Obituaries

Current Marxist thinking has been greatly impoverished since last June. With the untimely death of thinkers like Peter Gowan, Giovanni Arrighi, Chris Harman and now Daniel Bensaïd, we are sadly deprived of what each one of these regretted friends and comrades could have contributed, at a time when their intellectual production was in full swing.

Chris was a formidable intellectual, Marxist theoretician and writer, but most importantly he was an activist. For him ideas were never to be separated from action. He was fearless in argument but generous with encouragement. His talent was to make even the most difficult ideas clear and when explaining something he would always say, "Do you follow?" If you didn't he would happily start from beginning and go through it again.

His enduring legacy may well be the volumes of the Dictionary of Labour Biography that he edited, detailing the lives of many of the women and men who were active in the labour movement from the late 18th century.

Only someone with an extensive knowledge of the movement as a participant could possibly have embarked on such a project.

It would be wrong to describe Augusto Boal as a theatre director, a dramatist, a producer or an actor, though he was all of those things. Returning to his native Brazil in 1955 from the US with a degree in theatre arts, he was hired to work for the famous Arena Theatre, which challenged the social realism of the theatre of the time with the ideas of Bertolt Brecht.

He came from a comfortable background (his father was a doctor and he went to public school and Cambridge). But the disaster of the First World War shook all classes to the core. And like his more famous younger contemporaries, the poet W H Auden and his admirer and fellow novelist Christopher Isherwood, Upward was part of a revolt against the clapped out culture of the past.

Everything stopped for a moment when I heard of his death on 21 December. In that instant I remembered all those times he stood before me, the poetry of love and life and anger and outrage filling whatever space he had come to perform in. I stood with him in the middle of Piccadilly on 15 February 2003 - speechless, as we felt 2 million human beings for peace and against war moving around us like a slow, wide river. Adrian was momentarily the rock midstream.

His first full-length play, The Birthday Party, contains what Pinter came to think was the most important line he ever wrote: "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do." At 18 he had become a conscientious objector - a decision which marked him as a non-conformist for life. But Pinter's work isn't just dry, agit-prop drama of resistance.

Calder was in many ways a model of the type of engaged public intellectual that we more readily associate with New York in the 1930s and 1940s, rather than the Scottish capital, post-devolution.

Sembène had an extraordinary life. Born in 1923, he was sent by his father to an Islamic school in the Casamance - the poor southern region of today's Senegal, then part of the huge French West African colonial empire. Expelled from the school in 1936 for indiscipline, he worked as a fisherman before leaving to find work in the capital, Dakar.

Karl Marx divided the history of mainstream economics into two stages. The first he called "classical political economy". It was the product of thinkers, most notably Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who identified with the capitalist model of society when it was battling to establish itself in place of the feudal society that preceded it. Their desire to push capitalism forward led them to investigate its fundamental features-especially sources of value in productive labour and, by implication, profits in exploitation.