‘There are those that fight one day and are good; others fight one year and they’re better; and there are those who fight many years and are very good. But there are those who fight their whole lives, and those are the indispensable ones.’ Bertolt Brecht
The death of our comrade Carol Brickley is a massive loss to the Revolutionary Communist Group, the organisation she helped found in 1974, and to our newspaper Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! in whose political direction, design and production she played a central role for 40 years. The first edition of FRFI was published in November 1979. Carol wrote the editorial, setting out the RCG’s stall in the context of a deepening crisis of imperialism, at the time finding its sharpest expression in the liberation struggles in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Ireland. In it she stated, uncompromisingly: ‘We place ourselves alongside the oppressed in their struggles whatever the consequences for us from the British imperialist state…Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! will expose the opportunists and prevent them from sabotaging the building of a revolutionary anti-imperialist movement in this country.’
Carol Brickley was born just after the end of the Second World War into a mining family in Cannock in Staffordshire. The postwar period saw the opening up of higher education to wider sections of the working class and she went to university in Newcastle to study fine art in the 1960s before moving to Brighton in 1971 to work in a youth club with young people from local estates. This was a period of dramatic political, social and economic turmoil, both in Britain and abroad, marking the end of the postwar boom.
The foundations of the RCG
Carol, alongside many others, saw the political and theoretical response of the British left as glaringly inadequate to the time. She had joined the Brighton branch of the International Socialists (IS – the forerunner to today’s Socialist Workers Party), which she came to regard as neither internationalist nor socialist. Carol was active in her branch discussion group which was one of the many informal factions that developed inside IS with growing dissatisfaction with the leadership.
The main challenge for IS as a Trotskyist group was to explain the long boom of western capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1967 it had put forward the theory that the capitalist system had stabilised itself by creating a Permanent Arms Economy. This view was challenged by both reality, and by the critique developed by two IS comrades, David Yaffe and Rudi Schmiede, in their 1971 paper, ‘State expenditure and the Marxian theory of crisis’. Discussion groups arose around questions of the capitalist crisis which the IS leadership dogmatically refused to debate. In September 1972 15 members of Brighton branch, Carol included, were suspended and seven months later a group of eight who had been in necessarily secret discussions with Roy Tearse, an older comrade from the Revolutionary Communist Party of the mid-1940s, were expelled.
By the end of 1973, after a year of discussion papers, factionalism, meetings and heated debate, it was clear to a number of former IS members, including Carol, that the path of fighting for reinstatement and building a tendency within IS was sterile. In February 1974, a conference was held to discuss – and reject – the economic analysis of IS and establish new political perspectives. Following this, the Revolutionary Communist Group was founded and Carol was among those elected to the political committee. She would remain in the political leadership of the organisation for the next four decades, until ill health forced her to step down. From 1974 onwards, Carol’s political history is inextricably bound up with that of the RCG. She helped form our key positions on imperialism, capitalism and racism and provided impetus for the democratic and non-sectarian campaigns that the RCG was part of building. Her incisive and engaging articles in FRFI would cover everything from the battle for working class housing to the shenanigans of Tory ministers. Here there is room to highlight only some of her key contributions.
Women’s oppression
The RCG began to move away from the Trotskyist political positions which were its IS legacy; these for example relegated racism, the exploitation of immigrant labour and women’s oppression to ‘the crisis and its reflections among other strata’. Carol was one of a group of women comrades who developed instead a theoretical Marxist understanding of the specific oppression of women under capitalism, published as the fifth issue of the RCG’s theoretical journal, Revolutionary Communist,1in January 1976. In it, they rejected petit bourgeois feminist theory, formulating instead a materialist position based firmly in an understanding of Marxist economics and the crisis of capitalism that was intensifying during the 1970s. As they wrote, ‘As capitalism moves into crisis women are bearing the heaviest burdens and the sharpest attacks.’ It was women’s dual position as both privatised domestic workers in the home and wage labourers performing social labour that cemented their position. Everything else flowed from this. But this double oppression also made working class women key to emerging struggles, including the families of political prisoners in Ireland, and the predominantly black and Asian women who organised on the picket lines of Grunwick between 1976 and 1978. It is an analysis that remains absolutely relevant today.
Brixton, Belfast, Soweto: one struggle, one fight
In 1972, following the Bloody Sunday murders of unarmed protesters in Ireland by the British Army, Carol had along with other activists set up the Brighton branch of the Anti Internment League. Internment – the mass arrest and detention of Irish nationalists in the Six Counties by the British Army – had been introduced in 1971. Carol was amongst those who argued that, for communists in Britain, solidarity with the struggle in Ireland was key. Practically, the newly-formed RCG became active around the country in the fight against internment, in support of Irish prisoners of war and against the Prevention of Terrorism Act; it would offer unconditional support to all those fighting against British imperialism, by whatever means. Theoretically, our involvement in this work led to the RCG revisiting Marx and Engels on the question of Ireland and their understanding that, given the politically backward nature of the movement in Britain, a revolution in Ireland was key to the liberation of the British working class. The RCG developed this position, publishing in 1984 Ireland: the key to the British Revolution2by David Reed. This understanding of the position of communists in imperialist countries in relation to national liberation struggles developed further within the solidarity struggle against apartheid in South Africa, in which Carol played a leading role.
In 1976, Carol joined Red Lion Typesetters in London as an artworker, and soon also become a director. The company had been set up by the South African anti-apartheid campaigner and ANC member, Norma Kitson. Norma’s husband, David Kitson, had been jailed in South Africa in 1964 for his role in the leadership of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, and was serving a 20-year sentence. 1976 was the year of the Soweto Uprising, when black students inspired by the Black Consciousness Movement rose up against the racist state; at least 176 were killed by the South African police. The event sparked a new period of resistance in South Africa and the political alliance formed between Norma and, through Carol, the RCG was to prove crucial to the building of a solidarity movement in Britain.
