By: Michael Newman (Merlin Press, London, 2002. pp. xiv + 368.)
| In the mid-1970s, Ralph Miliband, although a Marxist, was one of the most cited political scientists in the world. By the early 1980s at the University of Sydney, so it was said, a student in Government could choose courses from first year to fourth in which Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society was required reading. Moreover, the political scientist was also a political agitator, his reputation reaching beyond academe, and beyond the intellectual Left, into the world of radical action. Michael Newman’s book reproduces the 1981 Pulitzer-prize winning photograph of a prisoner in the South-East Michigan State Prison, arms through the bars of his cell, defiantly brandishing a copy of Miliband’s book. Miliband was widely known for his campaigning against the Vietnam War and for his defence of direct action by staff and students at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the University of Sussex. | 1 |
| Because his life was part of contemporary history, it is difficult not to read about him without reflecting on the political present. Today his ideas are neglected in academic circles, the anti-globalisation movement requires contemporary gurus, and the formation of an independent socialist party, for which he argued and worked over many years, is still unrealised. | 2 |
| The great merit of Michael Newman’s book is that it deals equally with these two aspects of Miliband’s life. It begins with the teenage Miliband learning about class oppression in Belgium, where his working-class Jewish family, having fled Poland after World War I, lived in exile. As Newman suggests, it was not his becoming a Marxist in these conditions that was unusual or formative for Miliband; it was the ‘deep-rooted and passionate’ commitment that sprang from his hatred at the way class inequality had affected his family. Escaping with his father to England in 1940, Miliband soon showed both his prodigious intellectual talent and his sense of being an outsider. He learnt English, completed his schooling, and enrolled at the LSE. Meanwhile, although committed to working-class politics, his honest assessment of his feelings while working in menial jobs was that he would always feel superior, intellectually and politically, to ordinary people. Affective experience aside, Miliband would remain a labour intellectual, in the sense of locating himself intellectually and politically within the organised labour movement and the space, the labour public, that it provided for alternative ideas and arguments. | 3 |
| Taught and mentored by Laski, Miliband began as an historian of political ideas. Explaining how Miliband moved from Laski’s simpliste view that ideas should be studied as reflections of reality to the view that, because ideas played a role in power struggles, they had to be interrogated as ideologies, Newman lets us see Miliband’s own involvement in Labour’s power struggles. During the 1950s he was part of the Bevanite Left. His first book, Parliamentary Socialism, provided historical evidence that Labour’s unquestioning parliamentarism had always favoured the social reformers over the socialists in the party. It also showed that the social reformists were themselves being sidelined by the neo-liberal ‘revisionists’. What did the history of socialism offer as a solution in this situation? A ‘left’ reconstruction of the labourist alliance with the social reformers to rescue the party from the revisionists, or the formation of a new socialist party? Miliband’s approach to the study of ideas meant that there was no simple answer; it would depend on the analysis of the interests of those using the ideas. Miliband’s friendship with C. Wright Mills at this time would strengthen him in this approach, as Newman explains, although Miliband never accepted Mills’s argument that the agency of intellectuals had replaced the agency of the working class. | 4 |
| For each of the subsequent books, Newman similarly provides an account of its connection with Miliband’s political activities. Newman’s book is in fact as much organised by Miliband’s politics as it is by his writing, and as such acknowledges an important aspect of the latter’s influence, the applied nature of his thought. This is true even of The State in Capitalist Society. The charge of empiricism against Miliband that followed his extended polemic with Poulantzas, a charge that Newman has little difficulty in disproving, has obscured just what it was Miliband wanted the Left to do with his book. In Newman’s biography, four chapters out of nine deal with the period in which Miliband wrote this book, clarified its implications for socialist politics as he engaged with the ‘second’ new Left, and then spelled out the lessons in Marxism and Politics. With this extended discussion, Newman counteracts the unfair legacy of that debate, and it is, I think, the most original and valuable contribution of his book. | 5 |
