04.12.2014

Committed revolutionary

John Robinson, 1926-2014

My abiding memories of John Robinson, who died on October 29, revolve around the afternoons I spent with him in the British Library’s café. John arranged these get-togethers in order to target me for relentless, indefatigable contact work, designed to persuade me of the unique merits of the organisation he now supported - the Japan Revolutionary Communist League (Revolutionary Marxist Faction) and the theoretical work of its late leader, Kan’ichi Kuroda, who died in 2006. (In turn, he was held in high esteem by that organisation: two representatives of JRCL travelled to London to attend his funeral and deliver a final farewell to their comrade).

To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that these British Library meetings were foreboding or that John was some sort of grim-faced Trot automaton - far from it. The comrade was always warm and engaged, interested in the ups and downs of my dad’s dementia, the current state of my love life, and my memories of growing up in a South Wales Communist Party family. At his funeral on November 28 - along with the usual posse of lefties you would expect - there were a sprinkling of people who simply knew and liked him as a neighbour and a resident of south London’s Blackheath. He had clearly been a popular and friendly local character - as he grew more physically frail towards the end, some of these people pitched in to help. For me, finding time to meet him was often difficult, given my party duties, but he became a friend. I will miss him.

We shared a background in British Stalinism, of course. John joined the Young Communist League as a teenager and spent some time in the CPGB. However, he broke with the Communist Party in 1955 and embraced Trotskyism, joining The Club led by Gerry Healy, forerunner of the Socialist Labour League and the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Despite his best efforts John did not convert me to the world view of the JRCL (RMF). In truth, he had more political success with his writings on Marxism and psychology/psychiatry, which I always found interesting. His brief stint in the army as a young man - and the mental anguish and breakdown this produced in him - initially sparked this interest and led to him spending much of the 1960s and early 70s in Dublin studying for his masters (his thesis was titled: ‘A test of Pavlov’s cortical irradiation hypothesis’). Later in the 1970s, he produced several articles for the WRP’s Labour Review - material he later crystallised into two interesting books: The individual and society and The failure of psychiatry.

John remained a committed revolutionary until the end of his long life. He understood that genuine working class politics had to be fought for and, whatever our disagreements, I greatly admired the energy and persistence he displayed in that - a vim and vigour that could sometimes put comrades a third of his age to shame.

Our sincere condolences go out to his family, his friends and to all his comrades.

Mark Fischer