Ralph Miliband was a Belgian-born British sociologist who was known as a
prominent Marxist author. He has been described as "one of the best known
academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P.
Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.
Miliband was born in Belgium to working-class Polish Jewish immigrants.
He fled to the United Kingdom in 1940 with his father, to avoid persecution
when Nazi Germany invaded Belgium. Learning to speak English and enrolling
at the London School of Economics, he became involved in left-wing politics
and made a personal commitment to the cause of socialism at the grave of Karl
Marx. After serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he settled
in London in 1946 and naturalised as a British subject in 1948.
By the 1960s, he was a prominent member of the New Left movement in Britain,
which was critical of established Socialist governments in the Soviet
Union and Central Europe. He published several books on Marxist theory and the
criticism of capitalism, such as Parliamentary Socialism, The State in
Capitalist Society and Marxism and Politics.
Both of his sons, David and Ed Miliband, went on to become senior members of the
Labour Party following their father's death. David was to become the British
Foreign Secretary, and Ed was elected party leader in 2010, resigning in 2015.
Life and career = Early life: 1924–1940 =
Miliband's parents had grown up in the impoverished Jewish quarter of Warsaw,
Poland. Samuel Miliband had been a member of the socialist Jewish Labour
Bund in Warsaw. In 1922, they were among the Polish Jews
who migrated westward, to Brussels in Belgium, after the First World War. It
was here that Miliband's parents first met, and they married in 1923. His
father, Samuel, was a skilled craftsman who made leather goods, and his mother,
Renia, travelled around selling women's hats. She was embarrassed by having to
work in this profession, hiding it from her neighbours, but required the extra
income due to the economic troubles of the Great Depression during the 1930s.
Renia spoke Polish fluently, but her husband had only had a very basic
education and, as such, probably only spoke Yiddish, but he taught himself
French by reading newspapers. Their son, Adolphe, was born in Brussels in 1924.
He grew up in Brussels, and in 1939, aged 15, he became a member of Hashomer
Hatzair, a socialist-Zionist youth group. In May 1940, following the
outbreak of World War II, the armies of Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, and the
Miliband family, being Jewish, decided to flee the country from the
anti-Semitic Nazi authorities. They missed the train to Paris and, although
Adolphe – who was then sixteen – wanted to walk to the border, the family
recognised that his younger sister Anne-Marie, who was only twelve, was too
young for such a trek. It was decided that Renia and Anne-Marie would stay in
Brussels, while Sam and Ralph would go ahead and make the journey to Paris.
However, along the way Sam decided to change the plan and went with his son to
Ostend, where they caught the last boat to Britain. They arrived there on 19 May
1940. = Early years in Britain: 1940–1959 =
In London, Miliband abandoned the name Adolphe due to its connection with Nazi
leader Adolf Hitler and instead began calling himself Ralph. He and his father
gained work in the Chiswick area removing furniture from houses bombed in
the Blitz and, after six weeks, were able to send news to Renia and
Anne-Marie that they were in London. Discovering that the Jews of Belgium
were being rounded up by the Nazis, to be sent to extermination camps in the
Holocaust, Renia and Anne-Marie managed to escape to a rural farm, where they
were hidden by a French family until after the end of the war, when they were
reunited with Sam and Ralph. However, several of Miliband's relatives and his
best friend, Maurice Tan, were killed in the Holocaust.
To his dismay, the teenage Miliband came across antisemitism in London. In a
diary entry made shortly after he arrived in Britain, he wrote:
The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist
people in the world ... When you hear the English talk of this war you
sometimes almost want them to lose it to show them how things are. They have the
greatest contempt for the continent in general and for the French in
particular. They didn't like the French before the defeat ... Since the defeat,
they have the greatest contempt for the French Army ... 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.
