From LSHG Newsletter # 54 (January 2015)
PART 3
Editor’s
note: this third and final part of an extended review by Sheila Cohen of Ian
Birchall’s biography of Tony Cliff follows on from the previous two issues of
this Newsletter - see Part I here:
http://www.londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/book-review-part-1-tony-cliff-marxist.html
See Part II here:
http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/book-review-part-ii-of-sheila-cohen-on.html
This issue of the Newsletter contains
Ian Birchall’s reply to the entire review - see here
http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-reply-to-sheila-cohen-by-ian-birchall.html
http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-reply-to-sheila-cohen-by-ian-birchall.html
Of course, in retrospect a case could be made for the
“downturn” thesis in terms of the rapid erosion of the trade union movement
under Thatcher (elected in 1979). But a case can also be made for recognition
of, and socialist leadership of, the quasi-revolutionary potential of the
Winter[i]. The leadership seemed to be blind to this; while Steve Jefferys
demonstrated what Birchall calls a “highly over-optimistic perspective” at the
time, this optimism was “based on the successes of the ANL.” It was as if the SWP leaders were suffering
from a form of political Attention Deficit Disorder. It gets worse; although by
late 1978 the leadership had managed to notice that a major strike wave was
going on, it was not until this point that “[t]he rank and file strategy, which
had been dormant for some time, began to resume its relevance” (p436). A bit
late, maybe…?
The disorientation was confirmed when Steve Jefferys
resigned as industrial organiser, not in protest against the strategic
confusion but because “The decay of working-class organisation and the shift to
the right in the trade union movement has gone so far that all we can do in
this period is to make socialist propaganda as actively as possible.” This in
the midst of – shall I say it again? – the biggest strike wave ever. While Tory
ministers complained about “little Soviets”, a leading SWP intellectual could
turn from class-oriented agitational organising to…propaganda.
Of
course, all this can be retrospectively justified by the Thatcher victory and
all that followed. But apart from the fact that Thatcher’s win was hardly a
landslide, the reality is that trade unionism was at a historic high in
1979-80. An effective workplace-based activists’ network could have played an
effective part in combating the many betrayals that followed. But rather than
noting this tragic loss of potential, Birchall comments happily at the end of
this chapter, “The SWP, despite internal disputes, had held together well, and
Cliff could feel some satisfaction that…his party was in reasonably good
shape.” It resembles the complacency of a small business owner rather than a
revolutionary socialist noting the tragic ending – for the time being – of an
at times quasi-revolutionary period of intense working-class struggle.
The
next chapter, headed “1979-84: Enforced Retreat”, begins with the report of a
speech to the 1979 SWP Easter Rally at which Cliff commented, “[1969-74] was a
period when the class struggle achieved a level unprecedented in British
working class history for generations…” However, as Birchall sums up the
argument, “the Labour election victory in 1974 had marked a sharp turning
point” after which (Cliff again) “we did not have one national strike in any
key section of the class.” The leader’s “logic” ignored such minor matters as
the national Ford strike in late 1978, not to mention the subsequent waves of
public sector and civil service actions. Logic and history must fall by the
wayside; it was time for the (retrospective) declaration of the “Downturn”
(p441).
From
this point, our Casablanca passes its
peak, and we can only resign ourselves to the torrent of
diversion-cum-sectarianism that follows. As an unrepentant “workerist”, I will
pass over the extended discussion of Cliff’s initially hostile response to the
Women’s Liberation movement and the demands of women members of the SWP for
increased representation and attention to the issue; they were right, of
course, but as with most “movement” demands the response could be little more
than symbolic (though contrast the excellent, class-based restructuring of TDU
from its inception along lines that queried truckers’ “macho” and at times
racist culture – a very different dynamic). Like the rest of the left, the SWP
poured resources into support for the 1984-5 miners’ strike; yet this herculean
struggle was almost from its beginnings
more symbolic than effective, despite the enormous bravery of its participants.
The year after the miners’ defeat (which Cliff, to his
credit, had predicted) the leader was back on the numbers game. He rightly
criticised those who reversed Gramsci’s doctrine of “optimism of the will…” to
“optimism of the intellect and pessimism of the will”, instead recommending an
approach of “Everything in the garden is terrible, but there are things we can
do.” Yet such “things” were immediately translated into recruitment numbers:
“Can we grow to 6,000 instead of 4,000?” (p487).
