Born in Tarragona in 1921, Téllez saw action on several fronts as a young anarchist militia man at the ripe old age of 18, during the Spanish Civil War. He took part in the French maquis during the Second World War. In 1944 he took part in a resistance invasion of Spain via the Aran Valley. He was involved in clandestine organisation in Spain after 1945. He was also a comrade of many of the legendary anarchist fighters against Franco, people like Francisco Sabaté Llopart and José Luis Facerias. Having turned to journalism to earn his living in exile, he began a career as a prolific author in the "Fight for History", rescuing the story of the anti-Franco resistance from obscurity. As well as biographies of Sabaté and Facerias, he produced books on Francisco Ponzán Vidal (the "Anarchist Pimpernel"), The MIL, Puig Antich and numerous articles for the libertarian press.
Téllez himself said, in an introduction to "The Anarchist Resistance to Franco: Biographical Notes": "Any small selection of names among hundreds of thousands of victims is arbitrary.... [But] with the presentation of some names, with their physical image, we would like to remember all those who fell in the struggle against tyranny, in defence of Freedom."
Chris Pallis
Chris Pallis came from a wealthy Anglo-Greek family. Born in Bombay, he received most of his schooling in Switzerland and was fluent in English, Greek and French. In 1941 he began to study for medicine. He joined the Communist Party and was expelled almost immediately for its positions on the Second World War. He gravitated towards the Revolutionary Communist Party which united practically all the Trotskyists in Britain at that time (it included in its ranks people like Ted Grant, Tony Cliff, and Gerry Healy, all of whom went on to found their own parties).
In the mid-50s he took up an appointment at Hammersmith Hospital. He joined the Socialist Labour League, set up by Gerry Healy, which later became the Workers Revolutionary Party. He served on its national committee. In 1960 he participated in the expulsion of Ken Weller, a young London engineer and shop steward, who had grave doubts about the authoritarian behaviour of the SLL. This was part of the ongoing fight by Healy to purge the organisation of its critics, grouped around Brian and Celia Behan. Within a few months, Pallis too had left the SLL. He and Bob Pennington started having grave doubts about the SLL themselves and were summoned to a meeting of the London Executive Committee, where Pennington was subjected to a 20-minute diatribe from Healy, consisting entirely of personal abuse. When he and Pallis tried to leave, they were forcibly prevented and physically assaulted. Disgusted with Healy’s methods, Pennington and Pallis renounced Trotskyism and founded the Socialism Re-Affirmed Group, which got into contact with the French libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie and then changed its name to Solidarity. Pennington was to return to Trotskyism but Pallis grouped a number of other ex-SLL members around him like Weller, Bob Potter and John Lawrence.
The Solidarity group began to publish a duplicated magazine of the same name around 3 to 6 times a year. The group also produced some 60 pamphlets and 4 books. As well as providing some interesting translations by Pallis of Paul Cardan (the pen name of Cornelius Castoriadis, one of the leading lights of Socialisme ou Barbarie) the group produced many in-depth analyses of various strikes. As a result Solidarity had some respect and circulation among industrial militants.
Pallis had a direct, accessible and often humorous style. He produced interesting accounts of the Belgian General Strike of 1960-61, May 1968 in France and the Portuguese Revolution in 1975-6. But his most remembered works will probably prove to be the Irrational in Politics (which was really a popularisation of some of Wilhelm Reich’s ideas) and the Bolsheviks and Workers Control.
As a neurologist and brain surgeon, Pallis made many important contributions to medicine, especially on brainstem death. It is rumoured that Rudi Dutschke, the radical German student leader, who had been shot in the head by a right-wing would-be assassin, trusted only Pallis to remove the bullet from his head when he was operated on in Britain.
In the last 20 years or so, Pallis moved away from active politics as the result of the onset of Parkinson’s disease. He left a lasting impression however, and his funeral was attended by many who had been in Solidarity or who had come into contact with him through the anarchist movement.
Pallis and the Solidarity group had an important and mostly positive influence on the British libertarian movement, and produced some of its most important theoretical contributions between 1960 to 1980.
John Crump
John Crump died at the beginning of March 2005 at the early age of 60. Best known to Anarchist Federation members and Organise! readers as the author of our pamphlet The Anarchist Movement in Japan [ed: which is a summary of his book Hatta Shûzô and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan], he had been active in the socialist and libertarian movement since the early 1960s.
He started his political life in the Socialist Party of Great Britain and for some time was one of the editors of their magazine the Socialist Standard. In the early 1970s a significant number of younger members began to develop a libertarian communist critique of the SPGB. John was involved in this current and eventually left the SPGB after a number of others had been expelled. He helped form the libertarian group Social Revolution and wrote a number of articles for its publications, Libertarian Communism and Social Revolution. He eventually went to live in Japan [ed: only a research Sabbatical, and returned after], but continued to contribute articles from there. In the late 1970s he wrote a pamphlet, A Contribution to the Critique of Marx, which was published jointly by Social Revolution and Solidarity. This pamphlet can be found on our northern website.
John was unhappy with the eventual merger of Social Revolution and Solidarity and took no further part in those groups. His next important contributions were two books. In 1986 he helped write a critique of the Russian economy “State Capitalism: The Wages System under New Management”. He co-edited with Maximilien Rubel a book “Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” (1987). In this he argued that there exists a “thin red line of non-market socialism”, which includes all those tendencies arguing for a stateless, moneyless, classless society.
When the Subversion group was formed in the late 80s, he again helped. This time he wrote a pamphlet on the Japanese economy and delivered a seminar at a day school in Manchester.
Those of us who knew John valued him for the basic sense of his views and the straightforward way he expressed them. He made many in Britain aware of the contribution of Japanese anarchists, whilst at the same time doing much to argue against sectarianism and narrow mindedness. His lasting contribution was to help others see the links that unite those of us in “the thin red line”. He will be missed.
===========================================
* Organise is the magazine of the Anarchist Federation.
It is published twice times a year to promote discussion
and the development of anarchist communist theory.
_______________________________________________
Back to Organise! #64 contents