The last post

I started this blog on 25 July - less than six weeks ago - as a brief summer project. My aim was to collate a selection of Tony Cliff's most relevant and interesting writings, supported by a modest amount of video and audio input (there's sadly not much available), with my own introductions and commentaries.

I'm pleased to have covered a wide range of topics. Hopefully my own commentaries are useful, and readers are able to infer contemporary implications for themselves. Most importantly, I highly recommend reading the Cliff articles and book chapters I've posted over recent weeks - and indeed it's worth digging further into the archive of his work. There are now well over 100 items in the Cliff index on the Marxists Internet Archive.

In the right sidebar of this blog you'll find a list of the specific pieces of Cliff's writing I've posted, plus examples of Cliff speaking, articles about him and ways of exploring further. These features should serve as a guide - together with the blog posts - to a great revolutionary socialist from whom we can continue to learn an enormous amount.

Finally, I should mention an earlier request for examples of Cliff's rhetoric - stories, metaphors, analogies, jokes - which I wanted to collect. Instead of posting them here, as planned, I've decided to feature a selection of them on my regular Luna17 blog - http://luna17activist.blogspot.com - as soon as I get round to it.

So, please use this archive as a theoretical resource, a tool in both understanding society and changing it. It is no academic exercise - as Marx noted, philosophers have interpreted the world but the point is to change it. For, as Marx also wrote, we have a world to win.

Tony Cliff: selecting and searching

I thought I'd point out a few things you will find on this blog. In the right sidebar I've put various items I regard as valuable components in any Cliff archive. There's all 3 parts of the 1996 talk on Lenin (complete with wittily edited animations), which I've commented on previously.

You will find a number of articles about Cliff that I think capture very important elements of his poltical character and ideas - I've commented already on the John Rees tribute, but I also recommend the Paul Foot and David Renton articles. Ian Birchall's reflections on researching his biography of Cliff are also there - this paper was the inspiration for my previous post - and I've included his excellent article on Cliff in 1968 too.

I've included a small selection of Cliff's writings, courtesy of the Marxists Internet Archive which now has a mass of Cliff material. I've mainly picked fairly short pieces and they are all, I think, particularly good in different ways. They are essentially the pieces I'm posting here, and commenting on, but of course I haven't got round to all of them yet!

There are also guides to searching further, including the most exhaustive bibliography available (prepared by Ian Birchall in the early days of working on the as yet unpublished biography). The material archive - including various papers unearthed in Cliff's home after he died - are held at Warwick University, but the online archive at MIA is the next best thing.

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.