Eric Levy died on 20 July, aged 94. The RCG had known him for the entire duration of our organisation’s existence. We salute Eric’s contribution to the struggle.
Born in Manchester in1928, Eric lived in Egypt as a child and was politically active in North America before settling in London, where he became involved in Maoist and anti-imperialist political circles. He worked as a teacher in London schools and was a keen walker, cyclist, swimmer and film buff. In the early 1960s Eric shared a flat with the Caribbean revolutionary communist Claudia Jones.
Alongside RCG comrades, Eric was active in the 1986-90 Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy, and in 1995 he was one of the participants in our first brigade to Cuba organised by Rock around the Blockade. For over four decades Eric attended and participated in our meetings and demonstrations in solidarity with Cuba and Venezuela, in support of the national liberation movements of Palestine, Ireland and elsewhere, against deportations and racism, against the Poll Tax and other attacks on the working class, and in defence of the NHS.
In 2003 Eric was one of a team of international volunteers who travelled to Iraq to act as ‘human shields’ in a bid to stop the imminent US and British bombing. He also travelled to Palestine several times as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement. In London, he stood with Brian Haw, whose ten-year anti-war protest outside the Houses of Parliament so upset the Labour government it passed a special law to criminalise it. In his last years, Eric gave the same tenacious support he had given to Brian to the campaign against the extradition of Julian Assange.
A longstanding comrade of Eric’s who had known him since the early 1970s visited him in hospital shortly before he died. He told FRFI that a weak but lucid Eric told him: ‘Never forget, however long it takes, capitalism will eventually be replaced by socialism.’
