Obituaries

Good news - Pinochet is dead

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.

I demonstrated against him when he was briefly detained here a few years ago...

Ferenc Puskas and the revolution in football

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. A seminal event occured in November 1953 when they became the first overseas side to beat England at Wembley. Playing a flowing, short passing game, they won 6-3 (they would win the return match in May 1954 7-1). While England stuck rigidly to the 'W-M' or 3-4-3 formation invented by Arsenal in the 1920's, Hungary lined up in a system later known as...

Peter Fryer and Trotskyism

Peter Fryer, who died on 31 October 2006 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. He was the correspondent of the Stalinist Daily Worker (now the Morning Star ) who 50 years ago went for his paper to Hungary. He sent back honest reports of the Hungarian uprising against Stalinism in 1956, which was bloodily crushed by Russian tanks, and had his articles suppressed by the Daily Worker , which backed the Russians...

Ted Grant and Marxism

“The only true prophets are those who carve out the future they announce.” James Connolly Ted Grant defined Marxism, in my hearing, as the “science of prediction”. Grant made many “Marxist” predictions, about the Stalinist states, the, so-to-speak, predetermined evolution of the Labour Party and many other things. He got almost everything spectacularly wrong. The only prediction of his that came true was his often-repeated assertion that he would outlive all his contemporaries, all his one-time comrades, all his once-upon-a-time political rivals. He did. He was 93 when he died on July 20 2006...

Ted Grant

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. For decades he led what became the Militant Tendency in Britain, which in the early 1980s acquired some strength and prominence. At the time of his death he was a member of Socialist Appeal, a group which split off from the main body of ex-Militant people (now Socialist Party) in the early 1990s, to remain active within the Labour Party while the SP broke from it. Some readings on the Grant tendency can be found at: Ted Grant and Marxism as "Prediction"...

Stefan Piekarczyk

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. At the end of 1970s Stefan came to Poland to study. He was one of the most important people (along with Ludwik Hass) in rebuilding Trotskyism as a political current on the Polish left. He was active as a left journalist in the...

An unswerving fighter

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. Alan Fraser, who had himself been sacked for union activity in the local post office, was then chair of Basingstoke Labour Party and a supporter of Socialist Organiser. In my eyes Paul was a working class intellectual, a Marxist and unswerving fighter for...

Equality in the struggle

Jean Lane, a Women’s Fightback organiser during the miners’ strike, remembers how Paul Whetton responded to women organising. The need for the organisation of working class women to change society, became common parlance for men and women throughout the strike, changing forever how many women saw themselves and how men viewed them. Wife into comrade, women changed their role from housekeeper to picket, speaker, traveller, poet. Paul, from the beginning, was very clear on the importance of the role of Women Against Pit Closures. They were what kept Notts, and arguably the strike itself, going...

Paul Whetton, Trotskyist Notts Miners Leader In the 1984-5 Strike

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. On 3 March 1985, the National Union of Mineworkers delegate conference voted 98 to 91 to return to work without a settlement, but as a still-intact union. Paul lobbied against the return, arguing with other left wingers that the strike should continue until 700 sacked miners got their jobs back. Having been out-voted, however, he was part of the disciplined return to work...

Trotskyist martyrs

We honour the Marxist fighters who died for their commitment to independent working class politics. We take inspiration from Russian Trotskyists, the first victims of Stalin's gulags. We remember other Trotskyists such as Leon Sedov, Rudolf Klement, Moulin, Erwin Wolf and Heinz Epe (Walter Held) murdered by Stalin's agents in Europe during the '30s. We admire Trotskyists, including Martin Monat (Paul Widelin), who organised fraternisation inside the German army during World War Two, produced the paper Arbeiter und Soldat and were murdered for their work. We salute Marcel Hic, Joseph Jakobovic...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.