Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left

Rating:
Summary: Indulgent review of marginal egotist
Review: This book on Ralph Miliband, one of the key figures of the New Left, gives us useful insights into why that movement failed.

Newman (like Miliband a Professor of Politics) tells us that Miliband was happy 'to speak, debate and write political statements' but 'found meetings and organisational work very tiresome' and found 'organisation and discipline unacceptable'. Newman reveals the earth-shaking insignificance of the New Left's disputes at dinner-parties and seminars.

Not surprisingly, a New Left composed of egos like Miliband, E. P. Thompson and Tony Benn (who wrote in his 1985 Diary, "I'm always thrusting myself forward for publicity") could never work together. These 'critical' intellectuals only agreed in seeing themselves as superior to the 'ignorant' workers.

Newman tells us that by the mid-1960s Miliband had 'come to the belief that a new Socialist Party would eventually need to be established ..." And he did as much as helping in 'preparing the ground for the coming into being of a new party'! But did the New Left ever manage to found this new party?

In fact the New Left, just like the old left, adopted the tried and failed Fabian tactic of permeating the Labour party. The famed 'independent Marxism' ended up as a marginal colony of social democracy.

At history's turning points, the New Left always supported the US government: it was for the CIA-backed counter-revolution in Hungary in 1956, against Vietnam's liberation of Cambodia from Pol Pot, and against the Soviet assistance to Afghanistan's only progressive government ever, which gave women equal rights and land to the peasants. At these crucial times, the New Left took the enemy's side, then moaned that the 'left' was divided. It was always divorced from the working class, from the trade unions, from reality.

The New Left constantly whinged about the 'left's disarray'. But what did its fragments all have in common? They rejected Leninist democratic centralism, by dishonestly caricaturing it as oppressive! In democratic centralist parties, the minority carries out the decisions of the majority, whereas the New Left always wanted minority rights, its rights, to trump the majority. Marxism without Leninism is playing without winning.

The New Left's endless projects for renewal, unification, realignment, and saving the Labour party, are all part of the confusion of thought that alone has held back the British working class for so long.