1968: the great test

Posted item #3 Notes on democratic centralism (June 1968)

1968 was a momentous year: student occupations, mass strikes, anti-war demonstrations, riots, and much more. Although France is the country firmly lodged in popular consciousness, '68 saw social and political upheavals in most regions of the world. And while many people know it as the year of student unrest, it was the French general strike that marked the peak of struggle in western Europe.

Here in Britain there wasn't the scale of rebellion seen in some places, yet it was still the high point of the movement against war in Vietnam, a crucial year for student sit-ins and protests, and a time of ideological ferment. It is revealing that the International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP) went from just 400 members at the start of the year to around 1000 members in December 1968.

It was in Decemeber 1968 that IS held a conference which crystallised a sense of crisis inside the organisation. This might be surprising, but such sudden growth is likely to generate serious tensions. Some of the more experienced comrades - many of whom had in fact been members for no more than a few years themselves - felt undermined by the new influx or were concerned that they 'diluted' the revolutionary Marxist politics of IS. The new members, meanwhile, came from a variety of backgrounds politically and were subject to a range of ideological presures and influences. Towards the end of 1968 there were several factions, however short-lived, inside the organisation.

Three things reflect Tony Cliff's qualities as a revolutionary and a leading figure in IS from this turbulent time. First, he developed - extremely swiftly - a highly perceptive response to the French events and the broader sweep of revolt internationally. He recognised, for example, the vital role of students as detonators of mass struggle, while resisting the common tendency in 1968 to laud students as a 'new vanguard'. Cliff instead argued that the organised working class remained indispensable and central to effecting social change. His pamphlet 'France - the struggle goes on', co-written with Ian Birchall, was a crucial contribution to understanding the complex dynamics of the French events.

Secondly, he gave a lead in orienting IS on the new struggles taking place and the charged political atmosphere among students. He spent weeks going to the London School of Economics - epicentre of student revolt in Britain - and argued with students about the political issues being thrown up by the global rebellion. He led by example, winning a layer of students to revolutionary socialist ideas. While consistent in saying that students couldn't substitute for workers in making a revolution, he realised that newly radicalised students could play an important role in strengthening IS and the wider Left.

Finally, Cliff managed to navigate the stormy waters of his organisation's own internal crisis. He intervened in important conferences in September and Decemeber 1968, and sought to explain to new recruits - disillusioned with the setbacks that quickly accompanied the breakthroughs of '68 - the need for on-going and patient work in building socialist organisation. He was also willing to challenge the conservatism of many of the more experienced members, struggling to adjust to radically changed circumstances.

His key intervention, in writing, was a very short article 'Notes on democratic centralism'. This seems quite technical, but in fact reflects a fundamental concern with kind of organisation Cliff thought revolutionaries needed to build. It implicitly took on arguments within IS, especially from those of a more 'liberterian' bent.

IS had until then been organisationally loose, which meant that striving for a tighter, more cohesive force challenged the habits and assumptions of many established members. But it was also contentious with many new members, who were inclined - in the heady atmosphere of '68 - to privilege 'spontaneity' and downplay the kind of patient work and orientation on working class organisation required in the long term.

Cliff's arguments for democratic centralism, though rushed and under-developed, helped IS get through a brief period of crisis and sustain itself beyond the dramatic events of 1968. They also laid the basis for building effective revolutionary organisation in the 1970s - and indicated Cliff's preoccupation in those years with how to build a revolutionary party. This found its flowering mainly in the numerous articles about Lenin and the first volume of Cliff's Lenin biography, which centred on the great revolutionary's efforts to build the Bolshevik Party.

Further reading: Ian Birchall's article on Cliff in 1968

Key sources

The starting point for exploring Cliff's writing has to be the index of his work on the Marxists Internet Archive. You can follow up anything from an extremely thorough range of links to articles and book chapters (or even whole books), from his very first piece in 1935 (see earlier post) to the end of his life.

It's also worth looking at the exceptionally comprehensive bibliography compiled by Ian Birchall, composed when he started researching his biography of Cliff (yet to be published). Birchall has also written a very thought-provoking piece about the process of researching and writing the biography, which also serves as a concise overview of Cliff's life and achievements - and it contains a few obscure nuggets about Cliff's childhood that were news to me.

It was intriguing to learn more about Cliff's unpublished manuscripts too, including a full-length book on the Middle East from his years in Palestine and also an incomplete book about Keynes and economics. Warwick University has the full archive - in material rather than online form - including unpublished or unfinished documents.

Cliff's metaphors, analogies and catchphrases

I've already stressed that I by no means intend this blog to become the definitive Tony Cliff collection. There is, however, a slight exception to this principle - there's one way (and only way) in which I hope this blog can become the final word, the complete set, the definitive archive. I am referring to Cliff's magnificent repetoire of anecdotes, metaphors, one-liners, catchphrases, analogies, jokes and witticisms.

In this aspect of public speaking Cliff remains incomparable in the SWP's history: nobody else has developed such a richly diverse, inventive, quirky and sometimes quite baffling array of figurative ways of expressing political ideas. He was incapable of giving a talk at the SWP's annual Marxism event without dropping in at least one offbeat metaphor, unusual analogy or memorable one-liner. The same was true when he spoke in public meetings or at conferences.

