An explosive row over allegations of rape made against a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party has triggered bitter divisions in the largest of the far left parties in Britain and speculation about a potential split. Whatever criticisms others on the left have about the SWP, its interventions and its organisational methods, no one can take pleasure in the prospect of further fragmentation of the radical left when so many yearn for a coherent and effective socialist alternative to a discredited economic and political establishment.

The issue of sexual violence and how the matter has been handled by the SWP leadership – serious as it is – has in turn ignited far wider discontent among party members. What started as a purely internal dispute has now gone public and viral. It has exposed serious questions about the internal life of the party; its system of ‘democratic centralism’, the unrealistic hype which infuses much of the SWP’s propaganda, its sectarianism and resentment among many members about being treated as voiceless and ultimately dispensable foot soldiers.

The problems which beset the SWP are by no means unique on the far left. The recent story of the ‘Leninist’ far left, not only in Britain but internationally, has become too often a sad litany of millenarian expectations, followed by disillusionment, the exhaustion of activists, internal splits and political impotence. The largest left political grouping in Britain is today made up of former members of the SWP and similar organisations.

That said, some of the finest socialists and militants are still to be found among members of parties like the SWP and the Socialist Party (SP). Without them, opposition to the vicious onslaught on the living standards and rights of working people unleashed as a result of the present economic crisis would have been even weaker and less effective than it has been.

The real issue is whether political organisations of the kind which emerged from the revolutionary currents generated by the Russian revolution, a century ago, have any future in their present form. We live in a period when the left has to fight back against the rampant right wing offensive and at the same time seek to understand the profound changes which have taken place in society and come to terms with what they mean for the theory and the practice of the left.

One obvious question is whether the era of proletarian socialism which began about 150 years ago, generated by the industrial revolution, is passing. Not only has the organised labour movement shrunk in size and influence, the Labour Party seems to have become utterly disconnected from its original base. But the era of the revolutionary socialist currents, inspired by the Bolshevik tradition, has also passed.

Democratic centralism

A key issue for those in the SWP opposed to the leadership and seeking a wholesale reform of the party is the leadership’s insistence on an ultra-centralist form of ‘democratic centralism’. This, critics believe, has reinforced a self-perpetuating clique in control of the SWP apparatus and increasingly out of touch with the outside world.

Although Lenin’s name is regularly invoked in support of democratic centralism, it meant many very different things at stages in the history of the Bolsheviks. Arguably essential to the Bolsheviks very survival in the run up to the Russian revolution, under Stalin it became the rubric for dictatorship and the destruction of the party’s revolutionary base.

Democratic centralism has most often been justified as being necessary to lead the working class to the conquest of state power and/or to survive in conditions of illegality and repression. Neither of these conditions remotely applies in this country today and has not done so for a very long time. Little wonder so many rank and file party SWP members feel stifled by the curbs on dissent imposed by a self serving ‘leadership’.

The late Tony Cliff – the charismatic leader of SR, the IS and the SWP – adopted one of Lenin’s different views on democratic centralism, having originally advocated the libertarian model favoured by the great German revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg. He stressed the danger of ‘substitutionism’ described by Luxemburg: the tendency for the party to substitute itself for the class, the leadership for the party and finally an individual for the leadership.

The IS was better able to relate to the social upheavals in the late 1960s and early 1970s precisely because it had earlier dumped a great deal of the catechism of the so-called ‘orthodox’ Trotskyists and had a better understanding both of the seeming stability of western capitalism and the class realities of the ‘actually existing socialism’ of the Stalinist dictatorships.

The limited but important base that the IS established among militant workers in the late 1960s and early 1970s also acted as a brake on the more frenetic ‘stick bending’ (political exaggeration) by over ambitious IS leaders seeking to short cut the long hard road to mass influence.

This may be why Cliff eventually instigated a purge in the mid-1970s which saw and expulsion and departure of so many IS shop stewards and other militants. His task was facilitated by an already centralising tendency of the system of democratic centralism which had been introduced into IS during the heightened political atmosphere triggered by the revolutionary development in France in 1968.

