Asha Vivienne Jugdutt (1968-2022)

Our comrade Asha Jugdutt died suddenly at her home in Vancouver on 31 December 2022. A passionate fighter for communism her entire adult life, for more than 30 years Asha threw all her energies into building Trotskyism in Canada, serving at various times on the Trotskyist League’s Central Committee, the editorial board of our press and as organizer of the Toronto local. Her death at only 54 was a huge blow to her comrades and friends throughout the International Communist League.

A well-attended memorial to honour Asha was held in Toronto on March 9 of this year. The event was also streamed to close to 50 comrades, friends and family in Canada and the U.S. Photo displays captured Asha’s political history, and her beauty and warmth. The many letters we received from comrades and family, excerpts of which were read aloud, testified to her political and personal impact on everyone she knew. “From a very young age,” one of her sisters wrote, “she was an anthropologist,” genuinely interested in the people she encountered. Her passionate hatred of oppression and exploitation, not least the patriarchal oppression of women and children, fuelled her political determination.

Asha radicalized as a student in Edmonton in the mid-1980s. In her first term at the University of Alberta she organized student solidarity for striking meatpackers whose pickets were besieged by cops and scabs. Soon after, she joined the local affiliate of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec). She threw herself into many political struggles including those of the Lubicon Cree. Barely 20, she was elected to the Central Committee of Socialist Challenge (SC) in 1988.

Asha was a political force of nature, as her comrade and then companion Andrew Shilling described in his remarks to the memorial gathering: “Everyone, from the Communist Party, to the NDP, left academics and various churchy ‘social justice’ committees wanted a piece of this dynamic young woman to breathe life into their own sclerotic do-good reformist politics.” It was not to be. Asha was on a very different trajectory: the fight for revolutionary Trotskyism.

Asha’s serious study of Marxism soon led her to break with the USec’s accommodation of pro-capitalist reformism. The decisive issue was the Russian question. As decades of Stalinist betrayal led to counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of East Europe, the USec hailed this as a “democratic revolution.” Asha and others in the Edmonton branch fought against this and solidarized with the International Communist League’s fight against counterrevolution and for workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats.

That political agreement between the ICL and the comrades, now constituted as the Revolutionary Marxist Tendency (RMT), was codified in the comrades’ factional document, “Against United Secretariat Liquidationism—For Trotskyism!” This document was centered on the Trotskyist defense of the Soviet Union and against the USec’s liquidation into the anti-communist swamp of social democracy. It ended by calling on the comrades of Socialist Challenge who agreed with it to join them in pursuing the only principled course open to Trotskyists, the course of fusion with the ICL.

In October 1990, Asha took the fight for this perspective to SC’s Central Committee meeting in Montreal, passing out copies of the document. Comrade Shilling, also a member of the RMT, recounted that the furor had barely subsided when a motion was put forward “to expel Asha and all her followers immediately from the organization with no further discussion. Asha calmly stood up, collected her papers and declared, as she exited the hall, ‘Screw you, we’re with the Sparts!’” A few weeks later, in late 1990, the Revolutionary Marxist Tendency fused with the Trotskyist League.

Party, Program and Leadership

Asha revelled in getting out and fighting for our program, especially against the pretenders to Marxism who tied workers and radical youth to the bourgeois order. Addressing the memorial from Vancouver, comrade Sean James recounted seeing Asha in action at a January 1991 speak-out in Edmonton against the Gulf War:

Asha was a fine recruiter, and as one comrade noted, “she was able to explain and motivate Marxism to a wide range of people: she could hold her own and courteously shred the arguments of an ‘erudite’ Marxist prof. And she was very successful selling newspapers and subscriptions to the longshoremen.” On every issue, her fiery sincerity and intense focus served to deepen comrades’ sense that they were involved in struggles vital to mankind’s future.

Asha’s qualities as a communist were vivid in her contributions to internal debates. She would stand her ground until convinced and fight hard to convince others of her views. During our 1995 fight over the Quebec national question, writing under her party name A. Keith, Asha was the first TL comrade to come out hard for Quebec independence. Comrade Orlando Martin, a member of the TLQC Central Committee, highlighted this at the memorial gathering:

In the mid 1990s, Asha moved to Vancouver and lived there for the rest of her life. Chronic health problems led her to become a sympathizer for several years, but she later resumed regular activity as a consultative member. She actively participated in the more recent debates that have led to a major programmatic rearming of the ICL in spite of physical limitations that prevented her from contributing as much as she would have liked, which was more painful to her than physical illness.

A voracious reader and knowledgeable on many subjects—history, art, science, medicine, music—everything Asha studied became a tool for her political education and for building a revolutionary vanguard party. Some years ago, during her then frequent visits to New York, Asha made her talents available to the Prometheus Research Library, the central reference archives of the Spartacist League of the U.S. As the PRL comrades wrote,

Asha did not think that we would attain a beautiful communist future simply through persuasion or the force of ideas. She knew that this required the actions and program of a vanguard party that seeks to give leadership to the burning working-class struggles of the day. In one of her notebooks, she wrote, “Freedom for the oppressed of the world is not a subjective declaration but requires breaking the material chains of poverty, exploitation and oppression.”

We miss Asha terribly and extend particular condolences to her sisters and other family members, and to her husband and comrade Marlow, to whom we will give the last word: