19.04.2000

Tony Cliff May 20 1917 - April 9 2000

A 20th century revolutionary - part I

In many ways Tony Cliff embodied the steadfast courage, tireless dedication, and ultimately the failure of 20th century revolutionary politics. Whereas the 19th century begins with communistic sects and closes with mass working class parties, the 20th century showed an entirely opposite pattern. The first quarter of the 20th century was characterised by the optimistic foundation and rapid growth of communist parties. Yet now, as we step into an uncertain 21st century, most Marxists and would-be Marxists find themselves scattered and disorganised in mono-idea sects. Objective factors played a major role here - the treachery of social democracy, Stalin's counterrevolution in the revolution, Nazi terror, the long post-World War II boom. Nevertheless subjective shortcomings contributed too, including those of comrade Cliff.

Cliff was a genuine internationalist. Born Ygael Gluckstein in Palestine, he migrated to Britain following World War II in order to further the cause of global revolution. Arriving in 1946 he was kicked out as a dangerous subversive by Labour home secretary Chuter Ede. Entry into Eire was granted; its religio-nationalist government assumed his deportation was due to Zionist activities. It was Churchill's Tories who allowed him back into Britain in 1952. Perhaps MI5 cynically calculated that Cliff would help to disrupt and undermine the pro-Soviet 'official communists' and the Bevanite Labour left - famously the okhrana once banked on a factionally hard Lenin to inadvertently serve tsarism with his unremitting polemical blows against his opponents and its enemies.

Despite exile Cliff energetically intervened and manoeuvred within the fragmenting circles of Trotskyism - there were clandestine trips to Britain and numerous letters and articles. Cliff was the foremost personality in the Socialist Review Group and already an experienced factional fighter. As such Cliff constituted one of those invaluable links in the human chain which joins in some way the tradition of Lenin's Comintern with the ideological and political struggles of the 1950s and 60s. Certainly, where countless others resigned themselves to the bureaucratic socialism of Stalin on the one hand or reformist social democracy on the other, Cliff stands out with his constant stress on the necessity of socialism from below. During the darkest days of the Cold War that meant punishing isolation. Cliff's key theoretical works made their first appearance courtesy of stencils and a hand-turned duplicator, not a Goss press. The SRG had little more than a couple of dozen members and almost from inception sought refuge in the Labour Party.

1.1. Trotsky's theory of the USSR and its critics

As a deeply political personality and thinker Cliff was rooted in the intellectual achievement and mores of Russia's Bolsheviks, as celebrated and upheld by Leon Trotsky. Besides being a virtue, here lay two big problems. The first concerned Trotsky's theory of the USSR. The second was Trotsky's interrelated conception of the Party.

Without doubt, having come over to Bolshevism at the 11th hour, Trotsky played an outstanding and invaluable role in the Russian Revolution. (Incidentally the rapprochement between Lenin and Trotsky was not due to the former undergoing a Trotskyite conversion to 'permanent revolution' with his 'April thesis' - that is an unfounded myth which ignores, indeed insults, the history of Bolshevism pre-1917.) The Soviet regime was in its heroic years associated throughout the world with two names - Lenin and Trotsky. Yes, when he was in power, and incidentally under Lenin's protection, Trotsky showed distinct bureaucratic tendencies. In the early 1920s he notoriously proposed the militarisation of labour. Nevertheless, from 1924 onwards he took the lead in fighting the bureaucratic degeneration of the isolated workers' state.

Till his assassination in 1940, Trotsky's brave and unyielding opposition to the Stalin monocracy was that of a defencist. The Soviet Union was not only non-capitalist, but, he argued, a treasured world historic gain. Although workers were deprived of all democratic rights in the 1930s, although they were reduced to the level of an oppressed and formless mass, Trotsky stubbornly continued to regard the Soviet Union as some sort of workers' state, albeit a degenerated one. He did so for two main reasons.

