[A-List] Mark Jones

["Michael Keaney" <pk.mk@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Jones passed away peacefully on Wednesday, 9 April 2003. His death was
a surprise inasmuch as he had been making a steady recovery since a serious
bout of illness afflicted him in February. However, he was not in pain and
he was able to ensure that his best wishes for all his friends would be
communicated to them.

Mark was a committed communist, dedicated to the struggle against capitalism
as a system, and to the creation of something better. But his utopianism was
married to a vivid realism, through which he recognised the possibilities
arising from the contradictions occurring within global capitalist
development and, increasingly, the ecological limits to that development,
and the legacy of despoliation and degradation that would be bequeathed to
any succeeding socialist order. This gave his contribution to struggle a
unique, and oftentimes very hard edge. Mark was the embodiment of Marx's
injunction to ruthlessly criticise all that exists. And he was as unsparing
of himself as of anyone else. He once told me, for example, that campaigning
so hard in the 1975 referendum on EEC membership for British withdrawal was
"probably a mistake". This was because he had since recognised that the
greatest threat to the survival of the world was, and is, US imperialism,
rigged as that is to feed an insatiable appetite hell-bent on the
consumption, and thereby exhaustion, of the world's resources, at the
expense ultimately of the planet itself. This explains his longtime interest
in the political economy of oil, and his belief that, in hindsight, the
1970s could be seen as a time of a profound restructuring of global
capitalism whose effects are only now being recognised more widely.

With his undoubted talents and boundless energy, Mark could easily have
devoted himself to personal material enrichment. He was not poor, but there
is no question that a more single-minded pursuit of filthy lucre would have
been well rewarded, had he followed such a course. Similarly, he could quite
easily have pursued academic fame, even within the now relatively small
circles of the Marxist professoriate. But his work in founding the
Conference of Socialist Economists and their journal, Capital and Class, in
the mid-1970s did not blind him to the pitfalls of ego-gratification that
such otherwise worthy projects presented. In this he shared much in common
with Doug Dowd, whose April 1982 Monthly Review article, "Marxism for the
few; or, let 'em eat theory" encapsulates succinctly Mark's views of
academic Marxism.

Mark did not subscribe to the more anti-theoretical excesses of Edward
Thompson, whose railing against then-fashionable Althusserian structuralism
was the subject of "The Poverty of Theory" (1978). But he did agree with the
object of Thompson's attack, which was academic pretension and personal
aggrandisement at the expense of the wider movement. Eschewing the potential
rewards of academic Marxism must have seemed a risky course at the time.
After all, Paul Q. Hirst, in response to Thompson, rebutted that the
intellectual and organisational flux created by the expansion of higher
education and parallel social and political developments of the 1960s and
70s had "created the conditions for a Marxist intelligentsia on a mass
scale". But Mark saw clearly, and much more early than most, how this
Marxist intelligentsia would require an organic link with the working class
and then-emergent new social movements, otherwise it would atrophy. And in
this he was right. Thompson, for all his theoretical mistakes, rejected
academic pretension and died as he had lived -- passionately committed to
the cause of socialism. Hirst is now a leading, fêted academic in the field
of globalisation studies, but it is not clear what political contribution he
is making. And whatever happened to the "Marxist intelligentsia on a large
scale"? Few remained Marxists. Most drifted into the mainstream, one way or
another, the best of them practising an empiricist institutionalism, the
rest of them discovering the excitements of postmodernism or, worse still,
reverting to a sort of juvenile libertarianism, as in the case of Frank
Furedi and co. In rejecting the temptations of Marxist academic glory, Mark
accomplished far greater heights of intellect whilst keeping his Marxism
intact.

Mark spent time living and working in the Soviet Union, and then in
post-Soviet Russia. He witnessed the breakdown of the Soviet system from the
inside, working for a time with the New Statesman whilst using his time in
Moscow to research the archives newly opened under Gorbachev's policy of
Glasnost. It was at a book fair in the 1980s that he lived to pay for his
commitment to truth, when he published, for the first time since the 1920s,
the writings of Leon Trotsky. For that he was taken into custody by the KGB,
about which he laughed in later years. If anything, it belied his wholly
undeserved reputation as a "stalinist", a smear employed by sectarians and
bourgeois opponents alike. But what enthused him most was his having read
the documents to a revolution, in which the arguments that raged between the
main participants were laid bare before him in a way denied to so many other
scholars for decades. It was this experience that partly informed his later
use of the internet as an instrument of organising and strategising.

The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed Mark more insights denied to the
vast majority of human beings, including especially those US advisers like
Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers whose lack of expertise did not stop them
from wreaking havoc on post-Soviet Russia. A few of Mark's friends who had
occupied relatively senior positions in Soviet institutions committed
suicide, rather than living to witness what they predicted, correctly as it
turned out, would be a catastrophe on a scale unimaginable. The achievements
of the Soviet era were systematically destroyed in the name of liberating
the Russian people (analogous to the current situation in Iraq), in the
crazy belief that by destroying the state the institutions of capitalism
would miraculously rise up and a free market nirvana would ensue. Instead,
and very predictably, wholesale robbery on a gigantic scale took place, as a
few well-placed opportunists took advantage of the rich pickings made
available by the simultaneous collapse of the Soviet state and the
connivance of the US advisers and their Yeltsin-administration lackeys. The
scale of destruction will probably never be understood in the West, subject
as we are to a continuing ideological barrage reminding us of the evils of
Stalin and his legacy. But Mark's eyewitness experiences gave him insights
that many Marxists in the West were denied, as they concluded that their
lifetimes of activity were for nought and that they should make their peace
with social democracy and work to defend what remained of the commons in
capitalist society. Thus was Mark able to continue developing a rigorously
Marxist perspective of the conjuncture and not fall into the trap of
identity politics, "new" politics, or whatever consumer-friendly politics
was being touted as this week's "progressive" answer in the West.

