I heard on Monday 10 April that Tony Cliff, a founder member of the British Socialist Workers Party, had died of a heart attack. I never really knew him personally, but as a member of the SWP from the age of seventeen, Tony Cliff was part of my political upbringing, part of my teens and my early twenties. I was in the kitchen when my partner Anne told me, and the evening was spent mulling over her news. I'll miss Cliff's broken English ("Rubbish, it's all bloody rubbish"), the homespun metaphors, and the keen sense of political strategy.
Cliff should go down in history as the most successful of a troika of British Marxists from the 1940s which included himself, Gerry Healy and Ted Grant. Each one a Trotskyist, this generation attempted to carry into the working-class movement an activist Marxist politics, Healey with the SLL and WRP, Grant with Militant, Cliff with the Socialist Group, later the International Socialists, and then the SWP. At the end of their activity, Britain -- which had been a Marxist backwater in the 1940s --now possesses a larger number of clear, self-conscious and organised Marxists than any other country in Europe.
In his most recent published book, Trotskyism After Trotsky, Cliff outlined three contributions to Marxist theory made by the Socialist Review Group during the Cold War period. The idea behind each theory was to relate Trotsky's optimistic pre-war perspectives to the harsher atmosphere which dominated Europe and America after 1950. The first contribution was in developing a theory which described Stalin's Russia as state capitalist. Other writers had argued "state cap" previously in polemics, but Cliff's was a serious and closely-argued position, which stressed the need for workers' democracy as the main precondition for socialism. The second contribution addressed the puzzle of finding an explanation for the postwar boom in the extended arms-spending of these years, and led to the theory of the "permanent arms economy". The third was a realistic evaluation of the failure of the working class to lead the revolutions which took place in the 1960s Third World. Rather than seeing these revolutions as socialist, the theory of "deflected permanent revolution" explained them in terms of the needs of the local bourgeoisie to build a national state on its own account.
Cliff's autobiographical Memoirs of a Revolutionary, to be published this summer, adds a fourth and more practical contribution. The IS/SWP was the first large socialist group internationally to forecast the downturn in class struggle which marked the 1980s. Ironically, the consequence of taking this pessimistic analysis then would leave the SWP fifteen years later in an unchallenged position of size, influence and optimism on the British far-left.
The only times I met Cliff were through his wife Chanie Rosenberg, with whom I was a member of Hackney Council Workers SWP in the 1990s. The impression I acquired was of a man who suffered fools lightly. Cliff saw no reason to avoid the stereotype of the twenty-four-hour agitator. I remember discussing my Ph.D. thesis with both Cliff and Chanie. Each had lived through the brief revival of British fascism that I was researching, but Cliff quickly decided that my idea was a non-starter, and left me alone to speak with Chanie. On the telephone, I could here him damning the faults of one new organiser. His guest could hear the private conversation -- but who said the revolution needs privacy?
Again I remember the branch social which ended up at Cliff and Chanie's. The point of the barbecue was to welcome new members, many of whom felt unfamiliar in a "political" gathering. But instead of talking with his wife's comrades, Cliff was sidelined by an activist over from Turkey. Even when the convention required it, he was incapable of making Sunday small-talk.
To stress his impatience for change does not detract from Cliff's wicked sense of humour. In the planning sessions for the 1994 Anti-Nazi League Carnival, Cliff was told that the Manics had agree to headline. This clearly appealed to him, "The Manic Street Preachers?", he teased, "That's us!" A comrade from the Militant describes failing to heckle Cliff in the mid-1980s. "We should be more Bolshevik? OK -- I am Colonel Cliff." I imagine his response, five foot tall, but with his chest stuck out like a pigeon's, smiling and mocking himself with his critic.
Over the past few weeks, I've enjoyed preparing the index for Cliff's autobiography, a book which his comrades were encouraging him to write for twenty years, but it was only in the last few months, when the doctor ordered inactivity, that Cliff relented and agreed to publish. The result is a funny and modest account of Cliff's conversion to Marxism as a young anti-Zionist Jew living in Palestine seventy years ago. My favourite story? I think of the contact Tony Cliff describes who was signed up to the Socialist Review Group in the dark days of the 1950s, when the party was isolated and every potential member was special. Cliff attempted to visit this new name one weekday evening, only to be told that the ten-year old son of the house had already gone to bed. Of such small misadventures and other occasional successes are permanent socialist organisations built.
