Eric Heffer, who rose to the top of the Labour Party’s left-wing hierarchy in the 1970s and 1980s, spent much of his early political career in the Communist Party of Great Britain and, after being expelled in 1948, in the Socialist Workers’ Federation, an anti-Communist Party Marxist organization. Heffer relinquished his Marxism in the late 1950s but continued to support the hard-left section of the Labour Party and the Trotskyist Militant organization in Liverpool in the 1980s. Yet whilst much is known about his work within the Labour Party and his left-wing campaigns for the Labour Party Leadership and Deputy Leadership, little is understood about his Marxist years, beyond his own brief comments and writings. By examining both his personal papers and his extensive writings and speeches, this article attempts to reveal his experiences in Marxism and its impact on his political attitudes and actions. What it reveals is that Marxism shaped Heffer’s thinking towards the need for genuine, participatory, industrial and political democracy by the working class in the creation of a socialist Britain. It was only when he realized that the bureaucratic nature of the Communist leadership, dominated by Stalinism and the use of democratic centralism, restricted freedom of expression and dissent and abandoned revolutionary change that he made a seismic move to the Labour Party to pursue his goals in a non-revolutionary manner.

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