I won't pretend.  I never believed for a second that George Galloway would win the Bradford West bye-election for the Respect Party, much less that he would win with more than 50% of the vote and a majority of more than 10,000 votes, that the coalition vote would simultaneously collapse (the Liberals lost their deposit) and that all this would happen on a turnout of over 50% (very high for a bye-election).  

For me it opens up many strategic questions for the Left.  Because Galloway seemingly didn't have a huge amount in his favour.  He didn't have a lot of money or a powerful local machine.  He didn't have a sympathetic media establishment.  He didn't have the support of the mosques in Muslim areas, who overwhelmingly backed Labour.  The Respect Party for which he stood is not a well-oiled national organization, able to mobilise activists at short notice.  One thing he did have in his favour was his renown, but that has obvious drawbacks, and there were many, many Labour big-hitters flooding the constituency - including the Labour leader himself.  So, this result is extraordinary and demands explanation.  Both Labour and Tory pundits have colluded in a set of bilious talking points: here comes George Galloway 'stirring up tensions' again, he's going to divide the left vote and let the Conservative in, Big Brother cat impersonator, vain cigar-chomper, doesn't care about the real issues that affect this community, meow, go back to Talksport, indefatigability, fundamentalism, demagogue, Armani suit-wearing attention-scrounger, oil-dealing reprobate, hilarious, sinister, Pat Mustard, etc etc. Even Patrick Wintour of The Guardian participated in some of the worst of this, in a frazzled early morning report which repellently suggested that Galloway won by mobilising the "Muslim immigrant" population around a "fundamentalist call" to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and fight job losses.  I gather that the offending statements were removed from the article this morning.

We can dispense with these morality tales at once.  Anyone trivial enough to be obsessed with them can find many blogs that cater to that particular fancy.  There are even blogs who supported the Labour candidate who will have the cheek to talk about 'communalism', which (if you accept this highly problematic terminology) is arguably one of the things that was defeated in Bradford yesterday.  We can also do without the liberal lament ("how-dare-George-Galloway-win-an-election", and "he's-ruining-it!").  The most laughable retort came from a Labour politician who suggested that Galloway had won because of his Big Brother celebrity.  If he'd lost, that hardly luminous moment in his career would probably have been cited as a cause.  We can drop that stupidity as well.  Nor do I want to argue the toss with those on the Left who have allowed otherwise sensible disagreements with Galloway to obscure what is most important about this campaign - which is that its victory is a step forward for the Left, and particularly for the working class constituencies in Bradford West affected by racism, unemployment and cuts.  I simply take it as read that anyone on the Left with a sense of proportion will welcome this result, and move on.

The major strategic question that the result raises is how the Left relates to Labour in this period.  If it was wrong to underestimate the ability of social democracy to revive itself in opposition, it is evidently just as mistaken to underestimate the real weakness of Labour.  The fact that Ed Miliband has been aware of the secular degeneration of Labour's base, and seemed to have some vague idea of addressing the problem, doesn't mean that that he has been empowered to do anything.  Nor does it mean that his solutions have been anything but feeble.  Miliband's solutions appear to be predicated on the idea that Labour's problems in its previously formidable working class strongholds are mainly organizational.  That is, they can be resolved by incorporating a passive membership base, further reducing union influence and somehow 'reconnecting' with the 'grassroots'.  Either that, or they require better 'communication'.  Ideologically, his leadership is weak and prevaricating.  The thematic of the 'squeezed middle' interests few and excites no one, while the moronic Blue Labour guff turned out to be deeply damaging.  Politically, his leadership has worked to dampen and contain resistance to the cuts within the labour movement.  This is in some ways just the classic mediating function of social democracy - don't struggle, just vote for us and we will bargain a better deal for you.  But when this mediating function is captive to the logic of neoliberalism, the practical difference that Labour can offer is woefully inadequate.

