Ralph Miliband

Adolphe (Ralph) Miliband was born in Brussels on . Both his parents had lived in the Jewish quarter in Warsaw. His father, Sam Miliband, a former member of the Red Army, had left Poland after the First World War and became a leather worker in Belgium. His mother, Renia Miliband, travelled around selling women's hats.
On 10th May 1940, Adolf Hitler launched his Western Offensive. Miliband managed to catch a boat from Ostend and arrived in England on 19th May. He settled in London and changed his name from Adolphe to Ralph. During the Blitz Miliband found work removing furniture from bombed houses.
In January 1940 Miliband became a student on a course provided by the International Commission for Refugees in Great Britain at the Acton Technical College. Miliband had been dismayed by the anti-Semitism he found in London. For example, he felt he was unable to tell his first girlfriend that he was Jewish. In his diary 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: (1) because they don't have order, (2) because they talk too much, (3) because they change their ministers every month, etc. 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."
Miliband was a victim of the campaign of people like Lord Rothermere, who had used his newspaper, The Daily Mail , to support Oswald Mosley and the National Union of Fascists. Rothermere also used his newspaper to promote the policies of Adolf Hitler and worked closely with Nazi spy Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe. As The Daily Telegraph pointed out in an article on 1st March, 2005. "In 1933, the year that Hitler gained power, MI6 circulated a report stating that the French secret service had discovered documents in the princess's flat in Paris ordering her to persuade Rothermere to campaign for the return to Germany of territory ceded to Poland at the end of First World War. She was to receive £300,000 – equal to £13 million today – if she succeeded. Rothermere, meanwhile, was paying the princess £5,000 a year – £200,000 today – to act as his emissary in Europe."
While studying English History (1066-1914) at college he became a Marxist. Although he initially received poor marks his improvement was spectacular and in October 1941 He won a place to study at the London School of Economics (LSE). Miliband was active in a variety of left-wing groups and in January 1943 was elected Vice President of the LSE Students' Union. At the LSE he was taught by Harold Laski. He later recalled: "We did not feel overwhelmed by his knowledge and learning, and we did not feel so because he did not know the meaning of condescension. We never felt compelled to agree with him, because it was so obvious that he loved a good fight and did not hide behind his years and experience." Miliband was deeply influenced by Laski but the two men often clashed about politics. Laski told his father in December, 1942: "Laski... started to talk to me about the need to judge things for myself and not only through the eyes of Karl Marx."
Miliband later explained why he was so impressed with Laski: "I think I know now why he gave himself so freely. Partly it was because he was human and warm and that he was so interested in people. But mainly it was because he loved students, and he loved students because they were young. Because he had a glowing faith that youth was generous and alive, eager and enthusiastic and fresh. That by helping young people he was helping the future and bringing nearer that brave world in which he so passionately believed."

In June 1943 Miliband joined the Royal Navy. He served on HMS Royal Arthur and HMS Valorous. On 12th February 1944 he wrote: "I joined the Navy on June 28th 1943 and at that time I felt a tremendous sense of exhilaration at the thought of participating in the task of winning the war. It seemed to me quite beyond doubt that the mere fact of joining the Navy made it possible for me to do some really useful work. Well, that feeling is wearing off fast. I have been on a destroyer for the last three months or so, and done my work I think carefully and efficiently. There is no need to elaborate on it, but not the wildest flight of imagination would make me honestly feel that I have done anything appreciable towards winning of the war and the liberation of Europe. We have not yet met a German vessel, we have not been attacked by ship or aircraft, we have hit no mine, we have neither sunk nor shot down anything, we have killed nothing apart of some fish who died from the effect of depth charges. In fact, apart of the regular action stations, some frights, some start shells and some exercise at shooting, we have just gone along as if it had been peace time. No wonder the feeling of exhilaration has worn off. That is a euphemism. I am heartily sick of it."
Miliband eventually saw action in June 1944 when he was involved in the D-Day landings in Normandy. He wrote that this was "the biggest operation in history" and he "would not miss it for anything". Miliband then joined the Mediterranean war fleet and saw action in the landings near Toulon. During this period he considered the possibility of being killed while fighting for his adopted country: "Because most people just can't visualise getting killed suddenly and soon. I know I can't. I realise full well that within let us say six months I may be dead but somehow it does not assume an air of reality. The words, the idea sound hollow. Better that it does. Yet the possibility and the knowledge of the possibility do make some difference."
Miliband was demobilized from the Navy in January, 1946. He returned to the LSE and he obtained a First Class degree in July 1947. Three months later he was awarded a Leverhulme research studentship to work full-time on his Ph.D. proposal, "The Radical Movement in the French Revolution".
