Jim Higgins Internet Archive (original) (raw)

Marxists’ Internet Archive

1930 – 2002

Biography

Born into a working-class family in Harrow, Jim Higgins joined the Young Communist League at 14 and left school at 16. Two years later he was apprenticed to the Post Office as a telecommunications engineer. After National Service in the early 1950s, he became active in both the Communist Party and the Post Office Engineering Union. He broke with the CP in 1956 following Khrushchev’s “secret speech” and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Higgins read Trotsky voraciously, and joined a small group – Socialist Labour League – and then the Socialist Review Group which became the International Socialists.

By the 1960s he was a POEU branch secretary and was elected to the union’s national executive, but he gave up his union work to become IS’s full-time national secretary in the early 1970s. IS grew rapidly in the later 1960s and early 70s but in a burst of internal quarrels in the period 1973-76 he was forced out of the organisation and then built a new life as a journalist. He remained active as a writer and speaker at left wing meetings up until his death.

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