Pat Devine (Junior)
Born in 1937, he was a YCL branch secretary in Ilford, north London in the 1950s. The child of communist parents, he recalls that his mother “would sing me revolutionary songs in the bath”. Although opposed to the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 (along with his mother and stepfather) he remained in the Party and YCL for years afterwards. Indeed, Devine went to Balliol College, Oxford in 1957, where the entire membership of the party branch had left after Hungary, and he had to build it up again from scratch.
Whilst remaining a Communist Party member until the CPGB dissolved in 1992, after 1968, Devine moved towards a largely social democratic ideology, although his theoretical economics work is largely conducted within the Marxist tradition.
After two years in business and three years as a school teacher, he joined the then Economics Department at Manchester in 1965 as a Research Associate and became a member of the teaching staff in 1967. Thus, to add to his BA from Oxford, he gained an MA(Econ) from Manchester, where he became Senior Lecturer in Economics. His main areas of interest are industrial economics (being the joint author of `An Introduction to Industrial Economics’) and comparative economic systems (see his `Democracy and Economic Planning’). Pat Devine is currently an honorary research fellow at Manchester University.
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