I once wrote this about Ken Coates:
The pacifist tradition that Baker and Kurlansky inherit is not an ignoble tradition. In the UK, its home was, for many decades, the Independent Labour Party. I have a lot of respect for the ILP and its heritage. Ken Coates is the contemporary figure who probably most represents the political tradition of the ILP. Over the years I’ve been influenced considerably by Ken Coates, his humanist socialism, his advocacy for workers’ control, his sense of industrial democracy as an extension of the republican liberties fought for by the likes of Tom Paine. However, in his little magazine, The Spokesman, I have long noted an unpleasant drift towards sloppy conspirationist thought, anti-American hysteria, a “New World Order” mentality. Habibi at Harry’s Place nails this trend, and shows how it spills over into very unpleasant antisemitic territory.
I still hold to that opinion, and was saddened to read about his death on the 27 June. Ken Coates was one of the most thoughtful of British socialists, and one of the most activist of its theorists. His work on workers’ control is indispensable. This came out of his own proletarian experiences, out of an engagement with the experiments in self-management in Tito’s Yugoslavia (the cause of his 1948 break with Stalinism) and then out of Michael Raptis’ development of the Titoist model within the context of Trotskyism.
At the same time, I think that the dark side of Pabloism – its excessive enthusiasm for a Second Campist kind of national self-determination, which led it into supporting some authoritarian “anti-imperialist” regimes – also coloured his thinking. This element came to the fore in his later years, when geopolitics rather than class struggle became his central concern at The Spokesman. (See, for instance, this rabbit’s eye view of his use of Christian antisemitism in his late rhetoric.)
Among the groups Coates passed through, after the Communist Party, were the Revolutionary Socialist League, the International Group, forerunner of the International Marxist Group, the the Institute for Workers’ Control, the International Socialists (he was one of the journal editors in the 1960s, its greatest period, although I am not sure if he was ever a member), the Labour Party (several times, including a fair few expulsions), the Independent Labour Network and the North Derbyshire Socialist Alliance.
Please read Andrew Coates’ eulogy to this great man. Andrew has other links too: Guardian Obituary Here – letters about it here, Independent Here, Blog Three Score Years and Ten Here, Five Leaves Blog Here. Also: Socialist Unity.
Below the fold, some treasures from the archive:
Spluttering Taper, International Socialist, 1961 [on Stalinism]
Socialism and the Division of Labour, Some Notes on the Views of Paul Cardan, International Socialist, 1961 [Cardan = Cornelius Castoriadis]
In the Woodpile, International Socialist, 1961 [on some McCarthyite rubbish]
[Sean] O’Casey, International Socialist, 1961
Caribbean Pilgrim, International Socialist, 1961 [on Theodore Draper and the United Fruit Company]
The Unions, International Socialist, 1961
Reform and Revolution: Rejoinder 1, International Socialist, 1962, [on Alasdair MacIntyre]
Incomes Policy and Class Power, International Socialist,
Obituary for Peter Fryer, Revolutionary History
Buy his books from Spokesman. Read about Workers Control: Another World is Possible.
Poumista 
Thanks for the posting. It often times is sad to read about the demise of folks you have “known” for much of your political life.
While I can’t say I shared much in political common with Comrade Coats, I found the stuff around the Institute for Workers Control to be of much interest.
Honestly, I had very limited (if any) agreement with the forms of workers control argued by the Institute. The IWC did provide a glimpse into the thinking of the left wing of the trade union bureaucracy on the question of workers control. And, of course, there were some good historial pieces they did in cooperation with Spokeman Books.
The question–and the struggle– for workers self-management is one that should be argued as hotly today
as it was some 40 years ago.
Yes: Thank you for this.
Another World is Possible (largish pamphlet size), with many of the classic (IWC) texts on workers’ control was published a few years back:
http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/workers'%20control%20review.htm
Thanks comrade. Post updated with a clickable link.
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