Duncan Hallas was an electrifying speaker (Picture: Steve McTaggart)
The late Duncan Hallas, along with Tony Cliff and about 30 others, was a founder-member in 1950 of a small, anti-Stalinist Marxist group in Britain. It later developed into today’s Socialist Workers Party.
This great book contains selected writings by Duncan, and also sections written by others about him and his ideas. Duncan was my favourite political speaker. He addressed meetings with marvellous precision and sharpness.
This book reminded me that this clarity of expression applied to his writing as well as his speaking.
Alex Callinicos wrote in an obituary, “Not for Duncan the abstractions and obscurities of academic Marxism. He wrote plain English, punctuated by short pithy sentences.” And Paul Foot said, “He was the most coherent socialist I ever knew, whether he was writing or speaking.”
Marx wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world—the point is to change it.” And Duncan certainly tried to change it.
He was a lifelong activist as well as a theoretician, speaker and writer. One example was when he played a part in a mutiny in the British army in Egypt after the Second World War in 1946, Soldiers were demanding to be demobbed and sent home.
Like Marx, Duncan’s view of socialist revolution was that it involved the “self-emancipation of the working class”. That is, it meant a movement of the majority, collectively and democratically taking power from the hands of the exploiting minority of capitalists. This belief that democracy and socialism are inseparable meant that Duncan did not see the so-called “communist” states as in any way genuinely socialist or Marxist.
Orthodox followers of Leon Trotsky also criticised the Soviet Union. But they followed Trotsky’s view that Russia under Joseph Stalin was a “degenerated workers’ state”. Duncan was one of those who argued that Trotsky had moved away from a focus on workers’ democracy and workers’ power in this.
Duncan’s insistence on workers achieving their own liberation was rooted in a view of revolution.
He followed Marx in saying that there were two reasons a revolution was necessary. Firstly, because of the undemocratic power of the ruling class through its control of the economy, the media and the repressive machinery of the state. This closes off any parliamentary road to socialism.
And secondly, because it is through the process of class struggle itself that workers’ ideas change and they become open to socialist arguments.
I’m sure Duncan would have been really pleased to see the recent revival in class struggle. But he would also have pointed to the danger of these struggles being dampened down by the bureaucrats who lead the unions.
A final point. This book is not just aimed at “old-timer” socialists like myself, who met Duncan.
As it says on the back of the book, it is “a tribute to a remarkable life and a call to a new generation to enrich and deepen their understanding of revolutionary socialism through Duncan’s work.”
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