The real scandal of Ralph Miliband's politics

You need strong evidence to claim that a man who fled Nazi persecution and made his home in this country "hated Britain". In levelling that accusation against Ralph Miliband, father of the Labour leader, the Daily Mailhad no evidence at all. It does not follow from Miliband's having been a leading Marxist theorist that he lacked patriotism. Ed Miliband has good reason to be incensed by the Mail's attack, which can justifiably be termed a smear. Even so, Miliband the elder was neither saint nor sage. He was a sophisticated advocate of an ideology that had long since proved its uselessness and whose malevolent certitudes compromised even him.

Ralph Miliband arrived in Britain as a teenager in 1940. For the rest of his life, and in various academic posts, he devoted immense intellectual effort to interpreting and advocating the theory of Marxism. This was a particularly difficult task in the post-war era, when the capitalist economies were defying predictions of doom by radical critics. Miliband didn't deal in the crude Leninist rhetoric of smashing the State and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. He also, unusually, for a Marxist academic, wrote clear prose.

Miliband denied that capitalism had been tamed and transformed by the “managerial revolution”, in which ownership and control of the enterprise were separated. In his most influential work, The State in Capitalist Society (1969), he maintains that the State is still repressive in the democratic societies of the West - not by overtly cracking down on dissent but through subtler and more insidious techniques of social control. In modern capitalist democracy, differences are "safely contained within a particular ideological spectrum, and do not preclude a basic political consensus in regard to the crucial issues of economic and political life".

However roundabout the rhetoric, that's a nice example of the essentially anti-democratic approach of Marxism. It can't entertain the notion that voters may want a degree of consensus on matters of values. People have a material stake, literally, in not trying radical social experiments that have uncertain outcomes. The main political parties are responding to that commonsensical view when they project themselves only as better economic managers than their opponents. When the parties abandon those informal conventions of constitutional politics, as Labour did in its Bennite phase in the 1980s, they suffer electoral retribution.

For all his sophisticated reasoning, Miliband never acknowledged that his politics were unattainable in a democratic system. There is a neat historical irony in that his sons were the principal candidates in Labour's most recent leadership election. The book that made Ralph Miliband's name, Parliamentary Socialism (1961), was a sustained attack on the notion that Labour could be a vehicle for progressive social change. In it, he lamented that Labour's leaders didn't recognise that capitalist society was riven by class conflict. He described Labour as among the most dogmatic of left-wing parties - dogmatic, that is, not about socialism but about parliamentary democracy.

Oddly, and in a backhanded way, he was right. It's true that Labour can't really be a socialist party and the reason is precisely that it long ago chose to adhere to parliamentary democracy. It has done itself nothing but harm, in electoral terms, by continuing to insist, against all historical evidence, that it seeks a socialist transformation - an outcome that is remote from the interests and views of the electorate. Miliband the younger was still paying homage to this outdated notion at this year’s party conference, where he was asked; “When are you going to bring back socialism?” "That's what we're doing, sir" responded the Labour leader.

In his most detailed work on British politics, Capitalist Democracy in Britain (1982), Miliband fell back on a hoary and slightly desperate trope of Marxist analysis by imagining that the capitalist class might resort to repression in a way it had conspicuously failed to do in previous crises: "In sharply deteriorating conditions and in circumstances of exacerbated class conflict, the 'strong state', in some suitably British form, and with pronounced authoritarian features, is not impossible...." Lacking any substantiation, Miliband's fantasy is happily invulnerable to being refuted.

The genuine scandal of Miliband's political views, however, is one that the Daily Mail failed to unearth. Miliband was so hostile to the notion of foreign military intervention that he cautioned (in an essay called Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism, in 1980) against the then recent overthrow of Idi Amin in Uganda by Tanzanian forces and of Pol Pot in Cambodia by Vietnam.

Miliband was much influenced by the disastrous and unjust US war in Vietnam, and you may think that the more recent experience of Iraq bears out his hostility to intervention. It was worse than that. A sympathetic biographer, Michael Newman, has written (Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left, 2002) that Miliband's essay was “flawed, because it understated the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime and the justification for intervention following its crimes against humanity”. It's hard to argue with this or with Newman's explanation: “Without any real expertise on the area, he had understated the enormity of the crimes and endorsed a particular interpretation which appeared to minimise the responsibility of the Pol Pot regime itself.” Miliband was in no sense sympathetic to the genocidal and deranged nihilism that went under the name of Cambodian Marxism. His error was still culpable.

Surprisingly, Newman maintains that Miliband's general rather than specific points were important and have much relevance to Nato interventions since the Cold War. I'm sufficiently hidebound an empiricist to believe that an argument that ends up extenuating the Khmer Rouge can be summarily dismissed. Newman identifies a culprit: Miliband placed excessive weight on the arguments of Noam Chomsky, the linguist and radical critic of US foreign policy. And that makes complete sense. Chomsky is much feted by the Left for his supposedly forensic and consistent critiques of oppression. In practice, his arguments amount to sophistry. In the words of Christopher Hitchens, who was once close to him, Chomsky went from supporting the underdog to supporting mad dogs.

That is an indictment of Miliband. His argument was an example of the foolishness of very clever people. Nor was it consistent with his approach to foreign affairs in other respects. In the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel faced annihilation by Arab armies, Miliband was notably sceptical of the fantasies peddled by some academic Marxists that pan-Arab socialism was a progressive cause. “Israel is an excuse,” he maintained, “which most of these regimes use for not pushing further their revolutions. It is a bad excuse.” It's an observation that rarely now gets aired on the radical Left. I doubt that Miliband ever forgot the reason he arrived in Britain. This country gave him refuge; there is no reason whatever to suppose that this talented advocate of a flawed and failed ideology ever ceased to be aware of it and grateful for it.