Once in London, Ralph (né Adolphe) Miliband studied at the London School of Economics under Harold Laski, who later obtained a lectureship for him there. He settled in Primrose Hill, in the house David still owns, married one of his students, the equally ardent socialist Marion Kozak, and preached the gospel of class warfare: first at the LSE, later in Leeds, finally as a freelance transatlantic ideologue.
From the 1950s, Ralph was one of the high priests of British Marxism. Although less familiar than E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams or Eric Hobsbawm, Miliband was highly effective in using his academic pulpit to urge Labour activists to abandon what he contemptuously described as "parliamentary socialism". In the 1960s, he was seen as a luminary of the "New Left", a phrase much invoked by student protesters against the Vietnam War and by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In reality, there was nothing very new about the New Left: like their European and US counterparts, they were a product of capitalist affluence, and their pathetic attempts to distance Marxism from the Soviet Union were unconvincing.
These were the years when universities became political battlegrounds. When the LSE kicked out some of its extremists, Miliband resigned to form the Council for Academic Freedom and Democracy — an Orwellian title, given the Left's intolerance of dissent. In the late 1970s, he became close to Tony Benn during the period when a Bennite takeover of the Labour Party looked possible. Later, in the mid-1980s, Miliband set up the Chesterfield Socialist Conferences in Benn's constituency, in a vain attempt to shore up the crumbling intellectual credibility of the Left. Revered by trade unionists and Labour activists, Miliband revelled in creating groupuscules with names such as Socialist Society and Socialist Movement, besides by his peers, journals such as New Left Review and Socialist Register. He took himself, and was taken very seriously.
After 1989, Miliband's reputation was eclipsed. He died in 1994 and lies near Marx in Highgate. His prestige rested on his books. Though more readable than the agitprop prose of most academic Marxism, today they deservedly gather dust, along with the socialist cause Miliband served so faithfully and so pointlessly. Will his sons leave them on the shelf? We shall soon find out.
