Obituaries

Vladimir Derer, campaigner for Labour Party democracy

Vladimir Derer who was the leading figure in the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) for forty years after its foundation in 1973 has died at the age of 94. Although almost unknown other than amongst Labour activists, he was the Labour left’s leading strategist at the height of its influence in the 1970s and 1980s.His strategic vision made CLPD, the most effective organisation on the Labour left through to the New Labour years and the present. Tony Benn was rightly regarded as the Labour left’s outstanding leader and communicator of the period but he was often wrongly credited with...

Fran Broady, 1938-2014

Fran Broady, who was a leading member of our organisation in the 1970s, died on 18 May at the age of 75. Fran met us in 1970, when we were an opposition tendency in IS (forerunner of, but very much more open than, today's SWP). The IS/SWP expelled our tendency in December 1971, because of our campaign against the switch of line to "No to the Common Market" from advocating European workers' unity. Fran chose our small expelled group without hesitation. I remember a conversation with a student member of another left group in 1972, when we were labouring to get a circulation for our new, small...

Dave Broady, 1937-2014

Dave Broady died on 4 April. In 1972 he contributed regularly to Workers’ Fight, a forerunner of Solidarity . An excerpt [below] signals the tone and type of his writing. After joining the Navy, and being jailed and dismissed, Dave became a construction worker, a steel erector. He told me he couldn’t tolerate the more controlled environment of a factory. Dave’s then wife Fran Broady joined our organisation in 1970-1, and was a prominent member for a long while. Their older daughter Karen also became an active revolutionary socialist, and now works with AWL in Manchester. Dave himself, however...

Bob Crow, 1961-2014

Bob Crow represented plain-speaking trade union militancy. He was seen as the personification of the idea that the job of a trade union leader is to stick by and stick up for the union’s members — not apologise for, close down or slither away from their battles with employers. Everyone who understands and values that mourns his shocking and premature death. There is a genuine feeling of sorrow, shock, disbelief and profound sadness among RMT members, and condolences have poured in from everyone from union leaders around the world to passengers coming up to transport staff. On the day of Bob’s...

Tony Benn, 1925-2014

(The author worked with Benn and others to set up the Rank and File Mobilising Committee, which for a while united most of the Labour Party left, at the start of the 1980s.) The first thing that should be said and remembered about Tony Benn, who died on Friday 14 March, is that for over four decades he backed, defended, and championed workers in conflict with their bosses or with the "boss of bosses", the government. That put him decidedly in our camp. The political ideas which he too often linked with those bedrock working-class battles detract from the great merit of Tony Benn, but do not...

Pete Camarata, 1946-2014

This obituary was originally published on the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) website, here . Teamsters mourn the passing of brother Pete Camarata, one of the founders of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, who died at his home in Chicago on February 9th. Pete was the real deal—a Teamster who stood for principle at a time when few others would dare to. Camarata attended a meeting of Teamsters for a Decent Contract in 1975, and quickly became a leader and inspiration to many Teamsters. He went home from that meeting to his own Detroit Local 299, where the young man was a steward who had...

Norman Harding, 1929-2013

Veteran Trotskyist and Leeds activist Norman Harding passed away in December. He was 84. For the last 25 years Norman had been a key figure in Leeds Tenants’ Federation and pensioners’ rights campaigns. Before that he was a prominent member of the Socialist Labour League (SLL) and the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). He wrote about his experiences in a highly readable and cautionary autobiography Staying Red — Why I Remain A Revolutionary Socialist. Norman was a shop steward in a textile factory and member of Leeds Labour Party when he joined the SLL in the late 1950s, then the biggest...

Nelson Mandela 1918-2013

Nelson Mandela was a big man and his long life was punctuated by huge personal and political achievements. Foremost among his personal achievements was the dignity and apparent lack of bitterness with which he emerged from 27 years of imprisonment by the apartheid regime in South Africa. He had the personal grace to embody the long struggle against racism and for democracy when he re-entered the public sphere in 1990 and by nearly all accounts he set an example of leadership during his own long years in gaol. During this period Mandela was himself rather forgotten for much of the time, out of...

The legacy of Norman Geras

On Friday 18 October, Marxist political philosopher Norman Geras died of cancer at the age of 70. Geras was born in what was then Southern Rhodesia in 1943 and came to England to study at Oxford in 1962. He graduated with a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1965 and took up a teaching post at Manchester University where he remained for the rest of his academic life, retiring in 2003. He became more widely known in recent years through “Normblog”, which quickly became one of the most widely read and influential political blogs. Official obituaries, including that from his friend...

Remembering Paul Fyssas

Paul Fyssas, killed by a fascist in Piraeus on 17 September, grew up in the working class neighbourhoods of Keratsini. The son of a shipyard worker in Perama, he in turn went to work in the yard. From his school years he loved hip hop and from a listener quickly he turned into an artist. He continued to work from time to time in the yards, was a member of the Piraeus metal workers’ union, and consistently participated in its mobilisations. Paul distributed his music free via the internet. “He was one of Golden Dawn’s targets because of his anti-fascist lyrics”, admitted one former local Golden...

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