Harold Laski arranged for Miliband to do some teaching at the Roosevelt College in Chicago where he witnessed the early stages of McCarthyism in action. In June 1949 he obtained the post as Assistant Lectureship in Political Science at London School of Economics. This included teaching "Problems of Comparative Government", "The History of French Political Thought" and the "History of English Socialist Thought".
During this period Miliband was highly critical of Joseph Stalin and the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. He was particularly hostile to Stalin's policy towards Josip Tito and his socialist government in Yugoslavia. His main political friends were left-wing members of the Labour Party. This included Michael Foot, Jo Richardson, Ian Mikardo, Russell Kerr and Konni Zilliacus.
Miliband joined with other left-wing historians such as E. P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and John Saville to launch two radical journals, The New Reasoner and the New Left Review. Later he was to play a prominent role in the publication of The Socialist Register, "an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the independent new left". Each volume was focused on a topical theme and characterized by the inclusion of relatively long, sustained analyses which cut across intellectual disciplines and geographical boundaries.
In 1961, Ralph Miliband met Marion Kozak, one of his former students at the LSE. Michael Newman, the author of Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (2002): "From an early age she had been left wing, regarding herself as a Communist when she arrived in Britain. But she had soon rejected this, largely because of the Slansky trial in Czechosolovakia." They married and had two sons, David Miliband in 1965 and Edward Miliband in 1969.
In 1961 Miliband published Parliamentary Socialism: A Study of the Politics of Labour (1961). In the introduction he wrote: "Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic - not about socialism, but about the parliamentary system. Empirical and flexible about all else, its leaders have always made devotion to that system their fixed point of reference and the conditioning factor of their political behaviour."
Miliband played an active role in the campaign against the Vietnam War. In an article in The Socialist Register (1967) he attacked Harold Wilson and his defence of the United States action in Vietnam and described it as being the "most shameful chapter in the history of the Labour Party."
In a letter to John Saville he wrote: "Vietnam illustrates better than any other event in this century the fundamental elements of the world as we know it: i.e. American determination to crush social revolution; the existence and endurance of such movements; i.e. the real nature of present day imperialism; the decrepitude of social-democracy, its bankruptcy and moral collapse; ditto for liberalism; the paralysing nature of the Sino-Soviet conflicts;. .. the bankruptcy of liberalism, particularly liberal intellectuals; the paralysis of (Communist Parties) as agencies of protest and action; the nature of the still inchoate forces which are struggling to protest, students, ex-liberals like Russell, etc.; and one could go on like this. This is what the world is about, and which Vietnam pinpoints in the sharpest, most dramatic and bloody way."
Miliband was horrified by the Soviet reaction of the Prague Spring and wrote to Marcel Liebman: "The invasion of Czechoslovakia show very well that this oppressive and authoritarian Russian socialism has nothing in common with the socialism that we demand, and we must state this very loudly, even at the risk of seeming to be anti-soviet and to echo bourgeois propaganda... And then, there is also this question of 'bourgeois liberties' ... which, I am persuaded, we must put at the top of our programme. Or rather, denounce them as insufficient and to be extended by socialism. Nothing will work if it is possible and plausible to suggest that we want to abolish them. And that is one of the reasons why the democratization of 'revolutionary' parties is essential... The internal life of a revolutionary party must prefigure the society which it wants to establish - by its mode of existence, and its way of being and acting. While this is not the case, I don't see any reason to want to see the current parties take power: they are quite simply not morally ready to assume the construction of a socialist society."
Other books by Miliband include The State in Capitalist Society (1968), Marxism and Politics (1977), Capitalist Democracy in Britain (1982), Class Power and State Power (1983), Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism (1989) and Socialism for a Sceptical Age (1994). He wrote just before his death: "In all countries, there are people, in numbers large or small, who are moved by the vision of a new social order in which democracy, egalitarianism and cooperation - the essential values of socialism - would be the prevailing principles of social organisation. It is in the growth of their numbers and in the success of their struggles that lies the best hope for humankind."
Ralph Miliband died on . Ellen Meiksins Wood wrote in his obituary: "The steadiness of Miliband's commitment owed much to the unflinching clarity of his intellectual vision and the independence of his political judgment, which saved him from both mindless enthusiasm and abject despair, from both blind attachment to a party and a loss of faith in socialism with declining party fortunes, from both the certainties and the inevitable disappointments of socialist determinism. Welcoming every sign of advance toward democracy in the Communist world, he nevertheless showed a prescient scepticism about the direction of reform. Unambiguously committed to a truly democratic socialism, he freely conceded the inadequacies of traditional socialism in confronting the questions of gender, race and nation and accepted the lessons of the 'new social movements'; but he never lost sight of capitalism as an over-arching totality or of class as its constitutive principle."