Tony Cliff: a political obituary
[Workers Power Britain May 2000]

Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein), the leader of the Socialist Workers Party, died on 9 April 2000. He was one of the most significant leaders of the post-war British left. He was born in May 1917 in Palestine. He rejected Zionism and Stalinism and threw himself into building the Trotskyist Fourth International.

Towards the end of the 1940s Cliff became convinced that Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state was wrong and in a huge internal bulletin elaborated his particular version of the theory of state capitalism.

His adherence to state capitalism led to a break with the FI and the formation of the Socialist Review Group in the 1950s. This was transformed into the International Socialists in the 1960s and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1977 – the biggest left organisation in Britain and possibly in Europe.

Unlike so many leftists of his generation, Cliff stayed loyal to the cause of the working class right up to his death. And unlike other survivors of his generation - notably his main Trotskyist rivals from 1950s Trotskyism, Gerry Healy and Ted Grant - Cliff maintained a sense of proportion, a sense of humour and a sense of reality.

Healy descended into a macabre world of political fantasy and organisational gangsterism and Ted Grant into a world of lifeless schemas that has reduced his old organisation (Militant) to a fragmented series of sects. Cliff's genuine charm and famous ability to make jokes meant that at his funeral there were political friends and foes alike paying tribute.

Workers Power itself was formed after a break with Cliff's organisation in the 1970s. We were the Left Faction of the International Socialists in 1972. We had major political disagreements with Cliff: our determination to fight our corner led to our expulsion from the International Socialists in 1975.
In the first place, we have a major difference over state capitalism itself.

This theory, because of its anti-Stalinism, held attractions in a period when post-war Trotskyism was busily capitulating to Stalinists like Tito, and later Castro and Ho Chi Minh. But it was completely flawed as an analysis of the USSR. Like so many of Cliff's theories it was based on a method that owed more to superficial impressionism than to Marxism.

We have dealt at length with this theory elsewhere (Paul Morris, “The crisis of Stalinism and the theory of state capitalism”, Permanent Revolution 9). Faced with the actual restoration of capitalism in the degenerated workers' states the theory has come apart at the seams.

A long-running debate with Chris Harman over the theory within the SWP ended with Cliff himself conceding in the 1990s that the capitalist “law of value” had been present all along in the USSR - whereas the cornerstone of his original theory was its absence.

Cliff said capitalism was restored in Russia in 1927. The real restoration took place in the 1990s. It involved shock therapy, the re-introduction of market mechanisms, the dismantling of planning agencies. If the Stalinist states had been "state capitalist", the transition would have been relatively smooth. Precisely because the laws of capitalist accumulation had been bureaucratically suppressed in these states, the transition has been cataclysmic, confronted with countless hidden obstacles - and is still not over in Russia itself.

State capitalism, however, was not merely a wrong theory. Because it was based on an impressionist method it led Cliff to a full scale break with every aspect of revolutionary Trotskyism. In the 1950s and early 1960s it caused Cliff to reject Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, Lenin's theory of imperialism, and with it the theory of reformism as a trend in the working class based on a labour aristocracy, and - for nearly decades - the theory and practice of Leninist party-building.

In short, state capitalism was Cliff's fire escape from Trotskyism. What helped propel hundreds of people after him was “orthodox” Trotskyism's grotesque capitulations to Stalinism, nationalism and reformism. We do not argue that the Fourth International after 1951 was more revolutionary than Cliff: the whole revolutionary continuity was broken.

In the 1950s and 60s, Cliff's libertarian socialism was attractive to those genuinely repelled by "Trotskyists" who turned Trotsky's words into incantations while abandoning his revolutionary method. But Cliff was guilty of abandoning that method too. He did not try to re-elaborate Trotskyism. He broke with it.

The consequences of this break proved decisive in ensuring that, despite his energy, Cliff failed to build a party that could direct the working class from its day-to-day-struggles towards the struggle for power. The method of the transitional programme was replaced by another manifestation of Cliff's impressionist method: Economism.

Cliff elevated the economic struggle of the working class to a place of absolute pre-eminence in the general class struggle and then used the party to extend and develop that economic struggle around the immediate slogans and demands raised by the workers themselves. Cliff always opposed trying to fight for demands the workers "were not ready for".

He firmly believed that the struggle itself would spontaneously generate socialist consciousness, absolving the party of its role as a political leader of the class. Though Cliff abandoned his Luxemburgist opposition to the Leninist party in the late 1960s, for him the party was primarily an organisational mechanism rather than the embodiment of a programme and the instrument for translating that programme into action.

This remains a hallmark of SWP politics, a legacy of Cliff that the SWP must re-evaluate and break from. It is summed up by Cliff's oft-repeated phrase attacking Workers Power year-on-year in debates at Marxism: "Workers don't need a blueprint of a machine gun when they are being attacked [the programme], they need the bloody machine gun."

This particular joke falls flat when you give it a moment's serious consideration. After all, if this is true, what need is there for revolutionary theory or a revolutionary party, let alone a programme.
Workers go into struggle with their own version of a programme. Take Rover today. Sadly, thousands of Longbridge workers are campaigning for a capitalist solution to the car crisis.

This is because they embrace a reformist programme (a capitalist buy out). The whole purpose of a revolutionary organisation is to break workers from this programme so that they will take action in their own interest.

And their own interest is embodied in a revolutionary programme - which in this case can be very concretely posed around demands for the nationalisation of Rover with no compensation to the bosses, for workers' control over production, for the opening of the management and government's books and accounts.

Such demands do not fall from the sky - and they are certainly not the spontaneous products of the struggle at Rover. They are component parts of a programme which delineates the revolutionaries from reformism and equips the party to deploy its members not simply as paper sellers and placard distributors but as fighters for an alternative solution.

In the 1960s Cliff wrote: "Reformism can never be defeated by programmes. It can only be defeated by deeds."

This is classic Economism. Of course the defeat of reformism is not a literary exercise. It will only happen in life. But deeds alone will not destroy it. After all, the 1970s saw plenty of deeds - the dock strike, the strikes against the Industrial Relations Act, the two miners' strikes. These were followed in the 1980s by the steel strike, the great miners' strike, the strikes of printers, dockers and seafarers. The poll tax struggle saw deeds aplenty.

In 1997 reformism - refashioned by Labour's extreme right around Blair - came back with a vengeance. All those deeds had failed to vanquish it. The reason was simple. The deeds were separated from the revolutionary programme because revolutionaries were too weak to make the connection.

Where we were strong, important gains were made. Despite being scoffed at by the SWP, Workers Power's call for defence squads in the miners' strike struck a massive chord. Miners were busy building picket defence teams, organised and ready to do battle with the police, while the SWP were claiming that such demands were "too advanced".

The goal of the revolutionary party is to challenge, defeat and replace the reformists in the working class through deeds and through programme.

Cliff was very strong (after 1968) on the need for a party. Many of his writings were geared towards helping build a Bolshevik style party. He was famous for his "party, party, party" speeches. Without a revolutionary programme, however, Cliff's commitment to building a Bolshevik party was undermined by two key political weaknesses.