Peter Sedgwick Internet Archive (original) (raw)

Peter Sedgwick

1934 – 1983


Biography

Peter Sedgwick was born in 1934 and brought up in Liverpool. He gained a scholarship to Balliol College Oxford where he became a communist, leaving the Communist Party in 1956 with other members of the early New Left. He then joined the Socialist Review Group later to become the International Socialists. He wrote brilliantly for the group’s press, but also involved himself deeply in all the drudgery and activities of the rank rank-and and-file members. He was always a free spirit and was bitterly opposed to the International Socialism group renaming itself as a the Socialist Workers Party in 1976 refusing to join the new organisation while always remaining a man dedicated to the far left. He was editing the works of Victor Serge at the time of his death.

Works:

1954 America Over Britain
1955 Psychopolitics
1 January 1959 The Pretenders: An Answer to R. Emmett
Autumn 1959 NATO, the Bomb and Socialism
12 February 1960 Lidchester Leads the Way
Spring 1960 Towards an African socialism
July 1960 Labour’s Great Debate
November 1960 The Mind Of An Assassin (book review)
December 1960 Socialism, the Bomb and Neutralism
Winter 1960/61 The Fight for Workers’ Control
January 1961 Liquidating the Thirties (book review)
March 1961 Russia’s bomb (letter)
April 1961 Review (review)
May 1961 The Direction of Action
July 1961 Crime and Punishment
Autumn 1961 Stalinism without Stalin (review)
December 1961 Non-Violence – Dogma Or Tactic?
Winter 1961/62 The Last Time It Happened (review)
1962 The Reader’s Digest (short story)
Spring 1962 Reason in Revolt (review)
March 1962 Ghana, Guinea, Guiana: Three Strikes
August 1962 Sedgwick disagrees with Rex ... (review)
Autumn 1962 Historical Materialism (review)
Winter 1962 Caucasian Circles (review)
12 December 1962 Who Are the Troublemakers?
Winter 1962 States Of Emergency (review)
1963 Introduction to Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (review)
Spring 1963 The Left Reformist (review)
Autumn 1963 Defending Russia (review)
Autumn 1963 School Psychology (review)
Autumn 1963 Victor Serge and Socialism
Spring 1964 Original Marxism (review)
August 1964 The Two New Lefts
Autumn 1964 France Goes Pop (review)
Winter 1964/65 Colonial Sequelæ (review)
Winter 1964/65 International Nostalgia (review)
Winter 1964/65 Soviets Without Socialism (review)
Winter 1964/65 Whose Maturity? (review)
1 May 1965 Why May Day?
1 July 1965 Agents and Frameups
Autumn 1965 Life with Auntie (review)
Autumn 1965 Theory at the Hour of Wilson (review article)
1966 Natural Science and Human Theory
Autumn 1965 Too Involved (review)
15 February 1966 Nigerian workers
14 March 1966 Ghana – another saviour thrown on the scrapheap
Spring 1966 Centre for Socialist Education
7 April 1966 No noose is good noose (with Harry Goode)
Summer 1966 Doing Time (review)
Summer 1966 Pseud Left Review
5 August 1966 ‘Victory for the Vietcong’ – Is it the right slogan?
Autumn 1966 Hash Rehashed (review)
Winter 1966/67 Behaviour and Action (review)
Spring 1967 Too Much, Too Soon (review)
Winter 1967/68 Thoughts in a Dry Season (review)
Winter 1967/68 Tragedy of the Tragedian: An appreciation of Isaac Deutscher
January 1968 Guevara: Right or Wrong?
Autumn 1968 Anarchy and Organisation (review)
9 November 1968 Orwell: honesty, courage and faith in the ‘proles’ (review)
Winter 1968/69 They’re talking about me (review)
1969 FOCUMENT
April 1969 The French May ... (review)
26 April 1969 Welfare work or revolutionary politics – the choice for the Left
8 May 1969 Be careful with nicknames (letter) (with Bob Looker)
15 May 1969 Inspiring – the early struggle for the revolution in Britain (review)
June 1969 George Orwell: International Socialist?
10 July 1969 The appalling silence and inactivity of the British Left as Biafrans face death and starvation ...
13 November 1969 Financiers untroubled by mines ‘takeover’
February 1970 The Polish Spring (review)
February 1970 The Problem of Fascism (review)
12 February 1970 Russell – the eagle (obituary)
April 1970 An Electoral Strategy for the Left (polemic)
May-June 1970 Discussion on factions
10 June 1970 Do we say ‘vote Labour’ until doomsday? (letter)
15 August 1970 Class, race and ‘intelligence’
1971 A Prologue: A Day in the Life of the ’Fifties
January 1972 The Crucial Year: Victor Serge on Class and Party
5 February 1972 Who’s Mad – You or the System? (review)
11 March 1972 Family Life: The critic replies to his critics (letter)
13 May 1972 A Note on Ireland
13 May 1972 A Prophet Revealed
11 November 1972 Endpiece [George Orwell + Radical Scholars] (review)
18 November 1972 Endpiece [Tenants + Old friends]
9 December 1972 Endpiece [Thomas Szasz + Language of Politics] (review)
23 December 1972 Endpiece: What chance for the big man’s widow? [+ Black Panthers] (review)
1972 Editor’s Introduction to Year One of the Russian Revolution
1972 The Allied Part in the Czechoslovak Intervention (Editorial Postscript to Year One of the Russian Revolution)
12 May 1973 Guevara’s other great love (review)
4 August 1973 Death of a Community (review)
February 1975 The return of Bukharin (extended review article)
1976 Farewell, Grosvenor Square
December 1976 The SWP Fraud
1978 Editor’s Note to the 1978 Impression of Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary
1980 A Return to First Things (review article)
1982 The Ethical Dance (review article)
1984 The Unhappy Elitist: Victor Serge’s Early Bolshevism
Date unknown Letter from Afar