The Virtual Stoa

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered in Berlin, 15 January 1919.

James Joyce, novelist and socialist (”He calls himself a socialist, but attaches himself to no school of socialism”, said his brother); born 2 February 1882, died 13 January 1941 in Zürich.

Betty Reid, communist, born, appropriately enough, 1 May 1915; died January 4 2004.

Edwin Muir, poet and critic; also ILPer and guild socialist; born in Orkney, 15 May 1887; died at Cambridge, 3 January 1959.

Emily Lutyens, theosophist, feminist, socialist, vegetarian; born in Paris, 26 December 1874, died at Paddington, 3 January 1964. Brought up in Portugal, India, England and France, she married the architect Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) and joined the women’s movement, working in the Moral Education League (campaigning for prostitues suffering from venereal disease) and later the WSPU (her sister Constance Bulwer-Lytton was a hunger-striker). Annie Besant converted her to theosophy; she would later write Candles in the Sun, her memoir of her time in this peculiar movement. In 1916, she started a campaign for Indian self-rule. “This was perhaps tactless”, notes the ODNB, “as her husband was then designing an imperial capital at New Delhi.”

Will Thorne, general secretary of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers and Labour MP for West Ham (South) (renamed Plaistow in 1918), 1906-1945; born Birmingham, 8 October 1857, died at Plaistow, West Ham, 2 January 1946.

Everyone’s favourite Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek. Best known for his immortal literary creation The Good Soldier Švejk, Hašek earned his revolutionary credentials as a Bolshevik commissar in the Red Army, a period of his life fictionalised in the stories collected in The Red Commissar and other stories. Born in Prague, 30 April, 1883, died in Lipnice, 3 January, 1923. There’s an image of his grave here.

Mary Macarthur, trade unionist, Anti-Sweating campaigner and ILPer; wife of William Anderson (DSW, #264); born in Glasgow 13 August 1880, died at Golders Green, London, 1 January 1921.

Harry Magdoff, American socialist, one of the editors of Monthly Review, born 21 August 1913, died 1 January 2005.

Louis-Auguste Blanqui, French insurrectionary socialist. Pic of his grave here. More info here, with some original texts handily archived here. Born 8 February 1805, died 1 January 1881.

Philip Whitehead, Labour politician; born 30 May 1937; died 31 December 2005. Older Stoa discussion here.

Karl Renner, Austrian socialist politician; born 14 December 1870, died 31 December 1950.

Jim Figgins, railway signalmen and trade unionist, who travelled slowly from the communist-influenced left (the Railwaymen’s Minority Movement and the Railway Vigilance Movement) to leadership positions (executive, 1931-4, an organiser from 1938, assistant to the general secretary in 1943, elected general secretary in 1948, retiring in 1953). Richard Crossman thought he reminded him of “a retired Anglo-Indian country gentleman farmer” [David Howell, in the ODNB]. Born Largs, Ayrshire, 8 March 1893, died at Cuddington, Surrey, 27 December 1956.

Ada Nield Chew, trade unionist, ILPer and suffragist, who became paid organiser for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1912. After the war, she ran a successful mail-order wholesale drapery line. Born Audley, Staffordshire, 28 January 1870, died Burnley, Lancashire, 27 December 1945.

Louis Aragon, poet, novelist, surrealist, socialist; born 3 October 1897, died 24 December 1982.

Randolph Bourne, (1886-1918) (also here), author of the classic essay War is the Health of the State, left unfinished at the time of his death in the great flu epidemic.

Clementina Black, writer, suffragist and friend of Eleanor Marx; a key activist in the National Anti-Sweating League; born Brighton, 27 July 1853; died at Barnes, 19 December 1922.

Cornelius Cardew, experimental composer, Communist, and author of Stockhausen Serves Imperialism [pdf]; born at Greet, near Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, 7 May 1936; killed in a road accident in Leyton, 19* December 1981.

(*The ODNB says 19 December; other web things I’ve seen say 13 December. Other things being equal, it is current DSW policy to go along with the ODNB.)

Charles Buxton, socialist politician and philanthropist. After classics at Cambridge and a period travelling, he was called to the bar in 1902, also serving as principal of Morley College for working men and women in south London. In 1904 he married Dorothy Frances Jebb; their lifestyle was sufficiently frugal that, according to the ODNB, “on weekend walking tours in the south of England they were sometimes mistaken for tramps in their old clothes”. On a mission in 1914 to try to persuade Bulgaria to enter the war on the allied side, he was shot through the lung by a Turkish would-be assassin. Formerly a Liberal, he joined the ILP in 1917, and attended the Socialist International’s conferences in 1919 and 1920, visiting Soviet Russia, about which he was enthusiastic, with a Labour Party delegation in 1920. A delegate to the League of Nations assembly in 1924 and 1930, he was also president of the British Esperantists. He was elected to Parliament on three occasions, but never served for long: Liberal MP for Ashburton in 1910, Labour MP for Accrington 1922-3, and for Elland, 1929-31. Born London 27 Novmber 1875; died at Peaslake in Surrey, 16 December 1942.

Stuart Adamson, musician; born in Manchester, 11 April 1958, died in Honolulu, 16 December 2001.

Lelio Basso, Italian socialist, born in Varazze, 25 December 1903, died in Rome, 16 December 1978.

Gerry Healy, Trotskyist, born in Ballybane, co. Galway, 3 December 1913, died in London, 14 December 1989.

Alan Ecclestone, Communist and Anglican priest; born Stoke-on-Trent, 3 June 1904; died London, 14 December 1992. To those Anglicans who objected to the way in which he repeatedly stood as a CP candidate in the 1960s, he “always insisted… that the church was guilty of crimes equally as great as those of the party, and believed that commitment to a person, place, calling, or principle should not be lightly revoked.” [ODNB]

Herbert Burrows, leading propagandist for Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation, organiser (with Annie Besant) of the match girls strike of 1888, and later an active member of the Theosophical Society. Born Redgrave, Suffolk, 12 June 1845, died in London, 14 December 1922.