Learning to speak English, Ralph gained a place at Acton Technical College in
west London with the help of the League of Nations' Commission for Refugees in
January 1941. After completing his course there, he gained the help of the
Belgian government in exile to study at the London School of Economics. He had
become interested in Marxism and revolutionary socialism, and visited the
grave of Marxism's founder Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery in north London, to
swear an oath to "the workers' cause". Meanwhile, with the constant aerial
bombing of London by the Luftwaffe, the LSE was evacuated to the premises of the
University of Cambridge. Harold Laski, the historian and socialist theorist,
was a dominant figure in the LSE at this time. Miliband studied under Laski, and
was considerably influenced by him politically.
Miliband volunteered to be sent to Belgium to assist the resistance
movement, and passed his medical in January 1942, but as a Polish national
he was not allowed to join until the Polish authorities gave consent. He
asked Laski for help in joining the services, and shortly afterwards A. V.
Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote advising him to "go and see a
vice-admiral at the Admiralty, who would fix it up". Miliband joined the Royal
Navy in June 1943. He served for three years in the Belgian Section of the
Royal Navy, achieving the rank of chief petty officer. He served on several
warships, tasked with intercepting German radio communications. His initial
exhilaration soon wore off as months passed without seeing action, then in
June 1944 he took part in supporting the Normandy landings which he wrote was
"the biggest operation in history" and he "would not miss it for anything". He
saw further action at the Toulon landings.
After the war, Miliband resumed his studies at the LSE in 1946, and
graduated with a first-class degree in 1947. He began a doctorate on "Popular
thought in the French Revolution" in 1947, but did not complete his thesis
until 1956. After obtaining a Leverhulme research scholarship to continue his
studies at the LSE, Miliband taught at the Roosevelt College in Chicago. He
became a naturalised British subject on 28 September 1948. In 1949 he was
offered an Assistant Lectureship in political science at the LSE.
= New Left: 1960–1994 = Miliband joined the Labour Party in
1951, and was a reluctant Bevanite in the early 1950s. He joined the British
New Left, alongside the likes of E. P. Thompson and John Saville, at the New
Reasoner in 1958, which became the New Left Review in 1960.
Miliband published his first book, Parliamentary Socialism, in 1961, which
examined the role that the Labour Party played in British politics and society
from a Marxist position, finding it wanting for a lack of radicalism. Paul
Blackledge would later claim that it was "arguably Miliband's finest work". He
ended his membership of the Labour Party in the mid-1960s, and subsequently
remained independent of formal political affiliation. He began arguing that
socialists in Britain had to start working towards building a viable
alternative that would be genuinely revolutionary socialist in its
positions. He also set up the Socialist Register
with Saville in 1964 and was influenced by the American sociologist C. Wright
Mills, of whom he had been a friend. He published The State in Capitalist
Society in 1969, a study in Marxist political sociology, rejecting the idea
that pluralism spread political power, and maintaining that power in Western
democracies was concentrated in the hands of a dominant class.
Miliband was passionately opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam War.
In 1967 he wrote in the Socialist Register that "the US has over...a
period of years been engaged...in the wholesale slaughter of men, women and
children, the maiming of many more" and that the United States' "catalogue of
horrors" against the Vietnamese people was being done "in the name of an
enormous lie". In the same article, he attacked Harold Wilson for his defence
of the United States' action in Vietnam, describing it as being the "most
shameful chapter in the history of the Labour Party". He went on to say that
the US Government "made no secret of the political and diplomatic importance it
attached to the unwavering support of a British Labour Government".
He left the LSE in 1972, having found himself torn by the controversies which
had beleaguered the institution over the preceding few years, particularly the
LSE's responses to student protests in the late 1960s. He took up the post of
Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds. The time at Leeds was an
unhappy period for Miliband. He suffered a heart attack soon after the move, and
did not enjoy the administrative responsibilities as a head of
department. He resigned in 1978, and subsequently chose to assume several
posts in Canada and the USA. He took a Professorship at Brandeis University in
1977, and also lectured at other universities in North America, including
York University in Toronto and the City University of New York, although he
remained based in London. He published Marxism and Politics in 1977, and
Capitalist Democracy in Britain in 1982. By now Miliband was active in the
Socialist Society with friends such as Tariq Ali and Hilary Wainwright.
