a.k.a. Maurice Brinton, Martin Grainger, N.
Kastings (and possibly more)
10 years on – An Integrated
Brainy Life
Christopher Agamemnon (he kept that pretty
quiet) Pallis died on 10th March 2005. Obituaries that appeared in
the British Medical Journal, Guardian and Tribune (among others) testified to the extraordinary contributions
he had made both in his profession of neurology and in the sphere of
left-libertarian politics. Some extracts are given below along with added
recollections and documentation.
 |
| Among those who attended Chris’s funeral – family, medics, politicals – on 20th March 2005 were at least two founder members of RaHN, Alan Woodward and George Shaw |
The headline on The Guardian obituary – “An
irreverent critic of the Bolshevik revolution” was putting it mildly. The authors’
emphasis is on Chris’s writing for Solidarity, a selection of which David
Goodway edited under the title For
Workers' Power (2004), including the three most substantial and influential
‘Maurice Brinton’ texts: Paris May 1968;
The Bolsheviks And Workers' Control,
1917-1921: The State And Counter-Revolution (a book in itself) ; and The Irrational In Politics (1970).
<< The
eminent neurologist Christopher Pallis, who has died aged 81, was also the
principal writer, translator and thinker for the libertarian socialist
Solidarity group, which was most influential during the 1960s and early 1970s.
As a neurologist, his concept of and criteria for brainstem death have been
internationally adopted; and his entry on death for Encyclopaedia Britannica is
a masterpiece of historical and medical summary […]
As a
reviewer and polemicist, Pallis wrote very well. His style was punchy,
accessible and wickedly funny. Especially noteworthy are his vivid reports from
upsurges of popular self-activity: the Belgian General Strike of 1960-61, Paris
in May 1968, and Portugal in 1975 and 1976 […]
His
original work went beyond Castoriadis in certain areas. The pamphlet The
Irrational In Politics (1970) explores the role of sexual repression and
authoritarian conditioning in generating conformity. While derivative of
Wilhelm Reich, as he acknowledged, he convincingly identified 1960s sexual
permissiveness as a breakthrough in the "undermining of tradition"
and terminating a vicious cycle.
Pallis's
political chef d'oeuvre is The Bolsheviks And Workers' Control, 1917-1921: The
State And Counter-Revolution (1970). It traces the obliteration of the Russian
factory committees of 1917-18 so that by 1921 factories and trade unions had
been subordinated to the new Bolshevik state and the party […] >>
Paul Anderson in Tribune likewise concentrates principally on
the political Pallis, and on Solidarity, from a more personal, ‘insider’ (for a
time) viewpoint.
<< I know
lots of people who are good at more than one thing, but very few who could
match Chris Pallis, who died last week at the age of 81. From the early 1960s
until the early 1980s he managed to combine being both one of the world’s
leading authorities in neurology and one of the most innovative and stimulating
voices in British left politics […]
I was
reading his work again when I heard he had died: a collection of his essays and
pamphlets, edited and introduced by David Goodway, has just been published, and
I was working on a review. I had been struck by how exciting I still found his
writing. Brinton’s style is aphoristic, his approach to received wisdom
scornful, his erudition apparent but never intrusive. Very few political writers
are thrilling: Brinton was, and still is. It is very sad that he has gone, but
Goodway’s book is the best possible guarantee that he will not be forgotten. >>
For Workers’ Power, a collection of writings by Maurice Brinton edited by David Goodway, is published by AK
Press at £12
Another ex-Solidarist, Dave Lamb, who
developed an interest and expertise in the philosophical implications of the
brain-death debate, has pointed out in an appreciation of Chris that “it might
be worth considering how his contribution to both areas overlapped and
complemented each other.”
Always forceful in Solidarity
discussions. Above all he was a demystifier. This was also a fundamental
scientific and political objective. On the one hand were the centralist
Leninists and Trotskyites, and on the other were the subjective and frequent
woolly ideas of various anarchists, peaceniks, and supporters of cults. Both
sides were subject to his criticism. Likewise in medicine. Marshalling
scientific and historical material in support of a neurological definition of
death he demystified the cardio-centrists and their traditional definition on
the one hand and the frequently woolly and subjective ideas of the
bioethicists, philosophers and personal identity theorists on the other hand.
