His columns were crucial

When I joined the Socialist Workers Party in 1989, at the age of 18, John Molyneux’s weekly Teach Yourself Marxism columns in Socialist Worker and his book Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism (which collected many of those columns) did more than anything else to wed me to the Party’s politics.

From the nature of the Stalinist regimes to the abolition of money, John explained complex issues in terms that were brilliantly clear, while never over-simplifying his subject or patronising the reader.

Whenever I encountered John in the three decades that followed, I was always impressed by his uncompromising intelligence, his patience and his kindness. He was an exemplar of the Marxist as humanist.