Firstly, its origins in the October Revolution of 1917. Secondly, the USSR was a workers' state, according to Trotsky, because of its nationalised property forms supposedly inherited from the October Revolution and its immediate aftermath. The actual lived relations of exploitation experienced by workers, the surplus extracted by the bureaucracy-as-collective using political - that is, extra-economic - means, were either flatly denied or treated as entirely secondary. His criticism of bureaucratic socialism consequently focused on the sphere of distribution and consumption rather than that of production. He savaged inequality, but refused to see exploitation and the reproduction of the conditions of exploitation. In so doing Trotsky retreated from Marx's method of dialectal investigation - its highest expression being Capital - to a neo-Ricardoism.

From the beginning the Soviet Union in its unique evolution has divided the workers' movement. There were those who chose their own ruling class rather than side with the workers in revolutionary Russia. These labour traitors thereby proved themselves reactionaries of the worst sort. There were also, of course, the 'official communist' sycophants. However, within the revolutionary camp itself different critical interpretations of the Soviet Union phenomenon caused one split after another. Nowhere has such fractious behaviour been more prevalent and damaging than with the Trotskyite tradition. At the end of the day the reason for this is the dichotomy that exists between the strange reality of the Soviet Union and Trotsky's theory.

To begin with, as a loyal Trotskyite Cliff unquestioningly accepted the belief that Stalin's USSR remained a workers' state. Indeed, in the mid-1940s as a rising young star in the Fourth International he was specially commissioned to write 'doctrinaire' attacks on the rival 'theory' of bureaucratic collectivism. Cliff was to earn his factional spurs by lambasting the ideas of Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, Al Glotzer, and their co-thinkers; in the 1930s they had come to reject Trotsky's formulation.

Shachtman is Trotskyism's prince of darkness. The fallen angel whose name is for them irredeemably associated with class treachery. Shachtman's 'lesser of two evils' drift into the camp of democratic imperialism during the Cold War - criminally he supported the US-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 - is used to dismiss everything he said and wrote against Trotsky. The same technique could equally be applied to Marxists of the stature of Plekhanov or Kautsky. But that would be pure philistinism and a significant intellectual loss. Truth must be our goal. Labelling thinkers all right or all wrong gets us nowhere. People are complex ... and sometimes even mortal enemies are capable of revealing vital aspects of the truth.

There is in my opinion much to recommend in Shachtman. The conclusion of Shachtman and co that the Soviet Union was neither capitalist nor socialist, but bureaucratic collectivist points in the right direction. They rightly emphasised the centrality of proletarian political power for any genuinely socialist project. Trotsky's notion of 'socialist property forms' was a nonsense because it effectively equated nationalisation with socialism. That would make Inca Peru, Bismarck's Germany, and Nasser's Egypt examples of socialism.

As Trotsky's 'Trotskyite' critics pointed out, the key to understanding the Soviet Union was not property forms, but property or social relations: that is, the fact that with the first five-year plan the bureaucracy finally separated itself from any proletarian vestiges and launched a 'second revolution' against the workers and peasants. As we know, living standards plummeted. Millions died. The Communist Party was decimated and transformed into an organ which existed to promote the cult of Stalin. Here, in the first five-year plan, was a qualitative counterrevolutionary break. A new social formation had been born out of the failure of the Russian Revolution and the impossibility of building socialism in one country.

Using its - that is, the state's - monopoly of the means of production, the bureaucracy under Stalin ruthlessly pumped out surplus labour from the direct producers, who exercised no positive control over the product, let alone society. The peasants were effectively re-enserfed. The workers re-enslaved. Their trade unions were turned against them. They were denied the most elementary rights. They were atomised by a terroristic regime which ensured that they could not organise themselves into a collectivity. Any hint of political resistance meant imprisonment or death. In other words from 1928 the Soviet Union ceased being ours.

Bureaucratic collectivism is evidently a 'theory' which contains insights of value. Evidently life is much richer than the linear sketch drawn by Marx for western Europe in his Critique of political economy: that is, primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, communism. There have been and can be many other possibilities, including unviable freak societies like the Soviet Union. Hence bureaucratic collectivism as a 'theory' demands a concrete analysis. Unfortunately neither Shachtman nor any of his successors developed a fully rounded or general theory of the USSR. Shachtman, in his defence, never claimed to have arrived at such a necessary level of theorisation. His bureaucratic collectivism is therefore not really a theory - it cannot locate the Soviet Union's actual laws of motion and the essential contradictions which led it to stagnation and ignominious final collapse.

