Jean Brust TributeWorld Socialist Web Site

Messages from world Trotskyist movement

On behalf of the Socialist Equality Party [Australian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International] I would like to extend the warmest revolutionary greetings to the memorial meeting being held to honour our comrade Jean Brust.

Together with you, we cherish the memory of comrade Jean and her indefatigable struggle for socialism as a leader of the Trotskyist movement.

Together with her husband Bill, Jean was a living link with that generation of workers and socialist-minded intellectuals who were directly inspired by the October Revolution. But what marked out Jean's life was her steadfastness in the face of profoundly difficult objective conditions.

Even when the class struggle seemed completely smothered by the bureaucratic apparatuses, Jean never lost her understanding of what Trotsky had explained: that truth is more powerful than lies, that the laws of history are stronger than any bureaucracy and that the program of Marxism would find its way, under new historical circumstances, to broad masses of workers, youth and students.

All of us in the SEP recall with fond memories the occasion of Jean's visit to Australia in 1993 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Left Opposition and her account of how, when she was a youth, young people everywhere were actively searching for answers to the great issues which confronted society.

Through the collaboration of the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies, the capitalist class was able to establish a new economic and political equilibrium in the post-war period. But that equilibrium has now clearly broken down. A new generation is once again being confronted with all the great historical issues which inspired Jean Brust.

The example of her life and struggle will be of enormous significance in the education and training of new members and cadres of the Fourth International in the coming period.

Long Live the Memory of Jean Brust!

Long Live the Fourth International!

With revolutionary greetings,
Nick Beams, SEP national secretary

To the Brust family and to Jean's comrades and friends,

On behalf of the members and supporters of the Socialist Equality of Canada, I want to pay tribute to Jean Brust, whom I knew and respected as a comrade and friend.

For myself, as for revolutionary socialists the world over, Comrade Jean represented a vibrant link to the great working class movements of the 1930s and 1940s and to the struggles of the pioneer Trotskyists. We spent many hours listening--as it were at her knee--to Comrade Jean discuss the impact of the Spanish Civil War on the youth of her generation, the incarceration of the SWP leadership under the Smith Act, the Shachtman fight and countless other political experiences. Comrade Jean represented a link to the past not simply because she had been a participant, but because the bitter lessons of those turbulent years so animated her life.

Comrade Jean had a zest for life and for all it has to offer. The passionate engagement with the past that came to characterize her was rooted in the striving for a better and radically different future.

Above all, Comrade Jean imparted a profound confidence in the revolutionary role of the working class. Unquestionably, Jean's understanding of politics was shaped by the great mass struggles of the 1930s and immediate post-Second World War period. But these experiences had been pondered and their lessons enriched by a profound study of man's social evolution. There was nothing bookish about Comrade Jean--indeed, in a case of undue modesty, she oftentimes would say she was not "theoretical." But Jean's approach to political questions--her concern with the trajectory of events, with the relationship between the immediate issue at hand and the goal of a society free from exploitation--was grounded in her assimilation of Marxist theory.

All of us would have wished that Comrade Jean had lived a decade or two longer, for she had so much to give as a political leader, grandmother and friend. We take some solace in the fact that she lived a rich and rewarding life as manifested in today's gathering of family, friends and comrades.

Dear Jean, as you yourself said on several such occasions, we pay tribute to your memory by carrying forward the struggle to which you dedicated your life.

For the SEP of Canada,
Keith Meadowcroft

Dear members of the Brust family, dear comrades of the SEP,

It is well known that young people devote themselves with some ease to great ideals, particularly if they grow up in a period marked by massive social and political struggles. But it is very rare that they defend these ideals all their adult life--and this under conditions where the class struggle is receding and the majority of their former friends and comrades are accommodating to prevailing conditions. But it is exactly the few persons who do so who constitute the decisive link between the generations.

Jean and Bill Brust were such persons--and in this respect they were outstanding and extraordinary among their contemporaries.

With all the difficulties they faced in their private and political lives, they never abandoned for a moment the convictions they had arrived at in the great class struggles of the thirties and in the midst of the monumental faction fight between Trotskyism and Stalinism: that the human race has the potential to build a truly socialist society; a society that is in economic, social and cultural terms on a much higher level than the one we presently live in.

Jean and Bill made an outstanding theoretical and political contribution to the Trotskyist movement. But on that field, there were others who had greater talents and abilities. Their unique contribution was to bestow upon the movement a confidence in its historical mission, that only age and experience can give.

For the founding members of our section--who, at a very young age, set out to restore the Marxist tradition in Germany--the discussions held with Bill and Jean were among the formative experiences of our lives. They supplied our youthful enthusiasm and radicalism with the confidence and the sense of historical continuity, without which a revolutionary movement cannot last.

As Marxists we have no need for an immortal soul or other religious illusions to console ourselves about the fact that human beings are mortal. Jean and Bill are and will remain immortal through the contribution they have made to the development of human society.

On behalf of all members of the German Socialist Equality Party I am sending the warmest regards to your memorial meeting,

Peter Schwarz
Essen, 16 May

There is no more fitting location in which to hold a tribute to comrade Jean Brust than Minneapolis, the city whose socialist traditions and history of workers' struggles played such an important role in shaping her character.

Jean epitomised all that is best in the American working class: its courage, sense of duty and iron determination to fight for what is right and just. What distinguishes her is the degree to which these traits were reinforced and even transcended by her embrace of Marxism and the struggle for the socialist unification of the workers of the world.

Jean's entire adult life was animated by the great historic principles embodied in the Fourth International. She was one of the very few in the world's most powerful capitalist nation who were able to cut through the lies and calumny heaped on the workers movement by the Stalinist bureaucracy in order to ensure its bloody dictatorship and find the correct path. Her enduring significance, the political legacy she bequeathed us all, is more than simply the sum of her writings and speeches. It is the example she provides of a comrade prepared to give her all for the cause that she believed in with every fibre of her being.

Anyone like myself who had the privilege of meeting Jean treasures her memory. But many more--the future generations of socialist-minded workers and young people--will do the same. She was a wonderful human being.

Our fondest love and respect to Steve, Cynthia and every member of Jean, Bill and Leo's family. You have every reason to be proud of them all.

Christopher Marsden
On behalf of the Socialist Equality Party of Britain

Dear Comrades,

We of the SEP-Sri Lanka feel privileged to send this brief note in memory of comrade Jean Brust.

All of us who had the benefit of listening to her and learning from her realize that this was one of the great opportunities of our lifetime. This is because she embodied such vast experiences of the struggle for Marxism in the working class movement.

Trotsky in his article, "Class, Party and Leadership," said: "To be sure during a revolution, i.e., when events move swiftly, a weak party can quickly grow into a mighty one provided it lucidly understands the course of the revolution and possesses staunch cadres that do not become intoxicated with phrases and are not terrorized by persecution. But such a party must be available prior to the revolution in as much as the process of educating the cadres requires a considerable period of time and the revolution does not afford this time." Comrade Jean's contribution to the building of the world party of socialist revolution rises to enormous importance when one places it within the context of the years of World War II and its aftermath. She played an enormous role in politically preparing a generation of Marxists to shoulder the revolutionary tasks of the next century. She stood steadfast against the phrase-mongering intoxicators of petty-bourgeois radicalism and fought to build the Fourth International as the head of the international working class.

Jean sought to educate a new generation in Marxist culture. She and her husband, comrade Bill Brust, developed an interest that spanned the broad canvass of human activities to fulfill this task. No one can doubt that comrade Jean died a satisfied human seeing the new forces the ICFI is attracting throughout the world.

We pledge to dedicate ourselves to her lifelong wish of building a mass base for our parties on a world scale.

Yours fraternally,
Wije Dias
General Secretary, SEP, Sri Lanka

See Also:
Remarks of SEP Central Committee member Fred Mazelis
to the May 17, 1998 Memorial Meeting in Minneapolis

A Tribute to Jean Brust
Speech by David North to the May 17, 1998 Memorial Meeting in Minneapolis

Top of pageJean Brust TributeWorld Socialist Web Site