Class consciousness

Of course class still exists. Indeed class inequality, exploitation and injustice have become more not less grotesque in recent years. But class consciousness – what Marx described as ‘a class FOR itself not just a class IN itself’ – has declined dramatically. This has led to the virtual disappearance of much of the popular collectivist and co-operative self help culture expressed in a myriad of working class educational, cultural and other organisations built over 100 years of struggle.

The industrial working class is still growing in parts of Asia and Latin America but it is now a marginal force in the older capitalist economies in Europe and North America. Of course our trade unions still exist – mainly in an increasingly besieged public sector – and play a vital role in resisting the ever more aggressive demands of a deeply reactionary Tory government. But nonetheless the world has changed dramatically in the past 40 years and in ways that require new responses from the left.

Perhaps the least significant of these changes has been to render some of the distinguishing ideas of the original Socialist Review and International Socialists as no longer relevant. The concept of the ‘Permanent Arms Economy’ (PAE) was not originated in IS but was much developed by Cliff and Michael Kidron, the Marxist economist and first editor of International Socialism magazine.

Kidron later said that while the theory contained important ‘insights’ it did not succeed fully in explaining development in post war capitalism. The theory of State Capitalism – which analysed the dynamic driving the economies of the Stalinist states – was eventually rendered obsolete by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite economies.

These ideas initially helped give socialists confidence to resist the pressure from the Communist Party and some ‘orthodox Trotskyists’ to see defensible features of a ‘workers’ state’ in the Soviet system – including, for some, even the Russian H-bomb! The PAE was also an antidote to the tendency by some on the far left to see capitalist collapse constantly around the corner.

Doctrinal mummification

The IS had some impressive intellectual resources which could have been harnessed to develop the organisation’s understanding of the developments in global capitalism which exploded. But the original analyses got doctrinally mummified by the SWP as timelessly valid and this attitude became a break on the development of new ‘revisionist’ ideas of the kind which had initially inspired SR and the early IS.

I have always regretted the collective reluctance of the far left (not just the SWP) to explore the potential of what in the 1970s were described as ‘workers’ plans for alternative production’ which were developed by some rank and file workplace-based militants. They would not by themselves have defeated the Thatcherite onslaught on the organised trade union movement and the wholesale destruction of jobs and communities but they would have helped the labour movement build more powerful alliances with civil society and community organisations.

These were also years when feminism began to exercise a growing influence on socialists and the left’s lack of awareness of the specific problems of patriarchy and gender discrimination. This added to the internal ferment inside IS and led to the departure of a large number of the socialist feminist cadres.

It has to be faced that the left has more questions to ask at present than it has ready made answers to give. But the picture is by no means uniformly bleak. The economic crisis has undermined the political self-confidence of the ruling class. The right is fissured by a growing challenge from the populist far right. Some of the traditional social distinctions which divided working people (such as between white collar and blue collar workers) are disappearing. With the dramatic fall in the living standards of even skilled and professional workers, new forms of collective class awareness may now be emerging.

New forms of civil society activism are emerging. Many are marked by a strong, innate, internationalism. New forms of cooperative, not-for-profit associations and enterprises are emerging. Important gains for human rights have been codified in law although still widely ignored by state powers with ambitions for global hegemony. The green movement has injected the essential concept of sustainability into the debate about the economy which gives important leverage for those advocating a change in the capitalist system itself.

There is a remarkable awareness among young people that democracy needs to take more accountable and tangible forms than mere parliamentarism, as instanced by the Occupy movement. Interestingly a new YouGov poll shows a 64 per cent to 35 per cent majority among 18 to 34 year olds for remaining in the EU and fighting for a trans-national democracy to help shape global solutions for global problems.

Above all we can also learn from the struggle taking place now in the teeth of the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s about how new, pluralist forms of democratic organisation are emerging on the radical left. One obvious example is Syriza in Greece. Whatever the outcome of the internal struggle in the SWP, there is every reason for trying to build such a pluralist radical socialist left here.

