By Ron Radosh
You may not know the name Ralph Miliband, but the late Marxist
professor is a household name in the UK. He was the father of Ed
Miliband, the Labor Party’s leader and a possible future prime minister.
When the conservative Daily Mail ran a story about the father’s influence on his son, the controversy began.
Ed is now determined to bring about that vision. … How
proud Ralph would have been to hear him responding the other day to a
man in the street who asked when he was “going to bring back socialism”
with the words: “That’s what we are doing, sir.”
Ed Miliband’s father, the story continues, was a full-throated
Marxist, committed to nationalization and harsh socialist policies. Levy
paints the senior Miliband as a man who hated the country he adopted as
his own when he sought refuge from Nazi Germany, a man who was critical
of the Soviet Union but still believed it was socialist, and who
thought Gorbachev had successfully “democratized” Soviet society.
Nothing had changed in his belief system, he wrote, since the time when,
as a young man, he made the pilgrimage to Karl Marx’s grave in 1940,
and he wrote:
I remember standing in front of the grave, fist clenched,
and swearing my own private oath that I would be faithful to the
workers’ cause.
Now, Miliband is buried in a grave 12 short yards from Marx’s grave,
and his tombstone bares the inscription: “Writer Teacher Socialist.”
He had dedicated his life, he wrote near the end of his life, to
realizing the socialist dream, and preparing the ground for “such an
alternative.” With Ed as prime minister, Levy concludes, “perhaps that
ground is indeed now being prepared.”
That one article began the fierce war of words. Ed Miliband
told the press that he found the story “appalling,” and “responded by
accusing the paper of peddling ‘a lie’ and trying to ‘besmirch and
undermine’ his dead father for political ends.” He wrote:
Fierce debate about politics does not justify character
assassination of my father, questioning the patriotism of a man who
risked his life for our country in the Second World War or publishing a
picture of his gravestone with a tasteless pun about him being a “grave
socialist.”
The editors of the Daily Mail responded by saying that Ralph
Miliband sought to drive “a hammer and sickle through the heart of the
nation so many of us genuinely love.”
Miliband’s friends were aghast. They particularly did not like tying
Ralph Miliband in with the late historian Eric Hobsbawm, an unabashed
Stalinist who in a famous late-in-life interview justified the millions
Stalin killed as necessary for the triumph of socialism. Norm Geras,
a moderate and truly democratic man of the Left — he has been at the
forefront of condemning the current anti-Israeli stance and
anti-Semitism of the Left in Britain — argued that Ralph Miliband
believed in parliamentary democracy under socialism, and was anything
but a Leninist who believed in “smashing the state.” Geras wrote: “he was never a Stalinist or an apologist for Stalinism.” Geras was particularly incensed about a column by Benedict Brogan, who called Miliband one of the Cold War’s “bad guys.”
Editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail Paul Dacre responded in both his own paper and in the pages of the left-wing Guardian. He explained his decision to run the first column in these words:
The genesis of that piece lay in Ed Miliband’s conference
speech. The Mail was deeply concerned that in 2013, after all the
failures of socialism in the twentieth century, the leader of the Labour
party was announcing its return, complete with land seizures and price
fixing.
Surely, we reasoned, the public had the right to know what influence
the Labour leader’s Marxist father, to whom he constantly referred in
his speeches, had on his thinking.
It was not Miliband who was evil, but the ideas he believed in and the system he favored for Britain:
Ralph Miliband was, as a Marxist, committed to smashing
the institutions that make Britain distinctively British — and, with
them, the liberties and democracy those institutions have fostered.
At this point, columnists whose own fathers and ancestors were also
Marxist, or who at one point were themselves Marxist, took to the pages
of the press. Theodore Dalrymple (who
writes often for PJ Media) chimed in with his own thoughts, revealing
that his father was also wrong and was himself a hard-core Marxist. He
pointed out that the Marxist doctrine is both emotionally and
intellectually dishonest:
I quickly grasped that the dialectic could prove anything
you wanted it to prove, for example, that killing whole categories of
people was a requirement of elementary decency.
Dalrymple brilliantly noted the main problem with the doctrine,
which, as he notes, a belief in leads to justification for mass murder:
Marxism was also replete with heresies and
excommunications that tended to become fatal whenever its adherents
reached power. There was a reason for this. Marx said that it is not
consciousness that determines being, but being that determines
consciousness. In other words, ideas do not have to be argued against in
a civilised way, but rather the social and economic position of those
who hold them must be analysed. So, disagreement is the same as class
enmity — and we all know what should be done with class enemies.
Next, Peter Hitchens – brother
of the late Christopher — explains that he is now “conservative,
Christian, patriotic,” but as a young man he was a Trotskyist. Although
that made him a Marxist-Leninist, his brand of communism “hated Stalin
and the Gulag as much as anyone else.” Yet he believes:
People ought to know and care more about the influence in our national life of Marxist politics.
He personally worries most about the Tony Blair-ites, who he argues
hold “politically correct, multiculti, anti-Christian ideas” that stem
from Euro-Communism of the 1970s.
This is as good a time as any to turn to a man well-known to all of
us, and to what his experience shows about what Ralph Miliband really
believed. David Horowitz, in the late 1980s when he was beginning his
march to conservatism, wrote a letter to Miliband, who was his mentor
when he lived for years in Britain in the early and mid 1960s. Horowitz
eventually published it as an open letter in the pages of Commentary magazine under the title: “Socialism, Guilty as Charged.”
The full open letter is now posted at Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com.
At that point, Horowitz believed that although he had left the ranks
of the Left, he could maintain a personal relationship and friendship
with Miliband, who was important to him and who he knew as a good man
and loving father to his then young children.
