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Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left
Merlin Press: London 2002, £15.95, paperback
368 pp, 0 85036 513 9

Susan Watkins

A SOCIALIST CASSANDRA

In 1989 Ralph Miliband outlined two possible scenarios for the future of
class conflict. In the first, the deregulation and de-unionization of economic
life would be mirrored at the political level. Social Democratic and Labour
parties might retain their names but the notion of a fundamental challenge
to capitalism would have become decisively marginalized. Conflicts would
continue but would not constitute a threat to the social order; they might
even strengthen it, by functioning as safety valve or prompt to minor
reforms. An exception would be terrorism, practised by tiny groups at the
extremes of the political spectrum. This would be ‘a problem and a nuisance’
but quite incapable of destabilizing a securely legitimated system.
Miliband himself dissented from this view. Firstly, he pointed out in
Divided Societies, such a development should be understood not as a lessen-
ing of social conflict but rather a massive extension of ‘class struggle from
above’. More importantly, the nature of capitalism itself—a process of domi-
nation and exploitation that was intrinsically incapable of making rational
or humane use of the immense resources it had brought into being—would
renew, from generation to generation, the search for a systemic alternative.
The balance between a sober appreciation of class forces and reasoned hope
for a better world was central to Miliband’s work as a political scientist,
which provided such a solid keel for the various generations of the New Left,
through his books—Parliamentary Socialism, The State in Capitalist Society
and others—the annual Socialist Register and his many contributions to this
journal, of which he was a founding editor. Michael Newman’s meticulously
researched biography casts new light on the formation of Miliband’s world
view and the passions that lay behind it.

152 new left review 19 jan feb 2003

 watkins: A Socialist Cassandra 153

He was born not Ralph but Adolphe, in Brussels in 1924. His parents—
Samuel, an artisan leather-worker, and Renée, who ran a market stall selling

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hats—were newly arrived in the city: working-class, Yiddish-speaking immi-
grants, fleeing the economic chaos of postwar Poland. Samuel had been
a member of either the Polish Socialist Party (Miliband’s recollection) or
the Jewish Socialist Bund (that of his younger sister Nan). The price of politi-
cal citizenship in Belgium was more than they could afford, but Samuel
Miliband taught himself enough French to follow international affairs in the
newspapers and to discuss with his nine-year-old son Hitler’s accession to
power, the Spanish Civil War and especially, as Miliband recalled later, ‘the
daily events in Paris, changes of ministry, the respective merits of this or that
leader’. If his parents inevitably linked the rise of Nazism to earlier experi-
ences of Polish anti-Semitism,

The French connexion was greatly strengthened by the fact that Léon Blum,
a Jew, was leader of the French Socialist Party, and in 1936 Prime Minister . . .
The political climate in our home was generally and loosely left: it was
unthinkable that a Jew, our sort of Jew—the artisan worker, self-employed,
poor, Yiddish-speaking, unassimilated, non-religious—could be anything
but socialistic.

He was sixteen when the Nazi assault on Belgium tore the family apart.
Miliband and his father fled towards the coast, walking all through the
night to reach Ostend where they had to battle for a place on the last
boat to Britain. They reached London on 19 May 1940. His mother and
little sister, too young for the journey, clung on in Brussels until the
round-up of the Jews in 1942, when they managed to find refuge on a farm.
Working as a furniture-shifter in blitz-struck London—and now renamed
Ralph at the insistence of his landlady, who found Adolphe insufficiently
patriotic—Miliband recorded his impressions of the country (in French) in
his teenage diary:

England first. This slogan is taken for granted by the English people as a
whole. To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation . . .
When you hear the English talk of this war you sometimes almost want them
to lose it to show them how things are.

A few weeks later, exploring bomb-sites in the West End: ‘You feel in these
ruins a wealth which hasn’t gone, which will begin again tomorrow, and
for which this bombing is not a major crisis’, whereas: ‘in Whitechapel,
in the Jewish area and the slums, the devastation is really terrible. Rows
of people, waiting to be evacuated. New wretched refugees, like the others,
with a bundle on their shoulder. Shame and indignation and fury. You
ask yourself: how can they live like this?’ The instinctive, almost innocent
 154 nlr 19

sense of moral outrage at such inequity was not just the reaction of a
war-traumatized working-class teenager. Four years later, as a Royal Navy
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interpreter, he would describe the ‘flagrant, enormous’ difference between

