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Jim McClelland reflects that Marxism was just as much a dogma as religion. He talks of the collapse of communism in the USSR and his own disillusionment with Trotskyism.
Curator’s notes
Jim McClelland talks frankly with interviewer Dinny O’Hearn, a fellow Melburnian, about his early life as a committed Trotskyist. He ranges widely from the monstrous crimes of Christianity to those of Stalin, and muses about how the collapse of communism must have left a gaping hole in the life of some of its fervent believers who had treated it as a religion. He is sceptical of those who insist that if Trotsky had run Russia, instead of Stalin, communism might have worked. These days he believes that a totalitarian regime cannot be imposed upon a people.
Jim McClelland was always a snappy dresser and this is the origin of his nickname, 'Diamond Jim’. After his death, his widow Gil Appleton wrote a memoir of their life together called Diamond Cuts: An Affectionate Memoir of Jim McClelland (2000), which also included some of his last writing.