Then there was his wit, which he
considered essential in the presentation of arguments [...]
Fair enough, and it will strike a chord
particularly with those who were in on
the brain-stem death debate and heard that famous, memorable lecture – and saw
the slides, not all grim (a wiry tangle
captioned “Woolly thinking” – “Don’t copy that down”; a device for sending a
signal from inside a coffin, “so that if people felt they had been buried alive
..”) The primacy of consciousness and the favouring of human decision-making
based on rational assessment ("in full knowledge of the relevant facts") over a mechanistic ‘fix’, as well as the
humanitarian imperative to prevent suffering, are obvious points of contact and
carry-over.
Sometimes the medical-political overlap was
visible and the connection spelt out, an early example being Abortion: Law and
reality”, Martin Grainger’s review in Agitator
no.5 (pp.14-16) of Law for the Rich, by Alice Jenkins (Gollancz, 1960). He praised the
book for doing “more than to present a well argued case against the prevailing
laws. It deals systematically with all the objections, medical and eugenic,
;scientific’ and irrational, that the opponents of legalised abortion put
forward from time to time.” It was an unusual choice of subject for a left-wing
paper at this time, and its level of well-informed seriousness probably unique.
Chris was to continue to uphold women’s right to choose, and was ready to
deploy his expertise in opposition to attempts to turn the clock back after the
1967 Act. As with other issues, his support was not abstract and theoretical;
he would appear on demos, handing out leaflets and selling papers, regardless
of anonymity or pseudonyms. He extended his criticism of the status quo to the
medical profession itself, and was concerned about developments in the NHS, as
shown in a detailed critique of bureaucratic changes in 1978, reproduced
earlier on this blog.
The BMJ called Chris the “Neurologist who
defined brainstem death”, recalling the kerfuffle over a Panorama programme in October 1980 which
“alleged that patients certified as brain dead sometimes recovered, and hence
that the supply of transplantable organs was skewed by doctors wanting to
remove organs from trauma patients who might have recovered.”
<< Chris
Pallis stepped into the centre of this controversy. As a neurologist with a
strong interest in general medicine, and working in a hospital that was a
transplant centre, he was accustomed to diagnosing brain death. He was,
moreover, an outstanding writer and teacher. He took on the unenviable job of
persuading the profession and the public that brainstem death was true death,
and, indeed, that it could be diagnosed at the bedside without the need for
high-tech imaging. He was the author of the BMJ's ABC of Brainstem Death (1983,
second edition 1995), which remains a masterpiece of clear exposition. >>
This episode led to Chris becoming
recognised internationally as an expert on the subject, invited to travel and
spread the word, and to write on ‘Death’ for the Encyclopædia Britannica, an assignment he undertook with typical
thoroughness and enthusiasm, hunting up relevant sources and allusions in the
library and keen to share his discoveries. At the same time he was deeply
convinced of the seriousness of the project; it mattered to him that the
criteria should be understood and accepted in different cultural contexts, not
only to facilitate transplants and save lives, but to prevent the distress caused to
relatives and waste of resources involved in ‘ventilating a corpse’. (This
concern was no doubt a factor in his continuing insistence on preserving the
Brinton pseudonym for his political writings, in case anything else he wrote might
be dismissed out of hand as coming from a Red or loony-leftie.)
The
developments in the idea and diagnosis of brain-stem death
came as a response to a conceptual challenge. Intensive-care technology had
saved many lives, but it had also created many brain-dead patients. To grasp the implications of this situation,
society in general--and the medical profession in particular--was forced to
rethink accepted notions about death
itself. The emphasis had to shift from the most common mechanism of death (i.e., irreversible
cessation of the circulation) to the results that ensued when that mechanism
came into operation: irreversible
loss of the capacity for consciousness, combined with irreversible apnea
[inability to breathe]. These results, which can also be produced by primary
intracranial catastrophes, provide philosophically sound, ethically acceptable,
and clinically applicable secular equivalents to the concepts of
"departure of the soul" and "loss of the breath of life,' "
which were so important to some earlier cultures.
