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Next meeting of the Trust will take place on June 18th 2010 Applications to be received by 4 June 2010

Peter Gowan Memorial Conference

A one-day conference to discuss the contribution and ideas of Peter Gowan (1946-2009), author of The Global Gamble, founding editor of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, long-standing editor of New Left Review, and Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University.

Saturday, 12 June 2010, 10.00 to 5.30
School of Oriental and African Studies, Room G2

Agenda

10.00 - 12.30
Introduction: Tariq Ali
Session 1: Eastern Europe
Speakers: Gus Fagan, Marko Bojcun, Catherine Samary

12.30 - 1.30 lunch

1.30 - 3.00
Session 2: Imperialism and American Grand Strategy
Speakers: Gilbert Achcar, Susan Watkins

3.00 - 3.30 coffee break

3.30 - 5.00
Session 3: The Dollar-Wall St Regime
Speakers: Robin Blackburn, Robert Wade, Alex Callinicos

5.00 - 5.30
Mike Newman: Peter Gowan as an educator
Awarding of the Peter Gowan Prize

The conference is sponsored by Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and Historical Materialism.

Book Launch: Women Conscientious Objectors - An Anthology

23 April 2010, 7pm, Housmans Bookshop

War Resisters' International invites you to a book launch at Housmans Bookshop in Caledonian Road: we will be launching Women Conscientious Objectors - An Anthology, edited by Ellen Elster and Majken Jul Sorensen, with a preface by Cynthia Enloe. At the same time as WRI publishes this important work - probably the first of its kind - we also make available online another groundbreaking work of feminist antimilitarism on WRI's website: Piecing It Together: Feminism and Nonviolence - a germinal pamphlet from 1983

The Irene Bruegel Memorial Fund

Irene Bruegel (1945-2008) was a socialist feminist researcher and activist involved in many campaigns to right the injustices and empower the most vulnerable in society. Her research focused on the changing position of women and the intersections of gender, class, ethnicity and immigration status. She was active in the women's movement, in trade union organising and in campaigning in support of disadvantaged groups, particularly migrants and refugees. She was passionate about adult education and its potential for social transformation.

A special fund has been set up in Irene's memory, with money willed by her, to fund projects to promote better understanding of what is needed to empower those in whose interests she worked all her life. "Understanding" can be interpreted in the broadest sense to include research, education, debate and wide dissemination of ideas. Applications to the Irene Bruegel memorial fund should also meet the criteria for support for Lipman Miliband Trust generally and should be submitted in the same way. Applications can be for small projects but also could be for larger amounts than the £1,000 limit for projects funded from the Trust's main fund.

Below is the tribute published in Red Pepper:

A rebel with many causes
Tribute to Irene Brugel
2 January 2009

Hundreds packed into the largest room in Golders Green crematorium in October to say goodbye to Irene Bruegel. These people and hundreds more from all over the world sent messages to her partner Richard Kuper and children Dan, Jo, Martin and David expressing their sadness and paying tribute to her achievements. The sheer volume shows how much her decades of service to so many peoples, organisations and causes are appreciated. As Richard said, 'It's so desperately sad she isn't alive to enjoy them herself. Perhaps we all need to learn to recognise and express our love, gratitude and appreciation to others as we go along.'

The span of her activities, commitments and intellectual engagements was dizzying. 'A rebel with many, many causes,' as her daughter Jo Kuper put it. She always drew attention to the cause or the idea, not to herself, and to find some way to strengthen it. So here, instead of an obituary, Sue Himmelweit, Lynne Segal and Tim Baster focus on three causes and movements that Irene held dear - and celebrate her contribution to them.

A Jew for justice in Palestine

For the past seven years, I have been involved in a variety of groups and campaigns to end Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, with the goal of creating peace and justice for both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. One person alone was pivotal in drawing me into this work: that hugely missed, dynamic political optimist, Irene Bruegel.

After visiting the occupied West Bank in 2001, just after the start of the second intifada, Irene contacted many of her former comrades - especially her old socialist feminist friends who happened to be Jewish - with her 'modest proposal' that we protest against the denial of human rights and other brutalities ensuing from Israel's continued and expanding colonisation and enclosure of Palestinian territories. Our voices would be all the more effective, she indicated, if we spoke out as Jews.

