Ralph Miliband
Ralph Miliband | |
---|---|
Born | Adolphe Miliband 7 January 1924 Brussels, Belgium |
Died | 21 May 1994 London, England | (aged 70)
Citizenship |
|
Political party | Labour (1951–1964) |
Spouse | |
Children | |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | London School of Economics |
Thesis | Popular Thought in the French Revolution, 1789–1794 (1957) |
Doctoral advisor | Harold Laski |
Influences | |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Sociology |
Sub-discipline | Political sociology |
School or tradition | |
Institutions | |
Doctoral students | Leo Panitch[1][2] |
Notable students | |
Notable works | The State in Capitalist Society (1969) |
Influenced | |
Military career | |
Service | Royal Navy |
Years of service | 1943–1946 |
Rank | Chief petty officer |
Part of a series on |
Marxism |
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Ralph Miliband (born Adolphe Miliband; 7 January 1924 – 21 May 1994) was a British
Miliband was born in Belgium to working-class Polish Jewish immigrants. He fled to Britain 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
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 the British Foreign Secretary from 2007 to 2010, whilst Ed became Energy and Climate Change Secretary and was later elected party leader, serving between 2010 and 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.[11]
In 1922, they were among the Polish Jews who migrated westward, to Brussels in Belgium, after the First World War.[12] It was here that Miliband's parents first met, and they married in 1923.[11] His father, Samuel (1895–1966), was a skilled craftsman who made leather goods, and his mother, Renia (or Renée, née Steinlauf 1901–1975), travelled around selling women's hats.[11] 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.[citation needed] 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.[13] Their son, Adolphe, was born in Brussels on 7 January 1924.
He grew up in the working-class community of Saint-Gilles, and in 1939, aged 15, he became a member of Hashomer Hatzair ("Young Guard"), a socialist-Zionist youth group.[11] In May 1940, following the outbreak of the Second World War, the armies of Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, and the Miliband family, being Jewish, decided to flee the country from the antisemitic 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 Anna Hélène, who was only twelve, was too young for such a trek. It was decided that Renia and Anna Hélène 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.[13]
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.[13] However, several of Miliband's relatives and his best friend, Maurice Tan, were killed in the Holocaust.[11]
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.[14]
Learning to speak English, Ralph gained a place at
Miliband volunteered to be sent to Belgium to assist the
After the war, Miliband resumed his studies at the LSE in 1946, and graduated with a first-class degree in 1947.
New Left: 1960–1994
Miliband joined the Labour Party in 1951, and was a reluctant
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.[16] Paul Blackledge would later claim that it was "arguably Miliband's finest work".[8] He ended his membership of the Labour Party in the mid-1960s, and subsequently remained independent of formal political affiliation.[12] 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.[8]
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.[11]
Miliband was passionately opposed to
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.[11] He resigned in 1978, and subsequently chose to assume several posts in Canada and the USA.[11] 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,[16] although he remained based in London.[16] 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.[19][20]
In 1985, his essay "The New Revisionism in Britain" appeared in the 25th anniversary issue of the New Left Review[21] in which he responds to writers associated with the Marxism Today magazine such as Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall.[22] Despite their differences, Hobsbawm had been a long-standing friend of Miliband.
He suffered from cardiac problems in later life, and had a
Personal life
Ralph married Polish-born Marion Kozak in September 1961.[25] 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 (from 2007) 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 (DECC). On 25 September 2010,[26] he became the 20th leader of the Labour Party[26] after a leadership contest in which David had also run. David would step down from politics in 2013, but Ed would later serve as Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy under Keir Starmer's leadership, following a stint as a backbencher in the aftermath of the 2015 General Election and during the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.[27]
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".[13] On 27 September 2013, the Daily Mail published an article disputing Ralph Miliband's patriotism with the headline "The man who hated Britain". 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.[28] The Labour leader's office responded:
[Ed 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.[29]
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.[30][31]
The Lipman-Miliband Trust
In 1974 Miliband's friend, Michael Lipman, established the Lipman Trust as a progressive funding body for socialist education. Miliband would serve as the Trust's first chair, until his death. Miliband invited both John Saville, his wife Marion, and other notable scholars, academics, and experts in socialist education, such as Hilary Wainwright and Doreen Massey to the Trust. Following Miliband's death, the Trust became the Lipman-Miliband Trust, in recognition of Miliband's many years of work.
The Trust remains an important funding body for socialist education and provides regular grants for a variety of educational projects. [32]
Bibliography
- ISBN 0-85036-135-4.
- ISBN 0-7043-1028-7
- Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ISBN 0-85036-531-7
- Capitalist Democracy in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), ISBN 0-19-827445-9
- Class Power and State Power (London: Verso, 1983) ISBN 0-86091-073-3 (cloth), 0-86091-773-8 (pbk)
- Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism (1989)
- Socialism for a Sceptical Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) ISBN 0-7456-1426-4 (bound), 0-7456-1427-2 (pbk.)