Harriet Harman, who is far from the worst in Labour's leadership, showed the paucity of Labour's analysis when she insisted that 1) this result in Bradford a purely regional phenomenon, with no wider ramifications, and 2) this has nothing to do with Labour's failure to oppose, since "We've had a completely different argument from the Tories, arguing that they are cutting too far, too fast."  The latter, of course, is not "a completely different argument".  It is an argument which accepts the principle of austerity; which is to say, it is an argument which accepts that working class people have to put up with a generation being lost to joblessness, with tuition fees, privatization, service cuts, benefit cuts, and the evisceration of local infrastructure.  The real problem is that Labour has no sense of how to oppose the coalition, because it has preemptively conceded most of the territory.  This is because Labour's leadership knows that if the party wins a general election, they have no intention whatever of adopting a fundamentally different course or of significantly reversing anything the Tories now implement.

And of course, it isn't just Bradford West.  There were regionally specific factors assisting Galloway's victory, above all the local hatred for the managerial, machine politics of the Labour establishment.  But that machine has been in place for a long time.  Nor is it just a question of Muslim voters being disaffected with Labour.  The fact that some of the poorest and most oppressed workers in the UK have also been most willing to vote for left-wing candidates shouldn't even raise an eyebrow.  It is obvious, or at least it should be to marxists.  If it was only Muslims who could be reached on such an agenda, that might be a cause for concern, but Galloway gained more than 50% of the vote by mobilising a multiracial coalition.  This was a working class vote for a left-wing mandate.  It reflects not just polarization over austerity, a generational transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich, but also Labour's thus far hapless response.  The landslide for the SNP and Scottish Labour's ongoing problems, particularly in Glasgow, discloses essentially the same dynamic.  It has yet to be tested, but I think Plaid Cymru's new left-wing leadership could seriously strain Labour's presence in Wales.  And the Greens' Brighton victory in 2010 shows that wherever there is a serious left-of-Labour challenger, Labour has something to worry about.  Galloway had it right in his victory speech: Labour "must stop imagining that working people and poor people have no option but to support them if they hate the Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition partners."  

Of course this opens a space, no more than that, for some sort of left-of-Labour formation.  We should not be thinking purely or even mainly in electoral terms.  Labour's crisis is part of an organic crisis which is engulfing all the parties, and which is changing the relationship between those parties and their social base.  It is not just a question of masses fleeing from old banners and flocking under new banners.  Those parties which temporarily gain from social democracy's paralysis and breakdown only to emulate the social democrats in their basic mode of organization, often find themselves implicated in the same processes of breakdown.  What this crisis is doing is raising the question of new modes of organization, new ways in which masses relate to parties.  We know, for example, that there are going to be intense social struggles in the next few years, and orienting properly to those is even more important than exploiting electoral openings.  A formation of the militant, anti-cuts left is surely a reasonable goal in these circumstances.  

There's another reason why it is important to recognise and act on this opportunity now.  The question of austerity was never going to be resolved solely at the level of industrial conflict.  The lesson of austerity is precisely that it is at the level of politics that "that the contradictions of the economy are concentrated and that their ultimate resolution is decided."  In fact, even industrial struggles aren't won or lost purely at the level of industrial conflict.  Their success is partially contingent on the political 'line' that is won in those struggles, which depends on having a wider network of militants and activists plugged into every form of resistance, drawing and sharing lessons across the different fields of struggle, helping to overcome weakness and unevenness and resist the tendency of the union bureaucracy, particularly its Labour-affiliated right-wing, to retreat.  That requires a degree of coordination and unity on the militant left that has thus far been lacking.  More generally, the struggle against the cuts requires some degree of coordination between different levels and types of activity, and some form of organization that can negotiate a shift from one locus of struggle to another, as events progress.  We have already seen that things can look very bleak in the trade unions, then a student protest comes along and changes the whole calculus.  Likewise, a string of occupations can be winding down, only for a mass TUC-led anti-cuts protest to re-ignite the whole question.  Or, the situation can suddenly be radically re-polarized by a series of riots, and the presence or absence of a left with some weight can make all the difference.  And so on, and so on.  The fact is that 'austerity' is so comprehensive in its targets that its effects are likely to appear in aleatory and unpredictable ways at various points of antagonism.  Negotiating between and unifying these struggles is a strategic imperative, which is why I previously argued that the competing anti-cuts vessels of the Left should merge into a single flotilla.  I would now say there is space for a political organization which is more cohesive and ambitious in its objective; not a re-make of past models, nor a revamp of existing ones, but a new formation which quite deliberately sets out to organize and reconstitute those segments of the working class that are now well to the left of official Labourism.