In 1982, Norma’s son Steven was arrested while in South Africa visiting his father. She, along with the workers at Red Lion Setters and the RCG, sprang into action. As Carol wrote, ‘we tried to involve everyone we knew, including MPs and trade unionists, to free Steven. In a matter of days we had formed a formidable group…campaigning for his release, holding pickets outside the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square… [within a week] he was released, “squeezed like a pip from a lemon”’. Out of that campaign, City of London Anti-Apartheid Group was formed. Over the next decade, with Carol as its convenor, City AA was at the forefront of attempting to build a vibrant, uncompromising, anti-imperialist and non-sectarian solidarity with the black working class fighting in South Africa. It went from strength to strength, holding pickets of the embassy every week, developing its own rules for organising pickets and demonstrations. Crucially, it developed principles of non-sectarian solidarity, supporting all sections of the liberation movement and refusing to be dictated to by the interests of one section of the movement over another: this was in sharp contrast to the national Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, which supported only the ANC. This position, coupled with City AA’s principled stance against racism in Britain, its solidarity with the black youth who again rose up against police brutality in Brixton, Tottenham, Bristol and other cities around Britain in 1985, its willingness to risk arrest in defence of democratic rights, earned City AA the unremitting hostility of the ‘official’ movement.3City AA was expelled from the AAM and vilified by its supporters in the Labour Party and Communist Party as well as by sections of the ANC in exile. Carol was amongst those in the forefront of taking on these opportunists, challenging the leadership of the AAM year after year at their annual general meetings, calling out the AAM Chair and Labour MP Bob Hughes for his abject and chauvinist concessions to the apartheid regime when he begged activists not to boycott the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in which South Africa would be competing lest it ‘cost Scottish jobs’.
Carol would later describe City AA, and in particular the Non-Stop Picket of 1986-1990, as ‘the most important formative political experience of my life’. Her grasp of democratic organisation, of campaigning tactics and strategy informed always by the interests of the movement as a whole were extraordinary and while she could be ruthless in pursuing the correct path, she was almost always right and inspired a fierce loyalty. In the face of constant police harassment against the Non-Stop Picket, she was forceful, intransigent and generally knew the law better than they did, often browbeating the Cannon Row police into submission. As she put it, ‘We didn’t do deals. We always really obstructed what the police wanted. Usually they wanted us not to have [an event] or to tone it down or whatever. I was quite good at handling those situations… and we would go ahead and do it.’ No wonder the state saw Carol as such a threat. During this period, MI5 began surveillance on her, tapping her phone and on one occasion sawing through the ceiling to break into her flat.
After South Africa’s first free post-apartheid elections in 1994 and the winding-down of City AA, Carol pointed out that everything now depended on whether the form of constitutional settlement reached would offer real change to the black South African working class. By 2005, reviewing the AAM’s own mealy-mouthed and dishonest account of those years,4she concluded that while the black majority had achieved the vote, the ANC government had stopped there, ditching the Freedom Charter and demobilising the mass movement. The result was continuing abject poverty and squalor for the majority while black and white elites had secured their own privileges. This, she wrote, ‘is the measure of what the ANC and the AAM have achieved. Because of movements like the AAM, the Labour Party and its wealth of hacks remain in place to administer British imperialism and betray the working class in the 21st century, time and again. Because of the AAM, we know what opportunism looks like.’
Carol went on to complete a law degree, extending her grasp of civil liberties legislation and the ever-expanding powers of the police in an era of deepening crisis. As she wrote in 2001, ‘The British state is tooling up and honing its powers for future confrontations with the working class and its allies.’
Both as a member of the RCG’s political committee and on the editorial board of FRFI, Carol offered incisive political leadership. Like a hot knife through butter she would slice through liberal or sloppy ideas, lazy formulations or just plain bad writing. Her comments were often trenchant – she did not suffer fools gladly – but were a vital contribution to the clarity of the RCG’s political positions, the correctness of its tactics and the high standards of the newspaper.
A few weeks before her death, an event was held to mark the launch of a paperback copy of a book about the Non-Stop Picket.5She was unable to attend, but deeply encouraged that the lessons of that struggle were being learned and incorporated into new battles. These words of hers were read out:
‘[On the picket] I had the chance to mix with some amazing people who had given their all, their lives, to the struggle. That’s a privilege to see that. Those things that happen are important for the consciousness of any movement; they become part of its history and its future. They aren’t lost. Those victories aren’t lost. The City Group experience is a starting point, rather than the end point. The next movement will incorporate that knowledge and that experience. It’s important to pass it on and I’m glad that it’s being passed on.’
Hamba gahle, Carol.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 272, October/November 2019
The RCG will be holding an event in celebration of Carol Brickley’s life on Saturday 26 October, 2-5pm, at the London Irish Centre, 50-52 Camden Square, London NW1 9XB. Everyone who knew Carol is welcome to attend and to contribute their thoughts and memories; those who cannot make it but would like to send a message should write to the RCG address BCM Box 5909, London WC1N 3XX or email [email protected].
- www.revolutionarycommunist.org/britain/women-s-oppression/2850-women-s-oppression-under-capitalism
- Ireland: the key to the British Revolution, David Reed, Larkin Publications 1984
- SeeSouth Africa: Britain out of apartheid, apartheid out of Britainby Carol Brickley, Terry O’Halloran and David Reed, Larkin Publications second edition 1986 for a history of this period.
- ‘Anti-Apartheid: a study in opportunism’, Carol Brickley, FRFI183, February/March 2005
- Youth activism and solidarity: the Non-Stop Picket against apartheid, Gavin Brown and Helen Yaffe, Routledge pbk 2019
