We have lost the most important living Marxist

This may seem a big claim. but after looking at Chris Harman's achievements in nearly 50 years as a revolutionary Marxist, it is clear that his contribution has been enormous.

Harman's stature was only recognised outside the ranks of the IS Tendency in the latter years of his life. His conscious choice to stay out of the academic world, where he could undoubtedly have had great success, meant his books sold thousands of copies to rank and file revolutionaries, but rather fewer to the intellectuals who define "academic marxism".

Harman's commitment to the role of a "professional revolutionary", in the best sense of the term, was an important key to the quality of his writings. Hre spent the last 45 years as a revolutionary anticipating the theoretical and political needs of the movement and writing to nourish that movement and inform its debates. His work was also shaped by the over twenty years he spent editing the weekly paper Socialist Worker, responding in an even more immediate way to the needs of the movement.

Chris Harman worked out his ideas within the framework that had been developed by Tony Cliff. Cliff had extended the Marxist and Trotskyist tradition to enable the movement to deal with two great political problems that arose after the second world war. Trotsky had expected that the second world war would be followed by economic crisis in the West and either the collapse of Stalinism into open counter revolution or  new revolution in the East. Neither happened. The world economy entered an unprecedented period of uninterrupted economic growth.  Far from entering a crisis,  Stalinism expanded into eastern Europe and China. While still at lise, Chris Harman joined the Socialist Review group founded by Tony Cliff. Chris Harman's role was to become that of deepening the sometimes sketchy analysis of the Socialist review group of the 1950s and updating it to meet the needs of the new radicalisation after 1968.

The dates on which his articles were written are significant. Many were to later write similar things. Chris' role was to wrtite them when they would arm the movement for the problems it was about to face.  "How the Revolution was Lost" was published in the autumn of 1967. Up to that point, the crucial argument for socialists faced with the Stalinist monolith had been to say that "Russia is not Socialist". With the explosion of 1968, the discrediting of Stalinism after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the radicalisation of millions influenced by reformist ideas, the crucial argument would become whether Leninism had led inevitably to Stalinism. Harman's article armed socialists at a crucial turning point. Just a year later, his article on "Party and Class" engaged with the libertarian ideas of those turning away from Stalinism and Social Democracy and showed that a Leninist party was far from the undemocratic  monolith of the Stalinist caricature, and that building a Leninist party was also a vital necessity in the reconstruction of the post 1968 socialist movement.

In 1974, well before the 1980 Solidarity revolt in  Poland and long before the 1989 revolutions and collapse of the Eastern European regimes, Chris' book on "Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe" analysed not only the repressive nature of the Eastern European regimes, but also, and more importantly, laid out the dynamics of the crisis that would bring those regimes down 15 years later and showed that this was linked to and part of the crisis of the world capitalist system.

Chris' book on the lost revolution in Germany 1918-1923 was a ground breaking study that laid out the crucial importance of understanding how revolutionaries need to relate to reformists, and how the opportunity to spread the Bolshevik revolution was lost when the young German Communist Party got it wrong, condemning Russia to Stalinism and Germany to Nazism. The left publishing house that had published previous works by Chris and others in the International Socialists and SWP rejected Chris' book. No other publisher wanted to take it. The tide in Britain was ebbing to the right in 1982, and no-one wanted to publish  the work. The SWP was forced to found its own publishing house to publish the book. The. book remains an extremely important work for anyone who wants to understand the art of revolutionary politics.

In his book on 1968 and after, published in 1988, Chris was typically modest about his own role. He described himself as a grey face in the shadows during this period, not what I remember from the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation conference in 1969 in London's Roundhouse. Once agin the book was not written as an exercise in nostalgia, but in order to arm a new generation of socialists that was just beginning to emerge from a serious downturn in the working class struggle in Britain.

Chris was to make two major contributions to Marxism in the 90s, as well as writing his most popular book, the monumental Peoples' History of the World. First he identified the rising importance of the question of islamism to the left, both in the West and in the muslim world. Using the catastrophic example of the left's alignment with a "secularist" army in Algeria, Chris analysed the contradictions of islamism and why the left elsewhere should not follow the path of the Algerian left. Published in 1994, this article has illuminated the discussions and the failure of the Turkish left over the last 15 years. It is still vital reading today. In 1997 the left that failed to decisively oppose the 28 February coup, was saying "Turkey must not become Algeria" (sometimes "Turkey must not become Iran"). Unfortunately Chris' penetrating analysis had not reached them and a decade of opportunity for the left was to be lost by the policy of Ne RefahYol ne Hazır Ol". Those on the left who in 1994 were echoing Suleyman Demirel in saying that the rising islamists would "hang us all" would have done well to have read Harman. Now faced with an islamists government that has introduced some democratic reform and, however falteringly, taken on the power of the Turkish Armed Forces, they would not be paralysed, or worse, siding with the army.
Chris' other major contribution, spread over a dozen or more articles and two important books was his often prescient analysis of the developing crisis in capitalism. He pointed out that the "boom" of the Clinton era was based on  massive indebtedness of people and government, and with a detailed and concrete examination of the data understand the nature of the coming crisis far better that the bourgeois economists most of whom did not see it coming at all.

Ironically the September 2008 crash in the US forced to rewrite much of his nearly complete book, now published as "Zombie Capitalism", not because he had been proved wrong, but because many of his predictions had been fulfilled and he no longer needed to argue against the "official" economists in such detail. Once the crisis had broken Chris was also quick to warn those who had flipped from optimism to catastrophism about the future of capitalism. As always he was anticipating the needs of the movement. In a time of financial crisis the need of the movement is to formulate policies to fight the effects of the crisis, not to simply rub its hands at the hope of the system's imminent collapse. Capitalism is contradictory, but also resilient, particularly if the working class can be made to pay the price of the crisis. Chris warned, and was proved right, that, with massive government help (paid out of our pockets) the capitalists could mitigate the effects of the crash. To merely trumpet imminent collapse was to politically disarm the working class movement in the tasks that it now faced.

Chris' work is so well remembered by many revolutionaries because every article and every book was answering a deeply felt need for arguments and analysis to be used in the struggle. Because they "clicked" with that need, they were not to be easily forgotten. Chris' object in writing his books and articles was to build the revolutionary organisation that can help shape the struggle of the working class to make the world a better place. We have to continue to make that struggle, and, however inadequately, to fill the gap left by Chris' untimely death by trying to continue to produce those ideas and that analysis.

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