[forwarded from International Viewpoint]
Reply-To: International_Viewpoint@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I forward this as a document. There will be published other obituaries
soon, including one or another by comrades of the Fourth International,
which was - as you truely know - in sharp disagreement about some
questions to the organisation of the comrade, who has passed away and
already is deeply missed nevertheless, by us too.
Gerd
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The Guardian (London and Manchester)
Tuesday April 11 2000
Tony Cliff
Revolutionary political theorist and organiser who fired the Socialist
Workers Party with his charisma, charm and vision
Paul Foot
The first I heard of Tony Cliff, who has died aged 82, was from Gus
Macdonald, now Lord Macdonald, Minister of Transport. Forty years ago,
Gus was a charismatic leader of the Govan and Gorbals Young Socialists
and had an awesome reputation from a Clydeside apprentices' strike. In
late 1961, he reckoned it was time the Young Socialists took some serious
lessons in Marxist theory, and arranged a weekend school to be
addressed by two leaders of an obscure Trotskyist sect called the
International Socialists.
Gus and I met the couple in an airport lounge. I can still see them coming
in: Mikhael Kidron, smart, suave, urbane, and Tony Cliff, short and
scruffy, looking and sounding like a rag doll. As we mumbled through the
niceties of introductions, the rag doll looked irritated and shy. We
climbed into a taxi. As we did so, I saw a newspaper poster about events
in the Congo, and remarked, partly to break the silence, that I'd
never really understood the Congo. Quick as a flash, the rag doll came to
life, and started jabbering with amazing speed and energy. I can't
remember exactly what he said, but I do remember my clouds of doubt and
misunderstanding suddenly disappearing and the role of the contestants in
the Congo, including the United Nations, becoming brutally clear.
I met Cliff many hundreds of times subsequently, sometimes for
private conversations, more often on shared platforms, from which we
urged our audiences to join IS and its successor, the Socialist Workers
Party, and to organise for socialism. Though he often made exactly
the same speech and cracked the same jokes, I never failed to be
astonished and enthused. His death is shocking. Very few of us who knew
him well believed that such an essentially youthful figure could ever
pass away.
Tony Cliff was born Ygael Gluckstein, the son of a Zionist building
contractor, in Palestine, in May 1917, in between the great
Russian revolutions. He was speedily converted out of Zionism by
observing the treatment of Arab children. Aged 13, he wrote in a
school essay: "It is so sad that there are no Arab kids in the school."
The teacher scrawled across the page the single word: "Communist".
She was right, and Cliff was always grateful for her perception. He
fought vigorously against the exclusion of Arabs from the closed Zionist
economy. When a speaker from the Haifa trades council spoke glowingly of
the anti-fascist uprising in Vienna in 1934, and ended his speech with a
tribute to the Paris Commune and workers' unity, Cliff, aged 17,
heckling from the back of the hall, added the one word "international".
In this context, "international" meant Arab, and the stewards responded
by twisting his finger till it broke. Cliff joined the Communist party,
but was quickly disillusioned by the party's nationalism. He became a
Trotskyist before he was 20 and devoted the rest of his life to building
revolutionary socialist organisations. He came to Britain with
his newly-married South African wife, Chanie, and was promptly expelled
from the country on the advice of the Special Branch; he spent five
years in poverty in Ireland until allowed to return.
In the 1950s, he formed the Socialist Review Group, which grew into IS in
the early 1960s and the SWP in 1977. For a long time, these groups
remained tiny. But when the Communist party, with its
(comparatively) huge roots in the organised working class, collapsed in
1989, the SWP became by far the largest and most confident of the
socialist organisations to the left of the Labour party. This
achievement was due largely to Cliff's most striking qualities; his
immense intellectual power and his ability to explain his libertarian
Marxism in simple language. His unique intellectual contribution was
to describe, in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union as state capitalist,
and therefore imperialist - a proposition as shocking to most socialists
of the time as it was inspiring to those of us who were convinced by it.
With the theory of state capitalism came a number of associated ideas, all
of them based on Marx's message that the emancipation of labour must be
the work of labour itself; that capitalism is far too strong and
sophisticated a system to be brought down or replaced from on high; and
that the workers alone, through their union organisations
and instinctive solidarity, have the power to bring about that vital
change. This power, moreover, cannot be effectively mobilised without
political organisation in the working class rank and file.
These themes emerged from Cliff's early books about Russia, China and
eastern Europe, and his later four-volume biographies of Lenin (in the
1970s) and Trotsky (in the 1980s).
They emerged even more clearly from Cliff's tireless public speaking. His
wild accent often startled his audiences, but they were soon giggling at
his folksy jokes, like the parable in which a flea boasts to the ox on
whose back he is riding: "Look how far we have ploughed today."
My favourite featured an Arabian sultan, who went to Manchester to buy a
cooling system for his palace. As he was chatting to the managing director
in his office, the sultan heard a blast on a hooter. Out of the window he
saw, to his horror, thousands of workers walking out of the factory. In a
hysterical panic, he shrieked at the managing director, who told him not
to worry. Half an hour later the hooter went again, and the workers
returned from their break. "Don't worry about the cooling system,"
concluded the sultan. "Just give me the hooter."
Cliff died without a penny in his pocket or any property to speak of. He
was always bored stiff by property or talk of property. He left a far
richer inheritance: thousands of us socialists, who, without him, would
have degenerated into apathy, opportunism or careerism; a wife, who lived
and fought by his side for 55 years, and two sons and two daughters, all
of whom, in their different ways, are inspiring socialists and engaging
companions.
"Don't mourn, organise!" was one of Cliff's most consistent slogans, and
somehow we must try to live up to it.
Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein), socialist
activist, born May 20 1917; died April 9 2000