[PEN-L:36317] FW: Michael Kidron, 1930-2003

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: FW: Michael Kidron, 1930-2003

The following obit by Richard Kuper appeared in the Guardian on
Thursday.
If you are not in the UK you may not have seen it.

Ted Crawford

********************

Obituary
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Kidron

Publisher, writer and socialist whose life's project was to understand,
and
help replace, capitalism

Thursday March 27, 2003
The Guardian

Michael Kidron, who has died aged 72, was an economist, a Marxist
theorist,
an agitator, an editor, a publisher and the co-author of the bestselling

State Of The World Atlas (1981) and The War Atlas (1983). Both books
transformed the way people look at maps and the realities they reveal
and
conceal. In the 1950s and 1960s, he made revolutionary ideas of social
change into common sense for a generation coming of age around the
non-Communist party left. He had infectious optimism, razor sharp
political
insight and, above all, warmth, energy and love of life.

Kidron played a key role in developing a theory, that of the permanent
arms
economy, to account for the west's long postwar boom and the strength of

working class reformism. But as a critical Marxist he recognised all
theories as provisional - even his own.

His sympathy with the peoples of the so-called third world shone through

his biting criticism of theories which romanticised their struggles. An
internationalist, he always placed the peoples of the world above the
interests of their states.

He was born in Cape Town into an ardently Zionist family. The youngest
of
seven children, he was an adored but sickly child, further weakened by
rheumatic fever at the age of 13. He left South Africa just after the
war
to join his parents, who had already emigrated to Palestine. There he
went
to the Tichon Hadash progressive school in Tel Aviv - where he rejected
Zionism almost immediately - then on to the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem
to study economics.

A brilliant mind and a free, rational and open thinker, he clearly
enjoyed
the heady days of early 1950s Jerusalem immensely. But Israel was a
backwater for anyone not tied in to the Zionist project. So, in 1955
Kidron
went to Oxford as a doctoral student. Knowing nothing of Oxford
colleges,
he applied to the two colleges at the top of the alphabet and was
accepted
by Balliol.

He promptly clashed with his supervisor Thomas Balogh, which did not
help
his career much. But he thrived in the Oxford political world, carving
out
a role as oppositionist within the opposition, becoming a fiercely
independent libertarian Marxist, clashing vigorously with Communist
party
hardliners (before the 1956 Hungarian revolt had shaken their
certainties).
He also developed a close working relationship with his brother-in-law
Ygael Gluckstein who, under the name of Tony Cliff (obituary, April 11
2000), was trying to chart an independent Marxist course in the
Trotskyist-infested waters to the left of the Communist party.

Academic work provided a base for research and independent thinking, but

also for political activity in the Socialist Review (later International

Socialism) Group. Unlike others who looked to the Soviet bloc or the
third
world for salvation, this tendency argued for the centrality of the
working
class of developed capitalist societies as the agency for social change.

This meant jettisoning the shibboleths of both communism and Trotskyism
and
looking reality squarely in the face, recognising and accounting for the

success of postwar capitalism.

This Kidron did in some inspired writings, notably in a brilliant
critique
of Lenin - Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism But One (1962) - on
what he labelled the permanent arms economy, and in Western Capitalism
Since The War (1968). The latter book appeared just in time, he noted,
since after that year, capitalism's long-denied vulnerability to crisis
and
upheaval was no longer in doubt. In this period, too, Kidron threw
himself
into (unpaid) political organising, campaigning and lecturing, acting
with
charm and panache in a movement often noted for its solemnity and
dourness.

He also edited the quarterly International Socialism, which first
appeared
in 1960. The journal broke with the far-left style in its attempt to be
clear, jargon-free and relentlessly honest.

He was an academic at Hull University in the late 1960s and gave his
wholehearted backing to the wave of student protest which washed over
the
country. When the vice-chancellor accused him of being impertinent, he
was
honoured by student placards on their next demonstration which affirmed:

"Yes, we are all impertinent."

In 1972 he and his wife Nina joined Pluto Press, helping to make it one
of
the most influential socialist publishing houses of that time. His main
contribution was as an editor and a visionary, but he made his own
special
mark as an author and editor in the Atlas series, which produced The
State
Of The World Atlas and The War Atlas. And there was also The Book Of
Business, Money And Power (1987).

His lifelong project was to understand modern capitalism, to help
replace
it. Already in the mid-1970s he had questioned the central pivots of the

theory he had been so instrumental in developing in a brief but
devastating
critique called, in typically self-deprecatory fashion: Two Insights
Don't
Make A Theory.

Disliking the way the International Socialists - who were transformed
into
the Socialist Workers party later in that decade - had turned to
orthodox
Leninist forms of organisation, he drifted away in the mid-1970s,
throwing
his enormous energies into political publishing.

While a fellow at Chatham House, he wrote Foreign Investments In India
(1965). Pakistan's Trade With Eastern Bloc Countries was published in
1972.
His book of essays in political economy, Capitalism And Theory, was
published in 1974.

In the early 1990s, Kidron returned to that central project of his life
-
his attempt to understand (and write about) capitalism. It was becoming
a
vast intellectual project. Now that his conception of capitalism had
broadened, he wanted to address it - not just as an economic system, but
in
its political, social and psychological aspects as well - capitalism as
a
truly total system. Alas, his planned book remained fragmentary, despite

three-quarters of a million words in draft.

Dogged by illness, Kidron found it increasingly difficult to give the
focused attention the subject demanded. But his conviction that an
alternative was possible, indeed was being nurtured within the heart of
the
system, remained undimmed as new networked forms of communication and
relationships undermined the command and control relations of earlier
capitalism.

He received the news of last Saturday's demonstration against the war in

Iraq with quiet joy and was delighted that his two youngest children
were
on it. He loved his family, and although he separated from his wife Nina
in
the early 1980s they remained very close. Together they had three
children,
Adam, Beeban and Cassia. From 1991 Mike lived with Polly and they had
twins, Petra and Ruby, in 1995. He loved them all, as he did his seven
grandchildren.

Ronald Segal writes: I collaborated with Michael Kidron on successive
editions of The State Of The World Atlas and on The Book Of Business,
Money
And Power. They involved a great deal of drudgery, and only Michael
could
have made them so much fun. He had the sharpest of minds and the most
gentle of natures. He was a revolutionary and an intellectual who never
discarded people for ideas. He was wholly without pretentiousness. He
will
be remembered and mourned by more people than he would ever have
suspected.
There was no one like him.

Michael Kidron, revolutionary socialist and thinker, born September 20
1930; died March 25 2003