John Riddell (Marxist)


John Riddell is a Canadian Marxist essayist, historian, editor, translator and activist. He is best known as editor of The Communist International in Lenin’s Time, an eight-volume series of books of Communist International documents, many of which have been translated into English for the first time.

Biography

John Riddell was born in 1942.
Riddell joined the Socialist Education League in 1959 and was a founding member of its successor, the League for Socialist Action in 1961. From 1960 until 1967, he was leader of the Young Socialists, the youth movement associated with the SEL and then the LSA. He was the LSA's Toronto organizer in the late 1960s and its candidate for Mayor of Toronto in the 1969 municipal election. Riddell served as executive secretary of the LSA from 1972 until 1977 when it merged with other Trotskyist groups to form the Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue Ouvrière Révolutionnaire.
Riddell was the executive secretary of the Revolutionary Workers League/Ligue Ouvrière Révolutionnaire from its formation in 1977 until the mid-1980s when he was relocated to New York City to work for the Socialist Workers Party and Pathfinder Press on the Communist International project.
He returned to Toronto in 1993, and was active with the RWL's successor, the Communist League until 2004 when he broke with the CL and the SWP over their lack of support for demonstrations against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Ridell's father, Robert Gerald Riddell, was a Canadian diplomat and Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations from 1950 until his death from a heart attack the next year. His mother, Kay Riddell, founded the International Student Centre at the University of Toronto.

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