That very evening the wheels were set in motion to create Jews for Justice for Palestinians, a group whose numbers and activities increased rapidly over the following years, becoming one of the most influential Jewish organisations campaigning against Israeli occupation and for peace in the Middle East.

We have always been up against the world, especially given the four and a half billion dollars the USA pays annually into the terrifying Israeli military machine. Here in Britain, it was without doubt Irene's unique levels of energy, creativity, insight and intelligence, supported by that of her partner Richard Kuper, that kept the wheels turning. One thing she knew for certain is that Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, must work together in as many initiatives as we can manage to sustain the determination to end this tragic and barbarous conflict.

The early death of Irene Bruegel leaves the world a poorer place, bereft of one of the most vital and passionate people ever to have taken up the cause of justice for Palestinians, and many others as well. Our search to further the goals for which she fought so strongly will continue. But it feels hard to live up to her uniquely inspirational presence, spurring others into action, thinking up new projects, and ensuring that they came to fruition. I have always been inspired and moved by Irene's intrepid courage and perseverance.

Lynne Segal

A researcher for liberty

Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID) had been set up in 1998 against a backdrop of xenophobia and rising detention. Volunteers and pro bono barristers fought to obtain bail for detained asylum seekers and migrants.

The government's policy was to use detention to crush asylum seekers into returning to their countries. The lack of legal aid for bail applications meant that many detainees had no access to the courts. When they did get to court, they were required to prove the impossible - that they would not abscond. The Immigration Service constantly repeated that detained asylum seekers would abscond if released - with no evidence to back this up. We knew from our work that this was simply untrue - detainees who were released largely kept in contact with the Immigration Service. In 2002, Irene, furious at this injustice, volunteered to research the issue. No such research had been carried out before.

She assembled a team in record time and started work. This involved working in a tiny office surrounded by files, ringing solicitors, immigration officers and refugee networks.

We felt that we should be congratulated for our human rights work. None of it! Irene was utterly scathing about our files. She never took any prisoners. At the end, she sent the draft to the Home Office for their views before showing me a copy! I nearly had a heart attack as I had no idea what it contained. But her intellectual and academic rigour allowed no other course of action.

The research, published in June 2002, eviscerated the Immigration Service. It found that more than 90 per cent of the sample remained in contact. It added that the Immigration Service 'lacks the ability to forecast absconding with any degree of accuracy'. The barristers who fought for detainees' freedom in the immigration courts needed no second invitation - they went on the attack against the Immigration Service and the tide began to turn.

Irene's report was key to establishing new guidelines that require immigration adjudicators to grant bail unless the Immigration Service has strong evidence against it. The burden of proof in bail applications was reversed. Many hundreds of detainees have been and continue to be released, often without sureties, because of Irene's work. This is just one of her many legacies to the human rights movement.

Tim Baster

A socialist feminist

Irene was a wide-ranging thinker and activist, a socialist feminist, who was one of the founders of the women's movement in the early 1970s. She took an active part in many of the socialist feminist conferences of the following decade that defined a distinct socialist agenda for feminism, aiming to challenge the ways in which women's oppression was linked to class exploitation.

At the same time, she was an active member of the Conference of Socialist Economists, a lively non-sectarian movement aiming to provide socialist understandings of the workings of modern capitalism. Although at the time involved in the International Socialist group (now the SWP), her activism was never limited by it, and she left at the end of the 1970s over its political dogmatism and hostility to autonomous women's organisation.

Irene was active in campaigns for abortion rights, nurseries and for women's employment rights: equal pay and an end to the forces that led to women ending up in low paid, dead end jobs. She didn't see this as a result just of simple discrimination, but of a whole interlocking system in which gender divisions interacted with capitalist employment relations to produce different and unequal roles for men and women. As a feminist economist, she made important contributions to the understanding of this system, as well as taking part in many campaigns to change it. Debating whether class or gender was the primary cause of it all was unnecessary and meaningless - what mattered was to understand how the whole system worked.