For more than three decades socialists and others on the radical left have had to swim against a powerful and long-lasting political tide. Throughout the older capitalist economies, but nowhere more so than in Britain, they have had to come to terms with defeats for the organised labour movement, lower living standards, mass unemployment, wholesale de-industrialisation and the destruction of vibrant local communities.
Of course the picture has not been entirely bleak. Feminists and anti-racists have had significant successes in overcoming ancient gender and ethnic prejudices, the green movement has pushed fundamental issues of sustainable development into the heart of political discourse, human rights reformers have helped shape law – domestic and international – in ways that have weakened dictators everywhere.
But even as world capitalism is gripped by the most profound crisis since the 1930s, the political influence of the left remains fragmented and diminished. Social democratic parties find themselves in opposition almost everywhere in Europe. Far from this leading to increased support for the far left, revolutionary groups appear stagnant and gripped by one variety or another of sectarianism.
The obvious question is ‘Why?’ The publication of Ian Birchall’s massive biography of Tony Cliff – the charismatic leader of the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party, still the largest and most successful of the far-left organisations in Britain – throws some light on some of the problems.
A veteran supporter of Cliff, Birchall’s account of the life of this extraordinary man and his extraordinary commitment to the socialist cause is well written. In judging his strengths and weaknesses, Birchall is reasonably balanced. The story of Cliff and the SWP contains various lessons – some positive but also many negative – for socialists today.
Radicalised and stateless
Cliff’s life can be told very simply. Born in British-ruled Palestine in 1917, Ygael Gluckstein was the son of an immigrant Zionist family. He only adopted the nom-de-plume of Tony Cliff when he came to Britain after the second world war. Radicalised as a teenager, he rejected Zionism and gravitated, via left socialist organisations, to a tiny group of Jewish and Arab Trotskyists in Palestine during the 1930s.
Having been imprisoned by the British, Cliff arrived in Britain in 1947 with his lifelong partner Chanie Rosenberg. Given residency rights thanks to her British passport, Cliff remained stateless all his life. He soon joined the Revolutionary Communist Party – the British section of the Trotskyist Fourth International – and spent the rest of his life as a revolutionary socialist. He died, as he lived, with almost complete indifference to wealth or social advancement.
To get a real appreciation of the impact Cliff could make, Birchall rightly says it was best to hear him speak. He had few equals as an orator – in spite of (sometimes because of) his fractured English. ‘It is time for comrades to pull their socks seriously,’ I once heard him solemnly declare. But it was as an innovative thinker and as a Marxist willing to revise and rethink some hallowed orthodoxies of the revolutionary left that he really made his mark. Birchall rightly stresses the importance of the post-war years, after the disintegration of the RCP, for Cliff’s intellectual development.
Two things became clear to him at that time. Revolutionary socialists had to accept that capitalism was not on the point of collapse but had begun a potentially long period of expansion. He explained this in terms of the vast role of arms expenditure (the ‘permanent arms economy’) in acting to stabilise the system at least temporarily.
The second was that the totalitarian monstrosities masquerading as ‘socialism’ in Stalin’s Russia and its satellite states were in reality a new form of exploitative class society, which he understood as a form of state capitalism. Neither approach was totally original, but in a stream of books and other writing Cliff sought to integrate his insights into Marx’s own way of thinking about capital.
From Luxemburg to Lenin
In the early 1960s Cliff emphasised the more libertarian approach to party building of the great German revolutionary socialist, Rosa Luxemburg. He wrote that she ‘had a much earlier and clearer view of the role of the labour bureaucracy than Lenin or Trotsky.’
This approach was important in recruiting members from a new generation of young socialists, CND and peace activists. By the late 1960s, a tiny club of a few dozen members (Socialist Review) had grown into an organisation of thousands (the International Socialists). Disgusted by the first Wilson-led Labour government’s support for the US war in Vietnam, IS supporters left the Labour Party in droves. After the May événements in France in 1968, however, Cliff began to revert to a more Leninist concept of a democratic centralist party.