So, I am inviting those of you who remember Cliff speaking to get in touch with any examples you recall. I will be collating 'Cliff's miscellany of metaphors, analogies and catchphrases' from these submissions, and hopefully publishing a thorough collection in a few weeks time. You can contact me directly or post a comment underneath this post.

Examples don't have to be especially successful - his 'jokes' sometimes stretched the boundaries of what can be classified as humour - but it would be great to have as comprehensive a collection as possible. He used these rhetorical devices in speech more than in writing, so without your help many of these gems will be lost to posterity.

1935: Cliff's first published piece

Posted item #2 The Present Agrarian Crisis in Egypt

'Already in 1935 I had written an article entitled The Present Agrarian Crisis in Egypt, and sent it to a serious economic journal published in Tel Aviv, Hameshek Hashitufi. I was surprised by the editor’s letter accepting the article. He wrote that it was clear that I had spent years in studying the subject. As a matter of fact I spent about a fortnight. The article was a result of my enthusiasm for the subject, the study of a number of statistical reports and absorbing Lenin’s writings on the agrarian question in Russia. (In passing, one day I came across the editor, and both of us were very embarrassed when he saw me as a young man aged 18 wearing shorts.)'
(From Cliff, 'A World to Win', p33)

Cliff was born in Palestine, to a Jewish family, in May 1917. He changed his name from Ygael Gluckstein to Tony Cliff only after becoming active in British Trotskyism from the late 1940s onwards. Palestine was where he became politicised and where he was an active Marxist for over a decade. He returned to the topic of Palestine - and more broadly to the Middle East and the impact of imperialism on the region - many times later in life.

His rebellion against the Zionist orthodoxies of much of his family - and indeed of left-wing Jewish circles - was crucial to his political development as a teenager. He also devoured the Marxist classics - above all Marx himself, but also Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg - in these years.

He was clear, from an early age, that the internationalist spirit of Marxism had to mean implacable opposition to the growing Zionist movement, which sought a Jewish settler state through the oppression of Palestinians. This was a prinicpled and courageous stance considering his own personal background and the political climate he worked in.

Cliff's first ever published piece was about the Middle East. He wrote it in 1935, aged just 17 or 18, and it is strikingly practical and concrete. It's interesting that his first published writing was not theoretical abstraction, but an application of Marxist thinking to a specific situation. He would go on to do this again and again over the next 65 years.

Egypt was a significant choice of focus - Cliff recognised the country's centrality to politics and class struggle in the Arab world (this remains true today). It was dominant in the region in which Cliff was politically active. For more context around this, check out p32-35 of his autobiography, A World to Win, where he writes:

'Working class struggle in Egypt was far ahead of anything happening in Palestine and has remained at a high level ever since. Comparing Palestine to Egypt I became more and more convinced that the former working class was far too weak to be a lever to move events in the Middle East. The Egyptian working class was the key factor in the Middle East.' (p32)

Interview with Cliff - a video

Posted item #1 Video interview with Tony Cliff

Let's get started with an interview with Cliff from 1996, a few years before his death. At the time he was in his late 70s and still a member of the SWP's Central Committee (he remained so right up until he died in April 2000). Cliff outlines here some of the key prinicples in revolutionary socialism and building a revolutionary party, with some well-chosen examples.

About 10 minutes in he recalls taking the initiative with founding the Anti Nazi League in 1977 - essentially a decision taken by the SWP's leadership, but seeking much wider support and broad unity. The need for dynamism and initiative - for seizing the time and daring to act - is one of the core principles of the Leninist tradition which Cliff was so brilliant at applying in practice.

Examples since Cliff's time include the founding of Stop the War in September 2001, after the terrorist attacks in the US, and the launch of Respect a couple of years later. Revolutionaries have to keep ahead and give a lead, not just tail-end others or wait for something to turn up in the struggle. When things change dramatically - the start of a new phase in imperialism, a major new economic crisis, etc - revolutionaries have to take the initiative in instigating broader coalitions and pursuing political interventions.

Welcome to this blog

Welcome to this new blog devoted to recording the enormous contribution made by Tony Cliff, founder of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) and its forerunners, to the revolutionary socialist tradition. The purpose is to combine text and video in collating a selection of Cliff's works, with some commentary from me on their relevance to the challenges faced by revolutionaries today.

It is not an academic exercise, but a tool for activists. I won't be attempting anything like an exhaustive archive, but rather identifying key articles, extracts and speeches that I think are useful and interesting.

I'm intending to mostly feature Cliff in his own words, but there is scope for including others' writings about him and his ideas. I will welcome any suggestions for posting pieces either by or about Cliff - please get in touch.

This is what might be considered a summer project - I'll be posting a number of times a week up to the 31 August 2009, when I will post my final contribution to the blog (it will then remain online as an archive). Cliff was a polymath with incredibly wide-ranging political interests and expertise , so this blog will attempt to cover a range of categories - though, of course, I cannot hope to do justice to the full scope of Cliff's political and intellectual contribution.