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charlie van gelderen
International Socialist Group (Socialist Action's sister group in Britain) member and stalwart of the Fourth International, Charlie van Gelderen died peacefully at home in Cambridge on October 26 after a short illness at the age of 88. Charlie was the last survivor of those who attended the 1938 Founding Conference of the Fourth International in Paris. He attended as an observer on behalf of South African Trotskyists, though he was already living in Britain by that time.
Charlie was born in August 1913 in the small town of Wellington, 40 miles from Cape Town. He lived in various parts of the Cape until December 1935, when he came to London.
Charlie became politically active as a young man, initially joining the Fabian Society but then in 1931 became an enthusiastic supporter of the ideas of Leon Trotsky. Together with his twin brother Herman, he was instrumental in setting up the first Trotskyist organisation in South Africa; the International Marxist League.
Charlie was also involved in setting up the Commercial Workers Union in the Cape and for a time became its full time secretary. At a time when trade unions in South Africa were segregated in practice though not yet in law, he fought for the union to involve both black and white workers. He lost his full time position when opponents of an integrated union split, taking their financial resources with them.
The South African Trotskyist movement split in 1932 in response to the "French turn", the position put forward by Trotsky at the time urging his French supporters to enter the French Socialist Party. Charlie supported Trotsky in this, but others disagreed, and the organisation split.
This was Charlie's first split, and all his life he argued that many in the movement were far too quick to divide organisations on tactical questions. Charlie was instrumental in founding a new organisation, the Communist League, and edited its paper "Worker's Voice"
In 1935 Charlie followed his comrade and girlfriend, Millie Mathews, who was to become his first wife and mother of his daughters, to London. Though Charlie left South Africa as a young man he remained deeply committed to the political struggle there. He stayed in contact with comrades on the ground, and followed events closely. The recent strikes against privatisation in South Africa, and militant trade union action elsewhere in the continent were examples he was holding up to others in the last years of his life.
Once he arrived in Britain, Charlie linked up with the Marxist Group whose best-known member was CLR James. The Marxist Group had been active in the Independent Labour Party, but was discussing going into the Labour Party - the cause of bitter arguments between the leader of the Group, Bert Matlow and James, who was opposed to this move.
Charlie himself was told to go straight into the Labour Party and soon became very active in the East Islington branch of the Labour League of Youth, which was dominated by Trotskyists, speaking regularly at the weekly open air meetings they organised at Highbury Corner.
By the time of the founding Conference of the Fourth International in 1938, the Marxist Group had disintegrated. Charlie was a member of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) which worked in the Labour Party as Militant, while James had gone on to found his own organisation, which he represented at the Conference. The biggest Trotskyist Group in Britain at the time was the Workers International League, which then involved both Ted Grant and Gerry Healy.
The Fourth International was founded following the rise of Hitler in Germany, the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the Moscow trials and under the clouds of impending world war. Charlie was convinced of the need for the new International, under these conditions, as an alternative to the betrayals of Stalinism, and remained so for the rest of his life.
Writing at the time of the 60th anniversary of the Fourth International he said: "The historic conditions of the day were crying out for a new International, a new revolutionary general command of the workers and the oppressed peoples of the world. It was in these conditions that, urged on by Trotsky, we launched the Fourth International."
During the Second World War Charlie joined the British Army Medical Corps and travelled first to Iraq and then to Italy. One of the high points of Charlie's varied life was this time in Italy. He went on to help form the first Trotskyist group in Italy with Italian comrades and American Trotskyists also stationed in the area.
Charlie arrived in Italy just after the fall of Mussolini when the Italian working class was very much on the offensive. He participated in enormous demonstrations, dominated by banners calling for the working class to take power for itself.
Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party had been in exile in Moscow during the war and returned and, true to form and reflecting Stalin's line for the Communist Parties in western Europe, called on the workers to lay down their arms. In Italy Communists were called on to support the government led by a Field Marshall, whom the king had appointed to succeed Mussolini.
The importance of Charlie's role in Italy was underlined by the fact that after the war, the leadership of the Fourth International tried to persuade him to return there and carry on that work. Charlie did not feel able to do this because he had a wife and child and England.
By the time Charlie returned to Britain, the RSL had come together with the Workers International League to form the Revolutionary Communist Party. Ted Grant was the Political Secretary and Jock Haston was the General Secretary. Charlie became a prominent member of the leadership of this organisation almost straight away.
The majority of the RCP was against entry into the Labour Party, including Ted Grant at that time, but Gerry Healy had already formed a minority tendency fighting for entry. Charlie was himself in favour of entry but against a minority split on this basis. He also deeply distrusted Healy.
The leadership of the Fourth International, dominated by Michel Pablo, supported Healy and urged Charlie to do likewise. Soon Healy split and founded The Club which would later became the Socialist Labour League. Charlie stayed in the RCP for a time, but then Jock Haston proposed that the RCP dissolve and go in with Healy, which is what happened.
Charlie remained a member of Healy's organisation throughout the period when the Fourth International split in 1953 in a confused debate over Stalinism and the role of mass Communist Parties: but he broke with Healy when he refused to re-join the reunified organisation in 1963.
Charlie always felt that the original split itself was contrived, and that it was more about jostling for control between groups around Ernest Mandel and Pablo on the one hand and the Americans around James P. Cannon than irreconcilable political differences.
He met up with Ken Coates and Pat Jordan, who by this time had launched The Week, and decided to join with them.
Charlie was therefore a founder member of the International Marxist Group (IMG), for whom he worked for some time as a full-timer. His main political activity was around solidarity with South Africa.
He was a long time member of the Anti-Apartheid movement and served on its National Committee for some time.
The IMG changed its name to the Socialist League in the early 1980s: and it then went through some serious political convulsions and divisions which finally led to its break up over undemocratic functioning.
The International Group was formed, which later fused with the WSL to form the International Socialist Group in 1987.
Charlie was deeply involved in various events that took place to commemorate the 50th and particularly the 60th anniversary of the Fourth International. Charlie used every platform he could to argue for the left to fight sectarianism.
Charlie was pleased to be invited to attend the Fourth International's Youth Summer camp in Denmark in 1998 to speak there on the occasion of the 60th anniversary. I was also going there and some of my fondest memories of Charlie come from that time.
For various reasons we had an extremely tortuous journey, taking more than a day to get there and spending hours on freezing railway stations in remote places in the middle of the night.
However, Charlie, already in his mid-80s remained cheerful throughout, regaling me with stories from his political and personal past.
When we finally arrived at the camp, Charlie lapped up every minute of it. He thoroughly enjoyed meeting young comrades from across the world and was subsequently invited to speak in both Italy and Germany - engagements he was again more than happy to keep. He told me that he was very glad these young comrades were on the same side as him as they would have terrified him as opponents.
I have other memories of Charlie, from games of bridge we shared, to many occasions both at meetings and outside where he talked about different aspects of his life but that time in Denmark stands out above them all.
Charlie was a loyal friend as well a comrade. For example though he parted company in organisational terms with CLR James back before the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, after the war he got to know James quite well personally and visited him regularly until his death.
Tony Cliff and Chanie Rosenberg lived with Charlie when they first came to England, in a tiny flat that Charlie was not sure was big enough for them all, but they felt was luxury. Again while they parted political company when Cliff developed the theory of State Capitalism, Charlie always respected Cliff's incisiveness and integrity.
Charlie was a member of the Labour Party from September 1936 until March 2001. In many bitter debates in the Trotskyist movement, he argued that this was where revolutionaries should be active in order to win others to their political ideas.
However the transformation of the party by Tony Blair led Charlie - along with many others - to feel that those days were now over. Thus he welcomed the formation of the Socialist Alliance, became a member of its Cambridge branch and looked forward to becoming a "born again activist".
Charlie often said that when we call on the workers of the world to unite we must look at ourselves at the same time. This is also why he was so inspired by the development of the Socialist Alliance: it was not just an alternative to new Labour but the most important united initiative by the left for many years.
Charlie is deeply missed by his wife Christine who he married in 1989, his daughters Leonora and Tessa (both revolutionary socialists), and the rest of his family, and by the many comrades in Britain and across the world that knew him.
Charlie never lost his deep hatred of the capitalist system and the brutal misery it brings in its wake.
His column for this newspaper which he kept up until illness struck in the summer pulsated with his fury against the burden of debt, the scourge of HIV and the profits of the multinationals, the hypocrisy of new Labour.
The best way that we can celebrate his life is to continue the struggle to which he dedicated himself with such energy.
The article above was written by Terry Conway.