Copyright © 1994-2000 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
[highligting added]
It was a heady time to observe the Pallis
phenomenon, especially for anyone able to see both facets of his super-activity. In the midst of the writing, lecturing, TV interviews and incisive debate
(“What was the primary pathology?”),
he was also keenly interested in what was happening in Poland, where the
Solidarnosc movement was kicking off in a big way, and was involved in
organising the meeting that led to the formation of the Polish Solidarity
Campaign. (Ian Kennedy’s 1980 Reith Lectures on ‘Unmasking Medicine’ fed into
the intellectual buzz too, appealing to his conviction that issues of medical
ethics could and should be explained and understood outside the profession.) Once,
at the height of his media celebrity, after delivering his tour-de-force
lecture on brainstem death to a large and appreciative audience, Chris made his
way through the eminent colleagues and
others milling round to comment and congratulate him, to ask a member of
Solidarity (who happened to be employed in a lowly clerical capacity in a unit
on the Hammersmith Hospital/Postgraduate Medical School campus) something about
a meeting or leaflet. Whatever the demands on his attention, he could find time,
for example, to collaborate on a leaflet and to discuss whatever was going on.
His political commitment was an open secret
in his work environment, even if its details were hazy to many there. The word
among some overseas students was that his promotion to Professor was blocked
because he was a “communist”. It was not
always easy to get across the ideas either that someone of his views may not have
wanted a Professorship, or precisely what those views were. Conversely, he was always
known by his own name in and around Solidarity, the pseudonyms being for
writing only, and comrades were aware of his profession, most probably with
comparable vagueness. It was an open secret to the security services too; the
risks he ran were real. As early as 1945, when he was still a student (and
unregenerate Trot), his cover had been blown:
National Archives file HO45/25486: a report
on the RCP and the Trotskyist movement: "In 1946
attempts to build at Oxford University and the name of Christopher Pallis, a
medical student at Balliol appears who, it is said, spoke at the Neath
by-election under the name of N. Kastings."
and - in Extract from
New Scotland Yard (Special Branch) fortnightly summary No. 122 for the
period ended 30-11-45 - "The Revolutionary Communist Party is endeavouring
to secure a footing amongst students at Oxford University, and it has printed a
four-page pamphlet entitled "The Manifesto of the October League" for
distribution among the students. One of
the leaders is Christopher PALLIS, a medical student at Oxford, who, under the
alias of N. KASTINGS, spoke at a number of Jock HASTON's election meetings in
South Wales during March."
The anti-worker, blacklist-promoting
Economic League reported on a meeting held at his house in 1961:
National Archives file LAB
43/368 Economic League: statement on subversive activity in
the motor industry 1961 (was SECRET). File contains an Economic
League Report of 27-6-61, received by the Ministry of Labour,
mostly concerned with the CP and World Federation of Trade Unions. Also
mentions the National Committee of Shop Stewards as a `Communist subsidiary
organisation', lists a number of firms supposedly being targeted by subversives,
refers to strikes of 1957-58. At the end, page 6, the report adds:
`Together with the Communist-organised activities, note has
also to be taken of a new subversive movement recently set up in
the engineering industry. Last March a school for practical and theoretical
training of industrial agitators was held at a private house ... The
"instructor" was an A.E.U. shop steward from North London, who laid
it down that extremist activities in the workshops must be independent
of union control and that at all costs union officials must be kept out
of the factories...'
In the furore after the Spies for Peace
revelations his name came up again.
[The actual
perpetrators were never discovered]
A full biography would doubtless have much
more to reveal about this fascinating and significant life; if the insiders’
history of Solidarity comes to fruition it may contribute to this. In the
meantime we have an interview, some account of his early political trajectory,
and of course his own writings, many in print and/or online, plus much still to
be unearthed from the faded crumbling pages of our old magazines.
L.W.
