Ralph Miliband – a selection

An archive of Ralph Miliband’s works, if you’re interested in reading him in his own words: Marxists’ Internet Archive

In the press;

The Independent by Tariq Ali; “His father, a leather craftsman in Warsaw, was a member of the Jewish Bund, an organisation of socialist workers. Poland, after the First World War, was beset by chaos, disorder and, ultimately, a military dictatorship. There were large-scale migrations. One of Ralph’s uncles had gone eastwards and joined the Red Army, then under Trotsky’s command. His parents had left Warsaw separately in 1922. They met in Brussels where they had both settled and were married a year later. Ralph was born in 1924.”

The Telegraph; “Though committed to socialism, he never hesitated to criticise its distortion by Stalin and other dictators. He also inveighed against the timidity and limited horizons of West European social democracy. The ideal he sought was a democratic and open Marxism. Miliband’s scholarly writings, at once passionate and lucid, had great influence not only on students and dons but also beyond academic circles.”

New Statesman; “His first book, Parliamentary Socialism: a Study in the Politics of Labour, published in 1961, is a record of this growing disillusionment with the party. It is also an anatomy of the culture of “Labourism”, his term for Labour’s historic and debilitating attachment to the institutions of the British state – to the first-past-the-post electoral system and the idea that left-of-centre politics begins and ends with the capture of the levers of power in Westminster.”

Spartacus Educational; “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”.

BBC; “But, although Miliband briefly belonged to Labour in the 1950s (and even addressed its conference in 1955), he had little respect for the party which one of his sons is about to lead. Labour, he thought, would always give in to international capital, and enslave itself to US foreign policy.”

If you like to read off screen Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left is probably the most highly recommended “book” (remember those).

There’s also his entry on wikipedia for the children of the MTV generation.