Eric King

1930-2016

Eric King, a longtime sympathizer of the Trotskyist League in Toronto, died on January 27. He was 85. Born in a village in Lincolnshire, England, Eric’s key formative experiences as a young man came when he was posted to Germany as a British soldier following World War II. Seeing firsthand the devastation of the country led him to a deep, lifelong hatred of imperialist militarism and war. Eric later immigrated to Canada, where he worked as a hospital orderly and was an active trade unionist. In the early 1980s, when he worked with the Toronto Disarmament Network, he was arrested and jailed for helping to organize protests against U.S. cruise missiles, whose guidance systems were being built at a factory in suburban Toronto.

We first encountered Eric in January 1990 when he attended a TL public forum featuring an eyewitness report on the unfolding workers political revolution against bureaucratic rule in East Germany (the DDR). Our organization internationally made a major intervention into this upheaval, fighting for a “red Germany of workers and soldiers councils” and against the threat of capitalist counterrevolution. In the end, the Stalinist bureaucrats in the Soviet Union and their local allies committed a historic betrayal of the working class, pushing through early elections that led to the DDR’s annexation by capitalist West Germany. This devastating defeat helped to pave the way for counterrevolution in the Soviet Union itself in 1991-92.

Eric had been around the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), though he had reservations about their politics and methods of organizing. As the CPC underwent a major crisis in the context of the events in East Europe, he came to see that Trotskyism provided the only coherent analysis of the collapse of Stalinism as well as a Marxist road forward. He particularly appreciated our firm defense of the Soviet Union against counterrevolution, combined with the fight to replace the Stalinist bureaucrats with a regime of workers democracy.

Already in his sixties, Eric became an active sympathizer of the TL, regularly attending our events, selling our press and joining our contingents at demonstrations. For many years he came to our office every week to do clippings from the bourgeois press, which was crucial for accurately researching and writing articles for SC. Even though he lived alone on a meagre pension, he also contributed financially as best he could.

Though he had little formal education, Eric was an avid reader. He was particularly knowledgeable on some questions, for example the Algerian war of liberation from French colonialism. He liked to talk—he would joke that “I tend to run off at the mouth”—and would remain for all hours discussing politics with younger comrades and contacts while nursing a cup of tea or a pint of beer.

Eric had to pull back from political work due to ill health about a decade ago, but he remained in touch with comrades, particularly his friends Janet and Rusty. Resolutely anti-religious, he requested that his body be left to medical research and that his friends and political cothinkers remember him informally over a drink (or several). Though he came around our organization at a relatively advanced age, Eric was the kind of militant, class-conscious worker that will, in the course of future struggles, be a core component of a revolutionary party.