Below is a review of a wannabee hagiography by long term SWP member Ian Birchall of Tony Cliff, the founder of the Trotskite revolutionary "
Socialist Workers Party" (SWP). It is by Will Podmore who let us say is not that much of a fan of the SWP.
I meet Cliff once in Bethnal Green shortly before his death at a meeting to "
celebrate" a strike which I had taken part in. The lead up to this meeting was pretty weird and Cliff was treated by his supporters as some sort of really, really important being who if you met him would change your life. However, despite the fact at the meeting that I didn't agree with him on a number of points and described the role of the SWP in our dispute as being our "
useful idiots" he was pretty polite back and even quite good humoured. Anyway, the review of the book by Will Podmore....
"Ian Birchall, a long-time Socialist Workers Party member, has written a revealing account of its founder and leader, Tony Cliff. In 1936, Cliff
did a year of paid work, after which he never did another day’s paid work in
his life. He was never a member of a trade union, but this did not stop him
spending the rest of his life telling trade union members what to do (like a
monk telling us how to conduct our family lives).
Birchall calls
Cliff’s notion that Russia
was state capitalist his ‘major contribution to Marxist theory’. But it was
neither new nor true. The renegade Karl Kautsky called Russia state capitalist in 1919.
Capitalist classes use the state to grow the economy, but when a working class
uses its state power to grow a socialist economy, Cliff denounced it as
capitalist.
Cliff’s hatred
of the
Soviet Union led him to back
nationalists, as long as they were anti-Soviet terrorists as well. In 1955, he
praised the CIA-backed Ukrainian Resurgent Army, anti-Soviet terrorists who
attacked the Red Army from 1942 to 1949. So, later, along with Thatcher and Reagan,
he backed the Afghan mujehadin terrorists against the Red Army (see, for
example,
Socialist Worker, 4 February
1989.)
Similarly,
Cliff praised looters and rioters, as in 1981, “The riots and looting have been
fantastic, but they have not gone far enough. Because they have not been
organised, the kids have attacked shops when they should have been attacking
factories.”
The SWP still always
misreads situations. For example, Birchall writes here that in 1980 “the
industrial downturn was accompanied by a political upturn.” His evidence?
Labour party members’ votes for Tony Benn - as if Benn’s brief rise (and
inevitable fall) outweighed the dreadful effects of the millions of jobs lost
in Thatcher’s onslaught.
Cliff always attacked
‘trade union bureaucrats’, falsely posing rank-and-file (good) against
bureaucrats (bad). This was to split our unions. Cliff claimed
that he wanted the SWP to have ‘worker leadership’, yet ensured that it was
always led by full-time SWP staff (surely, bureaucrats?), living off other members’
dues.
The SWP mimics the old CPGB organisation, of full-timers telling workers
what to do, and its strategy, of seizing union positions in order to tell the
members what to do.
Cliff made a
policy of interfering in workers’ affairs. He urged the SWP to make “individual
interventions in individual disputes. In ninety cases out of a hundred we will
do it from outside.” He said, “We need to get back to the basics of trade union
organisation – solidarity at every level between workers.” No - organising at
the workplace is the basis. Without workplace organisation, solidarity is
nothing.
The weaker the
class, the more it allows the SWP to influence it, and the more influence the
SWP has in a union, the worse the outcome for the class. For example, during the
steelworkers’ strike of 1980, Cliff travelled the country speaking to
steelworkers. The strike failed, with disastrous results.
The SWP carried out
the same ‘death by solidarity’ on the Fire Brigades Union in 2005, and is
trying to do the same in the pensions dispute.
The SWP always
proposes the wrong strategy and the wrong tactics: a general strike now is
always the only right thing to do, whatever the situation (and as if 1926 was
not a disaster).
The SWP takes
in idealistic young people and burns them out. It spreads confusion and
demoralisation and causes only harm to our class.
The central
Trotskyist message to workers is ‘you can’t do it on your own’, which boils
down to ‘you can’t do it’, which is why no Trotskyist group has ever won power
anywhere, or ever will. Hence Cliff’s (inevitably ignorant) interference in
other countries’, and other unions’, internal affairs.
Birchall wants
his ‘lovingly crafted biography’ to help build the SWP. Instead, it will surely
put people off having anything to do with a group that is not even a squalid travesty
of a Bolshevik party".
Will Podmore.
Hope you enjoyed the inside YouTube story of the central committee of the SWP (now sadly dated) by Icepicker.
Last Thursday I was asked to speak to Shacklewell Labour Branch, Hackney North CLP on trade unions and the party by my blogging comrade, Dave Osler. 
We have the most stupid, wasteful and self destructive libel laws in the world. Last Friday afternoon in a hearing at the Royal Court of Justice an application to strike out libel action against Richard Dawkins, Amazon and Vaughan Jones (see 2nd left) was agreed and a £75,000 cost judgement 
Last week the Libel Reform Campaign sent out a letter calling on its supporters to contact their MP to try and make sure that libel reform is included in the next Queen's speech. Various people who have been subject to the madness that is English Libel law signed the letter including Dave Osler and my good self. Double click screen print to bring up detail. 
On Friday evening I made a (very last minute) submission to the House of Commons Joint Committee on the 
The legal saga and complete waste of Court time and public funds continues. Please bear with me while I try to set the scene and explain - since it is just a tinny weeny bit confusing. 
