Miliband père et fils

On the Spectator "Coffee House" blog, Matthew d'Ancona notes the "beauty contest" of Labour ministers and ex-ministers jostling for an undeclared and - unfortunately for the party - as yet non-existent contest for the leadership. This is a government in decay and not only disarray. I was particularly interested, though, in d'Acona's referring to a lecture by David Miliband in honour of his father, the late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband. It takes place tomorrow under the auspices of the LSE.

Ralph Miliband's best known works are The State in Capitalist Society and Parliamentary Socialism. I wrote a post about him, which I later adapted for The Jewish Chronicle, last summer, when David Miliband was appointed Foreign Secretary. Because Ralph Miliband's memory merits greater critical scrutiny than it is likely to receive from political correspondents reporting his son's lecture, I'm extracting a relevant portion of that post. It follows.

The late Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, is a man for whom I have a certain intellectual respect leavened with real contempt. See, most particularly, his essay for the annual Socialist Register in 1980 entitled “Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism” - anticipating an issue that has much exercised the Left more recently.

Miliband argues: “In socialist terms, the overthrow of a regime from outside, by military intervention, and without any measure of popular involvement, must always be an exceedingly doubtful enterprise, of the very last resort.”

You might think, with the failures of our intervention in Iraq in mind, that he’s stating a mere truism. But if you read the essay, you’ll see that he’s not. The examples he has in mind, and discusses at length, are the then recent military interventions by Tanzania to overthrow Idi Amin in Uganda and by Vietnam to overthrow the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Miliband considers them alongside the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which he objects to on the grounds that it “has obviously provided a very powerful reinforcement to the worst reactionaries in the Western camp”. You have to believe me – and you can check if you don’t – that he treats the overthrow of Pol Pot as analogously objectionable:

"No doubt, a pliant regime now exists in Phnom Penh. But it lacks legitimacy and requires the support of a Vietnamese army of occupation. The enterprise has reinforced secular suspicions of Vietnamese designs upon Kampuchea. Like the Russians in Afghanistan, the Vietnamese have been drawn into a permanent struggle with Kampuchean guerillas, with the usual accompaniment of repression and the killing of innocent civilians. The invasion has also weakened Vietnam's international position, and strengthened reactionary forces in the region and beyond. Here too, it does not seem unreasonable to ask 'What kind of security is this?'"

A few years ago a highly sympathetic biography entitled Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left, 2002, rose and fell without trace (despite Tony Benn's prediction in the foreword that it would "help a whole new generation of socialists to appreciate the unique role that Ralph played in the progressive politics of the period"). Even the author, Professor Michael Newman of London Metropolitan University, conceded (p. 294) that Miliband's essay "was flawed because it understated the atrocities of the Pol Pot regime and the justification for intervention following its crimes against humanity." And to be fair to him, Newman - daintily but not evasively - identifies the intellectual origins of that "flawed" position (p. 318, n. 124):

"... Miliband's judgement in aligning his position so closely to that of [Noam] Chomsky appears questionable. Without any real expertise on the area, he had understated the enormity of the crimes and endorsed a particular interpretation which appeared to minimise the responsibility of the Pol Pot regime itself. It is not entirely clear why he took this position, but three factors were probably particularly important. The first was the depth of his condemnation of American policy in Indochina: having opposed the war against Vietnam so bitterly, he may have had a predisposition to hold the US responsible for all the crimes in the region. Secondly, there was the perennial problem that the Right was exploiting the crimes of the Khymer [sic] Rouge regime as part of its general anti-communist propaganda and he was probably reacting against this. And, thirdly, he was trying to develop a general theoretical argument against socialist regimes intervening in the way that the Vietnamese had done and his case would have become more difficult to sustain had he accepted that the [sic] Pol Pot had carried out crimes against humanity on a massive scale."

Amazingly enough, Newman goes on to say that "Miliband's general points [in his essay] were important and have considerable relevance for the post-Cold War interventions by Nato". In my view, a general argument whose practical application involves denying the atrocities of the worst regime since the Third Reich can reasonably be dismissed out of hand.

