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Christoforos Agamemnon Pallis (Maurice Brinton)
4 December 1923 - 10 March 2005
Propaganda and policemen, prisons and schools, traditional values and traditional morality all serve to reinforce the power of the few and to convince or coerce the many into acceptance of a brutal, degrading and irrational system.
As We See It - Solidarity
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Maurice Brinton was the pen name of Christopher Agamemnon Pallis (2 December 1923, Bombay – 10 March 2005, London) who was the principal writer, translator and thinker for the British libertarian socialist group Solidarity from 1960 until the early 1980s.
He was born in India in 1923 to a distinguished Anglo-Greek family. When his father decided to retire and return to Europe, he chose to settle in Switzerland and Brinton received most of his schooling there, becoming fluent in English, Greek and French.
His great uncle, Alexandros Pallis, was a poet whose translation of the New Testament into demotic Greek provoked the bloody Gospel Riots of 1901. A second cousin, Marco Pallis, Alexandros's son, became a notable Tibetan traveller and authority on Buddhism.
He went to Balliol College Oxford in 1941 to study medicine and did his clinical studies at the Radcliffe Infirmary. While an undergraduate, he met Jeannine Marty whom he married in 1947.
He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain but was expelled as a result of his criticism of its policy on the Second World War. He moved on to Trotskyism and supported the Revolutionary Communist Party until 1946.
He then dropped out of politics for a decade while he pursued his medical career, but in 1957 joined the Trotskyist group led by Gerry Healy, the Club, which in 1959 became the Socialist Labour League. He was expelled by Healy in 1960 and with a group of other ex-members of the Socialist Labour League immediately set up Solidarity.
Like a number of other former members of the Socialist Labour League he was also involved with the journal International Socialism in the early 1960s. He wrote many articles and translated a significant part of the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, the main thinker of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, using the pseudonym Maurice Brinton. Worth mentioning are his brilliant reports from key moments in European politics: the Belgian General Strike of 1960-61, Paris in May 1968, and the Portugal Carnation Revolution Portugal in 1974- 1976.
Pallis had been writing as "Martin Grainger", but in 1961 he was exposed by the press, endangering his job as a Hammersmith hospital consultant in neurology. After that, his political writings and translations were anonymous or signed "Maurice Brinton".
Pallis's most significant works are the The Bolsheviks And Workers' Control, 1917-1921: The State And Counter-Revolution (1970) on the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution and The Irrational in Politics (1974) on sexual politics.
Pallis's intellect, command of logic and charismatic enthusiasm made him an outstanding clinical neurologist. Internationally he was probably the best-known English neurological teacher of his time by virtue of his many overseas trainees. He travelled widely, especially in Asia, studying tropical diseases of the nervous system and the cultures in which these occurred. His freethinking approach is evident in his transdisciplinary Neurology of Gastrointestinal Disease (1974). Towards the end of his career he became an expert witness on legal cases involving complex neurological issues.
In later life he had Parkinson's disease or a related movement disorder, from which he died in March 2005. He is survived by his wife Jeannine and his son Michael.
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