See also
References
- S2CID 155950833.
- ^ Panitch, Leo (7 August 2014). "Interview – Leo Panitch". E-International Relations. Interviewed by Fletcher, Louis. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
- ^ Allen, Josh (18 October 2013). "The Resurrection of Ralph Miliband". Jacobin. Retrieved 18 June 2020.
- S2CID 144003532.
- ^ Hopkinson, Amanda (16 February 2012). "Allan Segal Obituary". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 18 June 2020.
- ^ Coates, Tom (27 September 2018). "David Coates Obituary". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
- ^ Sunkara, Bhaskar (2014). "Project Jacobin". New Left Review (90): 35. Retrieved 18 June 2020.
- ^ from the original on 3 November 2013. Retrieved 13 November 2013.
- ^ Selected Writings, worldcat.org. Retrieved 8 February 2024.
- ^ "Writings of the Left" Cape, worldcat.org. Retrieved 8 February 2024.
- ^ doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/55138. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ a b c d Ali, Tariq (24 May 1994). "Obituary: Professor Ralph Miliband". The Independent. Archived from the original on 4 October 2013. Retrieved 1 October 2013.
- ^ a b c d e McSmith, Andy (7 September 2010). "Ralph Miliband: The father of a new generation". The Independent. Archived from the original on 4 October 2013. Retrieved 14 November 2013.
- ^ a b c Simkin, John. "Ralph Miliband: Biography". Spartacus Educational. Archived from the original on 3 October 2013. Retrieved 10 July 2011.
- ^ "History". Brunel University London. Archived from the original on 4 October 2013. Retrieved 2 October 2013.
- ^ a b c d "Obituary: Professor Ralph Miliband". The Daily Telegraph. 1 October 2013 [First published 7 June 1994]. Archived from the original on 1 October 2013. Retrieved 1 October 2013.
- ^ "No. 38454". The London Gazette. 12 November 1948. p. 5949.
- from the original on 4 November 2013. Retrieved 7 May 2008.
- ISBN 9780719067198.
- ^ Taylor, Matthew (1 October 2013). "Ralph Miliband friends dismiss Daily Mail's 'utterly grotesque' profile". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 1 October 2013. Retrieved 1 October 2013.
- ^ Miliband, Ralph (March–April 1985). "The new revisionism in Britain". New Left Review. Vol. I, no. 150.
- ^ Panitch, Leo. "Ralph Miliband, Socialist Intellectual, 1924–1994". The Socialist Register 1995. pp. 1–21. Archived from the original on 4 October 2013.
- ^ "From the archive, 23 May 1994: Ralph Miliband obituary - In the first rank of the dissenters". The Guardian. 10 March 2013.
- ^ Newsnight. 23 September 2010. BBC2.
- ^ Beckett, Andy (28 February 2004). "In the house of the rising sons". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2 October 2013. Retrieved 15 May 2010.
- ^ a b "Ed Miliband to take on brother David in leader battle". BBC News. 15 May 2010. Archived from the original on 16 May 2010. Retrieved 15 May 2010.
- ^ "Labour: Ed Miliband returns to Labour shadow cabinet". BBC News. 6 April 2020. Retrieved 25 January 2021.
- ^ Siddique, Haroon (1 October 2013). "Ralph Miliband row: what the Mail said and how Ed Miliband responded". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
- ^ Wintour, Patrick (1 October 2013). "Ed Miliband attacks Daily Mail for smearing his father". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 1 October 2013. Retrieved 14 November 2013.
- ^ Mason, Rowena; Aitkenhead, Decca (4 October 2013). "Mail attack on Ed Miliband worse than anything I faced, says Neil Kinnock". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 27 August 2014. Retrieved 11 April 2014.
- ^ Watt, Nicholas (8 October 2013). "Ed Miliband was right to challenge Daily Mail, says David Cameron". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 26 August 2014. Retrieved 11 April 2014.
- ^ "The Lipman-Miliband Trust | Funding socialist education projects". lipman-miliband.org.uk. Retrieved 25 January 2023.
Works cited
- Hallas, Duncan (1990). "Partial Vision". Socialist Worker Review 127. London: Socialist Workers' Party.
- Newman, Michael (2002). Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left. London: ISBN 978-0-85036-513-9.
Further reading
- Aronowitz, Stanley, and Peter Bratsis. Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered (University of Minnesota Press, 2002)
- Barrow, C., Burnham, P., Wetherly, P. eds. Class, Power and State in Capitalist Society: Essays on Ralph Miliband (London: Palgrave)
- Blackledge, Paul (2013). "Labourism and Socialism: Ralph Miliband's Marxism". International Socialism 129. London.
- Newman, Michael. Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (Merlin Press, 2002)
External links
- Ralph Miliband Archive at marxists.org
- Bibliography of Miliband at marxists.org
- Lipman-Miliband Trust
- Archival material at Leeds University Library
- Socialist Register