An old campaigner recalls

Scan page 9

attempt at "storming heaven"

In the face of attacks in the press of this country not very different from any lying garbage to be found in a capitalist paper today, Marx argued:

"Working men's Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them"

It is sometimes said that Marx lost suppori from British trade unionists for expressing views such as these. However, there is only limited evidence of this. The collapse of the International after 1872 had much more to do with the downturn of the workers' movement and the strength within its ranks of anarchists and others.

During his last decade, Marx F.A.RIDLEY was 86 on February 22 this year. One of the grand survivors of the Independent Labour Party, leader writer for the Socialist Leader' ', and former President of the National Secular Society, he has contributed at least 40 books and pamphlets to the catalogue of the British Library. What do you recall of the events leading up to the First World War and the Russian Revolution? As far back as 1907, I listened to people talking at the table about the date of 'the next war' . 1912 was the favourite date. These people were Tories and members of the Church of England when the Church of England could truthfully be described as 'the Tory party at prayer! I was called up four or five times, but was rejected on the grounds of the injury to my head which I received as a child.

I enrolled for New College, Oxford, but failed on the sausage machine of the examination system. I then studied theology for three years. I have always been interested less I believed in interest became.

This year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx. What sort of comment might he have made were he to view the contemporary scene?

theology. The the greater my I came up to London in the early. '20s, _and started public speaking in Hyde Park in 1925. I spoke on several occasions during the General Strike (1926), on Labour Party and ILP platforms.

At that time I was a strong supporter of the CP (I was particularly impressed by Leon Trotsky's book Whither England').

In the early '30s, I helped to found the Marxist Group. which became one of the starting points of the British Trotskyist movement. I urged Trotsky to start a Fourth International, but my views were fiercely resisted [at the time] by the Old Man. Our view was that the trade unions were going to become a ruling class, and would never introduce egalitarian socialism. Marx would have been extremely grieved at the failure of the Russian Revolution to spread over Europe. He would have been very surprised that it started in Russia, and not in Germany. While he might not have been surprised at the downfall of the English colonial empire, he would have been very surprised to find so many ex-colonial regimes describing themselves as socialist.

What message do you new left generation?

Clarify your ideas and develop a more concrete presentation of the socialist case, otherwise the Labour Party will degenerate into a reformist trade union movement, and we would see a concerted moved to the right on the part of the Tory party parallel with the decline of British capitalism. It would be desirable in my opinion if the ILP and NCLC [National Council of Labour Colleges] could be revived in a more modern form.

by Trotsky fiercely re sisted my arguments

Scan page 10

Socialist Organiser no.126 April 7 1983 Page 10 saw as