Preserving Disorder – David Widgery

PAUL FOOT

DAVID WIDGERY

In the moment I heard that David Widgery had died, I saw him standing in front of me on York station in the early summer of 1968. 

His eyes were shining and he had a grin on his face as though it were fixed there forever. 

I was off to speak on socialism at York Universit—he had just come from there. ‘It’s great’, he said. ‘Great. An enormous middle-class fun palace.’ 

Suddenly his expression changed, and he glowered at me. ‘They don’t need you there’, he said. ‘Not another of us. They need the proletariat.’ 

Years later when I read his book Some Lives!, 
I noticed again how he was the only person I ever knew who used the word ‘proletariat’ unselfconsciously, as though it came from the chorus of a popular rock band.

David was a creature of 1968. He revelled in 1968. At the lse he enjoyed the sectarian arguments every bit as much as the revolutionary action. 

All his life he remained fascinated by the political events of that wonderful year. He so much wanted to understand their origin that he spent a lot of his time in the early 1970s researching for his anthology The Left in Britain. 

The book charts, through the writings and speeches of the times, the development of the British Left from 1956 to 1968. It traces a clear line through the maze of those lse arguments, returning, without a hint of sectarianism, again and again to the proletariat. 

David’s theme was that the student arguments were all very important, but unless they were grounded in the fight against exploitation at work they were up in the air, vacuous. 

When he joined the International Socialists it was perhaps the smallest of the organizations left of the Labour Party, smaller by far than the Communist Party and smaller too than the other Trotskyist groups. 

He joined it, as most of us did at the time, for two reasons. First, he never for a moment identified with what was then called socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe. 

Nor was he prepared to put up with the very popular notion at the time that Russia was somehow half way or even quarter way to socialism, that it was somehow ‘better’ than the Western capitalist societies. Two of his early heroes—

David had a lot of heroes, and, a bit later, heroines—were the writer and revolutionary Victor Serge and his British translator Peter Sedgwick. David was attracted to both by their commitment and their refusal to be hidebound by their commitment. 

No one supported the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party’s role in it more enthusiastically than Victor Serge. Yet Serge saw before anyone else that the revolution was lost. 

It was, David thought, quite impossible to read The Case of Comrade Tulayev or Memoirs of a Revolutionary, translated by Sedgwick, and still defend Stalinist Russia as in the remotest degree progressive.

The second reason was—here we are again—the proletariat. He was fascinated by some of the great workers’ battles of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He liked to see and hear the stories of these struggles from the participants’ own mouths. 

For a time he was absorbed almost to obsession by the 1890s, not just by the strikes and lockouts but by the small groups of revolutionaries, anarchists and syndicalists which stuck together and kept their papers going long after the original impetus for them had petered out. 

He was always interested in what was going on down below. He was never in the slightest degree diverted by the message from professional politicians that the world could be changed from above, by educated people who understood the system. Change would come only if it were generated from below.

Those first five years of David’s active adult life were characterized by an unbounded enthusiasm. 

I remember many of his speeches at party conferences, but one in particular—in 1973. He spoke about the paper Socialist Worker, how and where it was produced, who wrote for it, the process of production, what a miracle it was. 

His words, full of wit, came tumbling out, it seemed almost by accident and yet in perfect order, and the whole hall was lit up in vicarious enthusiasm. 

A year later everything was different. We can look back now and easily trace how the enthusiasms and inspirations of the early 1970s were snared in Wilsonian pragmatism. While the Tories were in, lots of workers listened eagerly to calls for revolution. 

When Labour won in February and then confirmed their position a few months later, the mood changed. All our moods changed too. For a year and a bit, the toughest of my life by far, 

I took over as editor of Socialist Worker after a deep and bitter internal party dispute. David Widgery was a doctor down the road. Somehow he found time to come regularly to our meetings and to run what we absurdly called the ‘arts’ page. If I am honest, what I remember most about him in those years was the whiplash of his tongue.