Workers' Liberty

RMT members learned with great sadness of the untimely death on Sunday 6 April 2008 of Greg Tucker, secretary of RMT’s Waterloo branch since 1993 and of the union’s National Conference of Train Cr

RMT members learned with great sadness of the untimely death on Sunday 6 April 2008 of Greg Tucker, secretary of RMT’s Waterloo branch since 1993 and of the union’s National Conference of Train Cr

A month ago, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Dr. George Habash, died in Jordan. Dr. Habash died of a heart attack. He was 82 years old.

On December 22 2007, Andrew Glyn, left wing economist and prolific author of books and articles about capitalism, died of a brain tumour.

By John Bloxam

On 18 July Mick Cashman died, aged just 48.

For over a decade until the early 1990s, he was a member of the AWL’s predecessor organisations and supporter of Workers’ Action and Socialist Organiser.

Former AWL member and long-standing sympathiser, Roy Webb, has died following a short illness.Roy had lived with multiple sclerosis and had been very seriously disabled by the condition for many years. But he never allowed the physical problems MS caused him to stop his campaigning activity.

by Sean Matgamna

By Sean Matgamna

“The revolution... made its first steps toward victory under the belly of a Cossack’s horse”, wrote Leon Trotsky, describing the start of the Russian Revolution of February 1917.

Mike Wood admired Kurt Vonnegut

“The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.” Kurt Vonnegut’s prediction for the future.

Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84. He was a science fiction author who remained prolific, acerbic, and radically left wing right up until his death.

“The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce.”
James Connolly

Ted Grant, the last survivor from the leading figures of the Trotskyist movement of the 1940s died last July.

Despite a career as a playwright and essayist, it is as a novelist that Kurt Vonnegut will be most remembered. A social and moral critic, his writing held a mirror up to humanity and showed us all absurdity, the cruelty and plain insanity of the world. Any socialist worth their salt should read at least one, preferably all of his novels.

Earlier this week I found out that Mary Low Machado had died on 9 January, aged 94. I have been researching the Spanish revolution, one of the great events of the twentieth century, which she participated in as a Trotskyist. This is what I know of her life:

Augusto Pinochet, the butcher of Chile is dead. Good. He overthrew an elected reformist government, murdered thousands of revolutionaries and militants and pioneered neoliberal austerity on the backs of Chilean workers.

The Hungarian footballer Ferenc Puskas who has died aged 79, fifty years after the Russian invasion which drove him from his homeland, was a key member of the Magnificent Magyars, the national team who revolutionised football in the early fifties.

By John O'Mahony

Peter Fryer, who died on 31 October a few months short of his 80th birthday, is known now as the author of important books such as his history of black people in Britain, Staying Power. He once played an important part in the revolutionary socialist movement.

“The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce.”

James Connolly

Ted Grant, the last survivor from among the leading figures of the Trotskyist movement of the 1940s, died in July 2006 at the age of 93.

By August Grabski

Click here for a French translation of this article.

On 16 February 2006 Stefan Piekarczyk died of cancer in Warsaw. Stefan was a socialist, a Trotskyist, a translator and an economist.

He was born in 1955 and grew up in a Polish family in Glasgow and there he joined a British section of the Fourth International (FI) — the International Marxist Group.

Throughout the strike, pit villages were twinned with the labour movements in towns and cities throughout the country, and there was a constant flow of activists between the two. One of the towns the North Notts strikers were twinned with was Basingstoke, and Paul and his comrades spent a lot of time with socialists and activists from there.

Jean Lane, a Women’s Fightback organiser during the miners’ strike, remembers how Paul Whetton responded to women organising.

On Friday 3 March Paul Whetton, miner, trade union militant, socialist and Workers’ Liberty collaborator, died aged 66. It was the 21st anniversary of the end of the great miners’ strike of 1984-85. John Bloxam remembers him.

We honour the Marxist fighters who died for their commitment to
independent working class politics.

By Heenal Rajani

We should remember George Best for his football alone and not his decline.

Exactly 30 years ago, on 19 November 1975 Cynthia Baldry died in Liverpool. She was a member of one of Solidarity/AWL’s forerunners, Workers’ Fight.

By Dan Katz

“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over.”

Martin Luther King

“My resistance to being mistreated on the busses and anywhere else was just a regular thing with me and not just on that day.”

Rosa Parks (1913-2005)

By Gerry Bates

This article about Leon Trotsky was written in 1943 by Victor Serge for the radical-cultural review Partisan Review

Former Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath, who died on 17 July, has elicited lavish praise from what the bourgeois press likes to call “all parts of the political spectrum”. Tony Blair has described him as “magnificent… an extraordinary man, a great statesman, a prime minister our country can be proud of”, and eulogies from Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy have been similarly gushing and hackneyed.

Taking part in our international meeting on Saturday 18th June was Karim Landais. This young man worked with Yves Coleman on the magazine Ni patrie ni frontières and, unbeknownst to most of us at the meeting, he was battling with depression. A week later, on Saturday 25 June, he took his own life. This appreciation of Karim was written by Yves Coleman.

Notoriety clung for decades to the Tory politician Enoch Powell for his 1968 speech predicting that “rivers of blood” would flow if black and Asian immigration was allowed to continue. That was a foul speech by a foul man.