Tony Cliff

Information about Tony Cliff

Enlarge picture
Tony Cliff

History

Tony Cliff (May 20, 1917 – May 9, 2000) was a Trotskyist revolutionary activist. Born Yigael Gluckstein in a Jewish Zionist family in Palestine, he eventually changed his name to Yg'al (Yg'al: "Will Redeem"; Yigael: "Will Be Redeemed"), although in later years he would become far better known by his pen name Tony Cliff. In the late 1930s and early 1940s he used several pseudonyms in three languages due to the illegal status of the Revolutionary Communist League in which he worked. Due to his lack of established residency rights in Britain in the early 1950s and during his brief exile in Ireland the name Roger or Roger Tennant would be used. Much later in the 1960s Cliff would revive many of his earlier pseudonyms in the pages of International Socialism in which journal reviews are to be found by Roger, Roger Tennant, Sakhry, Lee Rock and Tony Cliff, but none by Yigael or Yg'al Gluckstein.

Although as a young man he identified with Communism, he never joined the Communist Party of Palestine, as he never met any of its members before becoming a socialist activist. However, he did join the socialist Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair, soon becoming not only a Trotskyist but also a confirmed opponent of Zionism. Along with other Hashomer Hatzair members, he joined the Revolutionary Communist League (Palestine). After becoming a Trotskyist in 1933 he was involved in leading groups until his death in 2000.

During World War II, Cliff was imprisoned by the British authority then governing the territory. After his release, he moved to Britain in 1947, but was never able to become a citizen and remained a stateless person. He was for a while deported to the Republic of Ireland and was only permitted to take up British residency due to his partner's status as a citizen. On his return to London, he again became active with the Revolutionary Communist Party onto whose leadership he had been co-opted.

For most purposes Cliff was a supporter of the leadership of the RCP around Jock Haston and as such he was involved with the discussions concerning the nature of those states dominated by Russia and the Communist parties initiated by a faction within the RCP. This debate was linked to other discussions on the nationalised industries in Britain and the increasingly critical stance of Haston and the RCP as to the leadership of the Fourth International with regard to Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia in particular.

Ideology

Part of the Politics series on
Trotskyism
Leon Trotsky
Fourth International
Marxism
Leninism
Russian Revolution
Prominent Trotskyists
James P. Cannon
Tony Cliff
Pierre Frank
Ted Grant
Joseph Hansen
Gerry Healy
C. L. R. James
Pierre Lambert
Livio Maitan
Ernest Mandel
Nahuel Moreno
Max Shachtman
Trotskyist groups
CWI FI(ICR) ICFI
IMT IST IWL
reunified FI
Branches
Orthodox Trotskyism
Third camp
This box:  •  • [ edit]
Cliff developed a version of the theory that Russia and the 'glacis countries' (buffer states), as they were referred to in the Fourth International at the time, were state capitalist. This theory was not at the time as iconoclastic as it came to appear later. The Fourth International held until 1951 that the 'glacis' states had remained capitalist even while the FI maintained the position that Russia was a degenerated workers' state. In fact one leader of the Fourth International (Ernest Mandel, writing under the name Germain) remarked that the ideas that both Russia and the glacis were capitalist, or that both Russia and the 'glacis' were workers' states, were both obviously incorrect and had no place in the Fourth International. However within months he would adopt the viewpoint that both Russia and the 'glacis' were workers' states.

Since then the consensus in most Trotskyist groups has been that all the states dominated by Stalinist parties and characterised by state planning and state ownership of property are to be seen as degenerated workers' states (The Soviet Union) or deformed workers' states (other Stalinist states, including much of Eastern Europe). In many ways Cliff was the main dissident from this idea although some of his opponents have sought to associate his state capitalist view with other ideas, for example the theory of bureaucratic collectivism associated with Shachtmanite Workers Party in the United States. However Cliff himself was insistent that his ideas owed nothing to those of Max Shachtman, or earlier proponents of the theory such as Bruno Rizzi, and made this clear in his Bureaucratic Collectivism - A Critique. Nevertheless, in the 1950s his group distributed literature published by Schachtman's group and the theory of the permanent arms economy which was considered one of the pillars of what became the International Socialist Tendency originated with Schachtman's group though Cliff refused to acknowledge this publicly.

On the break-up of the RCP, his supporters joined Gerry Healy's group The Club, although having been deported to Ireland Cliff himself did not. Indeed he was unable to settle permanently in Britain until 1952 whe he joined his wife, Chanie Rosenburg, and their children in London. By this time his supporters in The Club had been expelled due to differences on Birmingham Trades Council as to socialist policy concerning the war in Korea, where Cliff's co-factionalists refused to take a position of support for either side in the war.

In 1950 he helped launch the Socialist Review Group which was based around a journal of the same name. This was to be the main publication for which he wrote during the 1950s, until it was superseded by International Socialism in 1960, eventually ceasing publication altogether in 1962. The group was renamed the International Socialists at the same time and was to grow from less than 100 members in 1960 until it claimed in the region of 3,000 in 1977, at which point it was renamed the Socialist Workers Party. Cliff's biography is, as he himself remarked, inseparable from that of the groups he was a member of.

Cliff's wife, Chanie Rosenberg, was herself an active member successively of the SRG, IS and SWP, in which she remains active to this day. As well as authoring many articles on social questions for the groups' publications she was an activist in the National Union of Teachers until her retirement. In addition three of the couples' four children became members of the SWP. with one son, Donny Gluckstein, co-authoring a book on Trades Unionism with his father.