Shachtman, Draper, Glotzer, etc. paid a heavy price for daring to question their mentor. As a minority they found themselves barred from appealing "directly to the masses" by James Cannon and his regime in the US SWP: that is, openly publishing their political views. Trotsky, it should be noted, raised no objection. Quite the reverse, he praised the purge of the "petty bourgeois opposition" and described its call for a public debate as a "monstrous pretension" (L Trotsky In defence of Marxism London 1982, p207).

Trotskyism thus increasingly became a fixed sectarian dogma, not a scientific method open to unexpected challenges and new development. In step with ossification, in theory and practice, Trotskyism turned into its opposite. Trotskyism went from being a searing criticism of Soviet reality to an apologia.

Following World War II Trotskyism was plunged into utter incoherence by the export of Soviet-style society to eastern Europe. According to Trotsky's epigones, socialism was no longer conquered by the workers themselves. It came not from self-activity, but the Red Army (later other supposed agents of human liberation were discovered - Mao, Tito, Ben Bella, Castro, Saddam Hussein, Tony Benn, and Arthur Scargill have all been worshipped by post-Trotsky Trotskyites).

To his everlasting credit Cliff broke from orthodox Trotskyism. Cliff correctly reasoned that he had to jettison either his standard Trotskyite assumptions or the vision of working class self-liberation expounded by Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. In 1947 he wrote an internal Fourth International document titled The nature of Stalinist Russia. Here he affirmed his conversion to the idea that the Soviet Union was a system of "bureaucratic state capitalism".

In Britain, Tony Cliff, Gerry Healy, Ted Grant, and a host of lesser pontiffs presided over sects which fought each other on the basis not of the general interests of the working class, but according to this or that venerated text or revelation. Every theoretical dispute is thereby the source of new splits and thus invariably new sects. Cliff's break with Trotskyism over the USSR therefore resulted in the formation of a 'state capitalist' sect. As we have seen, Trotsky himself bears prime responsibility for this method which is taken as axiomatic by most leftwing group and grouplets. Trotsky, the non-sectarian sectarian scourge of Leninism in pre-revolutionary Russia, became in the 1930s the founder of a sect. The Fourth International was a parody of an international party, as were its national components and schisms. They were all based on agreement with a narrow set of specially defining ideas, not gathering and organising the advanced part of the working class.

As for Cliff, after conjoining his state capitalist theory with 'libertarian' Luxemburgism he announced his 'turn' to 'democratic centralism' in the late 1960s along with separation from the Labour Party host. Rising industrial militancy, Vietnam solidarity, and youth radicalism held out the promise of a warmer climate for revolutionaries. The International Socialists - as the SRG became - sloughed off its federal structure and took flight. There was a sharp upturn in fortunes: membership was soon to be counted not in the tens but the hundreds.

True, for a brief period factions were permitted. They were even given automatic seats on the national leadership and allowed to dissent in a regular internal bulletin. Sean Matgamna and his Workers' Fight group eagerly accepted Cliff's offer of unity and used it as an opportunity to accrue influence and cadres. However, by the time the Socialist Workers Party was formed in 1977 such democratic features were already history. All opposition factions had been ruthlessly purged in the early 70s (giving rise to a whole genus inhabiting the contemporary left - Alliance for Workers' Liberty, Workers Power, LM, Revolutionary Communist Group, etc.).

Regretably Cliff's understanding of Partyism never transcended the bounds of a sect. Advanced workers were not to be organised and trained as leaders of their class through their own movement, experience, and many sided critical debate, but instead initiated into the special ideas and principles coined or discovered by the theoretical guru. Militant workers had to be made into believers. An approach continued today by the SWP, which is implicitly brought into question by the London Socialist Alliance and the perspective of creating a higher, all-United Kingdom formation.

