The traducing of Ralph Miliband is a reminder of how far we now are from understanding socialism
‘The record sales of Marx's Das Kapital in the last few years indicates that people are turning again to an analysis of the exploitative logic of capitalism that remains singularly accurate and powerful.' Photograph: PA
Whatever their views of him, most decent people backed Ed Miliband this week as he defended his father against jingoist attacks on him by the Daily Mail. The Labour leader angrily described Ralph Miliband as a British patriot, and correctly noted that he does not share his father's principled commitment to socialism. Labour is right to demand an apology from the Mail, not only for a frankly bigoted attack on a respected Jewish intellectual, but also for claiming that the party's politics bear any resemblance to the socialism it formally abandoned nearly two decades ago.
The defence of Ralph Miliband runs along wearyingly familiar lines – that he unambiguously proved his patriotism by fighting in the anti-Nazi war, which along with "no apology for the empire" has become the principal litmus test for love of Britain. His lifelong commitment to a supple Marxism is noted but quietly skimmed over as an embarrassingly anachronistic aspect of an otherwise decent and loyal man. Yet a defence of Miliband senior which does not also challenge the red-bashing that often goes hand in hand with antisemitism is, at best, equivocal. More perniciously, it accepts the distorted terms set by the rightwing press which defines patriotism narrowly through obedient adulation of monarchy, militarism and elitism.
Ralph Miliband was not a patriot because he served in the navy. He was a lover of this country and its people precisely because he understood that institutions like the monarchy and the House of Lords symbolise and perpetuate inequality, and that militarism usually encourages the poor to die defending the interests of the privileged. Hispatriotism has more in common with long progressive patriotic traditions in Britain, from the Diggers and Levellers to the Chartists and anti-privatisation campaigners. It was about claiming land and country for the majority of its labouring denizens rather than the plutocrats and the powerful who live off the fat of the land while spouting an insincere "nationalism" which serves less to create collective wellbeing than to prevent their privileges being questioned.
Even while noting that Ralph criticised Eric Hobsbawm for not repudiating Stalinism, the Daily Mail recyles the false charge that adherence to Marxism is indistinguishable from commitment to a poisonous Sovietism. This is no different from claiming that Christianity is indistinguishable from the bloody crusades and inquisitions conducted by some of its adherents. However, Ralph Miliband would also have found his son's claim that capitalism can be "made to work for working people" incoherent, and wilfully ignorant of how capitalism actually works, constitutively reliant as it is on concentrating wealth among relatively few while extracting the labour of the many.
For years, captains of corporations in the affluent west have been able to peddle the myth that capitalism can be made to work for everyone by outsourcing its most exploitative aspects to other parts of the world, extracting both resources and labour ruthlessly. Now, however – as the centre of capitalist gravity shifts southwards, the western social democratic compact unravels, and the foundations of the welfare state are disastrously undermined – it will be less easy to keep up this pretence of affluence for all.
The record sales of Marx's Das Kapital in the last few years alone indicate that people are turning once again to an analysis of the fundamentally exploitative logic of capitalism that, for all its relentless bad press, remains singularly accurate and powerful.
It is time to junk the cheap and facile propaganda that socialism is reducible to Stalinist depredations. In Ralph Miliband's own anti-Stalinist understanding, socialism was about "the wholesale transformation of the social order" by giving ordinary people control over the economic system, fully democratising a political system in which ordinary citizens feel disenfranchised and helpless, and ensuring "a drastic levelling out of social inequality". It is the abandonment of these democratic aspirations for the craven pieties of the Daily Mail that must really "disturb everyone who loves this country".
No comments:
Post a Comment