Obituaries

Arthur Miller (1915–2005).

Fifteen years ago I went to see a production of Arthur Miller’s “The Price” at the Young Vic Theatre in London, where David Thacker was directing a number of Miller’s plays. At a time when Miller seemed to have been sidelined in his own country, his importance as a playwright of international standing was re-asserted on the English stage. In discussion with David Thacker before the play, Miller read part of the opening scene of perhaps his most famous work, “Death of a Salesman”. In Miller’s performance the opening of his modern tragedy became a scene full of comedy and laughter. Listening, it...

Veteran Vietnamese Trotskyist dies

The veteran Vietnamese Trotskyist Ngo Van has died in Paris at the age of 91. For more about his life and ideas, see this article from New Politics .

The lasting legacy of Derrida

Peter Thomas examines the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who died in October Derrida is often regarded in the Anglophone world as a leading French postmodern philosopher whose doctrine of “deconstruction” propounded a moral relativism and political passivity. In fact Derrida was neither French nor post-modern. He was as opposed to doctrines as he was insistent on the necessity of moral and political choices and commitments. He was, to be sure, a philosopher, but one whose life and work were spent interrogating and problematising precisely those responsibilities which accompany...

What Yasser Arafat can teach socialists

When he died, Yasser Arafat left the Palestinian people facing the threat that the prospect of a viable independent Palestinian state, side by side with Israel, is disappearing into the mists of history’s lost possibilities. He had presided over a quasi-government notorious for the venality and corruption of its members. Because he ruled as an autocrat, he left the leadership of the Palestinians to be decided by what may turn into a very destructive factional free-for-all. Reportedly he left a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Indeed, Arafat was no hero for socialists and...

How the PLO came to advocate "two states"

In 1959, based in Kuwait, Yasser Arafat started a magazine called Our Palestine. In the guise of another variant of Arab nationalism, the magazine, and the small group linked to it, al Fatah, in fact promoted something new: a distinct Palestinian nationalism. For most people then the Palestinian question was a “refugee problem”, and a problem of “Arab land”, not the question of the rights of the Palestinian nation. The Arab states refused to integrate the refugees, and used them as a standing argument against Israel. Their proclaimed plan was to reclaim the “Arab land” occupied by Israel and...

It's Dolly

Bruce Robinson looks at the life of Dolly Rathebe The South African jazz singer and actor Dolly Rathebe died on 16 September, aged 76. She was a major figure in the flourishing of South African urban black culture in the 1950s before it was suppressed by the apartheid regime. She made a come-back after its end in the 90s. Dolly Rathebe became well-known when, aged 19, she starred in the film “Jim comes to Jo’burg”, the first commercial film to deal with urban black lives. She had moved to the Sophiatown district of Johannesburg, one of the only areas where blacks could own property, and blacks...

The man who listened

Matt Cooper applauds the legacy of JOHN PEEL John Peel’s death at 65 on 25 October doesn’t mark an end of an era in at Radio One — Peel always was an outsider at Radio One, and the wonder is that the people in suits who run the BBC allowed such a maverick, motivated by love of music, not love of his own celebrity, to grace the airwaves for so long. To say that with Peel Radio One loses its last shred of credibility ignores Peel’s long time status as its only shred of credibility. Peel’s first British radio programme, broadcast in 1967 for the pirate station Radio London, was called the...

Livio Maitan, 1923-2004

Avec Livio Maitan, le mouvement ouvrier italien et européen vient de perdre l'une des figures les plus marquantes de son histoire dans le second vingtième siècle, celui qui commence en 1945 et se termine en 1989. [From the French Marxist bulletin Liaisons .] Vénitien, intellectuel de valeur, amateur de foot, au contact facile et ouvert, Livio Maitan est à la suite de son engagement dans la guerre civile contre les fascistes, un dirigeant des Jeunesses socialistes italiennes. C'est dans ce cadre, alors qu'il représentait les JS italiennes à un congrès de la SFIO, qu'il est "gagné" à la IV°...

The Two Souls of the Comintern part 2

Communism and philistinism This is the second part of an obituary article of James Patrick Cannon, one of the founders of the international Trotskyist movement. It was first published at the beginning of 1975 in Permanent Revolution, a magazine of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty tendency. We reprint it here to mark the 30th anniversary of Cannon’s death. The AWL has criticisms of Cannon’s political career (see Solidarity 3/57) but honours and respects the great contribution he made to the struggle against capitalism and Stalinism. The article contrasts Cannon’s political life with that of...

Paul Foot

Paul Foot, who has died at the age of 66, was one of Britain's best known socialists. A member of what is now the SWP for 43 years, he became widely known for "muckraking" books about miscarriages of justice such as Who Killed Hanratty (1971), for his association with Private Eye, and for his columns in the Daily Mirror and the Guardian. In the film "Time Bandits" John Cleese plays a boyish upper class Robin Hood - Paul Foot in voice and manner. It cannot but have been a deliberate take-off of Foot and it is accurate to a T. Born in Palestine in 1937, where his father was serving, he was of...

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