Bear in mind that it is the Foreign Secretary, and not I, who is raising the subject of Ralph Miliband's political legacy. I'm not attacking someone's late father for gratuitous reasons. Ralph Miliband should be considered in the round, in all his spectacular imperfection.

Comments

[Richard]

Is this an attempt to influence the content of David Miliband's speech tomorrow, Mr Kamm...like, don't associate yourself with the ideas of Noam Chomsky, or else ?

[Alcuin]

"Marxist theorist" ...

I note that people who I respect like Norman Geras, Christopher Hitchens and many others do or did describe themselves as Marxists. I do not know where you stand on this, Oliver, but I remain surprised at the power of Marx to entrance the young and utopian. I may have mentioned this before, but the position on Marx of John Maynard Smith seems utterly conclusive.

Smith was a Marxist, but found Marx and Darwin to be unreconcilable (from 0:37:33.000). Being a scientist, he took the standard line that any honest scientist would take, viz. it only requires *one* contrary fact to destroy a theory. Evolution has stood fast against every test, but Marx has not, so Smith had to ditch Marxism - all of it. Why this killer point evades so many on the Left, remains a mystery to me. It also means that one might as well be an Astrologer as a "Marxist Theroist", and I cannot consider such people to be rational or intellectual. Why waste your time on them?

[Richard]

"Marxist", "Socialist", "Communist", "The Left", "Liberal", "Chomskyites" etc..it's all the same to the 'Kammites' - who appear intent on demonizing anyone opposed to a Zionist Neo-Con agenda of PNAC's 'Full Spectrum Dominance'...cleverly in disguise, in the 'U.S.K.', as The Henry Jackson Society/Euston Manifesto Group.

[Jonathan O.]

Oliver Kamm attacking a left-winger over foreign policy? In the words of Harry Hill, 'surely not'.
Seriously, it cannot be a mystery to you why people doubt your left-wing credentials. It's well-known that the Reagan administration sided with the Khmer Rouge at the UN after the Vietnamese invasion; even the historian Niall Ferguson (often, like yourself, considered to be a neo-conservative) mentioned this in his last documentary series. For some reason, you seem less incensed or enthralled by the follies of the most powerful people in the world than by those of dead socialist writers or obscure bloggers.

[dirigible]

Smith starts with sympathy for Lysenko's bogosity, goes on to mention social darwinism while seemingly unaware of Darwin's own opinions on the matter, and then declares evolution and historical materialism incompatible due to personal incredulity.

This is conclusive, just not as proof of Marx's incompatibility with Darwin...

[Barry]

http://crookedtimber.org/2008/05/07/a-vicious-little-merchant-banker/#comments

[peter]

Alcuin writes: "Evolution has stood fast against every test . . ."

Could you point me to a scientific experiment which set out to falsify evolutionary theory and which failed to do so?

I believe the theory of evolution is articulated at such an abstract level, or over such long time scales, that it is simply not falsifiable.

What you could justifiably assert is that no competing theory so far proposed explains the wide range of phenomena explained by the theory of evolution. Such an assertion is very different from saying that the theory of evolution has passed every test.

[dsquared]

Would anyone be interested in the views of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson on the subject of the legality of Vietnam's invasion and occupation of Cambodia?

[Tim Newman]

http://crookedtimber.org/2008/05/07/a-vicious-little-merchant-banker/#comments

Thanks for posting this link. I was until now under the mistaken impression that educated people in the west no longer made lengthy statements justifying the horrors of the Soviet Union.

[dirigible]

I believe the theory of evolution is articulated at such an abstract level, or over such long time scales, that it is simply not falsifiable.

Evolution could easily be falsified. A Google search featuring the keywords "falsification" and "evolution" shows many examples. e.g.:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/falsify.html

Evolution by natural selection has indeed passed every test so far.