Tribute to Peter Sedgwick
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-12-01Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 11 →
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The practical effects of the "local AESs' as regards jobs are minimal. Islington council has proudly plastered the borough with posters claiming to have created 125 jobs. A sign above the town hall entrance informs us that there are nearly 20,000 unemployed in Islington! The GLC's claim is even more derisory - 500 jobs created in the whole area.
This practical criterion is not all-important. Marxists have always argued that the immediate material gains of a struggle are not as important as the political gains, in terms of self-confidence, organisation, and awareness of the working class. No such gains have come from the local AESs. On the contrary.
The GLC's 'Greater London NISES ISE JOHN HARRIS 78 IARS NO MURE CUTS IN EDUCATION ON Saturday November 19, abbut 70 of Peter Sedgwick's friends gathered in Leeds to pay tribute to him.
Peter had from his earliest political days at Oxford possessed a huge shambling intellect livened by flashes of gentle wit. His tragic death robbed the British labour movement of one of its most original and humane thinkers.
His articles on George Orwell provided many in the Marxist movement in the late 1960s with a new vision of that great writer, rescuing his works from the hands of the anti-communists.
In his translations of Victor Serge and in his struggles to bring this strange libertarian communist figure more to the centre of the Marxist stage, Peter was positing his own vision of the struggle for Peter Sedgwick was an enemy of humbug and rhetoric. He took on many of the puft adders of fashionable socialism, in particular in the field of psychiatry, and effectively exposed them.
Although for many years a member of International Socialism (now the Socialist Workers Party), he was never a party hack. He once stood up at a public meeting to congratulate Tony Cliff on the publication of his second volume on Lenin, saying that it was the best piece of autobiography that Tony Cliff had ever written.
Many at the meeting paid tribute to Peter from the trade unions, the universities, and the women's movement.
I will remember him last a few short months ago on the Aire Valley Yarns demonstrations. He always had a kind word for his many friends in differing political movements. He will be sadly missed.
GARTH FRANKLAND, Leeds.