Obituaries

Roy Battersby (1936-2024)

Probably best known for the TV drama Leeds United! (1974) which features a women’s textile workers’ strike (and was discussed in Solidarity 584 ), Roy Battersby had a highly productive and varied career as a writer and director of mainly TV dramas. He started off as part of that generation of left-inclined writers and directors (such as Ken Loach, Alan Bleasdale, Jim Allen, Dennis Potter, David Hare) who worked at the BBC on the Play for Today and then branched out into writing Cracker , Between the Lines , Morse , and many other dramas. As one of his last works he directed the film Red...

John Pilger: once an inspiring truth-teller

John Pilger, who died on 30 December 2023, was once a brave and principled journalist who spoke truth to power. Many of us of a Certain Age can remember being moved and inspired in the 1970s by his exposures of war crimes, racism, injustice and human rights abuses. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Biafra and probably (in Britain at least) did more than any other journalist to bring the horrors of those conflicts to public attention. He twice won the UK Journalist of the Year Award: in 1967 and 1979. His eponymous TV series on ITV was required viewing as far as I...

Paul Burkett, 1956-2024

Paul Burkett, the prolific author on Marxist ecology, sadly died on 7 January 2024. He was aged 67 and had sudden complications from acute myeloid leukaemia. He began teaching at Syracuse University, then worked at the University of Miami and at Indiana State University for more than twenty years. He retired in 2020. At the turn of the century Burkett made several seminal contributions to the revival of Marxist ecology. His book Marx and Nature: A Red And Green Perspective (1999) re-examined Marx’s works in light of ecological questions. He made good use of the Marx and Engels Collected Works...

Pat Markey memorial meeting

On Wednesday 13 December 2023 Northampton Trades Council held a memorial meeting for long time local NEU activist and Workers’ Liberty supporter, Pat Markey.

Tom O’Lincoln, 1947-2023

Tom O’Lincoln has sadly passed away. He had had a great influence in revolutionary left politics in Australia since he arrived from the US in 1971. He had in the late 1960s joined the US International Socialists, then strongly influenced by Hal Draper’s politics, including a bureaucratic collectivist analysis of the Stalinist states, rather than Tony Cliff’s state-capitalist one. Tom played a leadership role in a number of organisations of the “International Socialist” tradition (which has fractured a few times in Australia), and there are many tributes to him from current and former members...

Horace Ové, 1936-2023

Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Horace Ové grew up loving film after frequenting the cinema on a nearby US military base. Later, he became deeply influenced by Italian Realism. He was one of the first black filmmakers to make his mark after he moved to England in 1960, directing his first film, a short documentary, in 1966. He went on to make a number of documentaries, one of which featured the Black American writer James Baldwin. After numerous difficulties finding funds he directed his best known film, Pressure , in 1975. Co-written with Samuel Selvon, it centres on the life of a 16 year...

Alan McArthur 1972-2023

Comrades of a certain vintage will remember Alan McArthur, who died way too young earlier this summer

Pat Markey

It is with great sadness that we have to report that Pat Markey, a longstanding member of Workers’ Liberty in Northampton, has died after being diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. Solidarity 684 will carry a tribute.

Mario Tronti, 1931-2023

Mario Tronti, one of the foremost inspirations for the "autonomist" strand of Marxism, died on 7 August at the age of 92.

Hugo Blanco 1934-2023

Peruvian revolutionary socialist Hugo Blanco, who died in Sweden last month, needs to be recognised as a significant figure in the history of the Trotskyist movement. He became a Trotskyist as a student in Argentina in the 1950s, then returned to Peru. Sixty years ago, connected to the international trend led by the Socialist Workers Party in the USA, he played a major role in the peasant movement in La Convencion province in the Cuzco region of Peru. The majority of the peasantry there and elsewhere in the country laboured under semi-feudal conditions. Belonging to the indigenous population...

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