Socialist Viewpoint

Charlie van Gelderen was the last survivor of those who attended the 1938 Founding Conference of the Fourth International in Paris. He attended on behalf of South African Trotskyists. He died peacefully at home on October 26 after a short illness at the age of 88, still—until very recently—an active member of the International Socialist Group (British section of the Fourth International). Charlie was born in August 1913 in the small town of Wellington, near Cape Town, South Africa. He lived in South Africa until 1935, when he went to London.

Charlie became politically active as a young man, initially joining the Fabian Society, but in 1931 he became an enthusiastic supporter of the ideas of Leon Trotsky. With his twin, Herman, he was instrumental in setting up the first Trotskyist organization in South Africa, the International Marxist League. Charlie also helped set up the Commercial Workers Union in the Cape and for a time became its full time secretary. At a time when trade unions in South Africa were segregated in practice—though not yet in law—he fought for the union to involve both black and white workers. He lost his full time position when opponents of an integrated union split, taking their financial resources with them.

The South African Trotskyist movement split in 1932 in response to the position put forward by Trotsky at the time urging his French supporters to enter the French Socialist Party. Charlie supported Trotsky in this, but others disagreed, and the organization split. Charlie was instrumental in founding a new organization, the Communist League, and edited its paper Worker’s Voice

In 1935 Charlie arrived in Britain and linked up with the Marxist Group whose best-known member was CLR James. He soon became very active in the Labor League of Youth. By the time of the founding Conference of the Fourth International in 1938, the Marxist Group had disintegrated, and Charlie was a member of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), which worked in the Labor Party as Militant.

Following the rise of Hitler in Germany, the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the Moscow trials, and the impending world war, Charlie was convinced of the need for the new International, as an alternative to the betrayals of Stalinism, and he remained so for the rest of his life.

During the Second World War Charlie joined the British Army Medical Corps and traveled to Iraq and then to Italy. He organized Marxist Educational classes among the troops. He helped form the first Trotskyist group in Italy, together with American comrades and Italian comrades, both of whom already supported Trotskyism, and others.

Charlie arrived in Italy just after the fall of Mussolini when the Italian working class was very much on the offensive. He participated in enormous demonstrations, dominated by calls for the working class to take power for itself.

When Charlie returned to Britain, he became a prominent member of the leadership of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

Charlie was a founding member of the International Marxist Group (IMG), which became the British section of the Fourth International. His main political activity was around solidarity with South Africa. Though Charlie had left as a young man, he remained deeply committed to the political struggle there. He stayed in contact with comrades and followed events closely. He was a long time member of the Anti-Apartheid movement and served on its National Committee for some time. When the situation changed in the beginning of the 1980s he was able to turn his attention to the independent trade-union left and the new networks of the revolutionary socialist left. The recent strikes against privatization in South Africa, and militant trade union action elsewhere in the continent, were examples he was holding up to others in the last years of his life.

In 1998, he was invited to speak at a commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Fourth International at a European youth camp. He concluded: “You comrades have enthused me. Your enthusiasm has relit the flame which was kindled at that historic founding conference sixty years ago when, like many of you, I was in my twenties.” That was a remarkable characteristic of Charlie. Through over sixty years in our movement he retained and passed on his enthusiasm and his revolutionary conviction that the decision to form the Fourth International had been the correct one.

Charlie was a member of the Labor Party from September 1936 until March 2001, at which point he considered that the transformation of the party under Tony Blair meant that the new Socialist Alliance was a more important arena for revolutionary socialists than the Labor Party.

Charlie never lost his deep hatred of the capitalist system and the brutal misery it causes. His column for Socialist Outlook, which he kept up until illness struck, pulsated with his fury against the burden of debt, the scourge of HIV, the profits of the multinationals, and the hypocrisy of “new” Labor. Charlie is deeply missed by his wife Christine, his daughters Leonora and Tessa (both revolutionary socialists), the rest of his family, and by the many comrades who knew him in Britain and across the world.