Politics
Elected a member of the National Executive of the National Union of Students in the early 1980s, Rees is a former leading member of the Socialist Workers Party, and was for many years on its Central Committee. He was editor of the quarterly journal International Socialism for ten years and the organiser of the SWP's annual Marxism festival in 1982 and 1983 and again between 1992 and 2002.
A co-founder and a current national officer for the Stop the War Coalition, he has been a central organiser of all its marches including that of 15 February 2003. Rees is also vice president (Europe) of the Cairo Conference.
He was top of Respect – The Unity Coalition list in the West Midlands region for the 2004 European Election, and the Respect candidate for the Birmingham Hodge Hill by-election. He also stood for Respect in the 2006 local elections in the Bethnal Green South ward of Tower Hamlets, East London where he came second to Labour. Rees was controversially not selected by the SWP Central Committee to be on the slate for re-election and did not stand independently at the January 2009 conference. Shortly after his partner Lindsey German resigned from the SWP in 2010, Rees and 41 other members followed disenchanted with the party's direction, internal regime and approach to united fronts (18 others who had resigned in weeks prior also supported the resignations).
Rees is currently in the organisation Counterfire for which he has written two short books, Strategy and Tactics and alongside Joseph Daher The People Demand: A short history of the Arab revolutions.
He is currently pursuing doctoral research on the Levellers and the English Revolution at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2006, John Pilger said: "I know of few who speak and write more wisely of the danger we face from rapacious power, and what we should do about it, than John Rees".
Read more about this topic: John Rees (activist)
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“From the beginning, the placement of [Clarence] Thomas on the high court was seen as a political end justifying almost any means. The full story of his confirmation raises questions not only about who lied and why, but, more important, about what happens when politics becomes total war and the truth—and those who tell it—are merely unfortunate sacrifices on the way to winning.”
—Jane Mayer, U.S. journalist, and Jill Abramson b. 1954, U.S. journalist. Strange Justice, p. 8, Houghton Mifflin (1994)
“In politics people throw themselves, as on a sickbed, from one side to the other in the belief they will lie more comfortably.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)