{"id":3460,"date":"2025-06-18T07:57:03","date_gmt":"2025-06-18T06:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=3460"},"modified":"2025-06-18T07:57:03","modified_gmt":"2025-06-18T06:57:03","slug":"dan-gallin-1931-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/dan-gallin-1931-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan Gallin, 1931 – 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dan Gallin, the former general secretary of the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) passed away at his home in Geneva at the end of last month at the age of 94.\u00a0 He was to me, and to many others, a mentor, comrade and friend.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My earliest memories of Dan go back nearly fifty years.  When he would visit New York, we\u2019d meet at various events organised by the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, the forerunner of today\u2019s DSA.  Dan had an interest in the American Left dating back decades to the years he lived there,  at the height of the McCarthy era.  In his time in the US, Dan became a supporter of the anti-Stalinist Left and in particular Max Shachtman\u2019s Workers\u2019 Party (later known as the Independent Socialist League).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dan detested the Stalinists and equally detested the right-wing, CIA-funded Cold Warriors who both played destructive roles in the international labour movement.  But he would not have described himself as \u201cthird camp\u201d socialist.  As he once put it, \u201cthe fundamental line of cleavage in today\u2019s world is not the vertical one separating the two blocs; it is the horizontal one separating the working class from its rulers, and that one runs across both blocs. We are not \u2018East\u2019 or \u2018West\u2019.  We are \u2018below\u2019, where the workers are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Dan approached retirement age, having grown the IUF into a multi-million strong, militant organisation of the world\u2019s food and agriculture trade unions, he first attempted to revive the international workers\u2019 education movement.  In Dan\u2019s view, the workers\u2019 education movement was one of the surviving pillars of what was once a a vast labour movement including political parties, youth groups, cooperatives, and trade unions.  He compared some of those to the ruins of a lost civilisation \u2014 which he intended to help revive.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dan was elected president of the International Federation of Workers\u2019 Education Associations (IFWEA) and he brought me in to produce \u2014 for the first time in the organisation\u2019s 50 year history \u2014 a quarterly magazine, Workers\u2019 Education, which appeared in three languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later on, after stepping down from his role as IFWEA president, Dan established the Global Labour Institute, which he would sometimes describe as an \u201cNGI\u201d \u2014 a non-governmental individual.  Well into his long \u201cretirement\u201d he continued to write and speak and educate a new generation of trade unionists and democratic Leftists.  LabourStart collected many of Dan\u2019s essays going back decades and published them in two books, which are available here: https:\/\/www.labourstart.org\/pico\/?en\/publications<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, he long supported the idea of producing a book on the forgotten history of the first Georgian republic (1918-21).  Back in the 1980s he even suggested that if I could complete writing the book, he could arrange for it to be translated and smuggled across the border into Soviet Georgia.  But the writing of the book outlasted the Soviet Union.  When the book finally appeared, a much older and frailer Dan travelled to Tbilisi to participate in the book\u2019s launch.  As a friend of mine who was there recently reminded me, Dan explained that \u201cdemocratic socialism\u201d was a misnomer: there can be no socialism without democracy, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dan had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of the Left and labour movements, world-wide.  When I last visited him on the eve of the first COVID lockdown, his parting words to me were these: \u201cNext time I see you, remind me to tell you a story about Albanian Trotskyism.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That, in a sentence, expressed who Dan was, how he thought and how he lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

This article appears in this week’s issue of Solidarity<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Gallin, the former general secretary of the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) passed away at his home in Geneva at the end of last month at the age of 94.\u00a0 He was to me,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3461,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solidarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3462,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3460\/revisions\/3462"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}