Obituaries

Davey Hopper, 1943-2016

Davey Hopper, General Secretary of the Durham Miners Association, died suddenly on 16 July. The defeat of the 1984-1985 miners’ strike destroyed communities, lives and set back the cause of working class struggle for a generation. No one knew that better then Hopper, and he with others devoted the next 30 years of his life to turning the Durham Miners’ Association into a force which fought back for the community and the wider movement. Hopper was a working miner and shop steward in the Durham coalfield at the start of the Miners strike. He rose to prominence as an advocate of militant...

Bogdan Denitch: “a tireless organiser”

Bogdan Denitch was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1929. His father was a Serbian diplomat. In 1940 Bogdan went to London when his father moved to the Yugoslav embassy there. Eventually Bogdan came to New York in 1946. He enrolled at City College New York and soon joined the Young People’s Socialist League, YPSL, the youth group of the Socialist Party. Maurice Isserman, in his biography of Michael Harrington, who by the 1960s and 70s would become the USA’s best-known socialist, describes how Bogdan Denitch recruited Harrington to the YPSL. He met Harrington, then a devout Catholic, a member of the...

Remembering Leon Brumant

Leon, on the left, picketing Oxford Circus station during a London Underground strike in August 2015. Leon Brumant, London Underground worker, RMT union rep, and socialist and anti-racist activist, died on Friday 22 April, aged just 30 years old. He is survived by Nailah, his young daughter. He was an inspirational organiser and a profoundly effective communicator, with a non-sectarian attitude to politics that saw him build links and win friends across the socialist left, inside and outside of his union. He served on the RMT's national Young Members Advisory Committee, and was my predecessor...

Carl Hornsey, 1977-2015

I knew Carl during our student activist days. I can still recollect our intense political conversation in a noisy upstairs room of a London pub that led to him joining the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty in 1997, of which he was a member for around two to three years. His politics remained firmly on the left throughout his life. He would later define as a social democrat. He vehemently opposed religion and US hegemony, and he thought deeply about capitalism, alienation, and the struggle to live an enriched life in a society laden with oppression. Carl was an internationalist who valued his...

Les Forster, 1919-2016

The veteran Glasgow socialist Les Forster died last week, aged 96. Forster was the last survivor of a generation of socialist activists in the West of Scotland who broke with the Communist Party in the early 1950s and struck out to build a non-Stalinist and anti-Stalinist socialist tradition. That generation — which included Harry McShane and the lesser known (outside of Glasgow) Hugh Savage and Ned Donaldson — was a “bridge” between Glasgow’s “Red Clydeside” political traditions of the 1920s and 1930s and the New Left of the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Maryhill in the north of Glasgow in 1920...

Ellen Meiskins Wood (1942-2016): a Marxist who put class centre

Ellen Meiksins Wood, who has died aged 73, was a noted intellectual figure on the international left who influenced several generations of thinkers and activists. Born in New York as Ellen Meiksins one year after her parents, Latvian Jews active in the Bund, arrived as political refugees, Wood studied in California before establishing herself as an academic in Canada, based at York University in Toronto. Her writings were thought-provoking and luminous. She first came to a wide left audience with The Retreat from Class: A New “True” Socialism (1986). This was a collection of her interventions...

Benedict Anderson, 1936-2015

Influential historian Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson died on 13 December in Java, the Indonesian island that did much to form his outlook as a scholar of south-east Asia and theories of nationalism. Anderson was born on 26 August 1936 in Kunming, China, to an Anglo-Irish father and an English mother. His father was a commissioner in the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, and the family moved to California in 1941 to avoid the Japanese invasion during the Second Sino-Japanese War. From there they moved to Ireland in 1945, and Anderson studied at Cambridge, before receiving his PhD in...

Árpád Göncz: 1922 – 2015

Sometimes being worthy, decent and honest isn’t enough. Although at the time I moved in slightly more elevated circles than I do now, in the nine years I lived in Hungary I never met Árpád Göncz, Hungarian President for ten years in the nineties, who died on 6 October. Yet in those early days after the so-called “regime change” in 1989 his name, words and image were everywhere. For many Hungarians he epitomised the new start after the collapse of Hungary’s soft version of Stalinism, a voice of reason amongst what was often utter chaos. Like a number of other East European Presidents in this...

Grace Lee Boggs, 1915-2015

When Grace Lee Boggs died, on 5 October in her beloved adopted city of Detroit, she was well into her eighth decade of activism. A brilliant philosophy student who found decent-paying opportunities blocked by discrimination against Chinese Americans, by her mid-twenties Grace Lee was a socialist militant and contributor to the revolutionary Marxist journal New International . Under the party name Ria Stone, her essays there included analyses of the history of World War I and the anti-imperialist opposition, the rising importance of China, and particularly powerful pieces on the March on...

Bill Hunter 1920-2015

Bill Hunter died on 9 July. He was a leading member of the early British Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, later a member of the organisations led by Gerry Healy, but joining the faction which opposed and split from Healy in the 1980s. Sean Matgamna remembers Bill Hunter. Insofar as it is possible to separate personal qualities from politics, Bill Hunter was a model revolutionary: selfless, dedicated, always striving to be “objective” — that is, not to let personal feelings intrude on political attitudes and decisions — willing to pay whatever personal price his politics...

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