Irene was always an internationalist, putting much energy into, for example, the European Socialist Feminist Forum to foster socialist feminist campaigns across Europe. It was typical of her approach that when feminists from eastern Europe became involved, for whom the term 'socialism' was redolent of an oppressive state, she argued against fierce opposition to include them by changing the name of the organisation to the 'European Left Feminist Forum'. She was also a long-term supporter of Women in Black, standing up for peace against militarism and war.

Irene was open to new ideas and new people at all times. She was a terrific organiser, if always over-committed, and recognised that one had to give time to both the big and the small, and to people as well as movements, fighting injustices wherever they occurred. Non-sectarian, inclusive, passionate and sometimes infuriating, she will be greatly missed.

Sue Himmelweit

A fighter for a better world

Earlier this year, having been subject to some of the police harassment at this year's climate camp, and knowing she was ill, I expressed concern about my mother Irene coming to the mass day of protest. She came anyway, of course - that was my mum.

Many tributes allude to the searing hole left in the social justice movement by her untimely and deeply cruel death. I know my own work will suffer greatly. I have always sent her articles and reports I am working on. No matter that she was no expert on, say, tuna overfishing or climate change, she would always provide a fresh perspective and challenge assumptions I could no longer see.

Irene would always tell us that 'life's not fair' and yet she refused to let herself be overwhelmed by it - there was no time for that. Her motivation was always her resolute belief in the possibility of a better world.

I hope those reading this feature will be inspired to keep fighting - the only way to keep her spirit alive, and do justice to what she achieved.

Jo Kuper

Below is the Obituary for Irene Bruegel published in The Guardian:

Sue Himmelweit and Simon Mohun
Wednesday 15 October, 2008
The Guardian

"Life's not fair" - that was the advice the feminist, economist and socialist Irene Bruegel, who has died aged 62, gave to her children. She deployed her prodigious appetite for life to fight for equality and against injustice, inspiring and cajoling others to do likewise until a chronic liver disorder stopped her. In 2002, she founded Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP), today one of the largest and most influential of Jewish voices against the Israeli occupation.

Irene was born in London to German-speaking Jewish social democrat refugee parents. The family returned to Prague while she was still a baby, but her parents had to flee soon after without her, and it took some time before they were reunited in north London. Other refugees often passed through that intensely political household, an experience that fuelled Irene's drive to fight for the dispossessed.

She attended Henrietta Barnett and South Hampstead high schools before studying economics at Sussex University (1964-67) and taking an MA in urban planning at University College London. Her career spanned education, policy research and local government. Her first job was at the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies in Birmingham (1968-70), followed by a year at the Centre for Environmental Studies, Lanchester Polytechnic and the Architectural Association (1971-76), what was then North East London Polytechnic (1976-80), the National Children's Bureau (1980-83), the Greater London Council in its glory days until it was abolished by the Thatcher government in 1986, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies in Manchester (1986), the London Strategic Policy Unit (1986-87) and the London borough of Ealing (1987-89).

She returned to academia at South Bank University in 1990, where she was promoted to reader in urban policy in 1995 and professor in 2000. Since her retirement in December 2006, she had taught an evening course at Birkbeck College on researching London's localities, a subject she loved.

Irene was a gifted teacher who expected high standards from students, while understanding their needs and never patronising them if they did not have conventional qualifications or felt unsure about whether they belonged in a university. As a researcher, she never lost sight of the big picture, though her work was meticulously grounded empirically. She made a significant contribution to the understanding of gender and class as a system spanning both the labour market and the family.

All the while, Irene was politically active - starting with the Young Socialists, the Labour party, and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. She was part of the 1970 Ruskin conference that founded the new women's movement in the UK, and was active in campaigns for equal pay and abortion rights. She took part in debates about the relationship between feminism and socialism, and scorned the idea that one had to trump the other.

In the 1960s, she joined the International Socialism group (now the Socialist Workers party), which provided the framework for her activism for more than a decade in trade unions, the Conference of Socialist Economists, and other organisations. But Irene never subordinated her free-thinking to demands for political orthodoxy, and, as the space for debate within IS/SWP shrank, she grew increasingly distanced from it. The final straw was its hostility to autonomous women's organisation, and she left in 1979.