The main obstacle to achieving something here is not the tenacity of Labourism so much as the weakness of the organized left at this stage.  But unlike the former, we can do something about the latter.  We can certainly solve any problems of organization that have dogged us in the past, provided we acknowledge them.  That's why the ostrich-like response of the monomaniacs who can only see Galloway's flaws, and only see the result as a victory for a vanity campaign, is particularly irresponsible.  It is a moralistic abdication of the duty to engage in a concrete analysis of concrete situations, to think through the strategic possibilities, to calculate the relative gains and risks of the courses that are now open to us.   As I see it, the onus is on the Left to act on this opportunity.

Dan Hodges, once a flunky for the air industry, is a PR spokesperson for the Labour Right. During the leadership campaign, he distinguished himself by predicting 1 out of 0 victories for the elder Miliband, and was dubbed "the Carole Caplin of the David Miliband campaign" for his troubles. He felt that the Comprehensive Spending Review was a humiliation for Labour not because of Labour's complicity in making it possible, and not because of what it will do to Labour's base, but because Labour's stance was not completely dictated by the Tories' position: "Come on. We know how this game is played. Match their overall spending totals, and hit them over priorities within that framework. At the same time ensure there are no uncosted spending commitments."

So, that's Dan Hodges. Now he's in the New Statesman, prophesying civil war - ironically, this article is itself a shot in the civil war that the Labour Right launched as soon as the leadership election was decided. And his argument is that the "Brownites" - that's Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper, two cabinet members known for wanting to take a harder line against the cuts - are out for Ed Miliband's head. It will be Ed out, and Yvette in, if they get their way.

Now I know what you're thinking. Why do I care about these petty personality-base debacles? And if that was all that was at issue, I'd agree. I'm not a member of the Labour Party, so I don't have an immediate stake in such matters. But look at what the Blairites have been doing lately. Alan Johnson, whom Miliband installed as Chancellor on the basis of an old saw about tents and pissing, has been publicly going against the leadership on the 50% higher tax rate, saying that he would like to drop it in a few years, and that it's only a tactical response to the deficit. In truth, he is among those who thinks it was a mistake to ever introduce this popular measure.

Now, the Blairites are in The Times, calling for an end to the union link. Alan Johnson is involved again, attacking the legitimacy of Ed Miliband's leadership by attacking the way he was elected. He claims to favour the extension of "one member one vote", neglecting to note that if the principle was applied seriously in the Labour Party, Ed Miliband would have come a clear first in the first round, and Diane Abbott would have come third. Alan Milburn is making the logic explicit, however, in demanding that union affiliates don't get a vote, and that the structural relationship with the unions is abolished. Margaret Hodge, who owes everything to the unions behind the anti-fascist campaigns that worked their fingers to the bone in Barking, is also calling for Labour to cut "the umbilical cord". There's gratitude for you.

If the Blairites were to get their way, Labourism would be dead. That's what they appear to want, and why it doesn't seem to overly perturb them that in going along so slavishly with the cuts agenda they will destroy the constituencies that keep Labourism alive. Ed Miliband, with few radical ideas and a deficit of guts, was nonetheless the candidate for those who wanted to oppose the Blairite mission. He was the candidate who promised to rebuild the Labour base, to defend trade unionism and strengthen the link. That's why his victory left Blairites reeling, fuming, plotting a coup from the off. That's why rich donors like Lord Sainsbury went off in a huff.

