Not a household name, of course. But surely many readers will have been inspired by his designs, one of which is reproduced left.

You can read an obituary [in Spanish] here and see a selection of his other work here.

And yes, I have recently argued that today's left should move away from heroic muscle-bound worker-type graphics. But Fontseré's imagery was right for its time, which is why it will live on after his death.

Born in Canada in 1959, Flint is credited with transforming the ITF Communications Department, especially through pioneering use of the internet and email during the early days of the technology.

He also launched the ITF Seafarers’ Bulletin - the first international trade union publication aimed at rank and file workers in a globalised industry – which recently celebrated its 20th Anniversary.

Thanks to an academic interest in labour movement history, he was also responsible for the publication of the short book, Solidarity, which marked the ITF’s centenary in 1996.

Politically a socialist until his death, he was a member of both the Transport and General Workers’ Union and the National Union of Journalists.

Many ITF staff remember his time as their union representative, driving a hard bargain for the ITF workforce with their own management.

ITF general secretary David Cockroft said in tribute:

"When we learnt that he was suffering from a very serious genetic disease which was set to develop progressively, everyone working with him was deeply saddened, but even then – up to the moment when he really couldn’t face a full working day – he kept on polishing and perfecting ITF publications, campaign materials and, of course, his beloved ITF website.

"Richard may finally have succumbed to his disease, but his sense of humour, dynamism and very strong personality will live on his colleagues memory for many years to come."

Richard's website is here. And condolences can be left here.

The decidedly unatmospheric main auditorium at the Barbican Centre is probably my least favourite gig venue in the world, so it is a credit to his abilities - even at an advanced age - that he still managed to get the music across.

I was well aware that Roach was an anti-racist, and over the last few days, I've been told that he explicitly identified as a socialist. Long having treasured We Insist!, that shouldn't have come as a surprise.

Unlike much politically-inspired jazz, this album [sleeve pictured left] still stands up 47 years after its release.

You can read more about Roach's political activities - and watch some YouTube footage - over at Shiraz Socialist.

Andrew Glyn, perhaps the leading leftwing economist in the UK for the past 30 years, died on December 22 aged 64, shortly after the diagnosis of a brain tumour.

In his influential first book with Bob Sutcliffe, British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze (1972), he lifted leftwing economics out of sectarian Marxist theory into the language of modern economics and political economy.

His selflessness, enthusiasm for ideas and capacity for taking pleasure in life made him the ideal friend and tutor. These qualities helped him to build a successful personal and intellectual partnership with Wendy Carlin, his second wife, also an academic economist, and with his four children.

Born as Pierre Boussel in Paris in June 1920, the son of a Russian-Jewish émigré tailor, Lambert was recruited to the far left as a teenager, joining the grouping around Raymond Molinier in the 1930s.

Molinier - a sometime brothel keeper and taxi cab firm boss - has justifiably entered Trot history as something of a wide boy and general purpose spiv; but as Frédéric Charpier makes clear in his book ‘Histoire de l'extrême gauche trotskiste, de 1929 à nos jours’, he was capable of raising the funds to keep his show on the road, and consequently his faction picked up the proles; the intellectuals signed up to the rival grouping around Pierre Naville, who secured official recognition from the Old Man.

The Le Monde obit maintains that it is unclear what stance Lambert took in world war two; it seems that he may have argued for entrism inside collaborationist organisations rather than supporting the resistance. If this is true, that is obviously not to his credit. I’m not in a position to judge.

But Lambert gets more kudos for siding with the anti-Pabloites in the 1953 split in the Fourth International. His Parti communiste internationaliste was one of the principal components of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Formally, this was the correct side of the bust-up to be on, although ultimately what was to become the United Secretariat emerged as a far healthier political tradition.

By the early 1970s, the ICFI essentially boiled down to the PCI and the increasingly madcap Socialist Labour League in Britain; Lambert broke with the Healyites, and after a failed flirtation with the USec, ended up in a regroupment with the Latin American current around Nahuel Moreno. That wasn’t to last, either.

