Politics

Miliband: the socialist who hated Labour

May 13, 2010
Ralph Miliband
Ralph Miliband

If David Miliband is elected leader of the Labour Party, all three party leaders will be the descendants of European immigrants or refugees. That by itself would be noteworthy—but there's an extra element to the Milibands' background that makes his leadership bid particularly unusual.

Nick Clegg’s paternal grandmother was a Russian Baroness whose German-Russian aristocratic family fled the Bolsheviks. David Cameron’s great-great-grandfather, Emile Levita, was a Jewish immigrant who arrived from Germany in the 1850s. And David Miliband is famously the son of the Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, who was born in Belgium, the son of Polish Jews. Of the three, perhaps Miliband’s roots are the most intriguing. His father was, after all, a trenchant and long-standing critic of the Labour Party.

Ralph Miliband was born in Brussels in 1924. In May 1940, he and his father managed to escape to Britain while his mother and sister hid out in a village; Miliband went on to teach at the LSE from 1949 until 1972. He always viewed himself as “an independent socialist”, who briefly joined the Labour Party in the early 1950s, but left around 1960. He emerged as a key figure in the movement that became known as the new left, along with Raymond Williams, EP Thompson, the Labour historian John Saville, and Stuart Hall. All of them wrote for the first issue of The New Left Review—Miliband’s article was entitled “The Sickness of Labourism”.

His wife Marion Kozak, also Polish, later described how Miliband, Saville and Thompson soon broke with The New Left Review. Over a lunch of kebabs at the Milibands’ house, they decided to start a new left-wing journal, The Socialist Register, which Miliband co-edited for the rest of his life and which still exists today. Since it was founded in 1964, the Register has focused on changes in contemporary capitalism, imperialism and independence struggles in the third world, social democratic and communist parties, and Marxist theory. Miliband himself engaged in a long and acrimonious debate with the then-fashionable Marxist theorist, Nicos Poulantzas over the nature of the state.

Highlights of the journal over the past forty years have included: EP Thompson’s onslaught on Perry Anderson and the New Left Review group, “The Peculiarities of the English” and his famous exchange with Leszek Kolakowski in the mid-1970s; EJ Hobsbawm’s essay on “Guerrillas in Latin America”; (1970), Tariq Ali’s “Revolutionary Politcs: Ten Years after 1968” (1978), and Stuart Hall’s “The Battle for Socialist ideas in the 1980s” (1982). Regular contributors included Ernest Mandel and André Gorz, Isaac Deutscher, Kolakowski and Roy Medvedev. George Lukács contributed an essay on Solzhenitsyn for the second issue in 1965. The first issue included another piece attacking the Labour party, this time co-written by Miliband and John Saville .

Ralph Miliband continued to teach at the LSE until 1972, then at Leeds, and after that taught widely in the US. Over thirty years, he wrote seven books and countless essays on Marxist theory, the state and parliamentary democracy. He was a passionate critic of Labour throughout this time.

He died in 1994, two months before Blair became the leader of the Labour Party. Blair’s head of policy was the young David Miliband—soon to be joined by his brother Ed.