Duncan Hallas
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Duncan Hallas (23 December 1925 - 19 September 2002), was a prominent member of the Trotskyist movement in Great Britain. He was known as a lively and humorous orator.
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[edit] Biography
Born into a working class family in Manchester, Duncan Hallas joined the Trotskyist Workers International League and then its successor organisation the Revolutionary Communist Party while still a young worker during World War II. Conscripted into the army in 1943 he was involved in the great mutiny in Egypt after the end of the War. When factional disputes broke out in The Club, the name adopted by the British Trotskyists after entering the Labour Party, Hallas became a supporter of Tony Cliff's positions.
He was a founder member of the tiny Socialist Review Group when it was organised in 1951. As a member of the SRG he wrote its only major founding document not authored by Cliff entitled On the Stalinist Parties. He also wrote a number of articles for the early issues of Socialist Review but when his job took him to Scotland in 1954/5 he seems to have dropped out of the group, although he remained politically active in the National Union of Teachers and elsewhere.
With the upsurge in struggles in 1968 Hallas joined the International Socialists (IS) and rapidly became a member of the group's leadership. As such he was a full time worker for the group and daily involved in the struggles of those years.
Like many of the senior cadre of the IS, Hallas became concerned by the role played within the leadership by Tony Cliff and his increasing tendency to take decisions without consulting leadership bodies. This reached such a point that Hallas initiated an oppositional grouping to Cliff's course in the IS alongside John Palmer and Jim Higgins. However when this oppositional grouping became formalised as the International Socialist Opposition (ISO), a formal faction, Hallas broke with it. The result was the defeat of the ISO and the expulsion of its members.
Hallas would continue to be a member of the leadership of the IS and then of the Socialist Workers Party, its organisational successor founded in 1977, until his retirement from active politics due to ill health in 1995.
He was the author of innumerable articles for the socialist press and a short guide to the politics of Leon Trotsky.
[edit] Publications
[edit] Books
Trotsky’s Marxism (Pluto Press, London 1979)
The Comintern (Bookmarks, London 1985)
[edit] Pamphlets
Trotsky (Socialist Worker, 1970)
The Meaning of Marxism (Pluto Press on behalf of the International Socialists, 1971)
The Labour Party (Socialist Worker, 1981)
Why Import Controls Won't Save Jobs with Nigel Harris, (SWP pamphlet, 1981)
Days of Hope: General Strike of 1926 with Chris Harman, (Socialist Worker, 1982)
[edit] External links
- Duncan Hallas Internet Archive at Marxists Internet Archive
- Socialist Worker obituary by Chris Harman and Paul Foot.