Soon afterwards, she rejoined the Labour party, but quit over the first Gulf war. She supported Women in Black for Justice against War, the European Forum of Socialist-Feminists, and more recently campaigns over adult education, the treatment of refugees and the impact of climate change. Local issues were also important, such as a fight against London Underground's refusal to renew a local dry cleaner's lease, and she hurled herself into a campaign to keep her beloved ladies' pond on Hampstead Heath open and free.

After visiting the West Bank in 2001, she rounded up some dozen like-minded Jewish friends, mostly women, to found the JfJfP to campaign for an end to the Israeli occupation and a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now more than 1,300 strong, the group has been instrumental in shattering the illusion that all Jews unconditionally support the Israeli government.

Irene's partner, Richard Kuper, was JfJfP's co-founder. Theirs was a remarkable relationship; each was intellectually autonomous, but they often worked together. They also raised four children in a highly political, intellectually vibrant household that welcomed activists from all over the world with Irene's wonderful soups and cheesecake.

No matter how much Irene persuaded her friends to do, she would always be doing more - too much, as it turned out. But somehow she managed to reconcile being in a rush with always having time for people, and never made one feel small for not managing the level of activity that she did. She died peacefully, surrounded by her family: Richard, her children Dan and Jo, and stepchildren Martin and David. Her rare gift for friendship transcended political and intellectual differences, and she would have been astonished and delighted at the huge turnout at her funeral.

Irene Bruegel, academic and activist, born November 7 1945; died October 6 2008

The Peter Gowan Prize

Peter Gowan (1946-2009) was a Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University. Although he remained committed to a form of Marxism himself and had strong and informed opinions on an amazing range of subjects, he never sought to impose his views as a teacher. His goal was to force those around him to think and re-think their own views so that they could justify and defend them. In 2000 he established the MA in International Relations (Interdisciplinary), which he directed until he became ill in September 2008. His own inter-disciplinary insights shaped the degree, which highlighted North-South relations, while incorporating history, political economy and law as integral elements. The MA in International Relations was of crucial importance to him because its curriculum simultaneously sought to foster personal development and social justice, and because its student body was so multi-national and multi-ethnic that it promoted a genuine form of internationalism. It is therefore natural that one of his final wishes was to establish a prize for an MA International Relations (Interdisciplinary) student dissertation that would reflect the values to which he was so deeply committed himself.

The criteria for the award are as follows:

1. Any dissertation nominated for the prize will be academically excellent. This will normally be demonstrated by the fact that the examiners at London Metropolitan University have awarded it a distinction, although in some cases a high merit mark may make a dissertation eligible for consideration.
2. The dissertation should adopt a progressive and critical approach to the topic and include a 'north-south' dimension.
3. While there are no specific ideological or theoretical criteria, the prize would not be awarded to any work that implied that it could be legitimate deliberately to sacrifice human beings on a mass scale in pursuit of a political goal.

Procedures for Awarding the Prize

Each year the examiners of the MA International Relations (Interdisciplinary) at London Metropolitan University will mark the dissertations and, after the marks have been confirmed, they will select those that meet the above criteria. With the consent of the students, these will then be forwarded to three judges (the jury), who will make their decision as soon as possible and notify the prize-winner. The first jury will be Marko Bojcun, Mike Newman and Halya Kowalsky.

Monty Johnstone

With deep sadness we announce the death of our long-time Board member and friend Monty Johnstone, who joined the Trust in 1974 at the invitation of Ralph Miliband and John Saville. We will miss his unrivalled knowledge of socialist history and the working class movement as well as his sense of humour and helpfulness. A memorial meeting is being organised at Marx House, 37 Clerkenwell Green EC1, on Saturday 13.10.07, from 12-4 pm. All are welcome.

Below is the Obituary for Monty Johnstone published in The Guardian:

Loyal but critical communist thinker utterly indifferent to modern comforts

Eric Hobsbawm
Thursday August 23, 2007
The Guardian

Monty Johnstone, who has died from complications following treatment for a burst ulcer, aged 78, was an admired, but for the most part lonely, presence in communist and socialist politics for half a century.

