In memory of Ed Rooksby

Abstract

Ed passed away unexpectedly on 14 February 2021. He had just turned 46 years. Ed was a dear friend of ours. We met him in the mid 2000s when all three of us were PhD students at the Department of Politics, University of York. In the post-Thatcherite era in Britain, where individualism prevailed and universities were defined by marketization and managerialism, meeting Ed was like a breath of fresh air. Ed was a well-read, sophisticated person with a critical mind and more importantly, he genuinely cared about social justice issues and about making the world a better place. We remember him taking part in various protests and strikes throughout his PhD years. Even after graduation when he was trying to carve out a career for himself in academia, he was never the pragmatic type that played the game according to its ‘rules’ that stipulated the need to network, publish and publish more. In a context where academia is disconnected from wider struggles, he did not tame his anger in the face of injustice, violence and exploitation that defines this system. He was politically engaged and was active in Left Unity and UCU at Ruskin College, where he was the Politics Tutor, and he became an important voice in the British Left. We are heartbroken for losing a dear friend, a gentle soul. Yet, we know that Ed is not only our loss. Ed was one of the most thoughtful thinkers on the British Left. In this eulogy, we want to introduce his work with the hope that more people can read what he wrote. Two major issues occupied Ed since his PhD days: socialist strategy and Marxist state theory. These issues would be addressed in the book he was working on, provisionally entitled Taking Power: Reform, Revolution and Socialist Strategy, that he was contracted to write as part of Brill’s Historical Materialism book series. Unfortunately, he never managed to finish this book but the work he produced so far provides clues to the main arguments of the book. Ed strived to ‘put forward a general set of broad strategic principles that might help to guide the radical left in its struggle to realise socialism’ (Rooksby 2011: 29). These broad strategic principles would arise out of his critique of the two major classical socialist strategies: reformism and revolutionary socialism. Reformism can be defined as a ‘belief in the possibility of attaining socialism by gradual and peaceful reforms within the framework of a neutral parliamentary state’ (Rooksby 2011: 30). Reformism assumes that it is possible to achieve a smooth transition to socialism without a revolutionary break. Ed is critical of the assumption of 1016911 CNC0010.1177/03098168211016911Capital & Class research-article2021