He starts by noting the revolutionary vision he shared with Miliband at one point in his life, and asks him this question:
How could I divorce myself from a mission like this
without betraying those whom I had left behind? Especially without
betraying those like yourself who had been my guides and my comrades in
the ’60s through the moral wilderness created by the disintegration of
the Old Left.
It was not to be. Horowitz had his own famous second thoughts, while
Miliband had none. He was engaged in yet another and seemingly
never-ending attempt to bring into being another resurrection of the
Left, which would succeed in building the new world they both once
dreamed of. “For you,” he wrote Miliband, “the socialist idea is still
capable of an immaculate birth from the bloody conception of the
socialist state.”
Horowitz, in his usual precise and cutting style, dissects in his
letter to Miliband the follies, the hopes, the dreams, and the warped
methodology which the Left uses to keep alive the flame of revolution.
One thing it holds dear, he writes, is a belief in “the redemptive power
of the socialist idea” as a guide to getting to the goal, the ideology
of Marxism. Their allegiance was to Marxism, “to the paradigm itself:
politics as civil war; history as a drama of social redemption.”
When Leszek Kolakowski, the late Polish-born philosopher and
once-Marxist, wrote his swan song to Marxism consisting of a
three-volume history of the Marxist idea, he argued: “Marx’s ideas could
not be rescued from the human remains they created.” To that, Miliband
had nothing but contempt, and wrote these words, which Horowitz quotes:
“To speak of Stalinism as following naturally and ineluctably from
Leninism is unwarranted.”
That Miliband could write these words indicates that, contrary to
what Geras believes, Miliband was in fact a defender of the Soviet
Union, and believed that Stalinism was an aberration and not the
inevitable result of Leninism, as Richard Pipes and others have shown in
detail.
For socialists like you to confront these arguments would
be to confront the lesson that … the socialist idea, has been, in its
consequences, one of the worst and most destructive fantasies ever to
have taken hold of the minds of men.
As one might expect, there is no way that Ralph Miliband
could even consider or respond to Horowitz’s major essay. Indeed,
Horowitz waited two years before publishing the letter, hoping
undoubtedly that Miliband would respond in a serious fashion, much as
the late British socialist E.P. Thompson had when Kolakowski challenged
him similarly. This is particularly true as Horowitz ends with these
words:
By promoting the socialist idea … which required so much
death and suffering to implement, and then did not work in the end, you
and I have earned ourselves a share, however modest, in the
responsibility for its crimes. And it is these crimes that are the real
legacy of the Left of which I was, and you so tragically still are, a
part.
The answer is to be found not in the letter itself, but in Horowitz’s own memoir, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey. Here, Horowitz tells us that he hoped Miliband would publish the letter in the annual series he edited, The Socialist Register. After
all, years earlier, he had dared to publish Kolakowski’s seminal essay
in which he announced his disillusionment with the socialist project. It
was not to be. He told Miliband in a personal letter, which he
reproduces in the memoir: “I’m hoping the huge events of these last
years [the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern satellites] may
have softened the edges of the issues that divide us.” He told him that
he wanted Miliband “to understand that I did not turn my back on the
struggle we once shared for trivial or unreflected reasons.” He also let
him know that “I do not feel harshly towards you, but only warmth for a
friend who has remained on a path that I have left.”
Horowitz also told him that he hoped they might resume contact, despite their political divide. The answer came in a short note:
Thank you for your letter.
He added a brief p.s., saying that the opening lines of Horowitz’s
Open Letter were not true, and that he had not ever said that he had
spoken of Horowitz’s “apostasy” as a tragedy of the New Left. Then, a
cutting line:
The first notion grossly exaggerates its public importance; the second its personal importance to me.
This non-reply reflected the bitter truth: Ralph Miliband could not
even engage David Horowitz’s carefully spelled-out arguments. Moreover,
Miliband had indeed said what David quoted him as saying. I recall that
when Miliband was teaching at the City University Graduate Center, he
was asked about Horowitz, and he publicly replied that mentoring him was
one of the biggest mistakes he had ever made.
Moreover, Miliband revealed something that settles the issue being
raised today in the British press by Ed Miliband’s critics. He may have
considered himself a critic of Stalinism, but like the late historian
Isaac Deutscher, he firmly believed that Stalin’s reign of power had
played a progressive role in Russia. According to Deutscher and
Miliband, Stalin’s harsh rule had created the very modernization and
social structure that allowed Soviet society to evolve to the socialist
democracy it was meant to be; therefore — despite the horrors of
Stalinism, which again they believed did not stem intrinsically from
Lenin — it was a progressive social system that Stalin had created.
David Horowitz proved with the rejection of his attempt to dialogue
with Ralph Miliband that they had both belonged to “a community of
faith, hermetically sealed from knowledge that might wake it from its
dream.” Miliband could not even discuss the challenge Horowitz had put
before him; had he done so, confronting the bitter truths might have led
him too to the path of rejecting Marxism. That he could never do.
They still believed that “it was only ‘actually existing socialism’
that had failed; ‘real socialism’ had not yet been tried.” And so the
dream lived on, as it does today for Ralph Miliband’s son, Ed. The
lessons Horowitz learned were costly for him: he lost many that he
thought were his friends, and was subject to vitriolic diatribes from
those who could never learn from history. As far as they were concerned,
he had nothing to teach them. Miliband obviously saw Horowitz only as a
renegade who had betrayed him.
Our British friends would be wise to read David Horowitz’s “Road to Nowhere” (his open letter) and Radical Son.
There they will learn the truth about the late Ralph Miliband, who was
as his critics charge — a defender of the Soviet Union and of the
Marxist faith.
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