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| Chris Harman obituary Writer, editor and leading light of the Socialist Workers partyIn 2005 Chris Harman was writing about how the 30-year project to publish the collected works of Marx and Engels was done. It is 50 volumes long and he was reviewing Vol 50, having read the previous 49 one by one as they had appeared. Of course, he had read them all. Harman, who has died aged 66 in Cairo, Egypt, following a cardiac arrest, was the kind of Marxist who is never satisfied with second-hand summaries. To get a handle on why he was like this, we have to go back to the 1950s when Marxism was largely in the hands of communists and, as Orwell's Animal Farm shows, the link between Marx's ideas and the communist tyrannies was nothing more than a distorted rhetoric.Harman went to Watford grammar school, with its staff ranging from officer class traditionalists to old Welsh socialists and young CND-ers, the place run by the maverick, leftward-moving Harry Rée. I think I had my first glimpse of him there, as the friend of one of the school's senior lefties. He headed off to Leeds University in 1961 and became engrossed in a new Marxism, which tried to encapsulate several major bodies of thought, history and action: Marx's critique of capitalism, the Bolshevik and German revolutions of the early 20th century, a Marxist analysis of the Soviet bloc, and a turn to the revolutionary potential of the different kinds of working class across the world. This was a project that had begun in the 1930s, and Chris made his way to one of the several tiny organisations that had been trying to sustain and develop these ideas: the Socialist Review Group, whose main theorist was Tony Cliff.In 1964, he moved on to the London School of Economics (LSE) to do a PhD with the present foreign secretary's father, Ralph Miliband. At the time, revolution was coming from the American civil rights movement, and anti-colonial, anti-apartheid and anti-Vietnam war campaigns. Little did we know that the LSE canteen and the Holborn pubs had turned into a Left Bank of debate. The LSE became a focal point for the sit-ins and free universities in this country.I remember hearing Chris speak there, one moment alongside Danny Cohn-Bendit, the next with a shop steward from the occupation of the Renault factory in France, another at a demonstration against the Vietnam war. The Socialist Review Group had become the International Socialists (IS). "Neither Washington nor Moscow," they proclaimed, and many socialists, orthodox Trotskyists and communists recoiled from the hostility Harman directed at the Soviet Union. At one meeting, I recall how it seemed incredible to some that he could support Vietnam's fight against the US but be critical of Ho Chi Minh's Communist party. The events in Paris and the rest of France, he would claim, proved the point: existing parties claiming to be Marxist were unwilling and unable to make a revolution.Everything Chris did over the next 40 years was geared towards creating a political party that was able and willing. With IS and its successor, the Socialist Workers party, he spent his life speaking, writing, editing, organising and campaigning. He was editor of the International Socialism Journal from 2004 and had previously edited Socialist Worker for more than two decades. In conversation his eyes would move between the middle distance and the floor, his ears picking up on every word, his replies indicating that he was relating what you were saying to the library in his head.He didn't finish the PhD but produced a constant stream of articles, editorials and books: the book that would become Class Struggles in Eastern Europe (originally published in 1974 as Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe), which developed the theory that the Soviet bloc was "state capitalist"; a history of the German revolution in The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918 to 1923 (1983); and the Marxist classic A People's History of the World (1999). At various times, his articles, which mostly homed in on the economics of the moment, coagulated into books: Explaining the Crisis appeared in 1984, and this year he produced Zombie Capitalism.His style of speaking was rapid but analytic, good on irony and contradiction; his lifestyle frugal in the extreme. He was untempted by academe or celebrity. It was always a regret and an irritation to me why newspaper and TV debates about wars or the state of global capitalism did not call on him. That was a loss – and to hear that it is a permanent loss is deeply sad. Yet he leaves behind a terrific body of work that challenges received opinion.He is survived by his partner Talat and children Seth and Sinead.• Chris Harman, socialist and journalist, born 8 November 1942; died 7 November 2009PoliticsGeorge OrwellLondon School of Economics and Political ScienceCivil libertiesEconomic policyMichael Rosenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
