10.05.2000

Don't moan, organise

Tony Cliff memorial Sunday May 7 Hammersmith Apollo

For any revolutionary organisation the death of its founder and leading thinker can only but represent a watershed. The Socialist Workers Party is no exception.

The memorial meeting for comrade Tony Cliff reflected this fact. Not only did the living legacy of a dynamic and tireless revolutionary make itself forcefully felt at the Hammersmith Apollo last Sunday, but a surprising and welcome shift in the culture and the perspectives of the SWP was also evident.

Ever since dipping its toes in the socialist alliance project in the lead-up to the European elections last June, the organisation has been impelled by the crisis of auto-Labourism towards new conclusions, and company it would not otherwise have sought. With the success of the London Socialist Alliance, this is producing a welcome confidence in Britain's largest revolutionary organisation. Of course, this is uneven and is being driven from the top down. While the meeting was full of funny and endearing anecdotes about Cliff's life, the leadership of the SWP did not fail to use the opportunity of the 2,000 or so assembled members and supporters to ram home the new political line and the consequences that follow.

Reflecting this change in culture, CPGB comrades were warmly welcomed and, amazingly, sold out of papers - a revolution vis à  vis the SWP. (The CPGB was the only LSA component present - apart from the SWP itself of course.)

The meeting was a highly political and moving send-off. Although I only ever met Cliff once, in 1993, at the end of the meeting I felt as though I would miss him. The depth of warmth for Cliff was palpable - in spite of the evident exasperation many of his comrades felt at his near-maniacal and obstructive obsession with detail. In a revealing aside, Julie Waterson, central committee member and Anti-Nazi League organiser, said that the only decision on which Cliff did not finally get his way was on his demand for a mobile phone - the thought of Cliff being able to get hold of them any time, anywhere was just too much.

Through all this came Cliff's humanity, not despite - as many speakers implied - but because of his single-mindedness in building a revolutionary organisation.

No sombre or overly sentimental affair, the meeting, fittingly, was a celebration of his life and the impact it had on others - what better way to see off a revolutionary? Cliff would have hated it if it had been otherwise. The mood was positive and mature, reflecting a leadership body that feels it has the intellectual tools for the job. In reality though it is still lumbered with many of Cliff's partial and false ideas which have "inoculated us against events that happened 40 years later", as Alex Callinicos said in his testament to Cliff's theoretical contribution. He cited Cliff's 'trinity' of state capitalism, permanent arms economy and deflected permanent revolution.

Comrade Callinicos praised that legacy including what he saw as his "utterly unpretentious Marxism" (as opposed to that of a self-deprecating Callinicos himself), his "openness and flexibility, his preparedness to experiment", and his "audacité, audacité, audacité".

It was Cliff's "preparedness to experiment" that largely gave birth to the flips and zigzags with which the SWP has become synonymous. Tactical flexibility within the context of a democratically agreed and testable revolutionary programme is one thing: sudden shifts and arbitrary changes, with only Cliff's famous hunches as a guide, is something else.

Lindsey German as chair introduced a range of speakers representing the various political sediments of the SWP/IS tradition. From Frank Henderson, a former RCP activist from the 1940s, to Luke Kasawanga, a young comrade from Zimbabwe who had never met Cliff, but saw his legacy as a "pillar" for the future. Other speakers included Cecilia Prosper, Panos Garganas from Greece, Roger Cox, a militant from the 1960s, Mary Phillips, the SWP's proof-reader, Jim Nicol, the leftwing lawyer, Dave Hayes, the SWP industrial organiser, Jan Nielsen and Weyman Bennett.

Referring to the supposed 'controversy' over Paul Foot's obituary in The Guardian, Jim Nicol said that Cliff would not have repeated Joe Hill's parting words, but instead would have harangued: "Don't moan, organise!"