Ed Miliband's supporters on both the soft and hard left have called more than once for him to hammer the Blairites. Crack the whip, said Seumas Milne, and make the Right toe the line. Now, there's some faint hope that his decision to 'retire' Ray Collins as general secretary signals a determination to get tough, and purge the ruthless right-wing fixers and allow a real debate in the Labour Party. Collins was known, says Left Futures, for ensuring that any policy proposal discussed at any but the lowest levels of the Labour Party was in tune with what the leadership was thinking. He was certainly part of the disastrous witch hunt that threw Lutfur Rahman out of Labour, causing the party to lose an election for Tower Hamlets mayor that they would otherwise have easily won. And it's hard to believe that the subsequent manoeuvering to get Ken Livingstone booted out for having supported Rahman, and blockade the new East End mayor by refusing to cooperate with him at either a local or London-wide level, would have taken place without Collins' express consent. But while a different general secretary might avoid such obvious embarrassments for Labour, there's little prospect of anything fundamentally changing. The Labour Left is kidding itself if it thinks it's key strengths will flow from any processes inside the Labour Party, where they have been disenfranchised, bullied, witch-hunted and demoralised for a generation now.

John McDonnell is far more realistic. The real social forces that will provide a base for the Left, and thus potentially revitalise Labourism, will not come from the clapped out media-savvy think-tanks of the centre and soft left. They certainly won't come from the small clique of supporters around Ed Miliband. They will come from the very people that Labour's right-wing old guard least understands, and most dislikes - trade unionists, protesters, climate campaigners, and so on. The students whom Ed Balls denounced, and the strikers whom Ed Miliband has preemptively warned will not receive his support. They are the only real power that is capable of taking on the Blairites, whose legitimacy and authority is built on defeat, on acquiescence and conformity, and on deference to the media and public relations flacks.

With the Liberals lingering on 10%, the Tories have fallen to 37%, 5% behind Labour at 42%. This is just as the strikes and protests are barely beginning. Projections indicate that if the election were held tomorrow, Labour would have an outright parliamentary majority. Labour has been consistently in the lead in opinion polls for the first half of this month, largely due to the Comprehensive Spending Review and, importantly, the responses to it. But this is the largest lead Labour has had since October 2007, and follows on from the students crashing Tory HQ last week.

Perhaps this illustrates a point which the late Paul Foot used to insist on: Labour generally does better when 'our side' is stronger. It is not an iron law, but it is a trend that when the working class is more organised, more cohesive, and more combative, it gives even the most degenerate, bland, conformist Labour Party a new lease of life, because its organised base in the organised labour movement is full of fight. I believe he made this point just as the poll tax riots had driven Labour's support above 50% for the first time in decades. You may find this regrettable. Labour's leadership may find it embarrassing, but it is unavoidably the case, and it means that the coming insurgency will do more for Labour's standing than Ed Miliband's doe-eyed moderation.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that Labour's nearly cataclysmic slide in the polls between the credit crunch and the election was matched by a complete knock out for the employers in the class struggle. They shed jobs, they cut wages, and the degraded conditions more or less with impunity. New Labour governance had a lot to do with this, of course. The working class was disoriented and dazed by the recession, not immediately spurred to militancy except in a few enclaves. The labour movement was timid, fatalistic, and conservative. The right set the narrative on the deficit, and Brown and Mandelson, following the logic of their neoliberal commitments, acquiesced. Labour's base was shattered, disoriented, and largely disinclined to vote. Out of sheer urgency, a core vote mobilised that was bigger than anticipated. But Labour's base was still, as the famous Mister Ed has acknowledged, 5 million working class people short of what it could have been.

Gradually, there has been a sense of an urgent need to pull the finger out, a campaign emerging, the first sign in a long time of union assertiveness within the Labour Party itself, the flicker of grassroots dissidence forcing union bosses to retreat on having Cameron at conference and forcing the issue of joint industrial action onto the agenda, the local anti-cuts groups forming, the marches, some small, but some very big, and now the opening shot of a potentially powerful students movement. Even as Miliband goes to extravagant lengths to distance himself from the trade unions, to oppose militancy, to denounce this and condemn that, if an anti-cuts movement really takes off in this country, then he will be the ungrateful beneficiary of the revival and reconstitution of the very social forces that keep Labourism on the life support. However, if such a movement does not take off, or if it goes down to historic defeat, then Labourism may well disappear as a distinctive political formation. Its organised base would be shattered, and the remaining shreds of the party would be easy meat for a further round of Whig 'reform' that would basically turn it into a vulgar, populist adjunct of the Liberals.

