Tony Cliff: an appreciation
International Viewpoint2000sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
TONY Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein), the founder and chief theoretician of the British Socialist Workers' Party, died on Sunday 9th April 2000 at the age of 82.
TONY Cliff was a major figure of the far left in Britain and internationally. He built an organisation which during the 1990s has been by far the biggest on the British far left. Whilst I have had a range of disagreements with his politics and analysis the contribution he made to revolutionary politics in Britain was clearly substantial. His energy and integrity will be greatly missed and the workers' movement will be the poorer without him.
Cliff became a Trotskyist in his native Palestine in the 1930s. After a spell in jail in Palestine he arrived in Britain just after the second world war and joined the principal Trotskyist group at the time, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Although not the originator he became the principal protagonist of the theory of state capitalism: the idea that the USSR was a state capitalist country and not a degenerated workers state as Trotsky had argued in Revolution Betrayed. These ideas were set out in his seminal work State Capitalism in Russia. After expulsion from the RCP at the end of the 1940s he established the Socialist Review group. This later became the International Socialists (IS) and in 1974 the Socialist Workers Party.
First meeting
I first met Tony Cliff nearly 40 years ago when I was a young shop steward in the car industry in Oxford and still a member of the Communist Party, even if a dissident one. There were two Trotskyist organisations in Oxford at the time, the Socialist Labour League (SLL), led nationally by Gerry Healy and Cliff's IS.
My growing interest in Trotskyism, along with other militants from the car industry, was triggered by contact with a group of SLL students in the University. In the same period we had a discussion with Tony Cliff as well. He came and addressed a group of us from the car plants.
We were unconvinced by Cliff's rank and fileist politics, and IS's consequent reluctance to take positions in the trade unions and shop stewards movement — to build only amongst the rank and file, and as a result leave key leadership positions in the hands of the right-wing to be used against the rank-and-file, never made sense to us.
Rejection
Our decision to join the SLL a couple of years later was based on our rejection of Tony Cliff's two key ideas, rank and fileism and state capitalism. Cliff concluded that what had happened in the Soviet Union was not that the power had been taken from the working class by a counter revolutionary bureaucracy on the basis of existing property relations, but that the mode of production had changed back to a form of capitalism — state capitalism. The bureaucracy were now a new ruling class extracting surplus value and accumulating capital as capitalism does.
This led him to conclude that there was nothing at all to defend in the USSR and that it was as much an imperialist power as the USA. The practical application of this theory came when he took a position of neutrality in the Korean war, but it is a position which was not carried through consistently. The IS/SWP was not neutral in the Vietnam war but correctly opposed US imperialism and later developed a more consistent anti-imperialist position whilst maintaining its "Neither Washington or Moscow" slogan.
Tony Cliff saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR and the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe as a massive vindication of the theory of state capitalism. This view was shared by the SWP as a whole, and it gave them confidence at a time when the Communist Parties went into free fall in many countries including Britain and sections of the far left drew pessimistic conclusions out of these events. In my view it was Trotsky's analysis which was confirmed by the collapse of the USSR, not the theory of state capitalism. This is shown in the immense problems encountered in re-capitalising the Russian economy. Even 10 years later the capitalist mode of production does not predominate in the Soviet Union.
By the 1990s the SWP, with 4-5,000 members, was by far the biggest far-left organisation in Britain. It remained, however, a dogmatic, insular, top-down organisation with a history or riding rough-shod over other sections of the left on the single minded pursuit of higher membership figures.
Higher demands
In the period immediately before Cliff's death, however, the rightward march of Blairism was placing ever higher demands on the unity of the left in order the build a political response. It is to his great credit that Tony Cliff recognised these changes and emerging opportunities in the last months of his life and fully backed the London Socialist Alliance.
At the major rally of the LSA Paul Foot of the SWP spoke on the same platform as Tommy Sheridan of the new Scottish Socialist Party and Alain Krivine from the LCR on the theme of rebuilding the left across Europe. Only a year or two ago such a thing would have seemed inconceivable.
The organisation he built, regarded by many as insular for a very long time, has partly opened itself up to a dialogue, joint work, and collaboration with other sections of the far left. It would be a tribute to him for this to continue towards the construction of an effective alternative to the rightward march of new Labour.