Thomas A. Jackson

Thomas Alfred Jackson (21 August 1879 – 18 August 1955), known as T. A. Jackson or Tommy Jackson, was a founding member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was a communist activist and newspaper editor, and worked variously as a party functionary, freelance lecturer, and writer. Historian Jonathan Rose described him as "the most brilliant proletarian intellectual to come out of the British Communist Party."

Biography Early years Jackson was born in Clerkenwell, London, on 21 August 1879. His father, Thomas Blackwell Jackson, was a compositor and a firm Gladstonian liberal and trade unionist with Fenian sympathies. An avid reader from a young age, Jackson was limited in his formal education to attending Duncombe Road School in Upper Holloway, a board school at which he was a pupil between the ages of seven and thirteen and a half. After leaving school, he was apprenticed in the printing trade as a compositor, but eventually abandoned the trade to become a full-time political speaker, and later a writer.

Political career Jackson dated his conversion to socialism to 1900, after he read a copy of Robert Blatchford's book Merrie England which had been given to him years earlier by an older colleague at the printworks where he apprenticed. That year he joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), where he developed his oratorical skills at open-air meetings, overcoming the shyness he had endured as a child. Whilst a member of the SDF, he attended classes on Marx's Capital which were taught by Jack Fitzgerald, whom Jackson described as "very nearly the best-read man I have ever met".

In 1904, Jackson helped found the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB). He also contributed a small number of opinion pieces to the Socialist Standard. He resigned from the SPGB in March 1909 to become a paid speaker for the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Bristol and South Wales, initially spending three months in Bristol before moving to Newport, where he stayed until the summer of 1911. He was among those arrested before the General Strike of 1926. In 1929 he was removed from Party leadership, essentially for opposing the 'Left turn' of the Third Period (which characterised the Labour Party as ‘social-fascist’), but he remained a paid CPGB journalist who contributed to the Daily Worker and wrote several CPGB pamphlets. In 1933 he was an organiser within the British section of the League of Militant Atheists. In the 1940s, he returned to his roots, working as a lecturer on Communist theory for the Party's Education Department, travelling across the country for eight or nine months of the year. One of his pamphlets was a critique of the British monarchy, The Jubileeand How (1935), arguing that the Silver Jubilee of George V was inappropriate at a time of widespread unemployment.

His most substantial work was Dialectics: The Logic of Marxism and its Critics (1936). Largely self-taught in philosophy, Jackson attempted in the book to provide "a staunch defense of the dialectics of nature, and put great stress on the connection between the Marxist conception of understanding (its subjective dialectics) and its conceptions of nature, history, and revolution (its objective dialectics)." The book was also a polemic against various critics of Marxism in the English-speaking world.

Next, he researched the life of Charles Dickens and published Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical (1937). Jackson's 1940 book Trials of British Freedom recounted trials-at-law in British history that involved issues of "social emancipation and political sovereignty." As Philip Bounds notes: In 1946, he published a passionate defense of Irish independence, Ireland—Her Own. His 1953 autobiography, Solo Trumpet, retold the first forty years of his life and has been called "a classic working-class memoir". Katie died in January 1927, having been committed to Claybury Hospital due to declining mental health. Historian Stuart Macintyre described Dialectics: The Logic of Marxism and its Critics as "perhaps...the most considerable literary achievement of Jackson's generation of working-class intellectuals".

Selected bibliography

Footnotes

Sources consulted Socialist Party of Great Britain 1904–1913 membership register Justice, weekly newspaper of the Social Democratic Federation Thomas A. Jackson. Solo Trumpet "Thomas A. Jackson". Dictionary of Labour Biography, Volume IV Vivien Morton and Stuart Macintyre T. A. Jackson: A Centenary Appreciation. "Our History", pamphlet 73, 1979 Socialist Standard, August 1909