| Newman sums up his argument on this period of Miliband’s life by writing that ‘many of his deepest instincts were as much liberal as Marxist’: from the early 70s he emphasised the democratic over the class-oppressive aspects of the capitalist state. The background to this shift was the over-heated radical politics of the ten years after 1964. Miliband was not alone in becoming more ‘political’, striving to make each argument, each conference, and each publishing project more than just ‘intellectual’ work. At the same time, he came to a disillusioning series of conclusions about the political vehicles for socialism. Although never a Communist, he had sympathised with the role of the Soviet Union in international affairs and welcomed signs of liberalisation under Khruschev. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, however, he decided Leninism was a Blanquist distortion of Marxism, and that socialist humanism could not survive under conditions of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’. British Labour’s support for the United States in Vietnam convinced him that socialists should not waste their energies trying to win control of the Labour party. As for the student revolutionaries, he became increasingly alienated by the cult of violence among them, their contempt for research and intellectual life, and their preoccupation with attacking conventional morality. Newman provides an entirely convincing account of the disorienting effects of these shifts in Miliband’s politics, the resultant stridency in his intellectual interventions, and his growing commitment to political liberty and intellectual freedom as essential elements of democratic socialism. Marxism and Politics (1977), in an ‘applied’ reading, emerges as a case for reviving the kind of reformist socialism that existed prior to 1914, brought up to date by his proposal for strong institutions of civic power to work alongside a socialist government. | 6 |
| In the 1980s, sections of the Left rejected class analysis but Miliband defended the objective character of the class structure and the role of organised labour in the fight against capitalism, especially in his 1989 book, Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism. It did not seem to occur to him that his own concern to extend the bounds of capitalist democracy was part of the very drift away from a focus on capitalist class inequality that he was resisting. Out of step with the new social movements, Miliband quickly became yesterday’s man on the agitational front, although he redoubled his efforts to unite socialist intellectuals and, in a curious reversion, he became Tony Benn’s chief behind-the-scenes adviser, hoping that a new socialist party would be the result. | 7 |
| In general, Newman’s book is less successful in integrating this period of Miliband’s life into his account. I think there are two reasons. Most obviously, this was a period of personal turmoil for Miliband, and to treat it seriously would require a more psychologically grounded portrait than is possible because Miliband’s family and friends remain prominent on the Left. Newman does not ignore Miliband’s subjectivity, but he treats it more fully for the early life than the later. Of course, Newman does not claim to have written ‘a biography’, but nonetheless, for this reader, the absence of an explicitly biographical argument, to integrate the book’s intellectual, political and personal strands, is a teasing absence. Secondly, I think that what Newman did set out to do — to place Miliband’s thought in the context of his project to create an independent form of socialism — needs a theoretical basis, particularly when the project ran into difficulties in the 80s and later. Without such a theory, Newman’s overall assessment of Miliband’s significance falls back on an analysis of his thought. The book’s final chapter, ‘Ralph Miliband Today’, achieves its purpose in showing how the resonance of his writing, its lucidity, empirical basis, and refusal of dogma, as well as its political themes and moral concerns, are of enduring importance. But it makes us forget that his project failed. | 8 |
| In fact, Newman’s book can be read as an account of the difficulties of the socialist intelligentsia in the era of the decline of the labour intellectual. Miliband’s view that radical students, feminists, anti-war activists and environmentalists should throw in their lot with the labour movement was never going to work. Similarly, his own on-again, off-again relationship with the Left of the Labour Party is instructive, as is his complete failure to convince his comrades that a new party of socialists in the labour movement was possible. His Marxist background led him to identify with ‘working-class’ and party-centred action, but as a model of intellectual work it deflected his attention from the changes in class, culture, and politics of his lifetime. As a result of these changes, there was no longer any labour alternative public sphere of consequence, no room for the kind of intellectual role he desired. A theory of intellectuals and publics would have helped to bring these elements of Miliband’s world into the picture. | 9 |
| The achievements of Newman’s book, however, are many. It is detailed, reliable, sympathetic and moving. Newman, whose previous books include studies of Harold Laski and John Strachey, is one of the few serious intellectual historians of the Left, and this book deserves to be a standard reference for many years. | 10 |
| University of SydneyTERRY IRVING | |
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