Ed Miliband, Socialism and Ralph Miliband
by Ricardo A. Guarnero
Ralph Miliband, Marxist theoretician and father of the current English Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was one of my mentors at Brandeis University. I do not know, what the senior Miliband would make of Ed Miliband’s machinations and politics but I suspect he would disapprove. Ralph Miliband informed my own thinking on Marxism, critical thinking and socialism. Professor Ralph Miliband, arrived at Brandeis University in 1977, the same year that I matriculated at same institution. He was to have a profound impact on my intellectual development.
Professor Ralph Miliband was a political refugee from Nazism who early on embraced socialism. He refined his vision over the years by engaging in dialogue with many of the leading theoreticians on the left. Ed Miliband, by contrast, appears to be behaving the part of a well-mannered son of a University professor. Whatever vision he has, it does not appear to have come from his father. In fact, one wonders, whether he has a vision for Great Britain which is separate from the status quo.
The current Tory leader and English Prime Minister, David Cameron, has called Ralph Miliband an “unreconstructed Marxist.” This is completely inaccurate. If Miliband was anything, he was free-range thinker who was very much a proponent of the New Left. We had many discussions, most of them centered on the lack of a socialist alternative in the United States. My own impression is that Miliband (and when I use the surname, I refer to Prof. Ralph Miliband) was so grounded in the Continental intellectual tradition, that his forays into American Leftist thinking were mostly centered on the East Coast intelligentsia. Miliband never seriously ventured to the West Coast where arguably the left has taken its strongest roots. As well, the West Coast is where the left has been much more organic and arguably rooted in American cultural norms.
Miliband introduced me to Antonio Gramsci, and more specifically, his book “The Prison Notebooks,” where Gramsci articulates his political philosophy. Gramsci articulated a political philosophy which was embraced by New Left thinkers and activists such as Paulo Freire and Frantz Fanon. As well, Gramsci was an important influence in the development of “Critical Theory:”
Critical theory is a school of thought that stresses the reflective assessment and critique of society and culture by applying knowledge from the social sciences and the humanities. As a term, critical theory has two meanings with different origins and histories: the first originated in sociology and the second originated in literary criticism, whereby it is used and applied as an umbrella term that can describe a theory founded upon critique; thus, the theorist Max Horkheimer described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”
Gramsci drew a distinction between “traditional intellectuals” and “organic intellectuals:”
The notion of “the intellectuals” as a distinct social category independent of class is a myth. All men are potentially intellectuals in the sense of having an intellect and using it, but not all are intellectuals by social function. Intellectuals in the functional sense fall into two groups. In the first place there are the “traditional” professional intellectuals, literary, scientific and so on, whose position in the interstices of society has a certain inter-class aura about it but derives ultimately from past and present class relations and conceals an attachment to various historical class formations. Secondly, there are the “organic” intellectuals, the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social class. These organic intellectuals are distinguished less by their profession, which may be any job characteristic of their class, than by their function in directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically belong.
In this sense, I consider myself an organic intellectual. Much of what I thought and critiqued was considered heretical in my studies at graduate school and law school. In seminars with my professors, I would argue vigorously for positions posited by Herbert Marcuse and other thinkers in the vein of “critical theory.” I pissed the hell out of a lot of traditional academics, but I knew I had an impact on fellow students. The current left renaissance by thinkers such as Thomas Piketty and Sven Beckert has, in my view, obliterated the foundations of neo-liberalism. Prof. Miliband would be pleased.
Why do I touch on these subjects. Well, precisely because Ed Miliband is anything but an organic intellectual. To the contrary, Ed Miliband would be right at home in the milque-toast that is the U.S. Democratic Party. When asked if he had read, Thomas Piketty’s, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which articulates the proposition that inequality is a fact of capitalism, the Labour leader, stated glibly that he couldn’t get past the first chapter.
Miliband and Gramsci articulated a politics that called for activists to change the prevailing paradigm. By this, one does not merely argue for more money for the National Health Service (although that is important) but for a critical re-making of the hegemonic consciousness which the prevailing elites use to control the working classes or more broadly, the oppressed. Grand-sounding stuff. If there is any consistent critique of Ed Miliband, it is that he has failed to articulate anything which would excite the Labour Party’s constituencies. It is, that, like other elites, Ed Miliband is merely engaging with the prevailing elites in words and actions which fall squarely in the bounds of the acceptable dialogue. He brings nothing to the table.
Understand, this is not an argument that there is really no difference between Labour and the Tories. Clearly, the English will be incrementally better under Labour, if only because they will not engage in the savage austerity programs favored by conservatives. More urgently, because Ed Miliband has not articulated a true critique of the capitalist agenda, he has failed to capture the imagination of those suffering under neo-liberalism. As well, he has not given himself and more importantly Labour, the intellectual space to launch anything that would actually change the status quo. He has trapped himself and his party into an intellectual trap from which they become a shadow of the Tories. And, in this way, Ed Miliband has abandoned his father’s vision, he prances in a political theatre without plot or dialogue.
