Lovely Read on fierce socialist Ralph Miliband: 'There was music in his delivery'

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/22/tariq-ali-fierce-socialist-ralph-miliband-music-delivery
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Ralph Miliband was a socialist intellectual of great integrity. He belonged to a generation of socialists formed by the Russian revolution and the second world war, a generation that dominated leftwing politics for almost a century. His father, a leather craftsman in Warsaw, was a member of the Jewish Bund, an organisation of militant socialist workers that insisted on preserving their ethnic autonomy.

Poland, after the first world war, was beset by chaos, disorder and a foolish incursion by the Red Army, which helped to produce the ultra-nationalist military dictatorship of General Piłsudski. There were large-scale migrations. One of Ralph’s uncles had gone eastwards and joined the Red Army, then under Trotsky’s command. His parents had left Warsaw separately in 1922. They met in Brussels, where they had both settled, and were married a year later. Ralph was born in 1924.

The years that lay ahead would be bleak. Hitler’s victory in Germany in 1932, followed by the Spanish civil war, polarised politics throughout the continent. It was not possible for an intellectually alert 15-year-old to remain unaffected. Ralph joined the lively Jewish-socialist youth organisation Hashomeir Hatzair (Young Guard), whose members later played a heroic role in the resistance.

It was here that the young Miliband learned of capitalism as a system based on exploitation, in which the rich lived off the harm they inflicted on others. One of his close friends, Maurice Tran, who was later hanged at Auschwitz, gave him a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Even though he was not yet fully aware of it, he had become enmeshed in the business of socialist politics.

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I still have my The State in Capitalist Society