The last game - obituary for Ted Grant

Azeem Nazir from the Daily Post in Pakistan wrote an obituary for Ted Grant, which we reproduce here in full.

Like people, books also die. Like many dead books, the ideologies that trail behind the ground realities die too, and many a time commit suicide. But from Hugo Chavez to Munnoo Bhai, several people, leaders and writers scattered across the globe present the true picture of the UN’s ‘kitchen’ to the world by raising their voices against the brutalities committed on the innocent citizens of Lebanon and bombardment of its cities. Serious journals around the globe are paying tribute to the great revolutionary intellectual Ted Grant on his death. It goes to show that the people who wish to change the fate of humanity and the books and ideologies teaching the lesson of courage, never die.

After 1945, when the bureaucracy-controlled economic system in Russia and China was making historic progress, Ted Grant was the second revolutionary intellectual after Leon Trotsky, who had forecast in his writings that the Soviet Union would eventually fall, and capitalism would harbinger barbarism in the world. At that time, redcoat-wearing Stalin’s eulogizers who called themselves revolutionary ‘comrades’ declared Ted Grant’s predictions as a figment of a madman’s imagination. They watched in the 1990s the predictions of the person who used to keep only two suits to wear all his life, come true. Now Fukuyama, the renowned rightist ideologue and author of the famous book The End of History is watching the capitalists digging their own graves for themselves.

Apart from other languages, several of Ted Grant’s books and articles are being translated into Urdu. Russia, from Revolution to Counter-Revolution is one such introductory book of Ted Grant that shows the poor and the youth of the world a revolutionary path to end the problems of the workers across the globe. It gives the message of a peaceful world that will be free of demand, greed, wickedness, hunger, deprivation, and illness. Such a world is all the more possible today. It will be a society where men would not be slaves of their need, and only then would they be able to give selfless love and make sincere friendship. Only such a society can make a person a true journalist, true artist and the master of his trade. According to Ted Grant, every system that fails to cater to human needs becomes a burden, and if it is not replaced by a fresh one, the decadent system brings discrimination, bloodshed and destruction in society, very much evident these days.

Ted Grant had said in his last writing that we would witness flabbergasting changes in the days to come, which would give rise to big movements. If these movements were not transformed into an organised revolution of the workers, then capitalism would keep on spreading its reign of bloodshed by dividing people on racial, national and sectarian basis, because capitalism always keeps open a back door.

See any page of a newspaper. Most of the news report incidents that are the result of the circumstances arising out of the unequal distribution of wealth. Signing of an agreement such as the Charter of Democracy in London and presenting of its copies as a package to US envoys is also meant to keep this system intact, so that people’s anger against the US and capitalism could be vented through elections to receive a share in the government. It would ensure continuity of US policies and the agenda of international organisations, ensuring them another chance to suck the blood of the masses.

The masses have learnt a lot from their past experiences and if the PPP leadership would again try to swindle the poor, it would be the last time. This was also predicted by Ted Grant.

The writer is the Executive Editor of Khabrain

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