has died and John Weal, in the 'united front' far left newspaper Black Dwarf, a journal particularly well adapted for the student and cultural revolution of the time. Peter was involved in the split in the paper's editorial board, which saw the likes of Adrian Mitchell, Anthony Barnett and Fred Halliday assume control of the paper, while in 1970 the IMG-led majority went on to produce Red Mole.
The first issue came out in the middle of the June 1970 wave of student sit-ins against the universities practice of keeping secret files on students and their deepening links with private business!. IMG students were central to this protest in a number of universities, including Warwick and York.
At the start of the new decade, however, the IMG was struggling to establish its identity and role, as the antiVietnam war movement and student upsurge were giving way to an increasingly working class, union-centred, rebellion. A small organisation, with a weak leadership and few working class roots, met its destiny in the form of a faction organised by John Ross in Oxford, which quickly pushed aside the old leadership. At first Peter, like Tariq Ali, was convinced by Ross's blend of turning to the working class with programmatic, propagandistic ultimatism; but by 1973 he had broken with the Ross leadership to link up again with Pat Jordan, at first on the (self-evident) basis that the urgent need of working class struggle was to fight to kick out the Tories and not centralise the struggle against the state'. Peter said that discussions with Pierre Rousset, a leader of the French Ligue Communiste, had been decisive in his reassessment of Ross's passive propagandism.
Peter Gowan led more or less the same minority throughout the 1970s, as the IMG interpreted democratic rights in revolutionary organisations as meaning that having half a dozen internal factions was a virtue, rather than - if persisted in over a long period - a massively demoralising and destabilising factor. By the early 1980s Peter was leading a faction that urged entry into the Labour Party, but was also moving towards an academic career and deepening his interest in Eastern Europe. Around this time, at the 1982 conference, he refused to be on the national leadership again, and effectively drifted out of the organisation. This was also the period when Tariq Ali also left
In this period the IMG was trying to put into a practice a hare-brained tactic devised by the American SWP, the so-called 'turn to industry' sending young ex-students into anything that smacked of manual industry. Sections of the Ross leadership moved sharply to break up the organisation's growing base in white collar unions, and send white collar fraction leaderships to meet its conception of the proletariat' - often in un-unionised
Backing this tactic was part of an attempted rapprochement by sections of the Fourth International leadership with the Jack Barnes-led leadership of the US SWP, who had built their