Obituaries Australia

The death has occurred from pneumonia of Charles Reeves, one of the twelve men framed-up in the famous I.W.W. case during the last war.

Reeves was subsequently released by a Labor Government, as the Royal Commission which directed the release of the other men declined to do so in the case of Reeves.

Reeves could be described as a typical I.W.W. agitator in his "stump" methods. His misfortune was that he was impregnated with the non-Marxist, Anarcho-syndicalist ideology, which, in the end, has everywhere proven itself reactionary and bankrupt, in the U.S.A., in Spain, Australia, and wherever it has had a following.

Unlike J. B. King, Bob Bessant and other former I.W.W. leaders, Charles Reeves was unable to rise to the level of a Marxist-Leninist understanding, to Communism.

That is why, towards the end of his life, Reeves, was unable to take a leading part in the class struggle.

Despite his political limitations, in his prime "Charlie" Reeves did much to arouse a militant feeling among the workers.

Reeves often felt the heavy hand of capitalist persecution, in the way of gaol and victimisation.

The failure of the I.W.W. and the fact that men like Reeves were eventually left behind, as it were, by the progress of the revolutionary movement, proves once again that only the Party with a correct theory, i.e., Marxism-Leninism, can grow, along with the advance of the working class.

Such is the lesson of the life and activity of "Charlie" Reeves.