I have seen so many memories of John Molyneux, the British-Irish Marxist who has just died, that I don’t think that there’s much for me to add. Like many people, I knew John a little, which says more about his ability to reach out to an awful lot of people, than my particular qualities.

One thing though: I have seen some comments on John which have said that, unlike the organisations of which he was a member, John was unsectarian. Now. John was one of the least sectarian people I have known, but this is entirely a product of the tradition which he joined and built.

John was not the exception – he was the embodiment of a body of ideas which built on Marx, Trotsky, and many others, but was also prepared to say: where these ideas no longer fit, we will challenge and adapt them. Similarly, he called for a self-critical international tradition that was never complacent and regularly checked its theory against the experiences of its members on the ground.

Like Joseph Choonara whose memories of John are much more eloqent then mine, I grew up reading Molyneux’s How Marxism Works columns in Socialist Worker. These were never an exception to other articles in the paper, but a crystallisation of what they meant in practise.

Other people, who grew up on the same columns have ended up in all sorts of places, but I hope that they all benefited from John’s incomparable ability to explain complicated theory in a way that even idiots like me could understand.