David Howarth 2 August 1963 – 14 March 2026
David Howarth was a member and a supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Group for nearly 40 years. He joined the Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy in 1987 after moving down to London from Doncaster, where he had been radicalised by the impact of the miners’ strike on communities across Yorkshire, and had witnessed its shameful betrayal by the TUC and Labour Party. Almost immediately, he was catapulted into a direct action campaign to regain the right to protest outside the apartheid embassy, facing on many occasions arrest and detention in the cells of Cannon Row police station. He was not afraid to get his hands dirty quite literally, either – involved from the late 1980s in helping run the RCG’s publishing arm, Larkin Publications, he could be found on many a Friday night, sleeves rolled up, scrubbing thick black ink from his hands and forearms after printing reams of leaflets and newsletters on the office’s old Gestetner printer.
Dave played an active role in the RCG’s Rock around the Blockade solidarity campaign with Cuba – and was the inspiration behind our bat-themed Boycott Bacardi campaign. Despite being unemployed at the time, he tirelessly raised funds to take part in our 1995-1996 brigade to Cuba, fulfilling a dream to see how a socialist society worked in practice, and returned the following year. For him, Cuba stood as a shining example of all that is best about humanity, what the working class can achieve when it takes power.
After moving back to Doncaster when his father became unwell, Dave remained a supporter of the RCG. An ardent anti-racist, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 he went out alone to sell Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!, challenging the endemic racism and reaction of his home city. Most recently he worked with comrades in Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle, taking part in demonstrations on Palestine and interventions against the limp left social democracy represented by the newly-formed Your Party. Profoundly steeped in Marxist and Leninist theory, he was a patient and generous educator of newer and younger comrades and was looking forward to a closer relationship with the organisation in a period of renewed inter-imperialist rivalry and war.
Dave wrote for many years for FRFI under the name David Hetfield, and this is perhaps where he made his key contribution, recognising earlier than many on the left the crucial need for communists to take up the climate question, that only socialism can save the planet. Following Marx, he wrote: ‘In capitalist production, nature is seen as a free gift to capital. Driven by the profit motive, the capitalist is only interested in the unlimited expansion of capital. Natural resources like land, water, raw materials and hydrocarbons are only of interest to the capitalists in so far as they can be turned into profit… Today we see catastrophic global warming and fuel shortages, with the mass of humanity living in permanent underdevelopment, whilst a small minority live unsustainable consumerist lifestyles’. He pointed to how Cuba showed that only socialism could prevent this process and protect both the natural world and the working class that depends on it. In a critique of the 2009 Copenhagen COP conference he contrasted the ‘culture of death’ represented by imperialism’s predations on the planet with the ‘culture of life’ emanating from Latin America’s socialist leaders such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. Without a fight for socialism, he argued in one of his last articles in June 2025, capitalism will obliterate life on Earth.
In other articles, he denounced the devastation meted out by Shell against the Ogoni people in Nigeria and the terrible dangers of capitalist reliance on nuclear power following the Japan Fukushima disaster of 2011. He lambasted the cover-up of police culpability in the Hillsborough Stadium disaster of 1989 in which 97 Liverpool football supporters died; turning his attention to the United States, he shone a spotlight on the Democratic Party’s attacks on migrants, as well as the horrors unfolding in Haiti as a result of imperialist suffocation and repression.
Dave’s interests were wide-ranging; Cervantes’ Don Quixote jostled for space on his crowded bookshelves among the works of Lenin, Lukacs and John Bellamy Foster; CDs of classical operas nestled among those of Pearl Jam, Green Day and Led Zeppelin. He was a keen and talented photographer, particularly of wildlife, with an extraordinary eye for detail, and was all his life an avid follower of football – particularly the unequal fortunes of Sheffield Wednesday, Barcelona and Roma. But first and foremost he was a principled and unswerving communist, dedicated to the international class struggle and with a visceral contempt for any concessions to liberal and petty bourgeois ideology. Anti-imperialism ran through his core like words imprinted on a stick of Brighton rock: he stood with Cuba, with Venezuela, with the struggles of oppressed peoples – in Palestine, Kurdistan, Ireland and elsewhere in the world – for self-determination and against the brutal imperialist aggression being meted out against Iran in his last days. He was a comrade and a fighter to the end and died with a keffiyeh draped around him. He will be much missed. The RCG sends its profound condolences to his daughter, his comrades and his friends.
David’s funeral will take place at Mortlake Crematorium on Wednesday 1st April 2026 at 4:00 PM.
