Auckland historian and commentator, Michael Bassett, is one of the “good guys” to come out of the left of the Labour Party.
Like several of his Labour Cabinet colleagues, Bassett became a supporter of Finance Minister Roger Douglas’s economic policies and went on to become a firm advocate of freedom.
Now in an ironic twist, the Trotskyist comrades from Socialist Worker are selling some Marxist literature once owned by Bassett (complete with youthful scribblings) to raise money for their front newspaper, Workers Charter-edited BTW by John Minto.
Here’s the story
BASSETT! TROTSKY!
From the personal library of the Hon Michael Bassett, Labour cabinet member and historian, lefty in the swinging sixties when he wrote his PhD thesis on the American Socialist Party and was active in the Auckland University Princess St Branch of the Labour Party, eventually a cabinet minister in the notorious 1984-1990 Lange-Douglas government, and then all the way on his right-wing trajectory into the ACT Party—
the classic three volume Isaac Deutscher Life of Trotsky
(Oxford University Press 1963, hard cover, first edition)
signed and annotated by the young rebel Bassett!
In immaculate condition!
$500!
A historical gem and a fund-raiser for Workers’ Charter!
Help Michael Bassett and Leon Trotsky fund the workers’ paper!
(One for your Uncle Trev, prehaps?!! ; ) )
Contact Workers Charter for details: editor@workerscharter.org.nz
How did SW get these books? Does Michael Bassett know? Would Trotsky approve?
Who the hell is “Uncle Trev“?
We lefties love our Uncle Trev to death. We think his basic research skills and his paranoia are cute. As long as he’s trying to chase people who were in a student leftist group for three months in 1979 and are now respectable bourgeois public servants, real red radicals can sleep peacefully in their beds.
You.