So, I'm just saying, this poll result illustrates the perversity of Labourism, its dependence on social forces that it routinely attacks, and its inability to act in the interests of its own perseverance as a political force. That's all, like.

Ed Miliband's victory is not a win for socialism. Ed is not red, whatever the Murdoch press and the Blairites say about him. As he himself says: "My dad, if he was alive, would be saying that the idea that my son is 'Red Ed' is not something he would [recognise]". Labourism is not going to become socialism. But, as Ed Miliband also says, the era of New Labour is over. That is a defeat for the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, the most right-wing section of the leadership, the supporters of the war on Iraq, the civil authoritarians in the Labour Party, the most anti-union Labourites, and the majority of the corporate media.

And it is a defeat inflicted by the trade union membership, which is beginning to rally itself for a fightback against the Tory cuts package. If they didn't want to sack the Blairites in this context, I think we'd have grounds for being deeply worried. As it is, I am still encouraged by this result, and I think it will give some more confidence to workers on the frontline organising against the cuts - particularly if, as I suspect may happen, Ed Balls becomes the shadow chancellor. This, for me, is what it's really about. The class struggle always plays out in the Labour Party in a particular way. The question is whether the labour movement is prepared to have a political leadership that is in many ways hostile to the organised working class, openly spurning the unions; or whether it wants a traditionally Labourist leadership that seeks to represent the working class politically while trying to reconcile its interests with those of 'the nation' - ie national competitiveness, ie capital. This is not an inconsequential difference for the working class. Unless there is a concrete, left-wing alternative to Labourism available to us, then the political project associated with Blairism - of replacing social democracy with bourgeois liberalism, in imitation of the US Democratic Party - was always going to be catastrophic for the working class. So, the defeat of Blairism is a step forward.

Sadly, the result also comes with a sour lesson in how weak the Labour Left is, as Diane Abbott actually received fewer votes than Andy Burnham. I know from bitter arguments online and in the flesh that many left-wing Labour members didn't support Diane, ostensibly on grounds that I think are preposterous - her son's private education came up a lot, as did her television appearances with Michael Portillo. In reality, I think these rationalisations had little to do with it. The Labour Left is still deeply demoralised, and scarred, by years of Blairism. It is also numerically depleted by the mass defections of the Blair era. Milibandism of the 'Ed' variety is their dipping their toes in some moderate waters which, if successful, might encourage them to become more adventurous later on.

The trouble is that, as one particularly astute Twitterer pointed out yesterday, the Labour Right is never going to accept the leadership of a trade union-friendly centre-left. They're already sending out signals of a bitter turf war that they're prepared to wage in the coming years, with the help of their contacts in the Murdoch papers. The slightest sign of any deviation from orthodoxy will be the subject of relentless flack and destabilisation. The capitalist media is already on the attack over trade union members determining the outcome of a leadership election - the idea that a future Prime Minister could owe his position to bolshy toilers offends their sensibilities. We need a strong Left, both inside and outside of the Labour Party, to keep pressure on the new leadership. Inevitably, Ed Miliband will let down his supporters, and he may not even survive the next five years. The question then will be whether the party comes back under the control of the Blairites, or whether the pressure from the rank and file keeps the right-wing on the back foot.

John Gray has an interesting, though typically pessimistic, article on Ralph Miliband, his sons and the prospects for social democracy in the coming period in today's Guardian. He is astute, and appropriately scathing, on the failure of New Labour and of the US-led financialised capitalism that underpinned the New Labour model. I find myself less satisfied, though, by his account of Miliband's thought and of social democracy's dilemmas, and therefore of the glib 'irony' of his conclusion.