He was indeed hard to overlook. The journalist Francis Beckett recalled him at the final congress of the Communist party in 1991 as "a tall, thin, imposing figure who ran his fingers through his long dark hair as he spoke and sounded like an eccentric history professor". More likely he will be remembered, looking genial and perennially youthful, cycling through London - his grandfather Sir John Foster Fraser had in 1896-97 been the first man to cycle round the world - on his way from one meeting to another to debate Marxist theory and developments in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Learned, a formidably multilingual traveller, as vocal about public matters as he was silent about private ones, and utterly indifferent to the comforts and conveniences of life, he seemed a modern secular version of a medieval scholarly friar.

Born to CJS Montague Johnstone of the Royal Scots Greys and Margaret Fraser in Sir Walter Scott's house, Abbotsford, in Melrose, Monty joined the Young Communist League aged 12 in the unlikely milieu of Henley on Thames before going to Rugby school. After national service in Germany and communist agitation in the Hamburg dialect, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, with a languages scholarship to study politics, philosophy and economics.

After he graduated in 1952, he took a party job as editor of the Young Communist Challenge until his heterodoxy ended his party career in 1956. Perhaps he might have been happier as an academic.

Monty was to remain a loyal but critical communist all his life, hostile to the dilution of socialist ideals but equally critical of the destruction of democracy in post-1917 Russia and the blind loyalty of communist parties to Moscow.

Though he stayed in the party after 1956, he was viewed with suspicion, and the party press was closed to him until after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, during which, in Prague, he tried to dissuade embarrassed Russian tank crews in fluent Russian. Meanwhile in the CP, his anti-Stalinism pioneered what later became known as Eurocommunism. He also established a reputation among the 1960s New Left, and became associated with Ralph Miliband (obituary, May 23 1994) and Isaac Deutscher.

By the 1980s, the ideological shift in the CP leadership brought Monty rehabilitation within what was by then a doomed party. He was finally put on the editorial board of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels and was even elected to the CP executive committee. However, he was unsympathetic towards the wholesale revisionism of Marxism Today. None the less, in 1980 - nobody quite knows how - he secured that newspaper the journalistic coup of a double interview in Poland with the leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, and prime minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski. He was pessimistic about Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, opposed the dissolution of the Communist party of Great Britain, but kept a political home in the Socialist History Society, the Alliance for Green Socialism and various continental groups analysing the failures and might-have-beens of communism.

In the late 1960s, Monty gave up a successful career teaching at Woolwich Polytechnic - now part of Greenwich University - for a freelance life of writing, lecturing in Britain and abroad (he was a powerful speaker), and bringing up his children. He had a contract for a major book on the development of Leninism, but never completed that or any other book, although he published numerous lucid and persuasive lectures.

Following the break-up of his marriage in the early 1970s, he became in effect a single parent. After his children grew up and left, he sold the family house and lived increasingly in unadvertised and uncomplaining poverty in a south London flat without a telephone, analysing and presenting the history of communism with erudition and undiminished ardour, but without optimism.

Monty passed his last four years in deteriorating health, physically and mentally. He is survived by his children Christina, Michael and Laura, who had helped him in these difficult later times. A poem by Goethe, Edith Piaf's Je Ne Regrette Rien and the Red Flag accompanied his funeral.

Doreen Massey and Hilary Wainwright write:
Monty Johnstone was an extraordinarily understated person. We knew him for many years, including as fellow trustees of the Lipman-Miliband Trust (which gives modest grants for "education in socialist ideas"), and it was only gradually that we learnt the depth and extent of his knowledge of the history of communism - the Soviet Union in particular - Marxist theory and contemporary leftwing debate.

This encyclopaedic knowledge would come out in comments, sometimes wry, sometimes just informative, always shrewd. Clearly, he reflected deeply on this wealth of experience and drew lessons for present-day debates and strategic thinking. It gave him an independence of mind and an ability to combine commitment with a complete absence of dogma or sectarianism. He was always fascinating to listen to as he spoke unassumingly about historic people and events, many of which he had witnessed.

He always arrived by bicycle and was contactable by letter only, which reinforced the feeling of dedication and simplicity, but absolutely not worthiness or puritanism, that surrounded him. We shall both miss his contribution, his humour, his modesty and his wealth of knowledge and wise judgment.

Alastair Montague (Monty) Johnstone, communist thinker, born November 20 1928; died June 22 2007

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