In memoriam: Gáspár Miklós Tamás

Abstract

Gáspár Miklós Tamás (aka TGM, or Gazsi to friends) is being remembered in his many facets: essayist, liberal dissident, Tory anarchist and even in one case as “intellectual rock star.” But I knew him as a communist revolutionary. Almost in the image of protagonists of the Victor Serge novels he had read when young: blazing at the inept and corrupt ruling classes, agitating at rallies, surrounded by papers and books, insatiably curious, and – unlike most rock stars, even of the intellectual sort – blacklisted by employers, hounded by the security services, and struggling to make ends meet. I say “almost” because he grew into this role late in life and because in his world, whether Gheorghiu-Dej’s Romania or Orbán’s Hungary, bands of comrades operating within mass workers’ movements were absent. His arrival at revolutionary Marxism was individual and circuitous.