Memories of Ted¶
Core Argument¶
Ted Grant was a revolutionary Marxist of rare humanity and theoretical depth, who lived his politics with an all-consuming dedication that left little room for personal life. He never married, regarding the movement as his family, and spent his evenings in the offices of the RCP and later Militant, devouring every line of the British press as contemporary history. His encyclopaedic mind could deliver hour-long discourses on any subject, yet he connected with workers and trade unionists through concrete advice while never losing sight of the broader strategic perspective. As a speaker, he held audiences spellbound with facts, figures and infectious enthusiasm, never reading from prepared texts but studying his notes beforehand, deploying humour against bourgeois politicians while avoiding personal attacks.
Grant’s theoretical rigour was matched by his insistence on enthusiasm as an essential revolutionary quality. He possessed a healthy, proletarian humour that stood in stark contrast to the vinegar-faced sectarians he despised. He quoted Lenin that he who has the youth has the future, and avoided older comrades who dwelt on the past, though he made exceptions for those from the RCP days who had demonstrated lasting loyalty. His literary tastes were wide and revealing: he prized Jack London’s The Iron Heel for foreseeing fascism, and Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga for depicting the bourgeoisie as they truly were. He dismissed Orwell’s 1984 as the product of a dying man, full of petty-bourgeois pessimism that equated US monopoly capitalism with Stalinist totalitarianism. He quoted the Bible frequently, using ‘No man can serve two masters’ to explain the contradictions of reformist Labour leaders.
Grant grounded his theoretical work in constant re-reading of Marxist classics, a process he called ‘moulting’. He treated theory as a compass, not a fossil, and insisted that rigorous ideas were essential, not optional, citing Marx’s retort to Weitling that ignorance never helped anybody. He opposed the influence of science fiction on science, rejecting parallel universes and conscious clouds as mysticism, and illustrated the dialectic of necessity and accident with materialist precision. Despite his theoretical depth, he was notoriously badly dressed, favouring blue serge suits that his sister Rae despised, and was incapable of harming the mice attracted to his newspaper-strewn office.
Grant’s overriding object was the struggle for working-class emancipation. He resisted ageing, refusing to acknowledge birthdays, and after a stroke recovered his speech through sheer determination. He died of a heart attack on 20 July 2006, aged 93, having insisted that only the International Marxist Tendency preserved the ideas, methods and programme of Trotsky and the Left Opposition. The task he left behind, as the author argues, is to build a proletarian revolutionary organisation as a living monument to his life’s work.