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)