Maurice Brinton was the pen name under which
Christopher Agamemnon Pallis (2 December 1923, Bombay - 10 March 2005,
LondonLondon is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
) wrote and translated for the British libertarian socialist group
SolidaritySolidarity was a small libertarian socialist organisation from 1960 to 1992 in the United Kingdom. It published a magazine of the same name. Solidarity was close to council communism in its prescriptions and was known for its emphasis on workers' self-organisation and for its radical...
from 1960 until the early 1980s.
According to
David GoodwayDavid Goodway is a British historian and a respected international authority on anarchism and libertarian socialism. A student of Eric Hobsbawm, Goodway specialised in the history of Chartism in London and his work London Chartism is an acknowledged classic work on the subject...
's introduction to a recent collection of his work:
He then dropped out of politics for a decade while he pursued his medical career, but in 1957 joined the Trotskyist group led by
Gerry HealyThomas Gerard Healy, known as Gerry Healy , was a political activist, a co-founder of the International Committee of the Fourth International, and, according to former prominent U.S. supporter David North, the leader of the Trotskyist movement in Great Britain between 1950 – 1985...
, the Club, which in 1959 became the Socialist Labour League. He was expelled by Healy in 1960 and with a group of other ex-members of the SLL immediately set up Solidarity. Like a number of other former members of the SLL he was also involved with the journal International Socialism in the early 1960s.
For the next 20 years, he combined a distinguished medical career under his real name with pseudonymous revolutionary socialist writing and translation. His work includes several eyewitness accounts of key moments in European left politics (the Belgian general strike of 1960, Paris in May 1968, Portugal
Carnation RevolutionThe Carnation Revolution , also referred to as the 25 de Abril , was a military coup started on 25 April 1974, in Lisbon, Portugal, coupled with an unanticipated and extensive campaign of civil resistance...
in 1974-75), a substantial body of English translations of the work of
Cornelius CastoriadisCornelius Castoriadis was a Greek philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.-Early life in Athens:...
, the main thinker of the French group
Socialisme ou BarbarieSocialisme ou Barbarie was a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period . It existed from 1948 until 1965...
, and two short books — one (
The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, 1970) on the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, and one (
The Irrational in Politics, 1974) on sexual politics.
The publishers of a recent online edition of
The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control describe it as follows:
Chris Pallis died in March 2005; an obituary can be read on Paul Anderson's blog.
http://libsoc.blogspot.com/2005/03/socialist-for-all-seasons-paul.html
Further reading
- Brinton, Maurice (Goodway, David ed). For Workers' Power: the selected writings of Maurice Brinton. AK Press
AK Press is a worker-managed independent publisher and book distributor that specialises in radical left and anarchist literature. It is collectively owned and operated.-History:...
. 2004. ISBN 1-904859-07-0
External links