Vale John Molyneux

The news of John Molyneux’s sudden death came as a terrible shock. Right until the last he was contributing to the struggle – on picket lines and protests, writing and editing, fighting for the better world he knew was possible.

John has been a major figure in my life for more than 40 years, from near and far. As a young member of the Portsmouth branch of the SWP living in rural Hampshire in 1981, I’d get regular calls from him patiently convincing me that the upcoming branch meeting was very important, important enough to drive into town after a long day at work. John was a major theoretician but he knew all too well that theory meant nothing without the humdrum tasks of branch building.

Those calls paid off when war broke out with Argentina the following year over the Falklands/Malvinas. The SWP’s clear anti-imperialist politics meant we stood against the jingoism – and the patient branch building meant that we could organise anti-war protests in Portsmouth, the historic home of the Royal Navy. I was proud to stand with John and other comrades against the deluge of pro-war propaganda.

John was a prolific author and speaker. In more recent times he’s best known for his books on art and his activism around the environmental crisis. But for me, his contribution to clarifying the real Marxist tradition and the role of the revolutionary party was seminal. I’ve benefitted from reading many of John’s books, not least Marxism and the Party and What is the Real Marxist Tradition?. What was the key message? John could boil it all down to a simple but powerful proposition: Marxism is the theory of international proletarian revolution.

I was in the audience at the Marxism festival in 1985 when John debated Monty Johnstone from the then considerably more influential Communist Party on the question of Trotsky. Like many young SWP members, I’d cut my teeth in debates with the various Trotskyists of the various Fourth Internationals, lampooning their sometimes cartoonish efforts to squeeze random Trotsky quotes into current realities. We all knew one thing for sure – we weren’t Trotskyists, we were “state capitalists”.

That is until John spoke. He outlined four reasons why Trotsky was of crucial importance today: the central role of the working class in changing the world; the need for internationalism; the case for revolution rather than reform; and the need to build the revolutionary party. By the time he finished, I like many others in the audience was a Trotskyist and I remain proud to call myself so.

John argued that the revolutionary party had to be democratic, not for abstract reasons but so the party could collate, debate and synthesise the real experience of workers, all the better to lead. He lived that democracy, arguing against the SWP’s position in a debate that ran from 1984 to 1986 over the question of whether working class men benefitted from women’s oppression. John was wrong, but we all learned a lot in the debate, not least how to carry a position within the party without damaging its collective work.

I moved to Australia and John, much later, to Ireland. Our contact was mostly reduced to the occasional Facebook message. I watched every video of him speaking at Marxism and wrestled, not always satisfactorily, with his arguments about art. But I always knew that somewhere, across the globe, John was a comrade in the ongoing struggle. Until, suddenly, this week he wasn’t. The movement has lost a big figure in every sense of the word. My condolences to his partner, Mary Smith, his family and comrades everywhere.