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.

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.

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.