Remembering Comrade Chris

The following is an edited and expanded version of a note sent by Tom Riley to a group of comrades, mostly former Spartacists from the Bay Area, on 15 April, a day after Chris Kinder (“Knox,” “Korwin”) died.

As most of you know, Chris joined the Spartacist League (SL) at an early age; in 1965 I think, when he was 21. He was a high-impact recruit. In November 1966 he was arrested on the Berkeley campus of the University of California while protesting in front of an event featuring a Soviet diplomat holding a sign that read “Soviet Nuclear Shield Must Cover Peking, Hanoi.” Spartacist No. 9 featured the story on its back page.

From September 1972 to April 1973 Chris served as the managing editor of Workers Vanguard (WV), succeeding Nick Benjamin before being replaced by Jan Norden. When I met Chris in late 1973, he was a member of the SL Political Bureau and labor editor of Workers Vanguard. Chris also headed up the SL’s Trade Union Commission and oversaw the successful implantation of dozens of young cadres in various industries and the creation of at least a dozen significant party fractions during the 1970s. With the collaboration of SL founder/leader James Robertson, he wrote a very valuable series of articles on the history of communist trade-union work in America, which we reprinted in our 1998 edition of Trotsky’s Transitional Program.

In 1974-75, when we were starting up a Spartacist group in Toronto, we recruited a few postal workers who had less political experience than I did, and so I was briefly put in charge of our postal work. It was at this time that I got to know Chris who I would often phone for advice. He was generally patient and encouraging (a characteristic not shared by all leading SL comrades). If I asked a particularly stupid or naïve question, Chris would humorously rebuke me before suggesting a better approach to the problem. His suggestions sometimes seemed so obvious that I felt a bit foolish; but I learned a lot from him and gradually improved, as did the other members of the fraction. His modus operandi was to try to help the comrades doing the work in the field to get better, rather than belittling them for mistakes.

In 1977 Chris was sent to Australia to replace Bill Logan as the National Chairman of the Spartacist group there. His tenure in that post ended in 1981 when he became one of the targets of an irrational and apolitical purge (dissected in a 1996 letter to the Internationalist Group, see: pp 3-5 “The 1981 Purge of the Australian Section”). This led to Chris’s departure from the SL:

“A few weeks after the dust settled, Chris K. and Robbye [his then partner] were pulled out of the section and sent back to New York. On the way back they got off in the Bay Area and phoned in their resignations.”

Chris credited Howard Keylor and Ursula Jensen of the External Tendency with helping him make sense of his experience and understand what was happening to the organization in which he was so heavily invested. Chris agreed with us on every substantial political question and we hoped he would join us; but unfortunately he had been burned too badly by the SL to take that step. He did, however, loyally support us for years, both financially and politically.

Chris was one of several former SL cadres who worked closely with us during the 1984 anti-apartheid longshore boycott in San Francisco that Howard initiated. Chris was a genuinely nice guy, but he also had a hard political edge. This was evident in the scathing denunciation of the SL’s attempt to wreck the boycott that he drafted. The letter, co-signed by Jack Heyman (“Jeff Hayden”) and Mike Adams (“Anton”), which was ignored by WV, eventually appeared as “Third Period Robertsonism at Pier 80” in the May 1985 issue of the ET Bulletin.

In 1987 Chris wrote a review for us of a book by Bryan Palmer on a major labor struggle in British Columbia. Over the years, we worked with Chris on many issues—including in the Bay Area-based Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Chris was always reasonable, even when we had differences on an important question—as we did over the current war in Ukraine where he took a dual defeatist position.

I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to speak with Chris (and his partner Beth) after the 25 January memorial meeting for Howard held in the San Francisco longshore hall. That was our last contact.

Chris was a profoundly decent person who made very significant contributions to the socialist movement and, right to the end, remained committed to the struggle to liberate humanity from the irrationality of capitalism and open the road to a socialist future. His was a life well lived.