Peter Sedgwick
Socialist Action1980sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
MANY comrades on the revolutionary left will be shocked by the news of the death of Peter Sedgwick, at the age of 49. Peter left the Communist Party in 1956, and from that moment on was a partisan of the revolutionary movement. For many years he was a contributor to the SWP journal International Socialism.
Like his hero Victor Serge, whose books he brilliantly translated and edited, his Marxism had a decidedly libertarian and independent tinge.
I first met Peter at an IS meeting in York in 1968. Tony Cliff had come to explain why the organisation should be 'Leninist' from now on. Peter sat with his head in his hands, until he could stand it no more — and left.
Of course, he was wrong about Leninism (but not about Cliff) but it seemed to him like a repudiation of the libertarian Marxism he championed. Like many at that time, he thought that Leninism led to its grotesque caricature — Stalinism.
Despite political differences, Peter always befriended other comrades on the left. He hated sectarianism and the 'toy Bolshevik' posturing which makes deadly enemies of people who agree on 99 per cent of politics. In the late 1970s he briefly supported the Socialist Unity project as a possible step towards left unity.
Towards the end of his life Peter became preoccupied with problems of mental illness; his book Psycho-Politics was published in 1981. He always believed that capitalism was responsible for the agony and turmoil which fills our mental hospitals. His own life was far from happy — the insanity of capitalism seemed to weigh him down.
Peter was one of those comrades who reminds us in the heat of bitter faction fights and frenetic campaigns that socialism is about people, about liberation from the tyranny of the rulers and bureaucracies who crush our lives. For that reason and for many others, a comrade we can ill afford to lose.