Mark's direct experience of the Soviet collapse and the Russian
disintegration meant that he had ample material with which to fill several
books. But so much of that was just too fantastic, according to his
publishers, that he was unable to produce what would otherwise have been a
definitive account of a crime of enormous magnitude. We have had to wait
several years before fragments of evidence of that crime have been made
public, as in the works of people like Michael Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski,
Janine Wedel, and even Robert Service. Mark was too early, and so he
resolved to put as much of reality as he could into fiction, authoring the
novel "Black Lightning", published in 1995 by Victor Gollancz.

Another of Mark's great strengths was his refusal to countenance
sectarianism. Whilst rejecting any notion of surrender to capitalism as
final victor over the socialist struggle, Mark saw earlier and clearer than
most that the internecine struggles between Stalinists and Trotskyists and
whatever other "positions" might be staked out on the basis of the "correct"
reading of the "correct" authorities was utterly pointless, assisting only
those they were all purportedly against. He argued that no matter who would
have succeeded Lenin, or even if Lenin had lived another 20 years, what we
now know as Stalinism would have emerged -- a product of the "garrison state
mentality", as Henry Liu has called it, and which thoroughly implicates the
West in those crimes it uses to discredit the possibility of alternatives to
capitalism. Throughout his time as an internet activist, Mark insisted that
"we have to move on", that the old battles were largely mistaken anyway and
that now they were even more irrelevant than before. Thus his generosity
towards those of very diverse background, whose commitment to socialism
overrode any consideration of their adherence to whatever sect or authority.
Mark was especially concerned to build bridges between the green movement
and Marxist politics, recognising that while the latter had the theoretical
and strategic wherewithal, it was the greens who were the most organised and
dedicated in political struggle. As long as you were serious and sincere,
Mark would treat you with equal sincerity. His impatience was reserved for
time-wasters and narcissists content to use the internet as a means of
demonstrating their own imagined debating prowess or wit. Thus could Mark
remain on very cordial terms with those who were otherwise in profound
disagreement with him politically.

Mark was a tireless fount of ideas. He was among the earliest to recognise
the potential of the internet, and to that end he gifted us with various
discussion lists focused around a particular purpose, but always towards the
ultimate end of human emancipation via socialist revolution. Thus
Leninist-International, the Crashlist and its successor, the A-list.
Meanwhile Mark participated in other forums such as PEN-L and most
especially the Marxism list. His offlist encouragements of individuals have
been well-documented, most movingly by Macdonald Stainsby and Jim Craven.
Indeed, Jim's point about Mark's energy staying with us is most appropriate
-- not only did Mark sponsor the creation of internet discussion lists, but
he was responsible for the "left book club", the blueprint for a European
Workers Party, and much, much more that I could not possibly recount here.

I was very fortunate to have known Mark for two years, meeting him on PEN-L
and benefiting from his offlist encouragement of my research into Britain in
the 1970s, a period that he came to regard as of great importance in
understanding the present. We met once in London in July 2001, and resolved
to work together in the future. In October 2001 Mark launched the A-List,
intended as a place where the connections between apparently random and
unconnected local events could be placed in an explicitly global context.
This he intended as a complement to the already important and valuable work
of other lists like the Marxism list and Leninist-International. Aware that
his health could not be relied upon indefinitely, he already had plans to
pass on stewardship of the A-List to me, as occurred in February last year.
Fortunately, however, his health held out and he was an eager participant
and co-moderator until February this year, when his health started to give
way. By this time we were in regular telephone contact, usually once a week,
in addition to offlist emailing. During our last conversation at the end of
February, he complained that he had contracted some sort of stomach illness
that was causing him great discomfort and that he had been put on morphine,
which annoyed him particularly. However he was still able to speak lucidly
of current events and he also said that, because of the need to husband his
resources more carefully, he would have to withdraw from the lists and focus
on recovery and the writing of a book provisionally entitled "Oil and
Imperialism". Anyone who knew Mark well enough will know two things:
firstly, that any such book would have been the definitive account of what
is obviously the central issue facing planet earth today; secondly, that he
knew he was racing against the clock and used all his available strength,
right up until the last minutes, to finish this work. At the moment it looks
as if he was unsuccessful, which only underlines the sense of having been
grievously robbed that his death leaves us with. However, given the vast
quantity of his writing that remains floating in the ether, there are ample
clues to the narrative that Mark was in the process of synthesising.

Mark leaves behind an incredibly rich legacy, of which we are a part. As Jim
Craven wrote, his energy, of which there was so much, has merely changed
form. I believe that it resides in each of us, and that we could ask for no
better gift to help us in these dark times.

In gratitude for the life of Mark Jones,

Michael Keaney