The Trotskyist theorist who defined the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism and built Britain's Socialist Workers Party
The slogan the Cliff group raised in 1950, when a handful of supporters brought out Socialist Review: “Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism.” It was a refusal of both camps of the Cold War, and the sentence that defined this current for the next half century.
Born Yigael Glückstein. Raised in Palestine in a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he left the Zionist left in his teens for Trotskyism, served twelve months in a British Mandate prison for anti-war agitation, and moved to Britain in 1947. In The Nature of Stalinist Russia (1948) he defined the USSR not as a degenerated workers'' state but as bureaucratic state capitalism, breaking with Fourth International orthodoxy, and on that base he built the theory of the permanent arms economy, which explained the postwar boom by East-West military spending, and of deflected permanent revolution, in which neither bourgeoisie nor working class but intellectuals and officers carry the revolution out. The organization he started as the Socialist Review Group in 1950 became the International Socialists and, in 1977, the Socialist Workers Party. He left a study of Rosa Luxemburg and four-volume biographies of Lenin and of Trotsky, and, never granted British citizenship, remained stateless all his life.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1917Born Yigael Glückstein at Zikhron Ya'akov in Ottoman Palestine, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents
- 1931–1933Began in the youth section of Mapai, then Poale Zion, inside the Zionist left
- 1930년대 후반Became a Trotskyist and an anti-Zionist; active in the small Palestinian Trotskyist movement
- 1939Arrested by the British Mandate authorities and held twelve months in Acre prison
- 1945Married the South African socialist Chanie Rosenberg
- 1947Moved to Britain, was refused leave to remain, and worked in Dublin instead
- 1948Published The Nature of Stalinist Russia, defining the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism
- 1950Founded the Socialist Review Group: neither Washington nor Moscow
- 1952Allowed back into Britain and settled in London
- 1959Published Rosa Luxemburg: A Study, first using the pen name Tony Cliff
- 1962–1963Renamed the group the International Socialists and formulated deflected permanent revolution
- 1977Founded the Socialist Workers Party
- 1975–1993Wrote his four-volume Lenin and four-volume Trotsky
- 2000.04.09Died in London after heart surgery, still a stateless person
The International Socialists: Growth and Strategic Change
In 1950, Cliff's supporters broke from the existing Trotskyist group The Club and formed the Socialist Review Group (SRG). Its founding conference in 1951 brought together eight members. Cliff's analysis of the Soviet Union as state capitalist provided the small group with its theoretical basis, and it sought to expand through work inside the Labour Party. It focused in particular on the Labour League of Youth (LLY), the party's youth organisation, and recruited a new generation of activists through nuclear disarmament campaigns and the Young Socialists. By 1964 the group had 200 members. This was a tactic for reaching workers and young people through activity inside the Labour Party.
In 1960, International Socialism began to replace Socialist Review, and the group adopted the name International Socialists (IS) in 1962. After Labour came to power, the IS withdrew from entryist work in the party around 1965 and shifted more of its effort toward trade unions and direct workers' organisations. A 1966 pamphlet by Cliff and Colin Barker opposed the Labour government's incomes policy and discussed how shop stewards could fight it. In 1968 the organisation adopted democratic centralism. Its involvement in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the student protests of 1968 helped increase membership from 400 to 1,000, while the group also experienced splits.
From 1970 to 1974, the IS developed factory branches and rank-and-file newspapers and increased its industrial activity. During the 1972 miners' strike, miners took and sold copies of Socialist Worker. Membership rose from 1,000 in 1971 to about 4,000 in 1977. But the number of factory branches fell from 38 in 1974 to three or four by 1976, and the IS failed to organise significant solidarity during the 1977 firefighters' strike. Around 1978, Cliff concluded that the period of rising working-class militancy had ended and a downturn had begun. In January 1977, the IS had been renamed the Socialist Workers Party (SWP); by 1982 its leadership had abandoned the perspective of building rank-and-file organisations, refocusing on local branches and political propaganda.