Obituary from LSHG Newsletter #55 (Summer 2015)
A Working-Class Intellectual:
Jim Cronin, 1942-2014
I first met
Jim on 4 September 1964, at a meeting of the Tottenham International Socialists
(IS - forerunner of the SWP) at Tottenham Trades Hall at Bruce Grove. I’d just
arrived in London,
and it was my first IS meeting. Jim also had just arrived in Tottenham where he
was living with Alan and Maureen Woodward and their two young children. Also at
that meeting were Alan Woodward, who died a couple of years ago [see http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/alan-woodward-interviewed-by-ian.html
] and Alan Watts, who is here today. Others here today who may not have been at
that particular meeting, but whom Jim and I knew at that time are Mel and Gerry
Norris and Fergus Nicol.
If anyone
wonders why so many of us have kept a
political commitment over half a century, the answer is in two words – Tony
Cliff. Cliff, the founder and chief inspiration of the International
Socialists, was a remarkable figure who changed many lives, Jim’s among them. A
few years ago when I was working on my biography of Cliff [ http://www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk/view/2937/Tony+Cliff%253A+A+Marxist+for+His+Time
] I interviewed Jim about his early
experiences.
Jim had grown
up in a Catholic family and seems to have got little or nothing out of his
formal schooling. But by the age of nineteen he had become heavily involved in
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Labour Party Young
Socialists (YS) in the North Islington area
where he lived. He had also broken with his religion and was becoming an
atheist; his family tried to send him to the Jesuits to be sorted out, but he
declined the offer. He was in general very distrustful of adults and kept clear
of the adult CND and Labour Party.
His Youth CND
group used to hold regular weekly meetings which took the form of a political
discussion group. The various members would put forward their views. Then Alan
Woodward, whom Jim knew through CND and the YS suggested that they might invite
a speaker on capitalism and the bomb. The next week Cliff turned up and spoke -
his argument fitted ideas Jim had already been thinking about. Over forty years
later Jim recalled that he had been “bowled over”.
A few weeks later Jim went to a
YS meeting in East Islington where Cliff was
again the speaker. Jim and a couple of other YS members got talking to Cliff
after the meeting, and Cliff invited them back to his house. They sat up right
through the night talking about a wide range of political questions. One issue
Jim remembered arguing about was the question of what socialists should do in a
workplace where there was a racist strike. If they failed to win the argument,
should they join the strike or should they cross picket lines? At the time it
may have seemed a rather abstract argument – at this time Jim was scarcely
involved in trade-union activity – but it was a question which would acquire
burning relevance a few years later when London
dockers struck in support of Enoch Powell’s famous anti-immigrant “rivers of
blood” speech.
Jim remembered
this as a “fantastic experience”. At
around this time Cliff used to give a series of twelve lectures on various
aspects of Marxism. Jim followed Cliff around and heard the lectures half a
dozen times in various parts of London.
He was deeply impressed, not just by Cliff’s intellectual analysis but above
all by what he saw as Cliff’s “humanity”; Cliff seemed very different to the
other adults he had known. He rapidly joined the International Socialists, at
this time still a very tiny organisation; Jim may have been the hundredth
member.
Cliff
recognised Jim’s enthusiasm and took Jim under his wing. Once he had
established that Jim was reliable and would return books, it was agreed that
Jim was allowed to borrow any books from Cliff’s huge collection that Cliff was
not using at the time. This began to satisfy Jim’s thirst for knowledge and to
make up for the education that his school had failed to give him.
When in 1963
Cliff left London for several weeks to visit his
family in Israel,
Jim was allowed access to his house to borrow books while Cliff was away. Cliff
obviously regarded Jim as having great potential to encourage him in this way.
But there was no flattery. Jim had a Lenin-style beard, and Cliff would tell
him: “Jim, you look like Lenin …. But that’s as far as it goes”.
The
International Socialists in the early sixties was an exciting place to be.
Although the group numbered only a couple of hundred, it contained, as well as
Cliff, Michael Kidron, Alasdair MacIntyre, Nigel Harris, Paul Foot and John
Palmer. It was the ideas that Jim acquired in this milieu that sustained him
through the coming decades of political activity.
Over those
years he was involved in a great deal of activity that was not particularly
exciting or glamorous – notably Labour Party meetings in the sixties, and later
activity on two Trades Councils - but which was absolutely necessary to
maintain socialist organisation and animate local struggles. It is unlikely that he would have found the
energy and enthusiasm for this activity if he had not had a broader socialist
vision and a sense of the historical process.
From Cliff and
the International Socialists Jim got a view of the world that had two important
characteristics. Firstly, it offered a radical alternative to the dominant
ideology transmitted by the schools, media, churches etc., a view that
permitted a radical critique of all the institutions and practices of
capitalist society. But as well as being radical it was also realistic. It
recognised that capitalism was a tough old system, that reformism had very deep
roots. Jim never believed that the achievement of socialism would be quick or
easy, or that there were any short-cuts available.
