Paul Foot - Early Career

Early Career

In 1961, Foot went to Glasgow to join the Daily Record where he met workers from shipyards and engineering who had joined the Young Socialists. He read, for the first time, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and the biography of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher which had just been published. In Glasgow he met the Socialist Review group, led by "an ebullient Palestinian Jew" called Tony Cliff. Cliff argued that Russia was state capitalist and that Russian workers were cut off from economic and political power as much as, if not more than, those in the West. Persuaded by what he heard and saw in Glasgow, Foot joined the International Socialists, the organisational forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), in 1963. "Of all the many lessons I learnt in those three years in Glasgow," he wrote later, "the one which most affected my life was a passing remark by Rosa Luxemburg. She predicted that, however strong people's socialist commitment, as soon as they are involved even to the slightest degree in managing the system on behalf of capitalists, they will be lost to the socialist cause." He wrote for Socialist Worker throughout his career and was its editor from 1972 until 1978. He continued to write a regular column for the Socialist Worker until he died. He spoke at thousands of meetings for hundreds of left-wing and socialist causes, frequently trying to persuade audiences of the relevance of revolutionary socialism.