He is depicted as Jimmy Rock of the Rockers in Tariq Ali's satire Redemption.

See also

References

Cliff was a prolific author and journalist. His works were published in many languages as a result of the international nature of the movement of which he was a leader. A list of some of the more important of his works appears below. The date shown is mostly that of first publication.

External links

Archives

  • A Summary Description of the Tony Cliff papers held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick Library. Online abstract available. Retrieved June 16, 2006.
May 20 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events


..... Click the link for more information.
19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1880s  1890s  1900s  - 1910s -  1920s  1930s  1940s
1914 1915 1916 - 1917 - 1918 1919 1920

Year 1917 (MCMXVII
..... Click the link for more information.
May 9 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events


..... Click the link for more information.
20th century - 21st century
1970s  1980s  1990s  - 2000s -  2010s  2020s  2030s
1997 1998 1999 - 2000 - 2001 2002 2003

2000 by topic:
News by month
Jan - Feb - Mar - Apr - May - Jun
..... Click the link for more information.
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party.
..... Click the link for more information.
A revolutionary, when used as a noun, is a person who either advocates or actively engages in some kind of revolution. The term is usually applied to political revolutionaries or social revolutionaries, and less frequently used to revolutionary scientists, inventors, and artists.
..... Click the link for more information.
Activism, in a general sense, can be described as intentional action to bring about social or political change. This action is in support of, or opposition to, one side of an often controversial argument.
..... Click the link for more information.
Historical Jewish languages
Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, others
Liturgical languages:
Hebrew and Aramaic
Predominant spoken languages:
The vernacular language of the home nation in the Diaspora, significantly including English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and
..... Click the link for more information.
Zionism is an international political movement that supports a homeland for the Jewish People in the Land of Israel.[1] Although its origins are earlier, the movement was formally established by Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late nineteenth century.
..... Click the link for more information.
Palestine (from Παλαιστινη; Palaestina; formerly also פלשתינה Palestina
..... Click the link for more information.
Communism
Basic concepts
Marxist philosophy
Class struggle
Proletarian internationalism
Communist party
Ideologies
Marxism  Leninism  Maoism
Trotskyism  Juche
Left  Council
..... Click the link for more information.
The Communist Party of Palestine was a communist party in Palestine 1922-1923. It was formed through a split in the Jewish Communist Party (the other factions formed the Palestinian Communist Party). A major difference between the two parties was the attitude towards Zionism.
..... Click the link for more information.
Socialism

Currents
Communism
Democratic socialism
Eco-socialism
Guild socialism
Libertarian socialism
Market socialism
Revolutionary socialism
Social democracy
Utopian socialism


..... Click the link for more information.
Hashomer Hatzair (Hebrew: השומר הצעיר, also transliterated Hashomer Hatsair or HaShomer HaTzair, translating as The Youth Guard
..... Click the link for more information.
The Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) or 'Brit Kommunistim Mahapchanin' was a Trotskyist party in Palestine in the late 1930s and 1940s.

It was built out of three components: exiled German Jewish members of Heinrich Brandler’s KPO (Communist Party Opposition
..... Click the link for more information.
Allied powers:
 Soviet Union
 United States
 United Kingdom
 China
 France
...et al. Axis powers:
 Germany
 Japan
 Italy
...et al.
..... Click the link for more information.
Motto
"Dieu et mon droit" [2]   (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
"God Save the Queen" [3]
..... Click the link for more information.
Citizenship is membership in a political community (originally a city or town but now usually a country) and carries with it rights to political participation; a person having such membership is a citizen.
..... Click the link for more information.
A stateless person is someone with no citizenship or nationality. It may be because the state that gave their previous nationality has ceased to exist and there is no successor state, or their nationality has been repudiated by their own state, effectively making them refugees.
..... Click the link for more information.
Anthem
Amhrán na bhFiann  
The Soldier's Song


..... Click the link for more information.
London
Canary Wharf is the centre of London's modern office towers
London shown within England
Coordinates:
Sovereign state United Kingdom
Constituent country England
..... Click the link for more information.
The Revolutionary Communist Party was a British Trotskyist political party, formed in 1944 and active until 1949, and publishing the Socialist Appeal fortnightly newspaper, a theoretical journal Workers International News
..... Click the link for more information.
Jock Haston (1913-1986) was a Trotskyist politician and General Secretary of the Revolutionary Communist Party in Great Britain.

Haston was a member of a small group of members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who moved towards Trotskyism in the late 1930s after
..... Click the link for more information.
Fourth International (FI) is a communist international organisation working in opposition to both capitalism and Stalinism. Consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, it has striven for an eventual victory of the working class to bring about socialism.
..... Click the link for more information.
This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone and/or spelling.
You can assist by [ editing it] now. A how-to guide is available, as is general .
This article has been tagged since September 2007.
..... Click the link for more information.
Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija in the Latin alphabet, Југославија in Cyrillic; English: South Slavia, or literary The Land of South Slavs
..... Click the link for more information.
Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. Although the term is generally applied to behavior within civil governments, politics is observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious
..... Click the link for more information.
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party.
..... Click the link for more information.
Leon Trotsky (Russian: Лeв Давидович Трóцкий   (help info ) ,
..... Click the link for more information.
Fourth International (FI) is a communist international organisation working in opposition to both capitalism and Stalinism. Consisting of followers of Leon Trotsky, it has striven for an eventual victory of the working class to bring about socialism.
..... Click the link for more information.

This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the wikipedia encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.