Notes towards an intellectual history of the early communist party: The influence of David Ivon Jones

Abstract

One individual towered over the members of the early International Socialists in South Africa and determined that groups political destiny. He was its thinker, its ideologist, its direction maker. He provided the cultural milieu in which these socialists operated and he gave them organizational direction. Whether for good or for bad, the direction for the young Communist Party of South Africa stemmed from him, even though he had left the country before the formal constitution of the party. His name, barely known in South Africa today, was David Ivon Jones.