Duncan Hallas: Indomitable Revolutionary

Duncan Hallas (1925-2002) was one of the 33 founding members of the Socialist Review Group, the forerunner of the International Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party. A genuine working-class autodidact, his contribution to the international socialist tradition spanned the fields of theory, propaganda and action. For Duncan, Marxism was living, breathing revolutionary practice. His life was shaped by his experience as a young factory worker growing up in Manchester. Always the revolutionary fighter, he took part in an apprentices' strike in Manchester in 1941, an army mutiny in Egypt just after the Second World War and later became the driving force behind establishing rank and file teachers' organisation in the late 1960s. As part of the full-time leadership of the Socialist Workers Party for almost 25 years, Duncan maintained a stream of articles explaining everything from basic Marxist ideas to combating various forms of reformism and, above all, conveying the depth of the re