Ralph expressed a real anger about class divisions in society, something he never relinquished. He completed his schooling in England, learning English in the process, and went from the London School of Economics (LSE), to the navy, then back to the LSE to complete his degree and embark on a doctorate. While working on this he obtained a full-time post at the LSE where he was to remain until he took up a chair at Leeds in 1972. In 1977 he began teaching in the United States. From then until the nineties he would spend a semester a year in the United States or Canada--chiefly at Brandeis, York University in Toronto, or the City University of New York--and the rest of his time back in London writing and being politically active. His marriage to Marion Kozack in 1961 was the beginning of a deep personal and political partnership and, although it sounds pious, it is absolutely true to say that Ralph was devoted to Marion and doted on their two children, David and Edward.

His first major work, Parliamentary Socialism, appeared in 1961, followed by The State in Capitalist Society, in 1969. These books established his reputation as a major contributor to independent left thinking, and they, together with a widely publicized, extended debate with Nicos Poulantzas, on the nature of the state in the early seventies, brought him international recognition, in 1977 he published Marxism and Politics and then some others, none of which, it is fair to say, had quite the resonance of the earlier books. In 1964, Miliband and John Saville founded the annual Socialist Register. The Register was conceived of and produced as "part of a political mission," an ongoing contribution to critical debate on the left in which Miliband published some formidable essays of his own (p. 121). Miliband and Saville coedited the journal for more than two decades. Toward the end of his life, Miliband coedited the Register with his former student and colleague Leo Panitch.

All of this is carefully chronicled and analyzed in Michael Newman's magnificent political biography. Because Ralph Miliband's interests and activities took in every major political development in Britain during his adult life, we also have here an overview of the development of significant sections of the independent left in Britain from the fifties until the early nineties.

Miliband's work is that of an independent, undogmatic Marxist. While his evaluations shifted and changed in light of evidence and experience, his work has nonetheless an essential unity.

I would single out two themes as central to his work. First, foremost, and ever-recurrent was the question of agency. How was socialism to be brought about? The second central theme was the importance of civic freedoms. At the same time Miliband's approach was colored--positively--by the fact that he made no firm distinction between his academic and his political work. In both he deployed the same style of argument: a cautious, measured, reflective tone, occasionally suffused with ringing passion, that tried to engage with contrary ideas at their strongest in order to strengthen the force of his own responses.

On the first theme, the question of agency, Miliband never really wavered. Some kind of party was needed to spearhead the transition. But what kind of party? Parliamentary Socialism offered a devastating critique of the British Labour Party. Founded in 1900 by the trade unions to ensure that labor had independent political representation, the Labour Party appeared to provide a home for egalitarian socialists wanting to transform capitalist society. Miliband showed it to be dogmatically committed not to socialism and class politics, but to the parliamentary system. However more promising the Labour Party might have appeared as an instrument for radical change than, say, the U.S. Democratic Party, it was a dead end. Even so, it took Miliband a decade to follow this logic to its inevitable conclusion and to call explicitly for a new independent socialist formation.