(1) Harry Pollitt, The Communist (1937)

Ralph Fox was born in Halifax in 1900. He came from a comfortable middle-class home. He received the education and upbringing of his class, finishing at Oxford. The choice of a life of letters, of aloof culture, for which Ralph had all the intellectual capacity, seemed to open before him. Instead, in 1920, he went to the most hard-hit famine area of the Soviet Union. Instead he joined the Communist Party. Instead of mellowing gradually into a Literary Editor he died at 36 fighting the forces of Fascism in Spain. And as Harold Laski has written, his death was, “a fulfilment. It was, for him, simply a necessary service to his ideal.” Fox, in his combination of qualities, his devotion to the Communist Party and his intellectual ardour, was able to foreshadow the alliance between mental and manual worker in, the fight against Fascism and war, the destroyers of culture.

There was no personal economic reason why Fox should have joined the Communist Party. He did so from a deep sense of intellectual conviction, and from the moment he took out his Party card, his life was dedicated to the cause of Communism. Whether as author, journalist, or instructor of our factory groups in various parts of London, Fox undoubtedly influenced the thought of thousands of working men and women, and also of a big section of the professional classes of this country.

Fox had, what so many of the members of our Party lack - the recognition that the supreme aim of his work must be to build the Party to which he belonged, for he recognized that as a necessity, not in some narrow and sectarian way, but because he understood that the more powerful the Communist Party becomes, the more powerful the working class as a whole becomes in its historical struggle against capitalism.