Beneath its apparent vindication of past perspectives there was clearly a mood for change from the leadership. While the biggest of the revolutionary sects, the SWP is still small, and an eagerness to break from this was evident throughout the proceedings. Crucially, the way out of this impasse is being framed in the context of the crisis in Labourism, the LSA and unity with other left forces. While the rhetoric of the SWP remains that it is "the party", increasingly key figures indicate a recognition that it does not relate directly to the class, nor organise the vanguard. And this is where the socialist alliances are fitting in. Given the drawn out dithering of the SWP before it pulled out of the LSA's attempt to stand in the 1999 European elections, comrade German's passing remark about Cliff's successful obstinacy on the central committee was instructive.

The SWP feels that it has taken a real step forward with the London Socialist Alliance, and so it has. The leadership used Sunday's meeting to push home the message that the turn to elections was part of a renewed 'united front' work, as mooted in the latest issue of Socialist Review (May).

After the more anecdotal contributions about Cliff's life during the first part of the meeting, the final half contained the political meat, with John Rees, Paul Foot and Chris Bambery giving speeches. It was here that the triumvirate underlined the tasks for the SWP in the current period of crisis in Labourism and the difficulties facing the Blair government.

From an outsider's perspective, it appears that Foot is the party favourite, Rees the leading theoretician, with Bambery the man of action.

Comrade Rees, who was central in the LSA's campaign, highlighted two crises for "the system". One was within the electoral and political process itself. With devolution being a key aspect of Blair's government, and the London assembly and mayor being a "flagship" element of this, New Labour could be seen to have failed to engage the electorate in its programme, he said. It is a pity then that the LSA's platform did not address itself to such vital constitutional matters.

The other crisis for comrade Rees was the polarisation at the margins, with the BNP gaining in votes as well as the left. However, given the Green vote, the polarisation to the left is bigger, according to Rees, attempting to fit reality to the "1930s in slow motion" thesis. The losers, said comrade Rees, are the people who say that the centre is the key in politics.

Comrade Rees hammered home the success of the LSA, saying: "No SWP, no LSA - not a brag: a fact." While there is a truth here, it does not get around the fact that the SWP has an untheorised problem. The logic of the LSA, as leading SWPers on the steering committee admit, takes it beyond a mere electoral bloc towards the necessity of a mass party. But there will be sharp differences over this question, particularly the form any such party would take. Should the revolutionary left unite as revolutionaries, or should the revolutionary left unite as left reformists in an attempt to woo left reformists from Labour? As if left reformists cannot be won to a powerful and vibrant united revolutionary left.

Chris Bambery, SWP national secretary, touched on this - a theme he raised in Socialist Review - emphasising the need for "a real left in this country". And by this he means something beyond the narrow confines of adding the ones and twos to the SWP. In indomitable SWP style he said that the mood in this country was to the left. Encouragingly, he said that the SWP intended to repeat the LSA experience across the country and would stand against Blair in the general election. The challenge is there for the SWP: not only will it stand with others against Blair; it could be instrumental in building an all-UK Partyist movement - throwing down the gauntlet to the left nationalist Scottish Socialist Party to unite as one against New Labour.

Paul Foot, who was the penultimate speaker before comrade Bambery, homed in on the need to abandon "past sectarianism". Obviously encouraged by the LSA's performance, he said that it was mainly Stalinist sectarianism that prevented him being elected to the GLA.

It has been clear to us that Foot is on the right of the SWP. This was confirmed by the comrade himself: ever since he met Cliff, four monosyllables had stuck with him: "Paul, you are soft." Apparently this had coloured their "ongoing" debate around parliament and elections. For Cliff, said Foot, parliament was all about working class passivity: it "lulled people to sleep".

However, he said that Cliff's wife Chanie recalled that on the very morning he died Cliff was excited about the possibility that Paul Foot might be elected to the GLA. The speaker concluded that perhaps it was Cliff who had been going "soft" at the end of his days.

In fact comrade Foot brought home a truth. The experience of the LSA showed that a "revolutionary organisation practising elections brings people out of passivity".

Foot ended his speech with a poem "which Cliff would have loathed". It was the closing lines of Wordsworth's poem The French revolution as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement:

Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us - the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!