Tony Cliff
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Tony Cliff | |
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Born | Yigael Glückstein 20 May 1917 |
Died | 9 April 2000 London, England, United Kingdom | (aged 82)
Tony Cliff (born Yigael Glückstein,
Biography
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Trotskyism |
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Early life in Palestine
Tony Cliff was born Yigael Glückstein in Zikhron Ya'akov in the Ottoman Empire's Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem (in what is now Israel), in 1917, the same year Britain seized control of the territory from the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He was one of four children born to Akiva and Esther Glückstein, Jewish immigrants from Poland, who had come to Palestine as part of the Second Aliyah. His father was an engineer and contractor.[1] He had two brothers and a sister; his brother Chaim later became a notable journalist, theatre critic, and translator. Through his sister Alexandra, he was the uncle of Israeli graphic designer David Tartakover. Cliff grew up in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine; notable Zionist and future Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett was a family friend and frequent visitor to his family home. He had two prominent uncles: the noted doctor Hillel Yaffe and agronomist and Zionist activist Haim Margaliot-Kalvarisky . His piano teacher was a sister of Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel, and his father's business partner was one of Weizmann's brothers.[2]
Glückstein attended school in Jerusalem, then studied at the Technion in Haifa, before dropping out and studying economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his youth, he came to identify with Communism, though he never joined the Palestine Communist Party, as he had not met any of its members before becoming a socialist activist. A fifteen, he joined the youth section of Mapai, and then two years later moved to join Poale Zion.[1] In 1935 Glückstein worked for a year as a building worker, the experience "immunised me from the four-letter word: work".[3] After that he devoted himself to full-time political work. By the late-1930s, he was a committed Trotskyist and anti-Zionist.[1][3]
With the beginning of World War II, Glückstein was active in efforts to oppose mobilization of Jews to the British war effort, seeing the war as a struggle between imperialists. He was arrested by the British in 1939, and imprisoned at Acre for twelve months.[1] In prison, he meet Meir Slonim, general secretary of the Palestine Communist Party, Avraham Stern and Moshe Dayan.[3]
In 1945 he met, and then married, Chanie Rosenberg, a Jewish socialist immigrant from South Africa. They moved to Tel Aviv that year, with Chanie supporting them financially by working as a teacher.[1][3]
Move to Britain
Cliff and Chanie moved to Britain in 1947, but Cliff was never able to become a
On the break-up of the RCP, Glückstein’s supporters joined
By the time he gained permanent residency in Britain his supporters in The Club had been expelled due to differences on Birmingham Trades Council regarding socialist policy concerning the Korean War, where Glückstein's co-factionalists refused to take a position of support for either side in the war.[citation needed]
Owing to his lack of established residency rights in Britain, and during his earlier exile in Ireland, Glückstein used the name Roger or Roger Tennant as a pseudonym. The first edition of his short book on Rosa Luxemburg in 1959 was possibly the first use of the pen name 'Tony Cliff'. 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 Glückstein.[citation needed]
International Socialists and SWP
Glückstein’s group was renamed the
Cliff's biography is, as he himself remarked, inseparable from that of the groups of which he was a leading member.[citation needed]
Shortly before his death he underwent a major surgical operation on his heart.[7]
Ideology
Cliff was a revolutionary socialist in the Trotskyist tradition, attempting to make Lenin's theory of the party effective in the present day. Much of his theoretical writing was aimed at immediate tasks of the party at the time.[citation needed]
Since then, the consensus in most Trotskyist groups has been that all the states dominated by
Nevertheless, in the 1950s, his group distributed literature published by Shachtman's group and the theory of the '
Personal life
Cliff had little or no time for any activities not directly linked to the needs of building his party (with the exception of caring for his family). He did not drink or smoke, or socialise very much. Cliff's wife, Chanie Rosenberg (1922–2021), was an active member successively of the SRG, IS and SWP, in which she remained active for many years. As well as authoring many articles on social questions for the group's publications, she was an activist in the National Union of Teachers until her retirement. In addition, three of the couple's four children became members of the SWP, with one son, Donny Gluckstein, co-authoring two books with his father.[citation needed]
