AROUND THE WORLD
International Viewpoint #256 May 1994
FRANK RIDLEY (1897-1994)
FRANK Ridley, the founder of the
Marxian League, the first organisation to disseminate the writings of Leon
Trotsky after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, died on 27 March 1994. Ridley was the inspirer of the first comrades who were later to form the backbone of the International Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Although he parted with Trotsky over his opposition to Ridley's premature call for a Fourth International - he was considered a "Trotskyist" by the Brockway-McNair-Maxton leadership of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) to which he had gravitated in the 1930s. He consistently opposed the Stalinist frame-ups - from the Moscow Trials to the Titoist trials after the war. He sent a message of solidarity to the Fourth International on its fiftieth anniversary celebration at Conway Hall in 1988. In his latter years he worked with the broadly-based British journal, Revolutionary History. Despite his maverick role in the history of the movement, his importance in its formative phases should not be understated. *
RUTH BULLOCK (1909-1994) RUTH Bullock, for decades a pillar of the Canadian Trotskyist movement, died 8 April 1994.
Early in life she was exposed to hard work on her family's farm and to the socialist ideas in her family's collection
Personal experience brought her up against societal and legal obstacles which denied women access to abortion and even to birth control. For her, the informal networking among women seeking access to birth control and abortion led to semi-clandestine activity arranging abortions for women who were referred to her.
In 1934, she joined the recently founded Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Although a social democratic party, it had the stated goal of eradicating capitalism. Ruth did not fail to notice the number of independent women who were prominent in the 36
During World War Two, Ruth rejected the policies of the CCF and the Communist Party, both of which fell in behind the war effort of the Canadian government. When she was first accused of being a "Trotskyite" she wasn't sure what this term meant. At the end of the war, she and her husband Reg joined the branch of the Canadian Trotskyist movement in
Ruth was very demanding of herself and demanding of others. Numerous women remember meeting Ruth when they joined the movement and her encouragement of their personal and political growth. For many, it was Ruth who led them into their first study of the situation of women.
When the women's liberation movement emerged in the late 1960s, our organisation was ready to embrace it, in large part due to Ruth's preparatory
She did not cut back activity because of advancing age. In October 1970, for example, when the Canadian government invoked the War Measures Act, suspending civil liberties across the country, Ruth and Reg abandoned their vacation, heading back to Vancouver, and reported into our headquarters, ready for action.
Over the years, Ruth contributed thousands of hours to the Vanguard Bookstore, making it a prominent distributor of radical literature in Vancouver. And she was a formidable presence at Canada Customs when they were tempted to intercept certain periodicals. *
VIETNAMESE TROTSKYISTS IN GERMANY A DELEGATION of Vietnamese Trotskyists, led by Hoang Khoa Khoi, visited Germany twice in the month of February. They had been invited by several Vietnamese magazines to speak on the recently released Vietnamese translation of Trotsky's "The Revolution
Many different categories of Vietnamese live in Germany. There are refugees who left Eastern Bloc countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall. There are those who took advantage of the fall of the Wall to live in Germany. And finally there is the most recent immigration of those that used a "tourist" visa for Moscow and subsequently made
There are four magazines. In Berlin, the Spark is put out by Vietnamese social democrats. Good Will is put out near Dortmund and recently published Betrayed" and Khoi's preface. Hope is distributed in the Mainz area and has already published an interview with
Hope and Good Will invited the delegation to Germany. Meetings brought together as many as 70 people, including many youth and some "old timers" from the party, highly impressed by Trotsky's book and by the Trotskyist theory of the bureaucracy.
A fourth magazine, Swallow's Wing, put out in Nuremberg by 20 people, invited the speakers last year.
The meetings were very fruitful, and brought together people who are much more politicised than Vietnamese immigrants in the USA and France — anxious to understand what they had lived through and very receptive to the delegation's explanations. *