19 December 2006: who was Tony Cliff?

By 1930 or 1940, there was no task more urgent for socialists than to explain what had gone wrong in Russia. Here was the first society in the world to call itself Communist. Here also was a great police state, in which no worker was free.

In my last column I described how Trotsky began the struggle against Stalin, and how Stalin succeeded in having Trotsky killed. The one weakness in Trotsky's approach was that even until his death, he still considered that there was something socialist about Russia: an element that remained good, despite everything.

If Trotsky was right, however, then Marxism could not be true. For the simplest and most basic idea in Marx is that socialism can only come about through the struggle of the workers. If Russia was a workers' society, then how did the workers rule?

After 1945, when Russian tanks captured Hungary and Poland, many Western socialists said that these new societies were 'deformed workers' states'. This meant that they were still in some way socialist. But what had the Hungarian workers done to introduce socialism to Hungary?

In the younger generation, there were plenty who disagreed with Trotsky. Born in Trinidad and then living in England and America, one Marxist CLR James insisted that socialists should support revolutions even against the Russian regime.

In London after 1948, another Marxist Tony Cliff took this idea still further.

Born in Palestine in 1917, Cliff had been radicalised by the racism that Israeli society showed towards Arabs. A Jew himself, he rejected Israel. One teacher told him he was a Communist. It was meant as an insult. But Cliff took the point seriously. From reading Marx, he decided he was a Marxist. From reading Stalin, he decided he was a Trotskyist.

Remaining in Israel, Cliff argued that the best solution to the isolation of the Palestinians would be if workers from all across the Middle East rose up together and overthrew their regimes. Only in a socialist Middle East could Palestine be free.

Cliff always followed events in Egypt closely. He believed a strong protest movement in Cairo would be felt right across the region – and beyond.

Cliff tried to organise in Israel. But friends were jailed and the movement broken. He was forced to leave.

On settling in London, Cliff wrote his first great book, State Capitalism in Russia. Here, he argued that the Russian revolution had degenerated so far, that there was nothing left in it worth saving. Russia was a class society. Locked into military competition with the west, it was subject to the economic crises of the world market. America was a private capitalist society. Russia was a state capitalist society.

Cliff's was a serious and closely-argued position, which stressed the need for workers' democracy as the main precondition for socialism.

Cliff helped to found a party, the Socialist Review Group, which became the International Socialists and then the Socialist Workers Party. He recruited a talented generation of allies. They included the academics Nigel Harris and Mike Kidron, the campaigning journalist Paul Foot, as well as workers, trade unionists and many others besides.  

As well as the theory of state capitalism, other ideas emerged from this group. Their second contribution began from an honest look at the Britain of the 1950s. Most Marxists thought that capitalism was already on the brink of its final crisis.

Cliff had lived in Palestine and briefly in Egypt. He knew that Europe was in no real crisis. He tried to explain why not. Cliff argued that the military competition between Russia and America created an enormous cost on the system. Ironically, this helped to make it stable. Capitalism is prone to crises of over-production. But if the goods being produced remained unused, there was a mechanism which served to prevent such crises.

This theory suggested that the boom of the 1950s would not continue for ever. What kept capitalism stable was the arms race. But after America's defeat in the Vietnam War, there was a great pressure for states to spend less on arms. The countries which grew fastest were those like Germany, which did not have large armies or costly nuclear weapons. Their success encouraged other states to spend less on arms: ironically again, this meant a return to the old crisis-ridden capitalism of previous decades.

I have met many socialists in my life, in many different countries. Some have been brave, others not. Some have liked to talk, some to write, some to organise. Cliff distinguished himself by a refusal to ever consider anything except the possibilities for revolution. Everything else in life, food, clothes, driving, he left to someone else.

Cliff wrote a number of important books, including biographies of Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky. He wrote about the trade unions, and about the women's movement. When the workers of France began their uprising in May 1968, Cliff more than anyone else in Britain understood that something profound had changed.

Cliff had a wicked sense of humour. He teased his comrades, and he made fun of himself. A friend of mine was a member of a different Marxist party, and describes going in 1980 to hear Cliff speak. 'The problem with your comrades', he told Cliff, 'is that you are not Bolshevik enough.'

Cliff rose on the platform, with his long unkempt hair, standing barely five feet tall. 'Commissar Cliff', he declared, 'I shall be General, Commissar Cliff'. The audience fell about laughing. And a complex point was simply made: Marxists should never adopt airs or graces, should never pretend about what their party is or what it represents, bust should be brutally honest about what can be done.

That was why Cliff insisted that socialists should be utterly opposed to the dictatorship in Russia. Cliff believed that socialists should never exaggerate their success or their influence but should always, always tell the truth to the workers.