1.2. Cliff's theory of state capitalism - a brief account

It should be emphasised that state capitalism was not an original designation to apply to the USSR. Leave aside Lenin's characterisation of socialism beginning as monopoly capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky the centrist, Bordiga and Gorter as 'left' communists, the remnants of anarchism had well before Cliff expounded the view that the USSR was capitalism under the dictatorship of a new bourgeoisie; the former as early as 1919 in his anti-Bolshevik diatribe Terrorism and communism (see K Kautsky Selected political writings London 1983, p146). Nevertheless there can be no doubt that Cliff did elaborate a particular theory vis-à -vis the USSR; a theory that can therefore legitimately be dubbed as Cliffite.

Seven years after The nature of Stalinist Russia was distributed in duplicated form, the Cliff group published an amended version, Stalinist Russia: a Marxist analysis. In 1964 it appeared as the first part of a larger work, Russia: a Marxist analysis, upon which all subsequent editions are taken, including the 1974 State capitalism in Russia. Before outlining my differences with Cliff's theory it is obviously necessary to provide a brief account.

Essentially the whole of Cliff's state capitalist thesis pivots on the notion that Soviet society developed not primarily through internal contradictions, but rather through contradictions brought about by international competition, crucially competition in the sphere of arms. In point of fact the Soviet Union is defined as capitalist because of its foreign policy impulses; as if form determines content and not the other way round. How according to Cliff did such a situation come about? The raw material was the undeniable isolation of the proletarian revolution, imperialist encirclement, Russia's appalling poverty, working class deactivation, the bureaucratisation of the Party, and the absence of democracy at all levels of the regime.

For Cliff, like us, the key date was 1928. Out of the chrysalis of Party, state and army bureaucracy there emerged with the first five-year plan a fully fledged capitalist class. Siege conditions and the threat of renewed imperialist intervention forced the bureaucracy to undergo the mutation from a privileged caste, which was under the "direct and indirect control of the proletariat", into a collective ruling class which personified capitalism at its most extreme (T Cliff State capitalism in Russia London 1974, p154).

Stalin was certainly determined to build a powerful industrial base, no matter what the short-term costs in human suffering. Without heavy industry the Soviet Union could not turn out the armour, artillery, and aircraft needed to defend itself. It was either carry through a rapid industrialisation or die, Stalin said. In Cliff's account this was a compulsion which triggered off production for production's sake and accumulation for accumulation's sake: that is, though the peasants were collectivised, private capital eliminated, the kulaks liquidated as a class, and the mass unemployment of the NEP period ended, the bureaucracy began to fulfil tasks akin to the nascent bourgeoisie along with all the consequent social categories, contradictions, and antagonisms.

Being a revolution from above, there was no overthrow of the state, nor even a radical change in the upper echelons of the Party-state. For Cliff the first five-year plan signalled a violent capitalist social counterrevolution - not only because huge numbers of workers and peasants died, but because from then on bureaucratic management of the state amounted to "owning" it (ibid p169). This fusion of economics and politics under the pressures of a hostile world environment effectively turned bureaucratic salaries into profits and made the relations of production and the distribution of products capitalistically antagonistic.

The first five-year plan atomised the workers and reduced them to wage slaves with even fewer rights than those in the west. Trade unions ceased to defend their members' interests and instead became for Cliff instruments in the hands of a state hell-bent on extracting the maximum surplus value from the workforce. The same drive was responsible for a massive increase in the use of unfree labour in distant and inhospitable parts of the country and a steady erosion of workers' rights throughout the 1930s. To overcome resistance there was a "denial of any legal freedom to the worker": that is, the imposition of all sorts of coercive measures against absenteeism, frequent job changing, and the moving from one part of the country to another (ibid p22).

Though it supposed itself leading the construction of 'socialism in one country', the bureaucracy actually, argues Cliff, unintentionally produced the highest form of capitalism. The bureaucracy took the tendency of capitalism to divorce ownership and control to limits unobtainable by any organic evolution of ordinary monopoly capitalism. Because it emerged from the exceptional conditions of a workers' revolution which expropriated individual capitalism, Soviet state capitalism in effect ran the country as a singularity within which there could be planning and no need for the operation of the law of value (in other words just like the situation within Honda, Microsoft, or BT).