British supporters - the Socialist Labour Group, around Ken Stratford, Harry Stannard, Steve Lloyd, Mike Phipps of Labour Left Briefing, and RMT militant Martin Wicks - were active in the Labour Party during the 1980s. Thereafter, the SLG folded into Alan Thornett's International Socialist Group, today the soi-disant organised Marxist left of Respect Renewal.

Ultimately, the PT was doomed to remain number three of the three main Trot tendencies in France. Lambert - standing under his real name - picked up 116,823 votes in the 1988 presidential contest. That’s a whopping 0.39 % of validly cast ballots. But in keeping with its consistent orientation towards the class, PT remains hegemonic in the Force ouvrière union federation.

Whatever one’s final judgement on his political career, Lambert’s death marks the departure of another stalwart from the generation of 1930s militants who upheld the ideals of revolutionary socialism in the midnight of the century, against the monstrous hegemony of Stalinism. For that reason alone, mourn his passing.

UPDATE: French newspaper Libération pays tribute here. Yes, it's in French.

- Editorial in the Evening Standard, 4 January 2002

Greg Tucker – who died yesterday from throat cancer – was no stranger to hostile media coverage; it’ll be interesting to see what some of the mainstream press obituarists come up with. But he never had any difficulty with being described as ‘an unreconstructed figure of the hard left’, because that is essentially what he was.

Greg (pictured) and I got to know one another in the South London branch of the International Socialist Group in the early 1990s, and later worked together in the London Socialist Alliance. In the 2001 general election, he stood as a Socialist Alliance parliamentary candidate, polling 906 votes against Keith Hill in Streatham.

He also served as a Labour councillor in Lambeth throughout the period in which that local authority was controlled by the hard left, achieving a certain amount of notoriety, including this mention in the House of Commons by a Tory former cabinet minister.

As Michael Heseltine made clear, Greg lost his council seat not because he was voted out by the voters or democratically deselected by Labour Party members, but because he was deemed unacceptable by the Walworth Road machine:

Mr. Heseltine : But there is a consolation prize for the Labour party. It will win the vote of no confidence that was passed today in its Labour candidates in Lambeth. The House is entitled to the latest up-to-the -minute information. Today the Labour executive kicked out 13 of Labour's councillors in Lambeth. The Labour leader, Joan Twelves, is out. The mayor, George Huish, is out. The deputy leader, John Harrison, is out. The chief whip, Julian Lewis, is out. Greg Tucker, Mrs. Twelves's partner, is out. I leave it to my right hon. and hon. Friends to interpret that for themselves ; whatever he happens to be, he is out on his ear. As all those great luminaries of the Labour establishment get the chop, they have given a new political significance to the meaning of the Lambeth walk. [Interruption.] It is a long way to Tipperary and it is quite a long way to Sheffield as well.

As if all of this didn’t keep him busy enough, Greg went on to achieve notoriety all over again for his activism in the RMT transport union, playing a leading role in several strikes. In 1999, he stood for the position of general secretary on a rank and file ticket, and picked up around one-third of the ballot, a highly credible vote for a revolutionary.

The Daily Telegraph headlined one story about him ‘Left-winger at the heart of the dispute'. It's almost a pity that Greg will be cremated rather than buried, because that would have made the perfect epitaph. Condolences to Joan and to Greg’s son by an earlier relationship.

GUILLERMO Lora – leader of Bolivia’s Partido Obrero Revolucionaria, one of the few Trotskyist organisations in history ever to gain a mass following - died on Sunday, aged 87, as a result of a liver cancer. I haven’t seen his demise announced anywhere online in English yet, but the most extensive Spanish obit have I come across is here.

Lora is best known as the author of the Pulacayo Theses in 1947, essentially an application of the Transitional Programme to local conditions. The document formed the platform of the country’s militant miners’ union FSTMB in the revolution five years later. After 1952, the POR essentially found itself in control of the Bolivian labour movement.

