Tribute to our comrade Laurie

It is with great sorrow that we must inform our readers of the death of our comrade Laurie, at a hospital in Birkenhead where he had been a patient for the best part of a year.

Laurie was a real militant of the working class, both in the more immediate sense as a product of workers’ struggles in Merseyside in the early 1970s, and in a more historic sense, as one expression of the resurgence of class struggle that spread across the world after the events of May 68 in France. This is how, in an interview with other ICC comrades, he recalled his ‘initiation’ into politics:

 “I first became politicised when I was 23 years old, an unemployed worker in Birkenhead, made redundant in the shipyards. I attended unemployed claimant’s meetings, and I went to a rally in Liverpool where thousands of unemployed workers listened to the unions and Labour Party speakers; there was the then TUC leader, Vic Feather who was booed off the platform, I think it was ’72, a lot of commotion. The unions were very unpopular.  Reaction from bourgeois press and the local press - the Birkenhead News who wrote an editorial on the booing of Vic Feather.  I wrote to this paper explaining why the unemployed workers were so angry...”.

It was through the publication of this letter that he was contacted by the Workers’ Voice group, another, more directly political product of the revival of class struggle. Laurie describes the origins of the group as follows: “The WV militants were trying to appropriate the lessons of the past, passionately interested in Workers’ Councils and the German Revolution and the KAPD. Shared the same position as the KAPD that the unions were incorporated in the state. More importantly that the Shop Steward Movement was umbilically linked to the ‘official’ unions. Also, re-published many articles from The Workers Dreadnought, Sylvia Pankhurst’s paper based in the East End of London from 1916 onward”.

Workers’ Voice joined the International Correspondence Network initiated by the Internationalism group in the USA, and in 1973 they hosted an international conference of groups which included the Groupe de Liaison pour L’Action des Travailleurs, a councilist group from France, and ex-members of the Solidarity group in Britain, who later on formed themselves into World Revolution and Revolutionary Perspectives (forerunner of todays’ Communist Workers’ Organisation). But the most dynamic force at the conference were the comrades of Révolution Internationale from France, who most clearly defended the framework of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production as the basis for understanding the universal tendency towards state capitalism and the integration of the unions into the state. They also insisted that the aim of the International Correspondence Network should be to provide the starting point for the regroupment of revolutionaries on an international scale. The capacity of RI to convince the comrades of WR, and those in other countries, of the validity of this perspective laid the foundations for the formation of the ICC in 1975.

This was the first time comrades of the future WR/ICC met Laurie, and initially relations with Workers’ Voice were very cordial. Other conferences took place and the lessons drawn by WV comrades about the role of the shop stewards – some of whom had themselves been shop stewards – were a key factor in assisting the comrades of WR to complete their critique of the union apparatus from top to bottom.

However, the challenge of going beyond an essentially local activity and forming a unified international organisation proved too great for Workers Voice, some of whom had been scarred by their experience in the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League (later the Workers’ Revolutionary Party) and had developed a suspicion of the notion of a centralised political organisation, coupled with a very strong ‘workerism’ which was also an inheritance from the SLL. Instead of continuing the debate to clarify our divergencies, they broke off all relations with the ICC, citing an entirely distorted  description of our position on the state in the period of transition as proof of our alleged counter-revolutionary nature. We wrote about this retreat into sectarian isolation at the time[1], but the point we want to make here was that Laurie resisted this process and was in favour of maintaining relations with the ICC, which brought him into conflict with the other members of the group, leading eventually (although this was partly mixed up with personal issues given that this was a very difficult time in Laurie’s life) to his expulsion from the group. Soon afterwards, Laurie moved to London and eventually became a member of the ICC.

Whatever mistakes he made at this time, this was a sign of the comrade’s political courage – the willingness to stand up for your positions even at the price of being on your own or in a minority.