This "partial negation" of traditional capitalism was said to be fully in tune with the relentless drive by capitalism as a whole to production due to the demands of military competition; via which capitalism can gain new markets, new masses to exploit through conquest. Subordination of the whole economy to the production of arms explains, for Cliff, both the unique characteristics of Soviet "bureaucratic state capitalism": that is, its constant problems with underproduction, and the ability of western capitalism to (temporarily) "eliminate" crises of overproduction after World War II.

Showing their proficiency in abstraction rather than in analysis, until recently the world was portrayed by SWP leaders as a system of more or less internally planned states whose military competition remained the prime manifestation of capitalist anarchy. An extreme conclusion which completely ignored the real extremities of real capitalism and real bureaucratic socialism in the USSR.

1.3. Cliff on capitalism

Central to Cliff's ideology is the claim that despite the continuities of form inherited from the October Revolution the content of bureaucratic rule amounted to an "extremely high concentration of capital" (ibid p176). In other words the Soviet Union represented both a capitalism most ripe for socialism and at the same time a capitalism most antagonistic to the workers. Socialisation of production and the evolution of abstract capital does not mean the end of capitalism. On that we can agree. However, does the fact that workers were exploited in the USSR oblige us to classify it a society dominated by the capitalist mode of production?

Capitalism in Russia was quite clearly growing apace before 1917. NEP saw a controlled and partial recovery. But we would argue that in carrying through a second revolution, in expropriating the peasant class, in destroying merchant trade and all petty capitalist proprietors, in developing the forces of production under conditions of terror and bureaucratic command, the Soviet Union of Stalin established unique social relationships, ideas, and socio-economic categories. Refusal to countenance this simple truth is the source of all state capitalist confusion.

Capitalism is a definite historical formation with specific laws and coloration. Capitalism is not a universal phenomenon. Marx was insistent: the subject, humanity, the object, nature, endure in every society, along with surplus labour which "must constantly be performed" (K Marx Theories of surplus value Pt 1, 1969, p107). So capitalism is not a generic description of inequality or exploitation, as many SWP members I come across seem to think. That would make Cicero's Rome and the sprawling feudal kingdom of Henry Plantagenet capitalist. Nor is capitalism defined - as Chris Harman, editor of the SWP's Socialist Worker once said - by "production for competition, not need" (my emphasis Socialist Review November 1993). A deliberately evasive formula which cuts the hands and feet off capitalism in service of Cliff's Procrustrean theory. He dishonestly leaves out the cardinal fact that competition under capitalism, unlike the competition, say, between Rome and Carthage or European Christendom and the Moslem Arabs, is competition in essence for profit. If Harman owned up to that it would be impossible for him or Cliff to call the Soviet Union capitalist.

To see whether or not the USSR was capitalist one has to judge it against capitalism's "laws of motion" so as to bring out its identity. Playing sleight of hand with the bureaucracy or blurring definitions will not do (the anarchists, for example, called the Soviet Union capitalist because of the continued existence of the state - undoubtedly a feature of class society, even in semi-state form). Capitalism is fundamentally different to previous exploitative societies. It is not enough to have an oppressive state and aim for the maximisation of output, as was the case in the Soviet Union (and every pre-capitalist class society). Capitalism is generalised commodity production. Products, above all labour power itself, appear as commodities which are bought and sold by capitalists with the aim of realising a profit.

Not surprisingly Cliff places great emphasis on the war economies of capitalism. After all, during big wars the state steps in to regulate the economy. In the most important branches of the economy production is transformed into the de facto production of use values, which are only formally commodities. Workers are taken away from production by law and put in uniform. Other labour is conscripted into strategic industries which operate under military-type conditions. Free competition is abolished and, all in all, the working of the law of value is in many ways replaced by state capitalist planning. Of course what Cliff forgets is that such a situation is an exception, not the rule. It must be understood that the 'suspension' of the law of value during periods of war capitalism was designed to defend the operation of the law of value in the longer run. No higher social logic had come into existence.

