Chris Harman (1942-2009)

Revolutionary Marxism has lost one of its best representatives.

 

            Chris Harman died of a heart attack, in the evening of last Friday 6th of November, in Cairo, where he was invited by Egyptian comrades as a speaker. His sudden death filled with grief not only his comrades in the SWP in Britain, in SEK in Greece and in the other sister organisations of the International Socialist Tendency, but also a whole range of the Left all over the world.

            Born in 1942 in England, Chris Harman was a student in the LSE when the  wave of the occupations against the war in Vietnam broke out along with the international movement of May 68 that started in France but embraced the whole world. Already a member of the International Socialists, which later became the SWP, Chris provided the most valuable assets to that movement.

            Inside a new revolutionary left which was just being reborn, searching how to square its accounts with social-democracy and stalinism, Chris Harman had already offered an important contribution. His pamphlet titled «Russia: How the Revolution was Lost» follows step-by-step the course from the heights of the October Revolution to the netherworld of the stalinist counter-revolution, recording the haemorrhage of the Russian working class that undermined its control of power, exploding the claims that Lenin led to Stalin.

            In a second important essay of that period, titled «Party and Class», Chris confronted those who wanted to throw away Lenin΄s concept of the revolutionary party along with the dirty waters of stalinism. Revolutionaries could not be mere «movementists» without their own party, nor could they step back to the social-democratic notions of a «broad church» party able to win elections but betraying revolutions.

 

For us, the comrades who formed OSE (Socialist Revolution Organisation) and later SEK (Socialist Workers Party) in Greece, that period was the beginning that determined our course. Chris Harman was a colleague along with comrades from Greece in the LSE. They took part together in the occupation of the School, as well as in the occupation of the Greek Embassy in London in April 1967, immediately after the coup by the Colonels΄ junta. Like many other militants from Greece in those years, they were carrying the experience of the greek explosion of the movement that culminated in the «July days» of 1965, preceding May 1968. That experience of the first break with reformism in Greece met with the hidden revolutionary traditions that Harman and his comrades were bringing to the light of the movement. Until today, we still draw from the guiding power of that combination.

            Harman took Tony Cliff΄s theory of State Capitalism in Russia and elaborated it about the countries of Eastern Europe. His book «Bureaucracy and Revolution» revealed the roots of the workers΄ revolts  in Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, East Germany 1953 and Poland 1956, 1968 and again 1980-81, long before the collapse of the stalinist regimes in 1989.

            Chris proved himself a brilliant student of Cliff not only in the theoretical elaborations. He became a leading force in building the SWP, not only in the years of the headlong rise of the movement in the 1970s, but also in the difficult years of Margaret Thatcher, with the ebb of the revolutionary left internationally. He served as an editor of Socialist Worker for 25 years and he literally taught how important a tool is the revolutionary newspaper for the Marxists who remain faithful to the notion that Marxism is a guide to action. For us in «Workers Solidarity» newspaper, Chris Harman΄s newspaper was and remains a model.

            His journalistic duties didn΄t stop Chris from carrying on his theoretical contribution. His book on May ΄68 has been an invaluable intervention on how to see that explosion not as a «french moment» of the movement but as an international full decade that embraced Europe from Paris to Prague, and from Italy and Portugal to Greece after the fall of the Junta. He spread the panorama of the movement to Mexico and Argentina, helping the waning revolutionary left to assimilate the lessons and find the stamina in order to go on.

            In May 1988, when OSE was celebrating the 20^th anniversary of May 1968 with 3 days that inaugurated «Marxism» in Greece as an annual event, Chris Harman was in Athens with us. Since then, he came again and again to support this effort and also to «inhale», as he used to say, the experience of the movement in Greece.

           

As always, Chris didn΄t limit himself in arguing the necessity of building a revolutionary party of the working class. He took the experience of the German Revolution of 1918-1924 and transferred it in a book, every single page of which brings to life the need of the party for a victorious strategy and tactics in the workers revolution. With great patience and tenacity, and a remarkable wealth of historical knowledge, he took good care to provide his comrades with the best examples from history in order to help in understanding the difficulties of revolutionary action in changing situations.

            The scale of his historical studies appeared all together in his book «A people΄s History of the World». From the primitive communist societies to the 20^th century revolutions, it is a magnificent overview carrying all the transitions from the Antiquity to Feudalism, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the Bourgeois Revolutions, not only in Europe but also in China and the islamic world, in Africa, in Asia and in the Americas, from the Incas to the Vietnam War. It is a work enviable by academics, written by a revolutionary who preferred to stay a full-time cadre for the SWP, during all his working life. It is a book informed cover to cover by the effort to defend Marx and Engels΄s notion of historical materialism.

            Finally, what marks out Chris Harman΄s contribution to the international movement in recent years, is without doubt his contribution in the economic theory of Karl Marx. Between the economic crisis of the 1970s, that signaled the end of the post-war expansion of capitalism and the eruption of the present  world economic crisis, there is a period of about 35 years. Especially after the collapse of the Eastern block and the so-called triumph of capitalism in 1989, it was very difficult for someone to remain faithful to Marx΄s assessment that capitalism is a system carrying inside itself the tendency towards crises. In the 1990s, the years of Clinton, of the «new economy» and of the «magician Greenspan», it was easy for ideas claiming that the changes in capitalism have made crisis a thing of the past to dominate. Chris resisted that temptation, not in a dogmatic way, but with an arduous effort to keep Marx΄s fundamental ideas relevant with the actuality. With articles and polemics from the pages of the International Socialism Journal, where he served as an editor in the last years, with his books about the Economics of the Madhouse, with debates in conferences and meetings, he managed to provide to the new anti-capitalist movement of the 21^st century the tools in order to understand the eruption of the new big economic crisis. His last book, Zombie Capitalism is a dense result of his work of many decades.

            Harman closed his contribution to the cause of revolutionary socialism, in the way he started it. The young student of LSE helped the movement of 1968 to find the answers about the thread of revolution that stalinism had cut. The mature Harman of Zombie Capitalism helps a new generation of activists to find the contradictions of system they want to overthrow. All of us who marched with him in this journey, we mourn for his loss, but we are proud for the legacy he leaves behind. Everyone who wants to continue the struggle for socialism, will always feel Chris Harman΄s inspiration by their side.

 

Panos Garganas