New Left: 1960–1994
Miliband joined the Labour Party in 1951, and was a reluctant Bevanite in the early 1950s. He joined the British New Left, alongside the likes of E. P. Thompson and John Saville, at the New Reasoner in 1958, which became the New Left Review in 1960.
Miliband published his first book, Parliamentary Socialism, in 1961, which examined the role that the Labour Party played in British politics and society from a Marxist position, finding it wanting for a lack of radicalism. Paul Blackledge would later claim that it was "arguably Miliband's finest work". He ended his membership of the Labour Party in the mid-1960s, and subsequently remained independent of formal political affiliation. He began arguing that socialists in Britain had to start working towards building a viable alternative that would be genuinely revolutionary socialist in its positions.
He also set up the Socialist Register with Saville in 1964 and was influenced by the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, of whom he had been a friend. He published The State in Capitalist Society in 1969, a study in Marxist political sociology, rejecting the idea that pluralism spread political power, and maintaining that power in Western democracies was concentrated in the hands of a dominant class.
Miliband was passionately opposed to American involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1967 he wrote in the Socialist Register that "the US has over ... a period of years been engaged ... in the wholesale slaughter of men, women and children, the maiming of many more" and that the United States' "catalogue of horrors" against the Vietnamese people was being done "in the name of an enormous lie". In the same article, he attacked Harold Wilson for his defence of the United States' action in Vietnam, describing it as being the "most shameful chapter in the history of the Labour Party". He went on to say that the US government "made no secret of the political and diplomatic importance it attached to the unwavering support of a British Labour Government".
He left the LSE in 1972, having found himself torn by the controversies which had beleaguered the institution over the preceding few years, particularly the LSE's responses to student protests in the late 1960s. He took up the post of Professor of Politics at the University of Leeds. The time at Leeds was an unhappy period for Miliband. He suffered a heart attack soon after the move, and did not enjoy the administrative responsibilities as a head of department. He resigned in 1978, and subsequently chose to assume several posts in Canada and the USA. He took a Professorship at Brandeis University in 1977, and also lectured at other universities in North America, including York University in Toronto and the City University of New York, although he remained based in London. He published Marxism and Politics in 1977, and Capitalist Democracy in Britain in 1982. By now Miliband was active in the Socialist Society with friends such as Tariq Ali and Hilary Wainwright.
In 1985, his essay "The New Revisionism in Britain" appeared in the 25th anniversary issue of the New Left Review in which he responds to writers associated with the Marxism Today magazine such as Eric Hobsbawm and Stuart Hall. Despite their differences, Hobsbawm had been a long-standing friend of Miliband.
He suffered from cardiac problems in later life, and had a bypass operation in 1991. He died 21 May 1994. aged 70, survived by his wife and sons. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, close to Karl Marx. His last book, Socialism for a Sceptical Age, was published in 1994, after his death.