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Anthony Rota obituary Clubbable doyen of the antiquarian book worldOne fellow antiquarian bookseller described Anthony Rota, who has died aged 77, as the doyen of the trade and another remarked that "if booksellers were priests once, Anthony Rota was pope". With the appearance of a watchfully benevolent eagle, Anthony and his father, Bertram, helped establish first editions of books by British writers as an international, especially British and American, cultural commodity.Bertram founded the business Bertram Rota Ltd, presently of Long Acre, central London, and Anthony was considered to be the fourth bookselling generation, because his father had worked first for a great-uncle and two uncles. He helped broaden the term "antiquarian books" – previously applied chiefly to musty leatherbound volumes on abstruse subjects – to include a bubbling mainstream of contemporary as well as older literary art. Bertram had started the family firm in Charing Cross Road in 1923, specialising in modern first editions. Apart from these, Anthony also dealt extensively in writers' signed letters and manuscripts, having an eagle eye for rescuing a "missing" letter from JM Synge or the first pencil draft of a poem by Rupert Brooke. To him, a first edition of a Galsworthy or a Greene, a Sheridan or a Shaw, a Bennett or a Balchin, or a letter about them, was an object of intense interest.Although he shrewdly differentiated between an autographed book by an author who would sign practically anything, thus debasing his signature as currency, and an author who had a gentlemanly objection to following suit, it was always clear that he was interested in books and people first and money second – a state of mind that paradoxically served him well, by bringing in money from enthusiastic and expert clients who were less cautious when dealing with him than with some others.Anthony, born in Palmers Green, north London, and a pupil of Southgate county school, took charge after his father's sudden death in 1966, and soon established his own priorities. He began travelling to the US for trips during which he would visit up to 10 university libraries and speak to the staffs and students. His clubbability was as useful to him in the US as it was in the Garrick Club in London, where the business was located at various times in Albany, Vigo Street, Savile Row and Long Acre. He had integrity, a passion for books and a puckish sense of humour.Anthony persuaded his sceptical father in the 1950s that book barrows might be profitable territory. His father bought for five shillings in mint condition the first edition of the three-volume set of the 1885 novel Diana of the Crossways by George Meredith. Anthony himself picked up a yellow-paper-wrapped volume, John Sherman and Dhoya, by "Ganconagh", the pen-name used by WB Yeats when he wrote the book for Fisher Unwin's Pseudonym Library in 1881. Both made a scintillating profit and Anthony, thus encouraged, searched the same book barrows many times afterwards and never found a thing. He came to see this as an enactment of the unique unpredictability of his job.That unpredictability could be useful. Anthony had only just set foot in a New York book fair on Park Avenue when he saw just inside the door the stall of a British dealer, Ian Hustwick, who called him over, and offered him a scarce first edition of Gertrude Stein's Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia – one of 300 copies issued free of charge in 1912. Anthony bought it with as little hesitation as he would have displayed had it been offered to him in London. A few minutes later, he spotted the US collector Robert H Taylor at the fair. Six weeks later, when Taylor was in London, Anthony sold him Stein's book at a handsome profit – and Taylor took it back to the US. Anthony would have made his profit by waving the book under Taylor's nose in New York, but he preferred perceptive sales through personal contacts.His friendships with contemporary authors could be useful. He, his wife and their child in a carry-cot would often visit Jocelyn Brooke, author of that sad satirical novel on the failure of a once supreme public school type, The Passing of a Hero, and have a meal cooked by him. Brooke was a reviewer as well as an author and Anthony bought many of his review copies of first editions, some of which found their way into museums and universities.In 1971 Anthony became president of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association and served the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers as president from 1988 to 1991, continuing to do committee work for both organisations. In 1998, Apart from the Text, his authoritative book on the development of the printed book, in terms of paper, type and binding, was published. In 2002 a book of tributes to him on his 70th birthday, called simply Anthony Rota, appeared. His own autobiographical work, Books in the Blood, also appeared that year.Anthony Rota married Jean Kendall in 1957. She survives him, along with their two sons, Julian, who entered the family business, and Gavin.• Anthony Bertram Rota, antiquarian bookseller, born 24 February 1932; died 13 December 2009BooksellersLondonDennis Barkerguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |