Tony Cliff - an appreciation
TONY Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein), the founder and chief theoretician of the British Socialist Workers' Party, died on Sunday 9th April 2000
* Britain at the age of 82. ALAN THORNETT Ta He but an an aion which ONY Cliff was a major figure of the ly. He built an organisation which during the 1990s has been by far the biggest on the British far left. Whilst I have had a range of disagreements with his politics and analysis the contribution he made to revolutionary politics in Britain was clearly substantial. His energy and integrity will be greatly missed and the workers' movement will be the poorer without him.
Cliff became a Trotskyist in his native Palestine in the 1930s. After a spell in jail in Palestine he arrived in Britain just after the second world war and joined the principal Trotskyist group at the time, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Although not the originator he became the principal protagonist of the theory of state capitalism: the idea that the USSR was a state capitalist country and not a degenerated workers state as Trotsky had argued in Revolution Betrayed. These ideas were set out in his seminal work State Capitalism in Russia. After expulsion from the RCP at the end of the 1940s he established the Socialist Review group. This later became the International Socialists (IS) and in 1974 the Socialist Workers Party.
First meeting
I first met Tony Cliff nearly 40 years ago when I was a young shop steward in the car industry in Oxford and still a member of the Communist Party, even if a dissident one. There were two Trotskyist organisations in Oxford at the time, the Socialist Labour League (SLL), led nationally by Gerry Healy and Cliff's IS
My growing interest in Trotskyism, along with other militants from the car industry, was triggered by contact with a group of SLL students in the University. In the same period we had a discussion with Tony Cliff as well. He came and addressed 14 International Viewpoint #321 May 2000 a group of us from the car plants.
We were unconvinced by Cliff's rank and fileist politics, and IS's consequent reluctance to take positions in the trade build only amongst the rank and file, and as a result leave key leadership positions in the hands of the right-wing to be used against the rank-and-file, never made sense to us.
### Rejection
Our decision to join the SLL a couple of years later was based on our rejection of Tony Cliff's two key ideas, rank and fileism and state capitalism. Cliff concluded that what had happened in the Soviet Union was not that the power had been taken from the working class by a counter revolutionary bureaucracy on the basis of existing property relations, but that the mode of production had changed back to a form of capitalism — state capitalism. The bureaucracy were now a new ruling class extracting surplus value and accumulating capital as capitalism does.
This led him to conclude that there was nothing at all to defend in the USSR and that it was as much an imperialist power as the USA. The practical application of this theory came when he took a position of neutrality in the Korean war, but it is a position which was not carried through consistently. The IS/SWP was not neutral in the Vietnam war but correctly opposed US imperialism and later developed a more consistent anti-imperialist position whilst maintaining its "Neither Washington or Moscow" slogan.
Tony Cliff saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR and the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe as a massive vindication of the theory of state capitalism. This view was shared by the SWP as a whole, and it gave them confidence at a time when the Communist Parties went into free fall in many countries including Britain and sections of the far left drew pessimistic conclusions out of these events. In my view it was Trotsky's analysis which was confirmed by the collapse of the USSR, not the theory of state capitalism. This is shown in the immense problems encountered in re-capitalising the Russian economy. Even 10 years later the capitalist mode of production does not predominate in the Soviet Union.
By the 1990s the SWP, with 4-5,000 members, was by far the biggest far-left organisation in Britain. It remained, however, a dogmatic, insular, top-down organisation with a history or riding rough-shod over other sections of the left on the single minded pursuit of higher membership figures.
### Higher demands
In the period immediately before Cliff's death, however, the rightward march of Blairism was placing ever higher demands on the unity of the left in order the build a political response. It is to his great credit that Tony Cliff recognised these changes and emerging opportunities in the last months of his life and fully backed the London Socialist Alliance.
At the major rally of the LSA Paul Foot of the SWP spoke on the same platform as Tommy Sheridan of the new Scottish Socialist Party and Alain Krivine from the LCR on the theme of rebuilding the left across Europe. Only a year or two ago such a thing would have seemed inconceivable.
The organisation he built, regarded by many as insular for a very long time, has partly opened itself up to a dialogue, joint work, and collaboration with other sections of the far left. It would be a tribute to him for this to continue towards the construction of an effective alternative to the rightward march of new Labour. *
The General in the labyrinth
INOCHET had no reason to believe his visit to Britain in September
1998 for back surgery would be any different from those he had made since the 1997 general election victory of Labour and therefore with its full knowledge. The Anglophile was fond of attending arms fairs in Britain and taking tea with his old friend and former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
On those trips no attempt had been made by the Blair government to deny him entry or to initiate legal action for the torture of two British nationals and one's disappearance. However, on October 16th, 1998 Spanish investigating judge Baltasar Garzón issued a warrant for the General's arrest and extradition to Spain, to face charges of torture and murder of Spanish nationals in Chile while he was head of state between 11th September, 1973 and Ilth March, 1990. The British government had no alternative but to entertain this request and the slow wheels of the legal system began to turn.
### Cacophony from right
The cacophony of voices raised against Pinochet's confinement came predictably from the political right in Britain and abroad. The same tired and increasingly threadbare lines were recited. That Pinochet's extradition to Spain would undo years of reconciliation and harmony. That the Spanish authorities proposed and the British government were colluding in an infringement of Chilean sovereignty. That if Pinochet was to be tried anywhere it ought to be in his own country, by his own people and according to Chilean rules rather than that of a foreign tribunal. This last assertion became the tack taken by the campaign for Pinochet's release.
However, under the terms of the transition to civilian rule in 1988, Pinochet secured immunity from prosecution for human rights violations during the dictatorship for leading members of the regime including himself. This was in addition to the 1978 law which provides a blanket amnesty for abuses committed between 1973 and 1978 and a similar provision in of law
SO the old tyrant made his escape. Aided and abetted by the British government in the person of its home secretary
(interior minister) Jack Straw,
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte returned, as detective stories tell us the murderer always does, to the scene of the crime.
### B. SKANTHAKUMAR the 1980 Constitution. Further, in 1998 when he finally relinquished his control of the armed forces, the General elected himself Senator-for-Life which also guarantees immunity from prosecution.
It is true that the Concertación coalition which has governed Chile since 1989 cre-
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (better known as the Rettig Commission) to investigate acts of violence during the dictatorship. This body has performed the important duty of documenting the names of those murdered or disappeared by Pinochet's secret service, the DINA. However it never had the power, and nor is there the political will in the coalition, to punish those responsible for those acts.
"Impunity remains virtually total in Chile" according to Amnesty International. Between 1973 and 1998, "approximately 5,000 judicial complaints of human rights violations have been presented in Chile, yet only twelve cases have led to prosecution. Despite statements to the effect that Augusto Pinochet should be tried in Chile, the Chilean government has shown no intention of removing obstacles that make such trial currently impossible.." The Chilean Supreme Court has consistently failed to offer judicial redress for state violations of human rights, often throwing out cases.