officers and men on board an overcrowded destroyer as ‘the negation of
elementary democracy’—a gulf as wide as that between ‘a palatial 300-room
country house and a Lambeth slum’.
By this time Miliband was writing in English, the nightmare of its
mastery already quite expunged. Early in 1941 he had enrolled at Acton
Technical College with a sense of himself, as he recorded—whether through
his parents’ encouragement or from his ‘Jewish-socialistic’ 1930s back-
ground—as ‘a budding intellectual’. His early essays, painfully composed in
the alien tongue, earned him 4 or 5 marks out of ten and strictures on his
grammar. One on ‘Death’ that cited Darwin and Freud (on the adoption of
primitive funeral rites in modern society) was returned with the comment
that future work would not be marked unless spelling mistakes were cor-
rected. ‘Those verbs’, Miliband would cry in a subsequent essay, imploring
his reader ‘to imagine the torture of someone who not only has to write an
essay, but has to write it in a foreign language’:

Those verbs danse their crazy dance; like worms who dance on a grave, they
dance in my head . . . This is to what amounts my writing of an English essay.
Thereafter (notice my courage) I read it again. To me it is perfect. Not a syl-
lable misplaced. The essay comes back crossed and recrossed, the marks of
the blue pencil as abundant as the words. The reward of my patience, my
courage in fact, all the sentiments which are the best of myself.

Nevertheless he managed to matriculate that summer and, in October 1941,

started at the London School of Economics, evacuated to Cambridge. His
own writings powerfully convey the joy of entering ‘another world’: icy
winters heated by ‘foul but hot coffee’, intellectual controversy and ciga-
rette smoke. The 350-strong student body—the majority were women—was
highly cosmopolitan, left-dominated and, for Miliband, animated by the
intense excitement of close contact with Harold Laski. ‘He’s become pan brat
with me’, he boasted in a letter to Samuel, early in 1942. With Mancunian
paternalism, Laski—the subject of an earlier book by Newman—called him
‘a grand lad, one of the best I’ve had in years’.
A far more incisive political scientist than his teacher, and distinctly
to his left, Miliband would retain Laski’s focus on the discipline’s core
concepts—parties, classes, states—and breadth of comparative reference.
Laski helped him personally in crucial ways—securing a Royal Navy posting,
from 1943–46, that overrode competing Belgian claims; intervening with
the Attlee administration to reunite the Miliband family, separated for years
after the War by Labour’s anti-Semitic immigration policies, which kept
 watkins: A Socialist Cassandra 155

Renée and Nan stranded in Belgium. In 1947, under Laski’s supervision,

Miliband began the immense labour of his PhD thesis on radical thought

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during the French Revolution, examining the political ideas of the illiterate
menu peuple through their expression in police records, court hearings and
other primary sources (the thousand-page manuscript was submitted in
1956). In 1949, Laski got him his first post as Assistant Lecturer in the
Government Department of the LSE. ‘We never felt compelled to agree with
him’, Miliband wrote in warm tribute, after Laski’s sudden death in 1950,
‘because it was so obvious that he loved a good fight, and did not hide behind
his years and experience’. In other respects, Laski’s legacy was more ambig-
uous. As a teenage refugee Miliband had found his way to Marx’s grave in
Highgate and made a silent vow of allegiance, clenched fist raised. Under
Laski’s tutelage, however, he steered clear of any Communist affiliation,
eventually joining the Labour Party to work with the left Bevanites for a ten-
year span from 1951.
His formation was thus quite distinct from that of most of the British
New Left which emerged after 1956—the ex-CP dissidents of the New
Reasoner, the left bohemians around the Universities and Left Review or the
young Aldermaston marchers. In some ways, Miliband’s experience was
already much broader. Unlike CP members, he had been able to go to
the United States and had taught summer courses at the radical Roosevelt
College in Chicago in the late 1940s—excited by the city but horrified by
the McCarthyism: ‘papers and radio full of stuff about reds, spies, loyalty’.
In 1957, C. Wright Mills erupted into his life, dazzling the students at an
LSE seminar in April and, in July, whirling Miliband off on a trip to Poland.
Newman makes surprisingly little of this postwar tour of the land of his
forebears, or of the political and intellectual impact of the relationship with
Mills; but when Miliband spoke of The Power Elite as ‘intense, muscular,
alive—one of the very few books to glitter among the grey mass of what
passed for social analysis in the frightened fifties’, he was surely, in part,
evoking its author.
The emergence of the New Left in the late 1950s offered—finally—the
possibility of genuine intellectual collaboration at home. Contacted by John
Saville to write for the New Reasoner in 1958, Miliband contributed substan-
tial essays on socialist strategy; and wrote book reviews for Stuart Hall and
Raphael Samuel at the ULR. Towards the end of 58 he joined Saville and
Edward Thompson on the New Reasoner editorial board and, a year later,
wrote a ‘letter of thanks’ to the pair of them:

It’s an awkward letter to write in some ways. Actually it’s just to say a personal
thank you to both of you. In effect you have given me a sense of socialist
comradeship I’ve not had since early student days . . . You have both made me
 156 nlr 19
feel that, beside the sense of belonging to a movement, I was also involved
in a personal comradeship with people who had more experience than I, who
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could share in a direct way the political worries I have, who spoke my lan-
guage and who welcomed me as one of their number.