In 1985, his essay "The New Revisionism in Britain" appeared in the 25th
anniversary issue of the New Left Review in which he responds to writers
associated with the Marxism Today magazine such as such as Eric Hobsbawm
and Stuart Hall. Despite their differences, Hobsbawm had been a
long-standing friend of Miliband. He suffered from cardiac problems in
later life, and had a bypass operation in 1991. He died in 1994, survived by
his wife and sons. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, close to Karl Marx.
His last book, Socialism for a Sceptical Age, was published in 1994, after his
death. Personal life
Ralph married Polish-born Marion Kozak in September 1961. She was the daughter
of a steel manufacturer, David Kozak, with a Polish Jewish heritage, and also
one of his former students at the LSE. They made a home in Primrose Hill, and
later in Bolton Gardens, South Kensington, and had two sons, David in
1965 and Edward in 1969. = David and Ed Miliband =
His two sons both became Labour Party politicians, and in 2007 they became the
first siblings to serve together as cabinet ministers since 1938. His elder
son, David, was Labour MP for South Shields from 2001 to 2013. From 2005 to
2010 he served in the cabinet, latterly as Foreign Secretary. His younger son,
Ed, was elected a Labour MP for the Doncaster North seat in 2005. From 2007
to 2008 he served as Minister for the Third Sector in the Cabinet Office and
drafted Labour's manifesto for the 2010 general election. In October 2008 Ed was
promoted to the position of Secretary of the newly formed Department of Energy
and Climate Change. On 25 September 2010, he became the 20th leader of the
Labour Party after a leadership contest in which David had also run.
The journalist Andy McSmith of The Independent, in comparing the lives of
Ralph, David and Ed, said that the elder figure had a "nobility and a drama" that
was lacking in his sons' "steady, pragmatic political careers". On 27
September 2013, the Daily Mail published an article disputing Ralph Miliband's
patriotism. Three days later after negotiations the paper published a
response by Ed Miliband describing his father's life, and saying the Daily
Mail's article was character assassination. At the same time as
publishing this response, the newspaper reiterated its assertion and published
an editorial refusing to apologise. The Labour leader's office responded that
Miliband "wanted the Daily Mail to treat his late father's reputation fairly.
Rather than acknowledge it has smeared his father, the newspaper has repeated
its original claim. This simply diminishes the Daily Mail further. It
will be for people to judge whether this newspaper's treatment of a war veteran,
Jewish refugee from the Nazis and distinguished academic reflects the
values and decency we should all expect in our political debate." Ed Miliband's
response gained support from across the political spectrum, and was endorsed by
the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. When it was found that a Mail
on Sunday reporter had intruded on the private funeral of Ed Miliband's uncle,
the newspaper group's proprietor Lord Rothermere and the Sunday paper's editor
apologised for this. Bibliography
Parliamentary Socialism: A Study of the Politics of Labour. ISBN 0-85036-135-4.
The State in Capitalist Society, ISBN 0-7043-1028-7
Marxism and Politics, ISBN 0-85036-531-7 Capitalist Democracy in Britain, ISBN
0-19-827445-9 Class Power and State Power
Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism
Socialism for a Sceptical Age References
Footnotes Bibliography
Further reading Aronowitz, Stanley, and Peter Bratsis.
Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered Barrow, C., Burnham, P., Wetherly, P.
eds. Class, Power and State in Capitalist Society: Essays on Ralph
Miliband Blackledge, Paul. "Labourism and
Socialism: Ralph Miliband’s Marxism". International Socialism 129.
Newman, Michael. Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left
External links Marxists.org Bibliography of Miliband
Lipman-Miliband Trust Socialist Register