Marx long ago explained, not least in Capital, that competition under capitalism was essentially determined by the "restless, never-ending process of profit making" (K Marx Capital Vol I, 1970, p152). Capital then is an exploitative social relationship which relies on the continuous extraction of surplus value from workers who have to sell their ability to labour as a commodity in a system that moves according to the gravitational pull of profit. Without successful realisation of surplus value there can be no accumulation. More, without profit there can be no sustained reproduction.

Production and profit, use value and exchange value are therefore a unity, but a unity in contradiction. Precisely as Marx showed, again most fully in Capital, here was a fundamental problem within capitalism, which if it is the dominant mode of production comes in due course to throw the whole of society into crisis. Not because of contradictions imported via international competition, but because of inherent internal contradictions.

Cliff never proved, rather than stated or insinuated, how the Soviet bureaucracy personified capital in the sense described above. Let alone the means by which capitalism - that is, real capitalism, capitalism as the dominant mode of production - operated. That is not surprising. The Soviet Union was not capitalist. It was something else.

1.4. Cliff's method

Sophisticated advocates of the theory of state capitalism know that attempts to prove the USSR capitalist by actually grasping the real thing and its internal workings are futile. Thus in his State capitalism in Russia Cliff wrote that "if one examines the relations within the Russian economy, abstracting them from their relations with the world economy, one is bound to conclude that the source of the law of value, as the motor and regulator of production, is not to be found in it" (T Cliff State capitalism in Russia London 1974, pp208-209).

To fit the Soviet Union into the category of capitalism he lops off its limbs and, finding that this is not enough, he rips out its actual internal workings. Only then is he able to discern in this lifeless abstraction "the basic features of capitalism" (ibid p209). In fact he does not discern the "basic" features of capitalism, but the "basic" features of any exploitative social formation. Hence Cliff claimed that with "state capitalism" in the Soviet Union "competition through buying and selling is replaced by direct military competition. Use values have become the aim of capitalist production" (ibid p212).

Approach Buckingham Palace Cliff's way. Is it surprising that, if you let drop little by little all that constitutes its individuality, leaving out first its history and who lives there, the materials which went to build and furnish it, then you end up with nothing but a space. You can then leave out its dimensions and you soon have nothing but a pure abstraction that is indistinguishable from 23 Railway Cuttings. Cliff does not get to the truth about the Soviet Union: he merely discounts everything specific about it that is not capitalist, that made it what it was, that made it unique. This is crude reductionism. In every society the able-bodied produce use values through necessary and surplus labour. But if we take away both production for profit and the creation of an average rate of profit, both wage labour and the reserve army of unemployed, both exchange value and market competition, then we do not have a society with a specifically capitalist character, but merely a society in general. That is what Cliff's 'analysis' of the Soviet Union amounts to in the final analysis.

After rather effortlessly batting aside the bureaucratic collectivism of both Bruno Rizzi and Max Shachtman, and James Burnham's managerial revolution, Cliff offers a crude metaphysical "either ... or" (ibid p282). Either the Soviet Union was genuinely socialist or, given the ample evidence that it was not, crucially the lack of democracy, it had to be capitalist. One of Hegel's pithy remarks is pertinent here: "It is the fashion of youth to dash about in abstractions; but the man who has learnt to know life steers clear of the abstract 'either-or', and keeps to the concrete" (GWF Hegel The essential writings New York 1974, p95).

In his own way Cliff paints from the same monochrome palette as 'official communism', except that, where it engaged in whitewash, he does a blackwash (just like Kautsky). 'Official communism' presented the Soviet Union as the highest rung on a fixed ladder of human social evolution. It was meant to be the inevitable result of the supposed linear course from primitive communism, via the perfectly lined-up steps of slavery, feudalism, and capitalism.

Cliff's only disagreement would appear to be that, having failed to establish genuine socialism, the Soviet Union had no way to go but backwards, back down the ladder of social evolution, back to capitalism, albeit in a state capitalist form. In the absence of workers' democracy the Soviet bureaucracy had to function as a capitalist class. In order to keep its national privileges, spurred on by international competition, he says it operated as a national personification of capitalism and forced the USSR to move according to all the essential laws of capitalism. There was in his mind no other possibility - rashly he explicitly denied "internal forces" could "restore individual capitalism" (ibid p280). The court of life has shown otherwise.