As British capitalism encountered its first serious problems after the post-war boom, the IS began to recruit important groups of trade unionists in engineering, the docks, the steel industry and the coal mines. Birchall rightly stresses the importance of other socialist intellectuals who contributed to the development of the IS at that time. They included the economist Michael Kidron, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, psychologist Peter Sedgwick, historian Ray Challinor and an impressive cohort of working-class intellectuals such as Jim Higgins, Duncan Hallas and Geoff Carlsson. During the last major upsurge in working-class industrial and political militancy, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the IS organisation expanded to a membership of several thousand, had a paper (Socialist Worker) that at its peak sold tens of thousands each week, and had a modest but growing implantation among shop stewards and other active trade unionists.
The changed political mood that followed the election of the 1974 Labour government triggered a series of disputes, first about how to react to the new situation and then over the relationship between the party and sympathetic trade union rank-and-file bodies. Finally, divisions emerged over abuses of internal party democracy. Cliff’s earlier emphasis on the ‘need to learn from workers, not merely to seek to teach’ was replaced by an increasing insistence that the party knew best.
It all led to a bitter split within the IS, the expulsion and resignation of hundreds of members (including dozens of key shop steward militants) and the subsequent proclamation of the Socialist Workers Party by Cliff and his supporters. I was one of those who parted company with Cliff. A deepening sectarianism in his politics over the next 30 years generated a small army of ex-members.
Cliff, like all of us, was a flawed individual. Personally warm and with an infectious sense of humour rare among revolutionary leaders, he was ruthless in conducting polemics against those who disagreed with him. Longstanding comrades were abandoned without hesitation. The SWP reacted to the weakening of the working-class movement with ever more frenetic campaigns and abrupt and often contradictory tactical switches. Birchall suggests this was a price worth paying for the survival of the SWP.
Birchall acknowledges the process by which Cliff’s creative ‘revisionism’ gave way to a more sterile orthodoxy in later years and notes Cliff’s frequently disastrous handling of human relations. He even accepts that the nature and character of the socialist goals that seemed so obvious in the past are now less clear and predicts that it may not be easy to recognise ‘the Old Red Mole’ when it eventually resurfaces.
New questions
Neither Cliff, nor those who broke with him, fully understood the economic and social transformation taking place around us. Class, of course, remains a reality today. But there has been a significant erosion of class consciousness (what Marx called ‘a class for itself’, not just ‘a class in itself’) and the loss of many working-class social, cultural and educational organisations and traditions.
There are new questions to be asked. Is the fragmentation of class now being mediated by new awareness of community, of sustainable development and other forms of human solidarity? This was something detected by the late Michael Kidron in his last, unfinished, magnum opus, but now much in need of development.
Birchall’s biography does not recognise that the future of the political party as an organisational form is open to question, nor that the Leninist version of ‘democratic centralism’ is now profoundly anachronistic. Lenin never envisaged a democratic centralist party having to survive for decades without a revolutionary opportunity. Cliff himself once declared during the 1970s that if the party did not succeed it would have to be re-invented.
In the decades after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, socialists and other radicals in Britain and elsewhere in Europe also had to face a bewildering series of economic and social changes. The demise of the old artisan economy and the rise of industrial mass production brought with it a steady decline in the influence of the radical and insurrectionary Jacobin and Chartist politics that had spearheaded the revolutionary challenge to the old semi-feudal order.
We face comparable challenges today. However, breaks with the past are rarely total in history. A new generation of socialists, libertarians, greens, trade unionists and social activists now confront a familiar challenge – how to forge the emerging centres of opposition to a crisis-ridden capitalism and a feral ruling class into a politically coherent force for change.
Trotskyists sometimes speak of the need for ‘transitional programmes’ on the way to socialism. But the need today is for a more comprehensive transitional politics. Serious anti-capitalist politics in response to the crisis of globalisation calls for new forms of supra-national democracy, just as national democracy was central to radical change in the 19th century.
Ian Birchall’s account of the life of a man who influenced tens of thousands of socialists – including many who have moved beyond and away from the model of the SWP – should stimulate others to address these issues. But as Tony Cliff always insisted: ‘Revolutionary socialist politics has to be a politics of hope to be truly revolutionary.’
Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time, by Ian Birchall, is published by Bookmarks. www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk