18.09.1997

True spirit of Cliffism

Jim Higgins’ More years of the locust: the origins of the Socialist Workers Party was reviewed by Mark Fischer in the Weekly Worker (August 21). Here Dave Hume adds his opinion of the International Socialist Group publication

In the cynical view of Jim Higgins it is not so much Tony Cliff who is responsible for the failure of the SWP, but the collected works of the Marxist heroes.

Higgins once wrote about the history of British Trotskyism from 1938 until 1948, in an article entitled ‘10 years for the locust’. Now there are many more Trotskyist years for the locust. In the opinion of Jim Higgins,

“That these ‘new’ groups which followed the Revolutionary Communist Party have found it impossible to transcend the differences of the past, and continue to live vicariously through the collected works of the heroes, is the reason why the locust can still find ample sustenance” (p13).

Certainly the political antics of Tony Cliff have been enough to make a saint cynical - and Higgins is no saint. Cliff’s ‘adoration’ of Lenin is seen as typical of the virus which inflicts comrades with the collected works on their bookshelves. For Higgins it has become almost inevitable that seeking the authority of the classics leads to the rotten ‘method’ of Tony Cliff:

“History for him is a vast archive rich with precedents. He decides what he wants to do and then like some shyster lawyer, pillages the past for something that can be made to fit his case” (p105).

Where the quote does not lend itself to the narrow political purpose of the moment, then Cliff ‘loosely’ quotes without a reference, or changes the quote to mean something different. The two most appalling examples given by Jim Higgins are Cliff’s ‘justification’ for the mini-mass party of paper sellers and buyers in the mid-70s; and the rewriting of history in the shape of the unacknowledged alteration of Cliff’s Luxemburg pamphlet to show Lenin as the revolutionary guide for the party rather than Luxemburg - Cliff’s mentor for most of the 60s and some of the Cold War 50s.

In 1974 as the high tide of industrial militancy (1968-74) was ebbing, Cliff was indulging himself in his mini-mass party fantasy based on a travesty of Lenin’s party regime. Hundreds of workers on the council estates were expected to become supporters, to write for the paper and join the party. Only the ‘conservatives’ (Jim Higgins and friends) appeared to stand in the way. Having surgically removed any independently minded comrades from the leading committee, the time had come to boot out the journalist malcontents from Socialist Worker. What better way than words from Lenin to disguise the sordid manoeuvre. Cliff wrote:

“Pravda was not a paper for workers; it was a workers’ paper. It was very different to many other socialist papers written by a tiny group of sometimes brilliant journalists. Lenin describes one such paper as a ‘journal for workers, as there is not a trace in it of either workers’ initiatives, or any connection with working class organisations’.”

As Higgins writes, the alleged Lenin quotation is from Collected works vol 20, p328. The real quote actually reads as follows: “Trotsky’s workers’ journal is Trotsky’s journal for workers as there is not a trace ...” etc, etc. Lenin was not claiming Pravda was a paper predominately written by workers who were still at the factory bench; he was criticising a monthly paper of Trotsky’s which was not about strikes but about party unity or conciliationism. But any stick to beat the opposition.

When Cliff had a miraculous conversion to ‘Leninism’ in 1968/69, he deceitfully rewrote the second edition of the Luxemburg pamphlet at key points to recommend Lenin rather than Rosa as the ultimate authority on the party, without informing comrades or acknowledging the changes. To admit that for the previous decade, and more, he had been wrong about the party question and that what he always sneered at as toytown Bolshevism was correct on the theory, if not the practice of the party, would have required an honest theoretical readjustment for the entire party. But as usual everything was done with minimum debate and no cadre development. When Jim Higgins raised the question of the dishonest changes between the first and second editions of the pamphlet Cliff merely shrugged.

The fact that Cliff was able to get away with this kind of nonsense was a reflection of the lack of accumulation of cadre, primitive or otherwise. There was not primitive accumulation of cadre by Cliff - as Higgins asserts (and sneers) - but primitive recruitment. How could there be development of theory and cadre when the intellectual foundations of the IS group/SWP were not capable of holding up a Leninist or Marxist superstructure? Even Mike Kidron, who Higgins admires as the real intellectual leader of the Socialist Review group, had to admit that two insights do not make a theory. This was a reference to the notions of state capitalism and the permanent arms economy. Kidron conceded in humiliating circumstances that his idea of a permanent arms economy to explain the post-war boom rested on the theory of a bourgeois social theorist at a crucial point.

Despite the catchy Higgins phrase of defending Cliffism without Cliff, the fact is he is uncertain of the political value of the IS tradition. In so far as it had value, it seems to be iconoclasm for the sake of iconoclasm; or something different from the usual collected works is seen as progressive or healthy in itself, irrespective of the content. According to Jim Higgins,

“If the work of state capitalism, reformism, the long boom and Luxemburg were tentative and incomplete, they showed enough coherence to indicate there was some life in revolutionary politics after Trotsky’s death” (p131).

Further, according to Higgins, whatever the merits of Cliff’s theory of state capitalism (he does not give us a balance sheet), at least it helped comrades to appreciate the self-activity of the class rather than property forms. But he is compelled to concede that “it was not essential to adhere to state capitalism to accept the notion of the centrality of the working class and to analyse and build on contemporary working class experience” (p113). Again the ‘cult’ of Luxemburg is seen as a breath of fresh air (compared with the stale atmosphere of the collected works) rather than any serious evaluation of the content of Luxemburg chosen in preference to Lenin on the question of the party.

Ultimately the attitude of Higgins towards the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky is more political than cynical. He adopts an undefined post-Bolshevism (the true spirit of Cliffism). The reason for the failure of the revolutionary groups in Britain is their habit of seeing the future in Russia 1917, or the veneration of everything Bolshevik until 1924. Looking at politics through the prism of the Russian Revolution is the fatal flaw of the revolutionary left. For Jim Higgins, “The one enduring certainty is that the future will not be won by attempting to recreate the past” (living through the collected works). Instead he points vaguely to new forms and forces and new ideas.

For those who stand in the tradition of classical Marxism the collected works are an authoritative guide to action. We do not start from “brand new ideas”; we stand not only on the shoulders of the outstanding leaders and thinkers of the socialist movement, but also on the costly historical experience of workers. We try to use the collected works to throw light on our own struggles and develop theory to overthrow capitalism.

There are no guarantees, but it is possible to overcome the flawed politics of Cliff, Healy and Grant. It is Jim Higgins who is a prisoner of the past: the organisational practices of British Trotskyism cast a long shadow over his book.