First of all, briefly, it is not strictly accurate - or rather, it is incomplete - to claim that Miliband "had always bitterly attacked" the Labour Party. He had of course criticised Labour's record in office, and Labourist ideology. He had long argued that Labour was not a socialist party, and that a socialist party was needed. But his attitude to Labour was far more complicated than Gray's summary suggests. Labourism, he wrote, was concerned above all with "the advancement of concrete demands of immediate advantage to the working class and organised labour". This accounted for the modesty of its demands, and the tendency for Labour governments to go from being adminstrations of reform to being adminstrations of conservative retrenchment. Still, the achievement of reforms advantaging the working class was not to be sniffed at, and Miliband was aware of the value of social democratic reform. "For all its limitations," he wrote, "the victory of 1945 was a great advance". He also, despite disagreements with the Labour Left, had a great deal of sympathy for them, and tried to work alongside them. He understood the necessity of socialists relating to the Labour Party, it being where most of the working class was situated.

***

Secondly, on Bennism, Miliband's position was not exactly the naive one that Gray attributes to him, of believing that Benn could lead a socialist revolt and capture the Labour Party for the Left. There is an interesting story here, but it is not the one Gray tells. Miliband had long argued, as he put it in 1976, that "the belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone." ('Moving On', Socialist Register 1976) In the 1980s, it is true that in despair at the extraordinary difficulty of building support for a socialist alternative to the Labour Party, he decided that the question of whether a new generation of left-wing activists could challenge the Labour leadership was "more open" than he had previously conceded. Nonetheless, he wrote: "I have for more than ten years written that this hope of the left to transform the Labour Party - which has always been nourished by the Labour Left - was illusory ... I am far from convinced that I was mistaken." ('Socialist Advance in Britain', Socialist Register 1983).

Surely, you might say, either prospect, of forming a new socialist party out of the disintegration of Labourism (which Miliband assayed very insightfully), or of claiming Labour for the Left and driving out the right, had slim chances at that point. That is not an argument that I think Miliband would have dissented from, however. Whatever his flaws, unsophisticated utopianism was not among them. Moreover, I would say that Miliband's basic assessment that the disintegration of Labourism was long-term, and that it would eventually lead to activists in the Labour Party and in the trade union rank and file considering a wholesale political secession, was both accurate and in a way prophetic - if that isn't a polite way of saying 'premature'.

Miliband's position on Tony Benn, far from reflecting a deluded belief that he was poised to capture the big batallions of the labour movement for socialism, owed itself to the fact that Benn had extraordinary experience working at senior cabinet levels and within the state for someone on the Left. Through that experience, he had derived radical conclusions about the basic institutions of the British state and society that few of his predecessors had. Compared to Lansbury, Cripps, Bevan, or Foot, his critique of the capitalist state seemed to go much farther than most of the reformist left had ever done. Oweing to this experience and his radical conclusions, he was a natural leader of the Left.

Contrary to the impression given by Gray, it was long after the SDP split, after the right-wing had taken control of the NEC, and the leadership, after Militant had been expelled, and the miners' strike defeated, that Miliband started to look to Benn. It was not out of a delusional belief that Labour was about to become a socialist party at the height of Bennite radicalism that he began to cultivate Benn. It was in a period of right-wing hegemony when, out of his growing pessimism that a socialist alternative to Labour could be created, and his worry that Kinnock's attacks on the Labour left would farther reduce the scope for socialist agitation in the UK, he sought to draw Benn into a sort of unofficial national leadership role for the Left. In fact, he did not encourage Benn to try to take control of Labour, regretted his running for the shadow cabinet and strongly advised him not to run against Kinnock in 1988 - advice that Benn ignored.

Miliband's collaboration with Tony Benn is thus interesting less because it signals illusions in the Labour Party than because it signals disillusionment in his other major project of building a left-of-Labour alternative. I think this was the inevitable result of Miliband's relative isolation. That may seem like an odd thing to say about someone who was constantly organising conferences, polemicising, intervening in debates, lecturing, and so on. Yet, strangely for a figure whose analysis was so geared to socialist strategy, intelligently assessing the resources and class capacities available to the Left, and figuring out possible paths for future development, Miliband never put applied his insights inside any organisation. He was of the 'independent Left', which meant that in his particular views he was sometimes in a party of one. He never felt he could join any party - not the Labour Party, not the IMG, not the SWP.

A marxist intellectual without a party is not necessarily a marxist disarmed, but such a person will in practise either orient himself to existing currents that he is in principle opposed to, or retreat into arid theory or utopianism. An individual of Miliband's tremendous talents could resist the gravitational pull of larger social forces to some extent, but not completely. Unable to persuade sufficient numbers to build a new socialist party to replace Labour, unwilling to join the small revolutionary parties, in practise Miliband navigated between the academics around the New Left Review and the Labour Left. This isn't a terrible space to occupy, but it does seem a shame that Miliband's organisational gifts were squandered on a premature attempt to build a left-of-Labour vehicle to hegemonise the organised working class, and then on the possibility, which he knew to be distant, that socialists in the Labour Party might eventually be able push the question and eventually refound it on different principles.

By the end of the 1980s, he was no longer convinced that capturing Labour was even a remote possibility. He continued to be friends with Benn, but he saw that the 'long run' was going to be even longer than he had conceived, that the decline of the Left would continue, and that the 'new realists' around Kinnock and the TUC bureaucracy would hold the rank and file in check. Unlike his sons, of course, he did not consider that this was a good enough reason to actually join Kinnock and the Labour right.

***

Thirdly, Gray is even wider from the mark when he suggests that Miliband did not notice the ascendancy of the radical free market right, the failing fortunes of the socialist Left, and the fundamental changes in capitalism that took place in the twenty years before his death in 1994. Remarking on Miliband's lifelong socialism, he says that "it was capitalism that proved to be the revolutionary force in the late 20th century, consigning socialism to the memory hole". But Miliband, having no illusions in 'democratic socialism' and few in the USSR, had no reason to expect that either of these two major poles of attraction on the socialist Left were destined for any fate other than the memory hole. His brief, as he saw it, was to help reconstitute a more adequate socialism that was equipped to withstand the domesticating pressures of capitalist democracy.

If Miliband was ultimately unsuccessful in this mission, he was not deluded about the impact that the collapse of Labourism and Stalinism would have on the Left as a whole. Miliband's private thoughts, (recorded in Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the politics of the New Left, 2002), tend to concur with his public writings on this point. While in the mid-1970s amid powerful labour militancy, he saw opportunities for fundamental political realignment, by the time of the early 1980s and the political success of Thatcherism, he was less sanguine. In 1982, he was privately of the view that the Left was in a "terrible mess". In 1983, he was publicly of the view that Labour's defeat was "a major defeat not only for the Labour Party but for all socialist forces", and reflected "the most dramatic manifestation of a deep-seated, long-term crisis, for which no immediate remedy is at hand". Worse, it had conferred "a new legitimacy upon an exceptionally reactionary Conservative government".

As to the nature of this reaction, writing with Leo Panitch ('Socialists and the 'New Conservatism'', Socialist Register 1987) he noted its "major success" in shifting "political debate much farther to the right" so that much that was taken for granted in the post-war era was now being "powerfully and effectively challenged". He gave witness to the defeat of Bennism in Britain and the retreat from the Common Programme in France, both demonstrating the resilience of right-wing social democracy against left-wing attempts to supercede it, even as social democracy was itself increasingly reliant on conservative solutions to economic crisis. Above all, he stressed, the 'new conservatism' enjoyed much of its success because of the detumescence of the radical Left, itself the result of the failures of social democracy upon which too many socialists had pinned their hopes. Conservative retrenchment, and socialist retreat, was not blithely ignored by the elder Miliband in a hasty conversion to socialist Labourism - rather it was part of the perspective that led to him increasingly seeking allies in Labour itself.

In support of his case, lastly, Gray cites the fate of the USSR as a decisive point against Miliband's socialist faith. Miliband's own (highly ambivalent) attitude to the collapse of the Soviet Union is instructive here. He saw that at one level it would be a victory for the free marketeers, and knew what that meant for the foreseeable future. He visited Czechoslovakia and was very depressed to see privatization in action. But he also celebrated that a great weight had been lifted from the shoulders of socialists, that being the burden of 'actually existing socialism' which he insisted was at best a monstrous "perversion" of the socialist idea. Miliband never entirely broke with the idea that the USSR represented some kind of socialism, which he had held from his early days as a Communist Party member. Indeed, he was initially uneasy about the force with which some in the New Left denounced the USSR and the so-called People's Democracies. For that reason, EP Thompson accused him of being 'soft' on Stalinism. But this sympathy more and more became opposition in later years. He supported dissidents in Eastern Europe, and criticised Soviet adventurism in Afghanistan. The "immensity of evil" that Stalinism represented convinced him that the whole idea of a socialism that was both undemocratic and inegalitarian was preposterous and perverse. The formula he came to prefer when assessing the USSR was that it was 'oligarchic collectivist'.