Interestingly, a theoretical intervention by Cliff’s son
Donny Gluckstein provoked a sharp response by Alex Callinicos accusing Donny of
the twin sins of “absolving Luxemburg for her failure to build a revolutionary
party and tending to give priority to soviets over the party”. A clearer
demonstration of the SWP’s rapid progression to a form of Leninist Stalinism
would be hard to find. Yet in a later publication written jointly with Cliff,
Gluckstein “retrieved”‘ his reputation with a highly conventional analysis of
the trade union bureaucracy, defining it as a “distinct, basically
conservative, social formation” – an theoretically bankrupt analysis which did
nothing to explore the complex dynamics which so often make bureaucrats out of
activists. Obviously Donny had not escaped too far beyond his father’s
coattails[ii].
By
1992, Cliff was back in the prediction business; at a meeting in the annual
“Marxism” jamboree he described the argument that there was a long-term decline
in the working class movement as “a load of rubbish”. Instead there were “clear
indications of the strength and resilience of the working class movement”.
Cliff was lucky this time; late 1992 saw a huge popular protest movement over
the government’s inept attempt to close a further 31 coal mines. True to form,
“Cliff and the central committee decided that in this climate a call for a
general strike would be a realistic demand”, and the next issue of Socialist Worker duly bore the heading
“General Strike Now!” La plus ca change…
Cliff
produced another revolutionary biography during these years, this time on
Trotsky. The faithful Birchall concedes that “for the most part this was not
Cliff at his best.” Yet the book revealed a spurt of anti-Leninism with our
hero “quite critical about Lenin’s argument that the revolution should be
carried out in the name of the party rather than the soviet” (pp518-9). The
fact that this position contradicted most of what he had been up to for the
last twenty-plus years did not seem to occur to the author (or indeed his
biographer).
In
1995, again at Marxism, Cliff backflipped once more; lecturing on Engels, he
“drew out” what Birchall describes as a “fundamental point”, viz that ‘the
whole history of Marxism was about learning from the working class.’ Even more
bizarrely, he ended his speech by fulminating against what had in effect been
his own long-term practice: “I can never understand the idea…that the party
teaches the class. What the hell is the party?...The dialectic means there is a
two-way street…” (p530). By early 1995 he had decided that ‘the downturn
proper’ was over; no upturn was to be expected, but the SWP briefly adopted a
rank-and-file perspective in that year. This did not, however, lead to any
lessening of the domination of the SWP in party-class relations; the present
reviewer remembers distributing leaflets promoting the rank and file paper Trade Union News on the chairs of an SWP
“rank and file” conference, only to turn round and see a small gnome-like
figure following behind and picking them up. Not much non-sectarian class
unifying going on there.
Cliff died in April 2000, an event signalling, of course,
the end of Birchall’s biography. But the conclusion provides a number of useful
pointers to how we might assess Cliff’s – and IS/SWP’s – trajectory. The
outlook is not promising; for Birchall at least, “Cliff’s major theoretical
contribution was the analysis of state capitalism” (p554). It is true that our[iii] cynicism as to the true nature of
“socialism” in Russia meant that “Cliff’s followers were relatively immune to
any sense of defeat” while “The collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ after
1989 led to demoralisation among many sections of the left…” Fine, but 20-odd
years later the issue somehow lacks centrality, while for some of us at least
the issue of how socialists relate to the working-class vanguard remains as
central as ever.
The sense of other-universesness continues when we
discover that Cliff’s, or at least the SWP’s, “most visible success was the
anti-Nazi League” (p556). And perhaps the most arcane “tribute” comes with
Birchall’s recollection : “In the 1990s someone from one of the SWP’s rivals
characterised the party’s mode of operation as, ‘If it moves, recruit it; if it
doesn’t move, stick a poster on it.’ ”.
Astoundingly,
Birchall comments “It was meant as a
slander, but may serve as a tribute” (p557). Perhaps this final conundrum
should stand as an epitaph to “the biggest small mass party” in Britain?
Sheila Cohen
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