Further proof of this was supplied by the crisis in the ICC at the beginning of the 80s, which was centred around the section in Britain. WR had been split between two clans, partly based on personal likes and dislikes[2], and these divisions were exploited by a dubious element in the French section, Chenier, especially as they became more overtly political in the wake of the steel strike in Britain. Laurie had been drawn into the clan most directly influenced by Chenier, and during the steel strike in Britain these comrades, in Laurie’s words, “got totally tangled up in the support for the shop steward committees in the steel strike.  Effectively they were supporting union shop steward committees.  They thought it was important to look at movement as a whole and claimed it was a break with the unions, which it wasn’t. The strike finished and the antagonisms between clans became more intense”.  It was at this point that Chenier said he was leaving the ICC and most of his followers went with him, stealing typewriters from a comrade’s house with the excuse they would make better use of them than the ICC. Chenier soon left these elements in the lurch and was later seen carrying a banner for the French Socialist Party, confirming the correctness of the ICC’s decision to expel him and issue a warning to the proletarian political milieu. The efforts of the remaining elements to construct something out of a very confused anarchist milieu came to nothing, and nearly all of them quit political life soon after. But Laurie recounts how he had been ostracised by the ex-members of the Chenier tendency for the crime of trying to maintain a channel of communication with the ICC. Following the thefts, “there was an emergency meeting of the WR section in a pub where we met.  I asked to speak to the comrades and Krespel and MC (Mark Chirik[3]) came down to speak to me, comrade Krespel translated and both comrades had a lot to say.  They said we make no concessions, we want all our material back before we talk.  I was unhappy, thought I could be a middleman. But MC insisted – ‘this is a point of proletarian principle’; ‘theft from a proletarian revolutionary organisation is not the basis for a tendency’. I went back and informed (others in the ‘tendency’) that I had been to speak with the WR comrades and MC. Then the dye was cast, I was dead to them.” The comrade entered another difficult period in his personal life, with the break-up with his partner who had stayed with the ‘tendency’. “I missed political life, I realised that I had to return to the ICC, I wrote a letter to MC. I asked for his advice because I trusted him and admired his long years of militancy, his steadfastness.  MC replied, ‘don’t give up, discuss your situation with the comrades of WR, trust them’”.

Indeed Laurie did not give up, and was able to discuss and understand the political mistakes he had made by getting mixed up with the Chenier tendency. From that point on he never doubted his loyalty to the ICC and was always deeply involved in its activities, internal and external. He was in his element discussing with new contacts, distributing our paper and leaflets at demonstrations and pickets, as well as speaking up at his own workplace. In the struggles at the end of the 80s, for example, he was instrumental in his fellow bus workers joining a nurses’ picket line, and even when he was ill in hospital he asked to be taken down to be with the picket line of striking theatre nurses.  He was also particularly committed to travelling to other ICC sections to take part in their conferences and thus contributing to the international discussions within the ICC. It was a long way from the localist ideas that had contributed to the demise of the Workers’ Voice group. Up to his very last weeks, confined to hospital, he always emphasised that he could not wait to get back to militant activity within the ICC.

There is a lot more to say about Laurie’s personal warmth, his obvious enjoyment of the sociable relations he developed with comrades of the ICC and their families. And about Laurie’s abiding interest in literature and culture in general. As we wrote in a tribute written for his family at the time of his funeral, “it was characteristic of him that while he was in hospital he began writing about one of his favourite authors, Varlam Shalamov, a Russian dissident who wrote moving stories about life in Stalin’s gulag. Even though he wasn’t able to get very far with this project, it showed both his determination and his abiding love of literature. Laurie never subscribed to the idea that art, or classical music, or great literature were something for the elite, beyond the comprehension of the uneducated masses, any more than he thought that the working class was incapable of understanding the revolutionary ideas which, in the final analysis, came out of its own struggles for emancipation.  Laurie was truly a man of culture. And part of that was his love of fine food and his skill as a chef….” None of that meant that he lost contact with his roots: he never tired of telling stories, handed down by his parents, of life in the Liverpool docks and surrounding districts; and one of the dishes he most liked to cook and serve was none other than “Scouse”[4].

Within the past two years we have published tributes to three other ICC comrades who are no longer with us, Antonio, Miguel and Enrique[5]. The generation that came out of the historic resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 60s are now largely in their 70s. They have a major task in transmitting the political and organisational lessons they have learned through their long years of militant activity; it is the task of younger generations of revolutionaries to assimilate and develop those lessons in order to construct the revolutionary organisation of the future.  Laurie’s unwavering dedication to maintaining and building the ICC, his life as a militant of our class, is an example for them to follow.

ICC, January 2025

 

 

[1] See Answer to Workers’ Voice in International Review 2 and also ‘Sectarianism Unlimited’ in World Revolution No 3.

[2] For more on the problem of clans in political organisations, see our text  The question of organisational functioning in the ICC, International Review 109

[3] Founding member of the ICC who had played an important part in the development of the communist left in the 30s, 40s and 50s. See our articles in International Reviews 65 and 66,  Marc, Part 1: From the Revolution of October 1917 to World War II; Marc, Part 2: From World War II to the present day

[4] Wikipedia definition: “Scouse is a type of stew typically made from chunks of meat (usually beef or lamb) with potatoes, carrots, and onion. It is particularly associated with the port of Liverpool; hence, the inhabitants of that city are often referred to as ‘scousers’. The word ‘scouse’ comes from lobscouse, a stew commonly eaten by sailors throughout northern Europe in the past, and surviving in different forms there today.” The current writer, soon after visiting Laurie in the hospital in Birkenhead, was however distressed to learn from two young people from Liverpool that those from Birkenhead on the other side of the Mersey were not considered to be true scousers….a view that Laurie himself confirmed.

[5] Tribute to our comrade Antonio; In memory of our comrade Miguel; In memory of our comrade Enrique