Cliff is depicted as Jimmy Rock of the Rockers in
Selected works
- The Problem of the Middle East (1946)
- The Nature of Stalinist Russia (1948)
- Stalin's Satellites in Europe (1952)
- Stalinist Russia: A Marxist Analysis (1955)
- Perspectives of the Permanent War Economy (1957)
- Economic Roots of Reformism (1957)
- Rosa Luxemburg: A Study(1959)
- Trotsky on Substitionism (1960)
- Deflected Permanent Revolution (1963)
- Incomes Policy, Legislation and Shop Stewards (with Colin Barker) (1966)
- France: The Struggle Goes On (with Ian Birchall) (1968)
- The Employers’ Offensive, Productivity Deals and how to fight them (1970)
- The Crisis: Social Contract or Socialism (1975)
- Lenin Vol. 1: Building the Party (1975)
- Portugal at the Crossroads (1975)
- Lenin Vol. 2: All Power to the Soviets (1976)
- Lenin Vol. 3: Revolution Besieged (1978)
- Lenin Vol. 4: The Bolsheviks and World Communism (1979)
- Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation, 1640 to today (1984)
- Marxism and trade union struggle, the general strike of 1926 (with Donny Gluckstein) (1986)
- The Labour Party, A Marxist History (with Donny Gluckstein) (1986)
- Trotsky Vol. 1: Towards October 1879-1917 (1989)
- Trotsky Vol. 2: The Sword of the Revolution 1917-1923 (1990)
- Trotsky Vol. 3: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy 1923-1927 (1991)
- Trotsky Vol. 4: The darker the Night, the Brighter the Star 1927-1940 (1993)
- Trotskyism after Trotsky, the origins of the International Socialists (1999)
- A World to Win: Life of a Revolutionary (2000)
- Marxism at the Millennium (2000)
Archives
- A Summary Description of the Tony Cliff papers held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick Library. Online abstract available. Retrieved 16 June 2006.
See also
- Bureaucratic collectivism
- Deflected permanent revolution
- New class
- Permanent revolution
- State capitalism
- Ted Grant and Gerry Healy - two other former RCP members who went on to found prominent rival Trotskyist parties.
Notes
- ^ a b c d e McIlroy, John (23 September 2004). "Cliff, Tony [formerly Ygael Amnon Gluckstein] (1917–2000)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 7 December 2023.
- ISBN 9781441138521.
- ^ a b c d Cliff, Tony (2000). "chapter 1". A World to Win. London: Bookmarks.
- ^ Andrée Sheehy-Skeffington, Skeff: The Life of Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, 1909-1970 (Lilliput Press, 1991), p. 101.
- ^ The War and the International: A History of the British Trotskyist Movement, 1937–1949 (with Al Richardson), Socialist Platform, London 1986.
- ^ Farber, Samuel (8 August 2013). "Tony Cliff as a Socialist Leader". Solidarity. Archived from the original on 9 April 2018. Retrieved 31 January 2014.
- ^ Birchall 2010.
- ^ This allegation seems to have originated from Jim Higgins in his booklet More Years for the Locusts, but it would seem to be contradicted by the fact that International Socialism, Nos. 47 and 49 carried prominent ads for the book The Permanent War Economy by T.N. Vance, who is now acknowledged to be the originator of the theory. Both Higgins and Cliff are listed in No. 49 as editors of that issue.
References
- Articles
- Birchall, Ian (April 2010). "Tony Cliff remembered". Socialist Review. London.
- Biographies
- Ian Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time (London: Bookmarks, 2011)
External links
- Tony Cliff Internet Archive, biography and collection of his writings from 1938–2000 on Marxists.org.
- "50 Years of the International Socialist Tradition: Ahmed Shawki interviews Tony Cliff in 1997, 50 years after the publication of State Capitalism in Russia." International Socialist Review, No.1, Summer 1997, pp. 27–31.
- Obituary by Paul Foot, The Guardian (2000).
- Obituary by Duncan Hallas, Socialist Review (2000).
- Talkin' 'bout a revolutionary Interview with Ian Birchall about Cliff, International Socialism 131 (2011).
- Tony Cliff matters for socialists today by Alex Callinicos, Socialist Worker (2017)
- Tony Cliff Archived 20 August 2021 at the Wayback Machine by Ian Taylor, Socialist Review, 360 (2011)
- Tony Cliff rediscovered, International Socialism, 132 (2011).
- More Years for the Locust: The Origins of the SWP Criticism of Cliff and the SWP by Jim Higgins, a former colleague.
- Talks by Tony Cliff on Lenin and State Capitalism in MP3
- Tony Cliff (1917–2000) Archived 11 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine : Links to biographies, obituaries and websites, compiled by Modkraft Biblioteket - Progressive online library.
- Bibliography Archived 9 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine - the writings and works of Tony Cliff by Ian Birchall on Modkraft Biblioteket.
- Catalogue of Cliff's papers, held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick