An outstanding intellectual for the
The death of Louis Sinclair after a serious illness, on Saturday, 7 July 1990, has removed from the ranks of the Fourth International one of its outstanding intellectuals.
Louis entered the Trotskyist movement when he joined the Glasgow branch of the
Revolutionary Socialist League, an affiliate of the International Left Opposition, in 1937.
In 1943, he was in Italy with the British army. Mussolini had been suppressed ousted:
The socialist and communist movements emerged from underground. From their cellars and attics, booksellers produced the banned works of Marx, Engels,
Labriola, Lenin and other Marxists; some of them still uncut.
It was a time of political ferment.
This was the sort of intellectual atmosphere in which
Louis thrived.
With other
Trotskyists in the British and
American armed forces, he established contact with the small
Trotskyist group around Nicola di Bartolomea (Fosca. With his fluent
French and rapidly aquired Italian, Louis was a big asset in educating young cadres and winning their adherence to the ideas of the Fourth Interational. On his retum to Glasgow in 1945, he immediately dispatched to the the comrades in
Naples his precious collection of Trotsky's works in French.
For a short time after its founding in 1945, he was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, then the British section of the
Fourth International. For the rest of his long life, he was not formally a member of any organisation, but remained a loyal supporter,
South African Trotskyism
In Socialist Outlook 26 there is a review by
Charlie van Gelderen of my book Yours for the Union. In his comments, Charlie ques tioned the accuracy of my statement that Max
Gordon, the organiser of black trade unions in the 1930s in the Witwatersrand, was a member of the Workers Party of South Africa. Not so, he writes, Gordon was a member of the
Lenin Club.
I am not certain whether many of your readers stopped to ask themselves what these organisations were - or indeed where Charlie obtained his information.
Very briefly, those socialists who sym-
OBITUARY/LETTER
Fourth International
Louis Sinclair 1909 - 1990 both politically and materially, of the Fourth
International. For him, Trotskyism was the marxism of the second half of the twentieth century.
spent on compiling his massive Trotsky bibliography, which is now in its second enlarged edition and has become a standard work of reference. In the pursuit of this project, he ac-
A meeting to commemorate the unique contribution of Louis Sinclair to Trotskyism and the
University of Glasgow
Tony Southall
Glasgow, G41 cumulated library of Glasgow University lection.
get hold of. There can hardly be a secondpathised with the left opposition in the carly club at which socialist ideas could be dis-
Lenin Club as an open forum.
for some years had to rely on the information and his account was accepted, with the reservation that oral testimony has to be checked.
The greater part of the next twenty years he the counter.
Louis Sinclair
Fourth International will take place at:
Adam Smith Building on Friday September 28th at 7.30pm
All communications to:
67 Gleneff Street
Telephone: (041) 423 7929 an unrivalled collection of
Trotsky's writings, and of books and articles form the archives.
on Trotsky. This collection is now in the and should surely now be named The Louis Sinclair col-
It was no easy task. He must have visited every major library in Europe and America in his search for material; ransacked the archives him.
of every Trotskyist or ex-Trotskyist he could
1930s in Cape Town coalesced to launch a cussed. That was the Lenin Club. Unfortunately two factions emerged, and after some discussion the majority broke away to form provide the Workers Party. The minority formed the
Communist League and they retained the
In trying to write the history of those groups interviewed some early activists and obtained from them. Charlie was most hepiful
London hand bookshop that he did not enter or write to. It was quite a revelation, when accompanying him of some of these excursions to see how readily he was recognised. As soon as he entered the premises, the bookseller would say: "Mr Sinclair, I have the book you have been looking for", and produce it from under
He corresponded with people in all parts of the world and nearly every post would bring him something. I remember with what pride he showed me a copy of
Trotsky's Germany:
What
Next? in an obscure Indonesian dialect.
Louis rarely spoke from a public platform. He was most at home speaking to small groups, and especially enjoyed talking to young comrades, probing their brains and help ing them with their problems.
He was always being consulted by students writing theses on
Trotskyism and related subjects, and by would-be authors:
he was always more than ready with his help and advice.
He look a great interest in recent events in the Soviet
Union, and always on the lookout for new material
Trotsky and the Left Opposition emerging
He also compiled an index of pre-war intemal bulletins of the Fourth International which should be a valuable source for research for historians and students of the period.
He will be sorely missed as a friend and teacher by all who knew him and leamed from
By Charlie van Gelderen
It was only recently that I received a box of papers containing all the records from Cape
Town for the year 1935. These are, as far as 1 know, the only records of the early Trotskyist movement in South Africa, and this will now documentary evidence of the activities of those pioneer Trotskyists.
In respect to Gordon the situation is now beyond doubt. In January 1935, Gordon signed a membership form showing that he was a charter member of the Workers Party. I relied on other testimony when I wrote my book - but obviously I was correct.
Baruch Hirson
path to the Labour voters, the working class and by "campaigning' outside the Labour Party but
SOCIALIST
OUTLOOK
Ultra-left farewell to socialism?
The end of the sovereignty of Labour conference, the accountability of MPs and the rank and file individual and affiliated members's direct involvement in policy-making could be the outcome of this year's Labour Party Conference.
Jane Wells seems to share this view. In her article in the June issue of Socialist Outlook she stresses the threat the proposals to be put before this year's conference pose, and that thought they are described by the Party's General Secretary as "tinkering amendments", they are far from being so. She makes clear that they represent the first instalment of changes to be completed at the conference following the next general election.
One might therefore have expected Jane Wells to urge all sections of the left within the Party to unite behind demands which (if carried at conference) would frustrate the NEC's plans.
Yet whilst the Campaign for Labour Party democracy (CLPD) and Labour Left Liaison are mobilising the rank and file in favour of resolutions to this year's conference countering the NEC proposals (i.e. in the immediate present) Jane Wells (and presumably Socialist Outlook) argue that what is needed is an ap proach which "embraces and builds on the experience of struggles that working people face every day, and brings them into the Party to join the fight for working class democracy".
With this approach, she effectively writes off the struggle for socialism in the admittedly unfavourable circumstances of the political present, and - in the best social-democratic tradition - postpones the 'real' struggle to some indefinite future.
The underlying idea of "Economism" is the prioritisation of the economic struggle of the working class as against the political struggle. In the Labour Party today we have a mass political organisation arising out of its close ties with mass trade union organisations.
Unlike the left-wing Russian Social Democrats, the early British socialists proved incapable of striking deep roots in the mass movement. Not surprisingly, the reformist ideology of the Parliamentary labour Party managed to firmly establish itself in the inevitably reformist minded trade union movement.
The Labour Party's close relationship with the trade union movement nevertheless means that Labour is the mass party of the British working class. For socialists, therefore, the