Hallas 是英國社會主義工人黨（SWP，目前英國最大的左
翼黨派）的中堅人物之一，在七零年代主編過 SWP 的理論
刊物 International Socialism。他前幾天病逝了，以下
是這一期 Socialist Worker（SWP的週報）的報導。本文
作者也是 SWP 的重要理論家之一（我就不翻成中文了，對
國際左翼運動有研究或感興趣者，應該讀一下這篇報導）。
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Duncan Hallas （1925 - 2002）
Inspirational socialist
By Chris Harman
DUNCAN HALLAS, who died last week, was a lifelong fighter
for revolutionary socialism. A whole generation of supporters
of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) remembers him as an inspired
speaker and teacher of Marxist ideas. Year after year he would
fill halls with hundreds of people at the SWP's annual Marxism
event as he spoke about a range of topics-historical materialism,
the struggle of the working class in Britain, the revolutionary
tradition, the origins of humanity.
Duncan was not just a theorist. He was an activist and a
fighter. He was born into a working class family in Manchester-
his mother started work in the cotton mills at the age of ten-
and he went on to get a job in the local engineering industry.
By the age of 16 Duncan was a committed socialist. He joined
the Trotskyist movement in the middle of the Second World War,
at a time when it was the only political organisation prepared
to break the law and support strikes. Conscripted into the army,
he was sent to fight in Germany, and then to Egypt, where he was
a non-commissioned officer at the end of the war.
The newly elected Labour government wanted to keep a big army
in Egypt, to maintain control of the Suez Canal and the region's
oil. The ordinary soldiers were not happy about this. Duncan
helped lead a mutiny which forced their evacuation back to
Britain. He continued his socialist activity as an engineering
worker and became a leading light of the left wing grouping
inside the Labour Party youth organisation.
This was at a time when most of the left worldwide still had
illusions in Stalin's Russia. Those who lost those illusions
often went to the other extreme, and saw Western imperialism as
somehow more "democratic" and "civilised". Duncan was one of the
minority of socialists who insisted that revolutionary socialism
was equally opposed to the barbarism of the Western empires and
the barbarism of the Stalinist regimes.
He was a founder member of the small revolutionary group around
Tony Cliff, and a regular contributor to its monthly magazine,
Socialist Review. The 1950s and early 1960s were not an easy time
for revolutionary socialists. Massive arms spending enabled the
capitalist system to expand more or less continuously, creating
full employment which allowed workers to push up their wages
without confronting the system as a whole.
Fashionable thinkers like Labour's Anthony Crosland claimed
that capitalism would never again know economic crises or mass
strikes.
DUNCAN NEVER fell for this nonsense, but after moving to Scotland
he lost contact with the isolated Socialist Review Group. He kept
his socialist commitment as a student and then a tutor/organiser
for the National Council of Labour Colleges. He was secretary of
the Edinburgh Left Club in the early 1960s and by the mid-1960s,
after moving to London, he was a key figure in Wandsworth National
Union of Teachers.
The events of 1968 convinced him that we were entering a new
period of class struggles, and that building a revolutionary
organisation was possible. He was at the centre of a new militant
current in the teachers' union, Rank and File Teacher, and became
an activist in the International Socialists (the new name for the
Socialist Review Group) as it expanded from a couple of hundred
to a couple of thousand in membership.
My first memory of him is at a meeting in a living room in south
London. There were about a dozen of us there, almost all students
and all in our late teens or early twenties-except for this man in
his early forties with a Manchester accent.
We were stunned by the clarity of his ideas, the sharpness of
his mind and the depth of his knowledge of the labour movement-
of which the rest of us were fairly ignorant. In 1969 and 1971
attempts by first a Labour and then a Tory government to introduce
anti-union laws led to the first political strikes in Britain
since the year after Duncan's birth, 1926.
This took place against the background of the continuing war
in Vietnam and the use of British troops to subdue a growing
revolt in Northern Ireland. Duncan was central in showing the
links between these different issues. He became a full time worker
for the International Socialists and was a member of the
organisation's leadership for many years. He was editor of
International Socialism magazine during the 1970s.
He went on speaking tours with the Irish civil rights leader
Bernadette Devlin (now McAliskey) to audiences hundreds strong.
He also wrote regularly for Socialist Worker, and authored
pamphlets like Ireland's History of Repression and The Meaning
of Marxism, and the books Trotsky's Marxism and The Comintern.
HE PLAYED a major part in developing the understanding of
hundreds of students from 1968 and thousands of workers involved
in the industrial struggles of those years, helping to build the
Socialist Workers Party. The Labour government that was elected
in 1974 succeeded, with the help of the trade union leaderships,
in bringing the wave of workers' struggles to an end. The employing
class set about getting its revenge.
It used thousands of police to beat strikes like that of Asian
women at Grunwicks in north London, closed down militant plants
like Speke No 2 in Merseyside, and sacked union convenors like
Derek Robinson in Birmingham. This was followed by the Thatcher
years, massive unemployment, and the onslaught on the miners and
the print workers.
Much of the left became demoralised in this period. Duncan did
not. He never lost his revolutionary optimism as he continued
speaking three or four times a week, writing articles, and selling
Socialist Worker on the streets. Above all he patiently passed on
his knowledge of Marxism and the revolutionary tradition to groups
of younger people. He managed to visit the Marxism event just a
few weeks before his illness struck him down.
He is remembered by people all over the world, not least by
groups of workers and activists in South Africa where he did a
popular speaking tour before the fall of apartheid.
--
Un autre monde est possible！
Eine andere Welt ist moeglich！
Otro mundo es posible！
Un altro mondo e' possibile！
Um outro mundo e' possivel！
Another world is possible！
--
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