Over the next
thirty years Jim was involved in a whole number of campaigns in support of
workers in struggle and in opposition to racism and the far right. Let me give
just one example. Everybody knows about the Fords Dagenham women’s strike for
equal pay in 1968; it’s become the subject of a movie and now a musical.
But the
struggle for equal pay was a long one, and Dagenham wasn’t the only strike. In
1976 women at the Trico windscreen wiper factory in Brentford, West London, struck for twenty-one weeks before achieving
equal pay. The Lea
Valley was then still one of the major
industrial areas in London.
Jim played a major role in organising to bring strikers over to North-East London, and to take them round factories and
workplaces in order to raise money.
Many other
activities could be listed. When I first knew him he was chair of Wood Green
Young Socialists; later he was active in promoting and selling Tony Cliff’s two
books on Incomes Policy and Productivity Deals. He was also involved in the
campaign against council rent increases in Haringey.
In the
mid-seventies he was active in building the Right to Work Campaign, and joined
the pickets during the long-running Grunwick strike. In 1977 the National
Front, then on the rise, organised a march from Duckett’s Common at Turnpike Lane. Jim
was very much involved in the counter-demonstration which successfully challenged
the NF and was an important prelude to the big demonstration at Lewisham later
that year which turned the tide against the NF. On the back of this activity
the Anti-Nazi League was founded, and again Jim played an active role.
On a more
mundane level Jim and I were involved, not with any great success, in working
in Enfield Trades Council and trying to turn it into a more effective
interventionist organisation. A little later came the great miners’ strike of
1984-85, and once again Jim was heavily involved in solidarity work. Doubtless
there are many more activities I have forgotten.
Besides this
Jim was always involved with building the local organisations of the Socialist
Workers Party, as IS had become. Many, many hours were spent on building and maintaining
branch and district organisation, sustaining and encouraging comrades, and
sorting out often debilitating internal disputes.
Two more
things that Jim owed to Cliff. Soon after Jim joined the Islington branch of
the IS, Cliff arranged for him to become chair of the branch, which gave him
experience and confidence in chairing. I must have attended many dozens of
meetings chaired by Jim, but on thinking about it, I cannot recall anything of
them. That was because Jim realised that the job of a chair is to facilitate
discussion in the meeting and not to obtrude him- or herself.
And Jim always
remembered the way that Cliff had acted as a mentor to him when he was a young
recruit to the organisation. Jim often tried to play the same role for new
members, encouraging them to read and assisting with their political
development. One particular example was Andy
Strouthous, a young recruit in the 1970s, for whom Jim was a
guide and mentor, who later became a Central Committee member, and who was a
lifelong friend of Jim’s.
Two final
observations on Jim. Firstly Jim was, above all, a rank-and-file activist. Back
in the seventies we used to talk a lot about the rank-and-file, and Jim
exemplified all that was best in the meaning of the term. As far as I know, Jim
never served, nor aspired to serve, on any national body of the SWP; he was
never on the Central Committee, National Committee or any other national body.
With the
exception of his involvement in the rank-and-file engineers’ paper Engineers Charter, all his activity was
confined to North London, at various times in the boroughs of Islington,
Haringey, Enfield
and Barnet. That was his patch; that was where he made his contribution.
Without activists like Jim building on the ground, national organisations would
be completely meaningless.
And secondly
Jim was very much a working-class intellectual. He loved books, and was
fascinated by ideas. His genuine enthusiasm for knowledge stood in sharp
contrast to all too many who have the privilege of working in the academic
world but are quite cynical in their attitude to ideas and knowledge. He was
particularly interested in the revolutionary process, in the dynamics of the
Russian Revolution and also of the French Revolution of 1789.
With the rapid
expansion of higher education in the 1960s and after, many of the generation
who got their first intellectual stimulus in the Young Socialists later, at
various stages of their lives, entered higher education as mature students. The
Tottenham IS, which never had much more than a dozen members, produced two (I
think) PhDs, an MA and a few BAs.
Jim, however,
never entered any formal academic study. (Perhaps his recollection of his
unhappy schooldays deterred him.) For Jim the revolutionary socialist
organisation was his university, and it gave him a better education than he
could have acquired in an academic institution.
In his later
years, when health problems were making him cut back on political activity,
Jim, along with his friend Andy Strouthous,
was a regular attender at seminars of the London Socialist Historians Group,
and was always keen to participate in the discussions. While he did not
tolerate pretentiousness, he was always keen to expand his knowledge and
understanding of the historical process.
But while it
was revolutionary politics that had awakened Jim’s thirst for ideas, he was
never narrowly political in his concerns. His great pride in his three
daughters, his abilities as a photographer and his love of Arsenal all testify
to the breadth of his interests.
He was a
remarkable individual and it was a privilege to have known him.
Ian Birchall
This
a slightly expanded version of my contribution at Jim’s Memorial Meeting
