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Organizers. "Red Ted" Knight, an avowed Marxist and mentor to the Greater London Council's Ken Livingstone, is head of London's Lambeth borough council. He loudly protested police action during the riots, mostly by blacks, in Lambeth's Brixton section in April. Said he: "Lambeth is now under an army of occupation. Steps are being taken by the police to set up the same apparatus of surveillance as one sees in concentration camps." A fastidious dresser who drives a BMW, Knight is an unlikely looking street radical, but it is from the pavements that he draws his support. He has been widely accused of exploiting racial tensions in an attempt to rally radicals to his council campaign. Though he was thrown out of the Labor Party in the mid-'50s for being active in the Socialist Labor League, he was readmitted in the early '70s.
The Foot Soldiers. The firebrand Young Socialists provide the manpower for recruiting drives on factory floors and in local parties. "We're becoming enormously attractive to working-class youth," claims Laurence Coates, 22, an unemployed school janitor elected as Young Socialist representative to the Labor Party's 30-member national executive committee. "We're not a 'mass' force, but we're growing."
Among the converted is Margaret Reavey, 25, a public housing office receptionist in Gateshead, on the northeast coast, who became a Marxist in sympathy for the miners' strike that helped topple the Conservative government of Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1974. "You don't go to bed at night and wake up a Marxist," explains Reavey. "It comes through experience. I disliked what Heath and the Tories stood for."
Another young devotee, Sam Brown, 22, lived in Nottingham with his Jamaican-born parents before moving to London's Streatham district. He traces his radicalism to being black. As a member of the Young Socialists' London organization, Brown passed out leaflets during the Brixton riots urging young blacks and whites to protest police repression. Says Brown: "I'm a Marxist because that's the way people like me progress."
The Young Socialist canon comprises equal parts of rage against the Thatcher government and extremist idealism. Young Socialists demand full employment, a 35-hour work week and a guaranteed annual minimum wage of $9,434; the group would also curb "militarism" by creating soldiers' unions, free elections of officers and mandatory retirement of all generals currently in service. Notes Antimilitarist Coates: "Real Communism would make Brezhnev choke."
For all their noisy and strident confidence, the Marxist left has also suffered some setbacks. Labor's impressive showing in the recent local elections, in which Conservatives lost control in 23 of 54 counties, has given some encouragement to party moderates. Michael Foot used the occasion to proclaim that "the alternative government of the country is in a pretty healthy state."