---
By John Percy (Socialist Alternative)
The Australian left has lost one of its outstanding revolutionary comrades. Doug Lorimer, a committed socialist activist for 42 years and a remarkable writer and educator in the ideas of Marxism, died in Sydney on 21 July after a year of deteriorating health. Doug dedicated his whole life to the fight for socialism and the struggle to build a revolutionary party that will be needed to win it.
He was a rebel from his high school days, arrested at the Adelaide moratorium protest against the Vietnam War in September 1970. He joined the Socialist Youth Alliance (the youth organisation of the Socialist Workers League, which became the Democratic Socialist Party) in 1971 and the SWL soon after. He was elected as a full member of the National Committee at the SWL third national conference in January 1974.
Doug organised many branches of the DSP, worked in the party’s national office , frequently editing the DSP paper Direct Action , then also Green Left Weekly . He served for two years in Paris at the Fourth International centre.
But the main role he excelled at was in education, writing and Marxist theory. He was the main DSP comrade conducting our full-time educational school, which ran from 1981-1992, at which groups of eight to 10 comrades studied Marxism for four months.
His most important book was Fundamentals of Historical Materialism. This was translated into Indonesian, and also published in India in English and Hindi. Other books included Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution – A Leninist Critique. He was the comrade primarily responsible for drafting many of the DSP’s programmatic documents, including the DSP program.
He wrote many important articles and reports, some of them published as pamphlets, including “The making of a sect” (analysing the degeneration of the US SWP) and “The Collapse of Communism in the USSR”.
His books, pamphlets, reports to congresses and National Committee meetings, and the many analytical articles published in the internal discussion bulletins will be invaluable educational materials for new generations of socialist activists for many years to come.
He was one of the first comrades to raise doubts about the wisdom and effectiveness of the DSP’s broad left party strategy, which led to the formation of the Socialist Alliance in 2001. In 2005, after the Socialist Alliance conference, he proposed that it was time for the DSP to pull back from burying itself in the Socialist Alliance. The main DSP proponents of the broad party strategy disagreed, and from then on a vigorous political debate developed in the DSP.
After the January 2006 DSP congress, Doug was a leader of the minority Leninist Party Faction, which waged a determined struggle to restore the DSP as the revolutionary party we build.
In May 2008 Doug, along with the rest of the LPF comrades, was expelled from the party he’d joined 36 years previously and spent his adult life building. With others we formed the Revolutionary Socialist Party, Doug becoming editor of our paper Direct Action .
Doug ran several schools on Marxism for comrades in Indonesia. In August 2012 he went to East Timor for seven weeks to conduct a school on Marxism for the Socialist Party of Timor. At the time he was probably already starting to suffer from the effects of the disease that killed him – Buerger’s disease, a result of smoking (he favored a particularly nasty little cigarillo).
Doug was very enthusiastic about the RSP uniting with Socialist Alternative. It is so sad that he became ill before the fusion was completed and was never able to participate properly in the vibrant united organisation and contribute his knowledge and experience.
We will be holding memorial meetings for Doug in Sydney, and possibly other cities, which will be announced in Red Flag .
Red salute, Doug, to a great comrade and friend.
By Pat Brewer (Green Left Weekly: 27/7/13)
Doug Lorimer, a life-long committed revolutionary, died on July 21 in Sydney after a year of fighting deteriorating ill health and long term hospitalisation.
Lorimer was born April 17, 1953 in Dundee in Scotland and migrated to Australia with his parents Connie and Bill when he was four years old to settle in the South Australian steel town of Whyalla.
Lorimer radicalised as a high school student. He first became involved in left politics through the Australian movement against the imperialist war in Vietnam, when he and his mother joined the moratorium marches in Adelaide in 1970.
Lorimer was recruited to the Socialist Youth Alliance — which later became the youth organisation Resistance — aged 16 in late 1971 in his final year in high school. He then went on to enrol in a science degree majoring in physics at Flinders University.
He dropped out of the degree during his first year as his commitment to building a revolutionary party grew. However, his interest in science never waned.
He attended the founding conference of the Socialist Workers League (SWL) in January 1972, and was the SWL organiser in Adelaide until the mid-1970s. While organising, Lorimer worked for a few years in a chicken factory where he became the shop steward.
He was also active in Young Labor, the youth organisation of the ALP. Lorimer edited the Young Labor newsletter Insight in 1974, and was a delegate to National Young Labor. He even won the National Young Labor executive position of delegate to the federal ALP conference.
Visits to Australia by leading British Marxist Tariq Ali and US Marxist philosopher George Novack reinforced his commitment to international solidarity. Lorimer was always intrigued by philosophy with a scientific bent and Frederic Engels’ Dialectics of Nature was a favourite.
He was elected to the main leadership bodies of the party from 1974 and from then on played a leading role in the party and took on any assignment given to him. He spent time as a member in multiple state branches as well as taking on many roles in the party’s national office.
Lorimer took part in delegations to big conferences and meetings of the Fourth International (FI) and worked two years in the early 1980s at the FI centre in Paris.
He played a big role with Jim Percy in preparation and analysis on which the decision of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to disaffiliate from the FI was taken in 1986. He later became international secretary of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) for a time.
Having changed its name to the SWP to run in federal elections in 1975, the SWP then became the DSP in 1989 and later participated in the formation of the Socialist Alliance in 2001.
During this period, Lorimer worked full-time on the party paper as a journalist, editor and production worker on Direct Action from the late 1970s until 1991, when Green Left Weekly was launched, then on GLW until 2009, when he left the DSP and joined the Revolutionary Socialist Party — a group that split from the DSP on the question of the appropriate form of revolutionary Marxist party in the current political period. The RSP merged into Socialist Alternative this year.
Lorimer’s main strength however was his role as a writer and educator on Marxist theory and history.
Percy and Dave Holmes established the curriculum for a four-month party school for small groups of activist in 1981 and ran the classes for the first couple of intakes. Later Lorimer led these classes and later assumed the role of organising the school until 1992 when it closed and shorter forms of intensive education school series were established. On several occasions he conducted classes on Marxism with socialist activists in Indonesia and Timor.
Lorimer was a prolific writer. He wrote many articles, prepared many drafts for discussion on the party’s leading bodies and delivered many reports. He supported the publications the party produced and wrote many incisive introductions to important historical classics such as The Transitional Program and the Struggle for Socialism by Leon Trotsky.
He also wrote analytic pamphlets of revolutionary experiences such as his excellent pamphlet on Cuba, The Cuban Revolution and its Leadership. His interest in philosophy led to a series of pamphlets on Marxist dialectics and historical materialism.
The range of his writings serves as a historical heritage for the revolutionary left. Most of the books and book introductions written by Lorimer are compiled at Links online journal.
Lorimer lived an interesting, varied and fulfilling life. He was a unique personality. He had his own style of presentation and interaction. He loved nothing better than a critical political discussion, a good Cuban cigar and tot of Cuban rum, and if that wasn’t available, then a good dram of whiskey.
But what was fundamental to his life was his absolute commitment to life-long revolutionary activity and building a party; his “scientific” approach to understanding everything, from his thoroughly historical materialist approach to human history and society to the physical sciences and, in particular, the origins and workings of the universe which fascinated him.
He had a voracious appetite for reading and ideas. He believed that learning was a never-ending process. He read constantly, and re-read books he considered important dozens of times over. Finally there was his love of classical music — especially Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonies.
Lorimer's lifelong contribution will be missed by the Australian socialist movement.
[Pat Brewer is a member of the Socialist Alliance and was a longtime national leader in the DSP.]
- See more at: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54628#sthash.EeBGnCvC.dpuf