But throughout much of the following decade, Bolivia was ruled by a succession of short-lived military juntas, and POR found itself working in clandestine conditions. By the 1970s, Lora himself was forced into exile.

He was subsequently able to return to the country. Although POR never again rebuilt the base it once enjoyed, it retains influence in some white collar unions.

POR historically formed part of the International Committee tradition, siding with the Lambertists in the split, but in 1988 formed its own international grouping, the Comité de Enlace por la Reconstrución de la IV Internacional. It never expanded beyond Latin America, and seems to have been dormant in recent years.

FOR a man who purveyed little more than warmed over supply side economics and a stress on the need for religiously-rooted morality, Irving Kristol – who has died aged 89 – was idolised on the transatlantic political right to an extent entirely out of proportion with any distinctive intellectual contribution to their cause.

Given that he remains little known to the public in this country, the extent of the coverage given to the passing of the godfather of neoconservatism over here comes as something of a surprise.

Thus the likes of Daniel Finkelstein can rhapsodise about ‘what made Irving Kristol great’, without providing any evidence of greatness, other than general misantrophic grumpiness harnessed behind the cause of reaction and somehow served up as profundity.

If anything, Kristol was more of an organiser than an ideas man, acting as publisher for the journals that first got the neocon message across. That’s no bad thing from the right’s point of view; all political currents need people together enough make things happen.

But what I suspect the right really likes about him is his backstory; while Kristol coined the soundbite that a neoconservative is ‘a liberal who has been mugged by reality’, he was in fact a Trot mugged by conservatism, and then brutally beaten out of all recognition.

What will be of most interest to Dave’s Part readers is Kristol’s journey from far left to far right. This man made opposition to Soviet totalitarianism the fulcrum of his political thought, thus evolving seamlessly from young anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist to hardline anti-communist old man, while still retaining some level of consistency.

Back in the 1930s, of course, Kristol was a teenage member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, at a time when that organisation was in close contact with Trotsky himself in Mexico City.

In 1940, Kristol lined up with the breakaway minority opposition around Max Shactman, along with noted philosopher James Burnham and subsequently famous novelist Saul Bellow, both later to move to the right.

Shachtman himself supported the Bay of Pigs incursion in Cuba and the Vietnam war, and by 1972, implicitly endorsed Republican anti-communist Richard Nixon. A number of other big name neocons were associated with Shachtman in their youth, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

When I first got involved in the labour movement, elderly East End tankies routinely offered admonition that such line of motion was nascent within the Trotskyist DNA. Any word of criticism of actually existing socialism was tantamount to the first step down the road to reactionary Toryism. I suspect some on the left believe something pretty like that, even today.

Yet it is always impossible to know exactly what drives any individual down the path from right to left. As the Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrant garment workers, Kristol’s life story was clearly not another instance the standard posh boy university flirtation with paper-selling.

Ultimately I think the answer lies in both generational and national factors. Radical politics in the US in the cold war years, especially the McCarthyite 1950s, was subject to specific pressures which the British left was not forced to endure. In the UK, careerists always had the option of social democracy. Under our system, pensioned off former Cliffites can easily end up in the House of Lords.

But in the final analysis, the right loves Kristol because he started out as one of ours, and ended up as one of them, taking numerous other clever individuals along with him for the trip.

CHRIS Harman - former editor of Socialist Worker and International Socialism Journal, and a leading theoretician of the Socialist Workers' Party - died in Cairo last night, reportedly as a result of a heart attack. A statement from the SWP central committee can be read here.

He was a prolific writer, especially on history and Marxist economics. On the latter topic, he was one of the few authors whose work remained accessible to the non-specialist reader, although thanks to its mistaken theoretical framework, he inevitably reached obviously untenable conclusions.

My last memory of him will not be of an orator in full flight, but as a man holding a carrier bag with one hand and his partner's arm with the other, while traipsing round Dalston Kingsland shopping centre on a Sunday afternoon.

Condolences to his families and friends.