Cliff on Lenin

Posted item #6 Cliff speaks on Lenin and the party (1996)

Marxism 96 appears to be the source of a great deal of the publicly available video and audio material of Tony Cliff: the only video interview with Cliff, the only video on YouTube featuring Cliff's public speaking, and also this audio recording (in 3 parts) of his talk on Lenin. If he'd been laid low with flu that week, we would have almost nothing.

I've already posted the videos - this one is strictly speaking audio, but it has enjoyable animation to accompany it (courtesy of notthebbc on YouTube). The three parts of the talk together provide most of the key Leninist principles Cliff championed, especially from the 1970s onwards. He returned, again and again, to the core concepts outlined here, often using the same examples and phrases to make his point.

His bit, at the end of Part 1, on how revolutionaries relate to other workers on a picket line crystallises the major issues around how the revolutionary left can contribute to achieving shared goals and simultaneously win wider support for their ideas in the working class. This was one of the recurring preoccupations of Cliff's life, in particular once his group had reached a size where it could have influence on the course of at least some struggles. This was true from probably the early 1970s onwards.

By 1996 the Socialist Workers Party had somewhere between 8000 and 10,000 members, many of them with roots in the trade union movement and many possessing political expertise gained from years of activism. Cliff was insistent on the need for every generation of revolutionaries to learn from the giants of our tradition. This talk offers an example of him, approaching 80, popularising the ideas and spirit of one of those giants for a new generation.