12.04.2000

Internationalist for socialism

Tony Cliff May 20 1917 - April 9 2000

Tony Cliff personified the Socialist Workers Party. His quirks and characteristics marked the practice of the party in many small, detailed ways, as well as its politics. The Revolutionary Democratic Group emerged from the Socialist Workers Party; our politics are a reaction to perceived weaknesses in the SWP tradition and the style of leadership that Cliff embodied.

Virtually every member and ex-member of the SWP and its precursors, the International Socialists and the Socialist Review Group, has their own particular memories. Often they are of his little, peasant-style jokes and anecdotes. Cliff was interested in the tiniest detail of individual comrades' activities. At times this became invasive and destructive of any independent thought within the middle cadre of the organisation; often it endeared the man to those he met. It was his fascination with detail and his capacity to relate the particular to major events that made the politics of the SWP so effective and so distinct.

Born Ygael Gluckstein in Palestine in May 1917, Cliff developed a deep and instinctive internationalism that was grounded in his personal understanding of the treatment of his Arab neighbours. Internationalism, the opposition to nationalism in all its forms, has been a hallmark of Cliff and all the groups he helped found. Cliff joined the Communist Party as a young man but rapidly developed a Trotskyist perspective. In the 1950s, having been expelled from Britain when he first arrived, Cliff formed the Socialist Review Group. He was one of a series of figures that emerged from the wreckage of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party. These 'greats', Ted Grant, Gerry Healy and Tony Cliff all built organisations that were in their founder's image. The survival of the SWP and its ability to grow and change is a testament to Cliff's tireless activism. The SWP's lack of concern with political institutions, intolerance of dissent, and mindless routine activity were the other sides to this same coin.

Perhaps the most significant political contribution that Cliff made was his theory of state capitalism. Russia: a Marxist analysis was published in 1955. It provided the distinct political framework from which the SWP grew. The Revolutionary Democratic Group counts itself as part of the state capitalist tendency and Cliff's formulation remains a firm foundation. For me the most powerful element of this theory was its focus on the mechanism of capital as a lived system, not the formulaic and legal definitions of property that plagued other Marxist accounts. State capitalism provided workers with an explanatory theory that clearly distinguished between the anti-communism of the capitalist right and opposition to Stalinism. This theory prepared activists in the groups Cliff founded for the emergence of workers' movements in opposition to 'official communism'. When I first began to be interested in Marxist politics following the May events in Paris and the Prague Spring, it was this theory which set the International Socialists apart from other groups.

In the late 1960s and 1970s the International Socialists grew from a small group known for its intellectual prowess to a small but embedded part of the working class political landscape. Cliff produced a short handbook for shop stewards, The employers' offensive: productivity deals and how to fight them. Distilling the experience of the growing layer of shop stewards, this book helped to project the International Socialists into a wider layer of workers. Briefly in the early 1970s the Rank and File Movement looked like it might blossom into a significant force and the International Socialists saw the prospect of building a small mass party. By 1977 that prospect was receding, but the SWP was formed from the IS on a wave of optimism.

That optimism foundered on an ill thought out electoral intervention. The failure in elections was part of a wider miscalculation, but this was not properly examined: instead it was swept under the carpet. The organisation claimed its perspectives had telescoped events. The perspectives were not wrong: the problems were simply the result of poor timing. This weakness, the inability to own up to mistakes and examine failure, was characteristic of Cliff. It was often Cliff who fought long and hard to ensure a particular style of control over all political bodies within and outside the party. Personal contacts and individual pressure, rather than open political debate, were often the means by which he accomplished this. The organisations through which the International Socialists had begun to exert such influence were all disbanded in the 1980s.

In more recent years Cliff has been a partisan of the idea of the Leninist party. Always a believer in political organisation, Cliff developed an appreciation of what became known internally as the combat party. It was modelled on a reading of the early history of the CPGB. This development from a Luxemburgist position was in a classic Cliff manner surreptitiously imported into the International Socialists and later the SWP. So much so that some of us are still proud possessors of those collector's items, the Luxemburg pamphlet with a sticker over an offending paragraph that no longer fitted Cliff's revised views. Cliff's several volumes on Lenin and Trotsky were often inaccurate or partial accounts of the person: they were always accurate indicators of new turns in Cliff's thinking.

The RDG is proud to have a common history with the SWP. Tony Cliff will be best remembered in the political struggle for a new revolutionary workers' party. I and many other revolutionary Marxists will raise a glass to the teetotal Cliff. We will remember with fondness the small, bustling figure who lit up so many meetings in small halls in so many towns and cities. We will remember how he always sought out new contacts and spent time and care talking to them. With this care and consideration he won many hearts and minds to a revolutionary socialism that was centred on workers' self-activity.

Though the RDG broke with the SWP and we hold Cliff accountable for many of the organisation's failings, he was also a beacon to which we should aspire. It was a fault of the workers' movement as much as Cliff that for an entire period revolutionary organisation relied so heavily on the personalities of leaders rather than a wider collective leadership that was capable of open debate.

Form and structure will be critical factors if we are to build a new revolutionary workers' party. If we can proceed with half the vigour Cliff showed, we will be successful.

PCC statement

It was with sadness and regret that we learnt of the death of comrade Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein). Throughout his life he single-mindedly dedicated himself to the cause of the working class and socialism. Comrade Cliff was an internationalist and a tireless political activist. His Marxism was about changing the world.

Comrade Cliff was also a theorist. As the leading figure in the Socialist Review Group, the International Socialists, and finally the Socialist Workers Party, comrade Cliff was not content with simply repeating what had gone before. Rightly he attempted to develop Marxism.

Whatever their inevitable shortcomings, his writings on the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe exposed the false claims that these societies represented conquests by the working class, that they were some sort of workers' states and thus a step on the road to communism. His other writings on 'third world' liberation movements, the labour aristocracy, the post-World War II boom and the arms economy, and Labourism had a similar quality. They bear the mark of an original thinker.

The death of comrade Cliff is not only a loss for the SWP in Britain. His death is a loss for all revolutionary socialists and communists in Britain and internationally.