This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/26/michael-barratt-brown
The article has changed 3 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Michael Barratt Brown obituary | Michael Barratt Brown obituary |
| (2 days later) | |
| In the late 1950s and 60s, a number of British leftwing intellectuals and activists began to look beyond the prevailing concerns of Marxist thinkers – initially, to critical examinations of the Soviet model of socialism and of British imperialism. Michael Barratt Brown, who has died aged 97, was a leading figure in the development of this New Left, a pioneer in industrial worker education and the drive for workplace democracy, and later active in the movement for fair trade. He was one of the founders of New Left Review in 1960, of the Peace Foundation established by Bertrand Russell in 1963 and its journal, the Spokesman, of the Institute for Workers’ Control in 1968, and of the Conference of Socialist Economists in 1970. | |
| From 1948, he taught adult evening classes in Essex, and 10 years later moved to Sheffield. There, in the next two decades, he established and taught extension classes for miners and steelworkers. In 1978 he founded Northern College at Wentworth Castle, near Barnsley, as an adult and community education residential college, and was its first principal. The intake at the outset was largely male but Michael responded to the demand from women by making over a residential block for them and opening a creche. | |
| After retiring in 1983, he went to the Greater London council, led by Ken Livingstone, to produce study materials on the issues that its industrial sections were trying to address. Out of this work came his interest in fair trade: in 1985 he co-founded Twin Trading which, under his chairmanship, developed Cafédirect, the Divine chocolate business and other Fairtrade brands as a model for a different kind of trade between peasant producers and consumers in developed countries. | |
| All these initiatives in different forms are still running. His industrial classes in Sheffield produced a whole generation of shop stewards, union officials, local councillors and Westminster politicians. Northern College now has an annual student roll of 6,000, primarily those returning to education. Twin Trading acts as the developed world partner to, and is owned by, 30 co-operative networks in the developing world, with 300,000 members. | |
| Like his New Left contemporaries Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, Michael had joined the Communist party in the 1940s, but he abandoned it after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Like them, Michael was committed to being a peripatetic teacher for adults in the evening, after their daytime work. Like them, he attempted to make sense of the simultaneous twin events of Hungary and the Suez crisis. These were the years when Williams developed his ideas of a long cultural revolution and Thompson his equally influential work on a long political revolution. Michael, as an economist, set out to describe the contours of a long economic revolution. Together they marked out the three strands of the post-1956 British New Left. | |
| Michael’s first book, After Imperialism (1963), was a landmark in critical economic thinking at the time of decolonisation, and was widely translated. It argued that the end of formal colonial power was likely to intensify neo-colonial economic power, particularly in the form of the large corporations. What was needed was for the newly independent countries to use their political independence to resist these new forms of economic power and create their own path of social and economic development. | Michael’s first book, After Imperialism (1963), was a landmark in critical economic thinking at the time of decolonisation, and was widely translated. It argued that the end of formal colonial power was likely to intensify neo-colonial economic power, particularly in the form of the large corporations. What was needed was for the newly independent countries to use their political independence to resist these new forms of economic power and create their own path of social and economic development. |
| Many of his books continued with these themes, examining the ever more complex and tightening webs of post-colonial economic control, and the alternatives. He thought planning was part of the answer (in developed as much as in developing countries), but it had to be decentralised and democratic. | Many of his books continued with these themes, examining the ever more complex and tightening webs of post-colonial economic control, and the alternatives. He thought planning was part of the answer (in developed as much as in developing countries), but it had to be decentralised and democratic. |
| He applied a similar argument in relation to British economic policy, first in his contribution to The May Day Manifesto (1968), a “socialist alternative to Labour government policies” as the cover of the Penguin Special paperback proclaimed, and then in his book From Labourism to Socialism (1972). His work for the Institute for Workers’ Control, for adult education, and later for Twin Trading and fair trade were all initiatives aiming to put these ideas into practice. | |
| In all he did and wrote, Michael was part of the British tradition of nonconformist, dissident champions of democracy. Born in Birmingham, he came from Quaker stock. His father, Alfred, was one of the conscientious objectors who had been imprisoned because of their religious, and in his case political, opposition to the first world war: he was given leave to be present when his wife, Eileen (nee Cockshott), gave birth to Michael. There was a strong Quaker culture in and around Oxford, where his father was principal of Ruskin College, and Michael was sent to Bootham school, a Quaker establishment in York. After taking a degree in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, in 1940 he married Frances Lloyd and started serving full-time with the Friends Ambulance Unit, whose wartime postings took him to Cairo, Italy and Yugoslavia, with Tito’s partisans. | |
| This last experience led him to renounce pacifism, leave the Quakers, and join the Communist party, though his life’s work and writing reflected his view of Quakerism and its practices as the foundation of real democracy. He coupled this with a secular humanism that he said he owed to the Greek scholar and liberal Gilbert Murray, which he called Comtian stoicism. On this view, the ideas of the 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte resonated with the ancient Greek Stoics’ belief in reason, high-mindedness and altruism as a route to deterring conflict and promoting cooperation. | |
| Michael and Frances had two sons, Christopher and Richard, before divorcing in 1948. With his second wife, Eleanor Singer, he had two further children, Daniel and Deborah. Eleanor was a doctor with whom he had worked in Yugoslavia, and they shared an interest in public health issues and the development of Twin Trading that lasted until Eleanor’s death in 1995. | |
| Michael was then still running five miles every morning, gardening, cooking, sailing and travelling, quite apart from his involvement in fair trade, about which he wrote three books. In 2005, he met again Annette Caulkin, whom he had known in the Friends Ambulance Unit. He moved to London and lived with her until her death in 2012. | |
| Michael is survived by his four children, eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. | Michael is survived by his four children, eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. |
| • Michael Barratt Brown, economist, educationist and promoter of fair trade, born 15 March 1918; died 7 May 2015 | • Michael Barratt Brown, economist, educationist and promoter of fair trade, born 15 March 1918; died 7 May 2015 |