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Analysis of David Miliband David Miliband’s piece for the New Statesman is seen by some as a prelude to his return to British politics to challenge the Corbyn ascendancy on behalf of the Blairite machine. It has also been hailed as the ‘most significant intellectual contribution from Labour’s Right’. The dominant narrative structure of the essay is that of a Golden Age followed by decline and fall. The Golden Age is unsurprisingly the Blair years where the Labour party achieved according to Miliband ‘a powerful governing majority’. Miliband is a little coy when it comes to dating the beginning of the decline. It is a reasonable guess though he would date it from his own defeat when he ran for leadership of the party against his brother, Ed. It would appear though things really went to hell with Corbyn’s success. Miliband begins by lamenting the state of the Left. The first question that needs to be asked is in what sense is David Miliband a member of the Left? One reads his article in vain to find an answer to that question. Instead we find a boast about how New Labour had “defined the contours of political debate”. This is of course a less that innocent claim. The terms of debate that New Labour followed were laid down not by Blair or Mandelson but by Margaret Thatcher. Instead of hard analysis we get a series of aesthetic flourishes built around a number of contrasting pairs –inwards v outwards; old v new ideas; easy rhetoric v hard decisions; rejecting the Blair legacy v building on it; pre v post-New Labour; wealth creation v wealth distribution In each of these pairs it is the Corbyn tendency that represents the first element. To repeat there is no analysis here, none at all. It is true that George Eaton the political editor has praised Miliband’s essay, but that should be taken more as proof of the lack of political analysis rather than its presence. As well as the absence of analysis there is a contradiction in the narrative structure. Somehow regarding the Blair reign as a golden age is looking to the future while the Corbynites look, of course, to the past. There is though in the midst of the rhetorical sleight of hand a little nugget of *Realpolitik*. That comes when Corbyn is accused of not being enthusiastic enough about Europe or NATO and also of being soft on Russia. This is a chilling reminder or should be of Miliband’s support for the war in Iraq and also a warning to us of how keen the Blairites are to support the American war machine. But the rest of the article continues to be a melange of clichés signifying nothing. One would look in vain, if one wanted to find an examination of capitalism or neoliberalism. The reified talk of globalisation covers over the absence of any thinking about the class basis of the system we live under. In Miliband’s thought there is no ruling class. In his practice though he was prone to pander to the Chipping Norton elite. References to the danger that ‘flash mobs’ pose to democracy is a dishonest attempt to acknowledge the truth that it is the rich and the powerful who most oppose democracy. Moreover, it is the hatred of democracy that drove the Blairites to try and get rid of Corbyn against the clear wishes of the majority of the Labour Party. Richard Seymour has said that Corbyn shamed the Blairites because he had answers to the crisis of British politics while they did not. There is nothing in Miliband’s article which would show Seymour to be wrong. Complaining about inequality and dropping Larry Summer’s name and mentioning ‘secular stagnation’ is no substitute for the class based realities that we are faced with today. To be fair, as Seymour points out, Corbyn and his team talk about opposing the Tories and not about fighting the billionaire class. Miliband and Corbyn both share an aversion to basing their politics explicitly on a response to the dialectics of class power. Implicitly though Corbyn is on the side of the people against the class power of the rich. Miliband for all his rhetorical criticism of globalisation has no intention of working for the overthrow of the class system. Currently, he earns many thousands working for charity, on behalf of the refugees and the displaced, he assures us. There is no acknowledgment that the politics he espoused as Foreign Secretary helped create these same refugees and displaced. All in all, to read Miliband’s article is encouraging because it affirms one’s moral and intellectual superiority over him and his Blairite colleagues. For despite his claims to represent the new, the hard truth is that David Miliband is committed to the maintenance of the old power and the old privileges of the rich. Even a challenge as mild as that of Jeremy Corbyn’s is to be misrepresented, caricatured, demonized and opposed at any price. The British Labour Party lost some five million boats during the Blair ascendancy. As the working class came to realize that to vote for the likes of David Miliband was no different than voting form Tories. Despite David Miliband’s claims to the contrary, it was the people who rejected Blairism and it was the same people who came to understand that the Blairites were Tories. As I write this there is as yet no news as to whether Corbyn has won or not. A victory for Corbyn, will not mean the end of class rule in the UK. But it will provide a space where the Left can begin to articulate and demonstrate the answers to the multiple evils that capitalism has visited on the world. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
