Catching Up - Part Two

Papillion at A Revolutionary Act continues to find ABC's of Socialism gobbets down the back of his sofa. Who would have thought you could squeeze so much material out of a tea stained back issue of Socialist View(RIP)?

Reasons To Be Impossible gives notice of the recent passing of two members of "thin red line": John Crump and Chris Pallis. As Bill mentions in relation to himself in his post, one really cannot underestimate the impact that Pallis's The Bolsheviks and Workers Control 1917 - 1921: The State and Counter-Revolution - written under the pen name of Maurice Brinton - had on the thinking of a lot of people when it came to the issue of the October Revolution and its "proletarian content", if you want to use the jargon.

Pallis was a leading member of Solidarity, the libertarian socialist group inspired by the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, which had emerged out of the Socialist Labour League, and throughout the sixties and seventies punched above their weight politically and in publishing terms by bringing the ideas of Paul Cardan/Cornelius Castoriadis to a wider audience, whilst also republishing such works as Ida Mett's The Krondstadt Uprising and Alexandria Kollontai's The Workers Opposition.

I may be wrong but I get the impression that John Crump was also a member of Solidarity for a period in the mid-seventies when, following a merger with a group that had been expelled from the SPGB, Solidarity became Solidarity for Social Revolution. His best known work from this period, 'A Contribution To A Critique Of Marx', is available online here.

From speaking to an ex-member of Solidarity last year, it appears that there is a history of the organisation in the pipeline but in the meantime ex-member Paul Anderson gives his recollections of his time in the organisation in the eighties when it was coming to the end of its life*, and Louis Robertson speaks of his time in Solidarity in the seventies here.

*It has to be said that stylistically the issues of the Solidarity journal produced from the mid-eighties onwards should be collectors items, irrespective of their content. Beautifully produced, it is one of few occasions when one can mention socialism and style in the same sentence.

Update

In my haste to get the full take on Paul Anderson recollections of his time in Solidarity, I didn't spot in his intro to the piece that it is in fact John Quail, of 'Slow Burning Fuse' fame, who is working on the history of Solidarity. It will be a must read.