What he badly needed now, he went on, was ‘not reassurance but really
solid criticism’. He had been wrestling with a manuscript on the politics of
Labour—‘I’ve worried myself into a fine state about the whole affair, and
now feel the thing is damn awful’.
Parliamentary Socialism, published in 1961, remains a landmark of
British political historiography, a coolly scathing account of Labour’s record,
from its subaltern role in the First World War government, dedicatedly fun-
nelling troops to the Front—Keir Hardie: ‘the lads who have gone forth to
fight their country’s battles must not be disheartened by discordant notes
at home’—through MacDonald’s 1931 cuts in unemployment benefit, in def-
erence to the Tories’ view that these were better implemented by a Labour
prime minister; to the ‘circumspection’ of the 1945 Labour Manifesto, in
which boards of nationalized industries would be dominated by business-
men and financiers, while Britain’s foreign policy, as US Secretary of State
Byrne noted, was ‘not altered in the slightest by the replacement of Churchill
and Eden by Attlee and Bevin’. Miliband had a superb sense for detail
(Attlee: ‘The King always used to say that I looked very surprised at the extent
of our success’). His anatomy of what Parliamentary Socialism termed the
‘sickness of labourism’—the knightly order of trade-union general secretar-
ies and crippling inhibitions of the parliamentary Left—became the starting
point for a radical British politics of the 1960s.
Miliband was alone on the New Reasoner editorial board in opposing
the 1959 merger with the ULR that founded New Left Review. It was partly
because he felt so deeply involved with the New Reasoner, he explained to
Thompson and Saville, that he had ‘fought so stubbornly against its dis-
appearance’. Another reason—swiftly vindicated—was his scepticism as to
the viability of such a heterogeneous editorial project as the infant NLR.
Miliband left with Thompson, Saville and others when its unwieldy board
fractured in April 1963. That same evening, he sat down to type the proposal
for the annual that would become the Socialist Register, which he would co-
edit until his death in 1994.
Thirty years later, Miliband would look back with some satisfaction at the
Register’s solid record of contemporary political analysis and tally of classic
pieces (though early hopes for ‘culture, Freud and all that jazz’ never materi-
alized). At the time, though, he was ferociously self-critical, chastising Saville,
his co-editor, that the Register’s contents—Isaac Deutscher on Maoism, in
1964, and on Khrushchev in 1965; Ernest Mandel on neo-capitalism; Marcel
Liebman on the meaning of 1914; Lukács on Solzhenitsyn—were ‘not good
 watkins: A Socialist Cassandra 157

enough . . . We simply must raise our standards: this year is no improvement

on last—most disappointing’. Miliband’s editorship drew on a strong net-

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work of political friendships. Marion Kozak describes, as well as Deutscher,
Mandel and Liebman, ‘Leo Huberman, Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff
of Monthly Review, K. S. Karol, André Gorz and other French intellectuals,
Rossana Rossanda in Italy. Ralph had many American friends from the late
1940s as well as New Left acquaintances he had met through C. Wright
Mills . . . and the Poles, including Kolakowski, Schaff and Lange’.
If Socialist Register published strong pieces on anti-colonial struggles
and the Vietnam War, the demands of the new student movement initially
caught its editors on the back foot. On sabbatical to finish The State in
Capitalist Society, Miliband followed the events of May 68 and the invasion
of Czechoslovakia from a distance. Back at the LSE that autumn he was
shaken by the students’ adoption of direct action—endorsing the phrase,
‘fascism of the Left’ in a letter to Marcel Liebman. But what horrified
him most was the administration’s immediate resort to brutal authoritari-
anism: ‘Sophisticated Oakeshottismus is a fairly thin crust; when it cracks,
as it did here, a rather ugly, visceral sort of conservatism emerges’. The
events of 1969—the students’ protests against the School’s investments in
South Africa and its heavy-handed security measures at home were coun-
tered by mass arrests, followed by the illegal dismissal of a lecturer, Robin
Blackburn—shattered Miliband’s relationship with the LSE. At the time
he tried to mobilize the academic staff to resist any expulsions; later he
reproached himself for not having resigned on the spot, for the atmosphere
there now seemed irremediably poisoned. In 1972, despite the wrench of
leaving London, he accepted the politics chair at Leeds; teaching part-time,
after 1977—the strain of the LSE business compounded by a bad heart
attack—at Brandeis, Toronto and CUNY.
The State in Capitalist Society had been published in 1969 and Newman,
drawing on Miliband’s notes, gives an illuminating account of its genesis.
The book was dedicated to Mills, whose study of the interlocking circles
of the US ‘power elite’—warlords, corporate rich and political directorate—
was a clear influence. ‘I mourn the death of C. Wright Mills, bitterly and
personally’, Miliband had written in these pages in 1962, after Mills’s final
heart attack that March. Two months later, in Chicago, he noted in a diary:
‘I decided tonight—and discussed with Marion—the writing of a big book
on The State, something that would take possibly five years, that would
be theoretical, analytical and prescriptive . . . with the world as my prov-
ince’: a detailed comparison of the state in capitalist, socialist and ex-colonial
countries, ‘history, sociology and politics combined in one intimate whole’.
The classical Marxist concept of the state as executive agent of the ruling
class was ‘enormously helpful’ but not enough: ‘an instrument is not always
 158 nlr 19

pliable, develops interests, values, procedures of its own. But need to explore’,
he underlined. The well-known result was a major sociological study of the
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operations of the state throughout the advanced capitalist world—the US

and Britain, France, Germany and Japan; a solid refutation of the main-
stream conception of a neutral instrument, responsive to the democratic
interplay of competing forces.
It was a difficult book to write. Struggling with the conclusion through
the spring and summer of 1968, Miliband wrote to Saville that the work had
‘brought out certain quite basic and unresolved tensions in my thinking’.
The final chapter was far-sighted but sombre: if the state in advanced capital-
ist societies served primarily as guardian of dominant economic interests,
the limited civil and political liberties it permitted were still of crucial value,
and the goal of socialist strategy should be their radical extension and fulfil-
ment. But in the absence of political agents—serious mass parties—ready to
carry forward that agenda, the likelihood for the decades ahead was rather
a new form of authoritarianism, which preserved a carapace of democracy
while reducing the power of representative institutions, whittling trade-
union rights and restricting the area of legitimate dissent. Social Democratic
parties, he thought, would play a key role in bringing this about.
To re-read the Miliband–Poulantzas debate today, in the hour of Cooper
and Bobbitt, is to be forcefully reminded that, despite the polarizations of
the time—‘instrumentalist’ vs ‘structuralist’—its two protagonists shared a
common strategic project. Even Miliband’s impatience in private correspond-
ence (‘there is a vast amount of sheer charlatanism in the Althusserians’
stuff’) has the dismissive ring of a family quarrel. Nicos Poulantzas’s 1969
review of The State in Capitalist Society in NLR had questioned whether
Miliband’s method—the direct rebuttal of the ‘neutral’ state by the use of
empirical data—did not leave him ‘floundering in the swamp of his adver-
sary’s ideological imagination’: overstressing the role and motivation of the
individual (bureaucrat, businessman, politician) as social actor; failing to
comprehend them as essentially the bearers of the objective structure of the
state, itself relatively autonomous from the various ruling-class fractions.
In his reply (NLR 59), Miliband mounted a gallant defence of the uses
of empirical validation—a procedure to which, he suggested, Poulantzas
and other Althusserians ‘give rather less attention than it deserves’. To
dismiss the subjective nature of state elites completely—reducing them to
the merest ‘executants of policies imposed by “the system”’—resulted in a
‘structural super-determinism’ that would detect no difference at all between
a state ruled by liberal or social democrats, and one run by fascists. It was,
he argued, equally as false as the obverse position, which assumed that the
election of a Social Democratic government, plus a few changes in adminis-
trative personnel, would impart an entirely new character to the state.
 watkins: A Socialist Cassandra 159

By the 1980s, Miliband had evolved into an elder statesman of the

independent Left, increasingly committed to the practical political work

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of building a radical alternative to New Labour: the Socialist Society; the
Chesterfield Conferences; the Independent Left Corresponding Society (with
Tony Benn). If in retrospect some of these attempts seem myopic, they
nevertheless provided valuable opportunities for molecular socialist educa-
tion. With his straight-backed, naval bearing and clarity of address, Miliband
was a compelling speaker. His death has robbed a new generation of young
radicals, sickened by Blairite sermons for the neoliberal order and its wars,
of a great teacher.
Admirably clear in its construction and scrupulously researched, per-
haps the most valuable contribution of Newman’s book is its thorough
pillaging of Miliband’s letters, diaries and private papers. Here, Miliband’s
character—his enthusiasms, his temper—springs from the page, and with
it the intensity of feeling that drove his scholarship. This goes a long way
to compensate for an otherwise rather drily text-based work. There is no
attempt to evoke, or conjure up from other sources, the atmosphere of 1930s
Brussels, navy life or postwar London: the flats, the cafés, the movies, the
emotional life—‘culture, Freud and all that jazz’. There seems to be not
a single adjective of colour—red or brown, green or yellow—in the entire
book. In this sense, the promise of Newman’s subtitle, ‘and the Politics of
the New Left’, goes unfulfilled. There is no broader portrait of the move-
ment of which Miliband was a part, or the times through which he lived: the
intensity of political debate, the clash of personalities, the historical break-
ing points; the particular inflexions of culture, background and individual
psychology with intellectual or political allegiance and tradition.
Lacking such a backdrop, Newman is driven to a rather forced insist-
ence on the originality of Miliband’s political positions, which on the whole
fell squarely within the broad consensus of the independent left. On the
Soviet Union, for instance—moving from postwar scepticism, combined
with instinctive hostility to McCarthyism, to qualified optimism for the
Khrushchevite thaw, to a strong condemnation of the 1968 invasion of
Czechoslovakia that led him to redefine the Communist states as ‘oligarchical
collectivist’, a position reinforced during the return of the Cold War in
the early eighties—Miliband was not out of step with broad layers of the
American and European left. On Palestine, too, his defence of Israel during
the 1973 war—he saw the blockade of the Gulf of Aqaba as a threat to the
state’s existence—and subsequent powerful condemnation of Israeli poli-
cies during the first intifada, were not unusual.
More striking was his overall political consistency, holding steady against
the prevailing winds of both the 1960s and the 1980s; and his prescience.
In his 1985 essay in NLR, ‘The New Revisionists’, he argued that a crucial
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weakness of those fleeing rightwards towards populism, localism and iden-

tity politics was their refusal to analyse, or even acknowledge, the ‘shape
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and strategy of the enemy’: their backs were turned to the tidal wave of neo-
liberal restructuring that was about to come crashing down on their heads.
Yet the wealth of personal material that Newman presents does much to illu-
minate the sensibility that lay behind such far-sighted analysis. From early
on—a working-class Jewish boy growing up, with eyes wide open, in inter-
war Europe—Miliband combined a strong sense of internationalism with a
remarkably clear grasp of power structures and of what he would describe,
in Parliamentary Socialism, as ‘the hard and basic fact of proletarian exist-
ence’. Class, religious background, nationality, or its lack—he put ‘Belgian’
in inverted commas when describing, in his teenage diaries, what he felt
marked him out from his English co-workers in the bomb-struck house-
clearance business—all clearly played a part; but there was, above all, the
attraction of ideas.
For what was most distinctive in Miliband’s contribution to the New Left
was the particular quality of independence in his thinking—expressed with a
calmness and lucidity to which the strongly emotional tones of his personal
correspondence stand in interesting counterpoint. A striking example is his
classic 1979 essay on the role of the individual in history, ‘Political Action,
Determinism and Contingency’. Miliband pinpoints the inadequacy of clas-
sical Marxist thought on the question—its lazy reliance on a few famous
formulations. He carefully unpicks the argument that, if not Napoleon—or
Hitler, or Stalin—the times would have thrown up another similar figure,
with the same results; and that the role of such ‘accidents’ as character can
only be to accelerate or delay the general course of development. Instead,
he urges, we need to conceptualize two different, but interrelated, histori-
cal processes: ‘transgenerational’ changes taking place over centuries—the
shift from feudalism to capitalism, for instance—in which contingencies
will indeed have only a minor effect; and ‘generational’ history, at the level of
decades, where individual interventions—Lenin in 1917—may have a deci-
sive impact. In a transgenerational perspective, the Bolshevik revolution will
‘work its way into the tissue of time’: Lenin loses his importance. Yet if
these long-range processes suffuse generational history, they do not negate
it. For nobody really worries about the posterity of twenty generations hence
and ‘there is enough “openness” in generational history to make the actions
of individuals count, and their involvement meaningful’. Miliband’s own
interventions in his time live on, in his books and essays; but his personal
writings, amply extracted here, give a vivid sense of the man behind them—
making this a good book to have.