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Lifelong Apprenticeship
- Life and Times of a Revolutionary
This is a political autobiography with a difference. Born into the Durham
working class six years before the 1926 General Strike, Bill Hunter has
stayed loyal to his class and dedicated his adult life to the fight against
capitalism, and against capitalism’s apologists in the Labour Party
and Communist Party.
A Trotskyist from the age of 18, a factory shop steward at 21 and a borough
councillor at 32, Bill Hunter has taken some hard knocks - including bureaucratic
expulsion from the Labour Party in 1954. Here he recalls these battles
with humour, anecdote and documentary evidence.
These pages are crowded with thumbnail sketches of Trotskyist and working
class fighters of the period before, during and after the second world
war: Harry Wicks, Hugo Dewar, Reg Groves, Gerry Healy, Ted Grant, Tony
Cliff, John Lawrence and the stalwart dockers’ champion Harry Constable.
There is an affectionate portrait of Bill’s lifelong companion Rae.
The book’s heroes are the rank-and-file dockers, engineering workers,
and miners in whose struggles Bill played a part, either directly as shop
steward or as editor of the lively left-wing journal Socialist Outlook
(1948-54).
Lifelong Apprentice shows Hunter’s part in the international struggles
of the Fourth International against capitalism and Stalinism, and includes
an inside account of the Trotskyists’ response to the 1956-57 crisis
in the Communist Party. It ends with the launching of the Socialist Labour
League in 1959. Bill Hunter is now working on a second volume covering
the years since 1959.
Porcupine Press
ISBN: 1-89943-831-9
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