SWP tradition

There is much in Alex Callinicos's article "Is Leninism finished?" (SR, February 2013) that Socialist Review readers will agree with: the inability of reformism to offer any way out of the horrors of capitalism, the need for working class revolution led by a revolutionary party, the defence of the Bolshevik Revolution and in particular of Lenin. Alex has restated themes developed by the SWP, notably in the work of Tony Cliff.

The demise of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and of the political tradition that it seeks to embody have been widely proclaimed on the British left in recent weeks. Thus the columnist Owen Jones has announced that "the era of the SWP and its kind is over." Is he right?

Few Marxist revolutionaries become household names, but it is a travesty that the greatest Marxist of the latter part of the 20th century is so little known. So the appearance of a biography of Tony Cliff is a major event.

Sixty years ago, on the weekend of 30 September to 1 October 1950, 21 people met in a flat at 866a Camden Road, London NW1, to form a new political group. It took its name from the publication it produced and became known as the Socialist Review Group (SRG). In 1962 it changed its name to the International Socialism Group and then, in 1977, to the Socialist Workers Party.

Ten years ago this month I was telephoned late one Sunday night to be told that Tony Cliff was dead. I knew he was 82 years old and had recently had a major heart operation. Yet I was devastated to realise that after nearly 40 years I would never again hear Cliff's judgements on events - judgements I had sometimes disagreed with, but which I had always respected as being based on a remarkable political understanding.

In 1978 Tom Robinson recorded a song called 'The Winter of '79'. In it he imagined someone from an unspecified future (perhaps 2005) looking back on the late 1970s. After recalling that 'A pint of beer was still ten bob [50p]' he described how:

'The National Front was getting awful strong
They done in Dave and Dagenham Ron
In the winter of '79
When all the gay geezers got put inside
And coloured kids was getting crucified
A few fought back and a few folks died
In the winter of '79.'

One of the great things about the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements has been the refusal of people to take old certainties for granted. You cannot seriously contemplate changing the world unless you are prepared to critically examine every accepted dogma. If you try, you end up rather like those 17th century clerics who tried to cling onto the 2,000 year old Aristotelian notion that the earth was the centre of the solar system.

Mike Kidron, who died last month, was probably the most important Marxist economist of his generation, although he never received the recognition he deserved from the academic Marxism of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Before 1960 Tony Cliff established himself as a theoretician with books on state capitalism in Russia, China and Eastern Europe. But as a revolutionary Cliff could not be satisfied by this. To show that Stalinism had nothing to do with socialism was merely a negative statement. Cliff now wanted to negate this negation, to look forward to the rebuilding of an authentic socialist movement.