Incident at a restaurant

Still trying to deal with the shock of hearing that my dear friend and comrade John Molyneux has died. I worked closely with John in the Portsmouth branch from 1998 to about 2005. He helped me at Portsmouth Uni on my (still unfinished) Phd on the language of the Blues, introducing me to the work of Bakhtin, Voloshinov and Walter Benjamin. 

He was a Marxist writer and speaker of great effectiveness and a central figure in the building nationally of the IS and the SWP. But he was also engaged with building Portsmouth branch at many levels. On a rainy, windy Saturday, often accompanied by his friend and comrade Max, he was always first at the town centre paper sale, unfolding the table and generally setting things up. As a writer and speaker, he had that rare ability to explain complex things simply, which was why for years before I met him, his regular Socialist Worker column was always the part of the paper I read first. He was a demon at chess and poker. Watching him eviscerate an opponent at chess was a delight as well as an education. 

But there was one incident that I remember as summing up so many aspects of the man. He and I were in a Chinese restaurant opposite King’s Cross. It was fairly late when a group of about seven customers decided it would be a good laugh to get up and leave without paying.

It was a small family restaurant and the stunt was clearly racist. The small, middle-aged Chinese woman on the till was begging them. Seven meals with lagers was a lot of money. John got up, walked over and engaged the ringleader in conversation. Quite quietly and calmly he questioned the man: did he really think it was a good idea to take money off these people, who had very little to start with, and who worked all the hours in the day to be able to afford the rent? Would he have done the same if the restauranteurs had been white? And so on in the same vein, without a trace of anger or aggression. And in the end, amazingly, the group paid up. 

That was John. We have lost not just a brilliant Marxist, but also a fighter against injustice and an implacable tribune of the oppressed. Rest in power, my friend.

Tim Evans, Swansea Branch