Duncan Hallas, 1925-2002

Working class tribune

Thousands knew him through the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s as one of the feature speakers at the annual Marxism event that has been hosted by Britain’s Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) since 1977.

For many, his talks were the highlight.

He could explain the origins of class society clearly and simply.

He could debate circles around leading members of the Labour Party, exposing the holes in their arguments, and making the case for revolution.

Above all, he was a person who had assimilated the lessons of the great Russian Revolution, and knew how to transmit those lessons to a new generation of socialists.

It is no exaggeration to say that thousands of activists learned their politics in large measure because of Duncan.

He was, first and foremost, a member of his class, a worker, who grew up during the terrible years of the Great Depression.

As a young man, he soon came to identify with the socialist movement, and also came to see that the dictator Stalin had corrupted and destroyed the socialist experiment that had begun after the Russian Revolution of 1917.

He became a Trotskyist, a follower of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who led the fight against Stalin and his bureaucratic counter-revolution.

But the Trotskyist movement in Britain — and the world — in the 1940s was tiny, and marginalized. Crushed between the twin terrors of Nazism and Stalinism, only a handful kept alive the tradition of socialism from below. Hallas was one of those.

And he always knew that this was not just a question of theory, but of practice, and that practice had to take place regardless of the difficulties. At the end of World War II, he was one of the participants in a mutiny of British soldiers, for which he spent time in jail.

With the war over, Hallas was a key supporter in Britain of Tony Cliff, when Cliff developed his crucial theory of state capitalism.

Many revolutionary socialists clung to Trotsky’s every word and refused to think critically.

Cliff and Hallas knew that to take that road would lead the socialist movement into a sectarian dead end.

Cliff used Trotksy’s method to move beyond Trotsky. He argued that with the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the workers’ state that had been borne in 1917 was no more. What existed was bureaucratic state capitalism, and it had to be opposed as vigorously as western capitalism.

"Neither Washington nor Moscow" was the slogan around which revolutionary socialism was slowly rebuilt.

In the late 1960s, when the International Socialists in Britain (today the SWP), began to grow rapidly, and began to sink roots into the working class, Hallas emerged as a critical part of the central leadership.

He edited International Socialism during the 1970s, and was the author of numerous articles and pamphlets, and of two books, Trotsky's Marxism (1979) and The Comintern (1985).

As International Socialist groups began to develop and grow outside of Britain, in the 1970s and 1980s, Hallas played an important role.

In 1977 and in 1987 he toured Canada on the 60^th and 70^th anniversaries of the Russian Revolution. In 1977, the IS in Canada had been in existence for just two years, and had precious few links to the real revolutionary tradition. Hallas explained clearly the need to both build open revolutionary parties, and to also work in united fronts with large numbers of working people regardless of their politics.

A favourite slogan of Karl Marx’s was "nothing human is alien to me."

That was a motto which described Hallas, who was nothing if not completely human.

A voracious reader on the most complex subjects, he also devoured detective novels at an enormous rate.

Hallas will be missed. But he left a real contribution. He was a key person in rebuilding the real Marxist tradition. He lived to see that tradition go from being carried by handfuls to inspiring thousands.

In 1986, he described the early years of the founding of the IS in Britain, which emerged out of the crisis of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).

"Our own tendency … emerged as the Socialist Review group in 1950-51. It was necessary, in the process, to reject much of the RCP’s theoretical baggage. One thing the Socialist Review group did inherit was the model (even if only as an aspiration at times) of an active, flexible, interventionist (where possible) organization whose fixed point of reference was working class struggle. And that was vital."

It is still vital, a half-century later.

Hallas on cd