Miliband did have a soft spot for Gorbachev, whom he believed had recognised that socialism needed democracy. However, he saw the demise of the USSR coming, believing that whatever Gorbachev's intentions he would be quickly pushed aside by opportunists, and any chance for a democratic socialism would be crushed. And given his disillusionment in the USSR as a bastion of socialism, his failure to shed tears at its downfall is perfectly reasonable. On the prospects for reviving socialism after the USSR, he wrote: "I am not a Pangloss, but I do think there is more going on than meets the eye, and that the opposition will make itself felt." I think he is vindicated in this. Although there is a hell of a long way to go in reconstructing the Left, the germinal revival of systemic critique with the anticapitalist movements and the global rebellion since 2003 against the very US hegemony that was consolidated with the fall of the USSR, do constitute opposition making itself felt. And I am convinced that we will see it more often, and feel it more deeply, than we have until now.

If Miliband tended to foreground his optimism, it was sober optimism, and he was also alert to the dangers of a climate where socialism was off the agenda. As he wrote in Socialism for a Sceptical Age, his last book, the political and intellectual reaction in the West that was strengthened by the USSR's collapse "plays its own part in creating a climate of thought which contributes to the flowering of poisonous weeds in the capitalist jungle—weeds whose names have already been noted—racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatreds, fundamentalism, intolerance. The absence from the political culture of the rational alternative which socialism represents helps the growth of reactionary movements which encompass and live off these pathologies and which manipulate them for their own purposes." The return of fascism as a serious electoral option in parts of Europe, the growth of xenophobic street gangs, and genuinely terrifying pogroms in Italy and Hungary, shows that Miliband was not exaggerating.

***

The difference between Gray and Miliband is that the latter was a socialist, and was always concerned with a scrupulous assessment of class forces and particularly the structural capacity of the working class to assert its interests. This is not to assent to Gray's caricature of Miliband as someone who was unaware of the fact that "politics is driven by far more than class conflict", much less as someone who failed to notice that the "interests of capitalists are often at odds". No one who had actually read the texts cited by Gray - Parliamentary Socialism, and The State in Capitalist Society - could have made that mistake. But it is to say that as a socialist, he was first and foremost interested in what forces the exploited and oppressed had at their disposal, and particularly how robust the working class's organisational capacities were. His assessment of whether social democracy would survive a worldwide systemic crisis, or even give way to more radical alternatives, would be shaped first by his view of how well placed the working class was to resist the incursions of capital, and secondly by his assessment of the institutional capacities of the Left.

For Gray, of course, this is not even an issue. The only real agencies are global capital, and the hopelessly inadequate representatives of social democracy fighting a rearguard action to defend the welfare state against capital's demands for austerity. Though he speaks of "class conflict", I'm not convinced that the whole idea, inasmuch as he grasps it at all, isn't faintly ridiculous for him. Similarly, the "Marxian insight" that capitalism is inherently unstable, constantly mutating and volatile could just as well be an "Austrian insight" or a "Schumpeterian insight". Because he refers to marxism doesn't necessarily mean that he means the same thing as most marxists do by it. The story, as far as Gray is concerned, is of one revolutionary utopian movement, socialism, being overtaken and diplaced by another, the 'false dawn' of neoliberal capitalism. In that light, it is easy to condescend to Miliband a little, and appropriate some of his more convenient critique, now that his dangerous utopian ideas are harmlessly consigned to the memory hole. Unfortunately, that means that the Milibandism which young Labourites should be reading up on, even as they're sticking up 'twibbons' advertising young Edward, has been somewhat mangled and traduced in the process. Which, as I say, undermines an otherwise savvy critique of our New Labour ex-overlords.