Building a revolutionary party

Posted item #14 'Why we need a socialist workers party'

The Socialist Review Group, which Cliff founded in 1950 after a split from the main British Trotskyist organisation, remained tiny throughout the 1950s. Entering the 1960s, it had only 60 members but grew to around 400 at the beginning of 1968 (via a name change - International Socialists - in 1962). In the wake of the tumultuous events of '68, membership was around 1000 and, following interventions in class struggle in the upturn years of the early 70s, this grew to 3-4000 by 1974.

IS changed its name to the Socialist Workers Party on New Year's Day 1977. This wasn't some momentous event, but rather a formalising of how the organisation had developed in preceding years. The party's name derived from its paper, published on a weekly basis since September 1968, and the notion of being a 'party' reflected its growth in size compared to a decade earlier.

It was also symptomatic of the emphasis Cliff placed on the goal of building a revolutionary party inspired by the example of Lenin and the Bolsheviks: 1977 was midway through the publication of Cliff's multi-volume biography of Lenin. Volume 1, called 'Building the Party', had helped persuade the great majority of IS members of the need for Leninist principles, though this was controversial with some who were still influenced by more libertarian ideas.

The article here coincided with this move from IS to SWP - Cliff doesn't attend much to the reasons for the change, but instead focuses on the tasks facing party activists. The old IS had in fact been through a rocky two or three years, with a damaging split in 1975 when around 150 members left - this was against the backdrop of a sharp change for the worse in working class combativity, disorienting everyone on the left. Cliff reflects, however, on exisiting strengths - notably the ability to take significant initiatives, e.g. Right to Work Campaign - and outlines ideas for how to move ahead.

The 1970 talk about Lenin

Posted item #7 Cliff speaks on Lenin (1970)

This is the first section of Cliff's talk about Lenin from 1970. He was then in the early days of rediscovering Lenin's ideas and writings for his comrades in the International Socialists. During the first half of the 1970s he gave talks and wrote numerous articles about various aspects of Lenin's life and politics, with a major emphasis on Lenin's ideas about building a revolutionary party (and the practical experience of the Bolsheviks).

This focus was linked to his dedication to orienting the IS - which in 1970 still had a fairly weak worker composition, depending heavily on students - on working class struggles and creating a party rooted in both the Marxist tradition and working class organisations. There was some resistance to this, with Cliff having to argue relentlessly for some Leninist positions.

The talks and articles of the early 70s developed into the multi-volume Lenin biography, published between 1975 and 1979, that I wrote about in my previous post. In these books Cliff elaborates the ideas he derived from Lenin - as well as the facts of Lenin's political life - in far greater detail.

The revolutionary tradition: standing on the shoulders of giants

All four volumes of Tony Cliff's biography of Trotsky are now online, at the Marxists' Internet Archive, as well as two volumes of his Lenin biography. This is a major advance in getting Cliff's work online, so a big thank you to those involved. And thanks to the Histomatist blog for alerting me to the news, in the post 'Tony Cliff on Lenin and Trotsky'.

There's a useful chapter about the writing of these biographies in Cliff's memoir, 'A World to Win'. He comments that volume 1, 'Building the Party', is the cornerstone of the Lenin biography. It is basically the nearest you'll get to a definitive manual on building a revolutionary party. Not, it ought to be stressed, because any of us can mechanically apply what the Bolsheviks did in pre-1917 Russia in radically different conditions. Cliff recognised the differences required, but he was also exceptional at identifying the general lessons that could be derived from Lenin's experiences in taking the Bolsheviks from small underground circle to leadership of the only successful workers' revolution in history.

Cliff also suggested that it is the final volume, covering the dark years 1927 (expulsion from the Communist Party) to 1940 (assassination by a Stalinist agent), that was most important in his Trotsky biography. This was partly because it was unique in being the only volume of either biography to cover years Cliff had personal recollection of. He became a Marxist in British-ruled Palestine in around 1933 and was a dedicated Trotskyist - admittedly in a tiny group on the fringes of the Trotskyist movement to begin with - from the mid-1930s.

He also felt especially strongly about the book - titled, poetically, 'The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Star' - because he admired immensely the courage and resilience shown by Trotsky in these years, and felt pity and sorrow when contemplating what he endured. It is a powerful personal tribute - to someone who sustained himself and his political commitment through Nazism and Stalinism - as well as an acute political analysis. These were the years of - to cite just one important area - Trotsky's astute analysis of the rise of Hitler to power in Germany, which Cliff regarded as amongst the greatest of Trotsky's contributions to the Marxist tradition.

Lenin volume 1 was surely also very personally relevant - indeed I've heard it suggested that many passages could easily be interpreted as autobiography, as Cliff is to an extent writing about his efforts (in the early to mid 70s) to build revolutionary organisation through the International Socialists (which became the SWP on 1 January 1977). His own preocupation with turning IS into a disciplined, cohesive revolutionary party was the motor behind his devouring of Lenin's work - and, furthermore, writing a multi-volume biography - from 1968 onwards. His very short piece on democratic centralism in summer 1968 effectively marked the beginning of a massive study of the Bolsheviks, and also the start of a determined effort to re-orient what was then the International Socialists.

The Lenin biography was completed by the end of the 1970s and for generations of SWP members it served as a valuable guide to a hugely important era in revolutionary history and a source of insight into party building, the nature of revolution, and some knotty questions around Leninism and the common charge that the seeds of Stalinism could be found in the Bolshevik Party. The biography, published during the Cold War, was a superb refutation of precisely that charge.

The Trotsky biography came later, between 1988 and 1993. Cliff acknowledged in his memoir that he'd rather not have had the time to write either biography. It was the onset of the downturn in the mid-1970s that facilitated the Lenin biography - such a task would have been impossible in the heady days of revolt in the late 60s and early 70s. Likewise he could only devote such time to Trotsky because of the relatively low levels of resistance and struggle during the period in which wrote it, though he always took an active interest in contemporary politcs and day-to-day party building.

It was appropriate that the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapse during this latter period: events that vindicated Cliff's pioneering analysis of forty years earlier, and which created an opening for the rediscovery of the tradition of which Trotsky was such a magnificent representative.

That tradition was a world away from the monstrosities of Stalinism. It was, and is, a tradition of socialism from below, with the self-activity of the working class at its core. Today, with capitalism in its deepest crisis since Trotsky's final struggle (and Cliff's formative years), the need for us to carry forward that thread of genuine socialism is profound. The biographies of Lenin and Trotsky are an aid to us in the project of strengthening revolutionary socialism in the 21st century.

A full index of Cliff's online writings - including the biographies - can be found here: www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/

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.