Tony Cliff
In June 1948, a mammoth 142-page text appeared in the internal bulletin of the British Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The Nature of Stalinist Russia was written by a 31-year-old Palestinian Jewish migrant, Ygael Gluckstein.
He had already built a small Jewish-Arab Marxist current in Palestine, challenging the Stalinist domination of the left.
However, he had become increasingly aware that the tiny Palestinian working class could not overcome the might of Israel, created through the expulsion of the Arab masses.
Gluckstein decided to move abroad. He considered Egypt, home to a much more powerful Arab workers’ movement, but soon realised that the country’s tiny network of Trotskyists could not provide the necessary support for underground work.
Then an opportunity to travel to Britain presented itself. The father of his partner, Chanie Rosenberg, owned a factory in Cape Town, and Gluckstein was able to come to Britain in 1947 as the company’s representative.
There he joined the 400- strong RCP, rapidly establishing a reputation among its members as a serious and sharp-minded Marxist.
Three months later, the British authorities caught up with him and he was deported, winding up in Dublin where he managed to get a position studying at Trinity College. He remained there until allowed to return to Britain in 1952.
That is where his bulletin article was composed, chapters posted across the Irish Sea in a mixture of English and Hebrew and painstakingly assembled into a coherent text by Rosenberg.
Gluckstein would come to be better known by his pseudonym, Tony Cliff. His article, later published as a book, would be the foundational text of the Socialist Review Group, formed when the fragmenting RCP pushed out Cliff and his co-thinkers.
The Socialist Review Group became the International Socialists and, eventually, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Cliff’s work would challenge the Trotskyist orthodoxy of groups such as the RCP.
Trotskyism had helped preserve the Marxist tradition since the Stalinist takeover of the Soviet Union.
Leon Trotsky possessed the immense authority as a leader, alongside Lenin, of the 1917 Russian revolution, which had seen a brief flourishing of socialism and liberation.
However, the new regime was isolated, particularly after the failure of the revolutionary struggle that began in Germany in 1918. Russia’s revolution was followed by a brutal civil war and invasion by foreign imperialist powers, eager to crush a fledgling socialist state.
The Bolshevik Party continued to cling to power, but the working class had been decimated and the economy destroyed. With these changes, democratic institutions such as the soviets—councils of workers and soldiers forged in the revolution—withered.
Initially the Bolsheviks sought to preserve what they could from 1917, while focusing on spreading the revolution. That would have connected Russia to far bigger working classes abroad.
Yet, over time, the bureaucracy running the state detached itself from the remaining working class. The Bolsheviks, now renamed the Communist Party, were overwhelmed by new recruits, often lacking the clear socialist commitments of the “old Bolsheviks”.
Joseph Stalin stood at the head of the emerging state bureaucracy. By the late 1920s, he would cement his rule, driving Trotsky into exile and eventually murdering swathes of the “old Bolsheviks”.
The goal of spreading the revolution internationally was dropped in favour of “socialism in one country”.
Trotsky continued to challenge Stalinism, but his analysis was often flawed. He argued that the Soviet Union remained a “workers’ state”, albeit a “degenerated” one.
This was because workers still legally “owned” the means of production and, he thought, healthy elements of the party could ally with the working class to cast out the bureaucracy.
This was linked to the idea that the bureaucracy had emerged to administer scarcity. It was, he thought, a relatively feeble force with no real base in society.
Trotsky was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in 1940, but his followers were left with an even bigger conundrum.
In Eastern Europe after the Second World War, regimes were created with economies and bureaucratic elites like those of the Soviet Union. This happened not through workers’ revolution but was imposed from above.
Trotskyists would claim these regimes were “deformed workers’ states”. But if you could create a workers’ state by rolling tanks across the border, what was the point of the Marxist tradition of workers’ self-emancipation?
What was the point of revolutionaries fighting for a workers’ state where workers exercised, in practice, no real control of the state or the economy?
Cliff’s argument offered a way forward. He concluded that the Soviet Union and its counterparts were not workers’ states at all. They were an expression of “bureaucratic state capitalism”.
The decisive moment in the Soviet Union came in the late 1920s, when the bureaucracy under Stalin imposed the first Five Year Plan.
The peasantry was crushed by collectivising land and the country rapidly industrialised by squeezing workers. The state bureaucracy was now acting as a coherent class.
Industrialisation meant that the accumulation of capital took priority over workers’ consumption—just as in the West. This meant exploiting workers, pumping unpaid labour out of them and directing it towards the goals of the bureaucracy.
The state bureaucracy ran the economy, directing it a little like a gigantic factory with multiple divisions. But it was compelled to do so in a capitalist manner.
This was because the Soviet Union now sought to carve out a role within the global capitalist system. That meant participating in inter-imperialist rivalry with other powers.
Internally market competition was eradicated, but international military competition enforced a capitalist logic.
That is not to say the economy was identical to those in the West. Work by Cliff spelt out the distinctive dynamics at work under state capitalism, but they were variations on a theme, and the theme was exploitation and accumulation.
Members of the SWP and its forerunners were often dubbed “state caps” during the Cold War, in recognition of the vital role the theory played. It allowed them to avoid any concessions to Stalinism or the notion that socialism could be won by means other than workers’ revolution.
At the same time, because the Soviet Union was a variant of capitalism, it was not seen as a uniquely barbaric form of society, and so Cliff and his co-thinkers avoided slipping into support for the Western ruling classes.
This was expressed in the slogan that used to appear on the masthead of this paper, “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism”.
The theory’s relevance outlasted the Cold War. There are elements of state capitalism present even in countries that do not go down the full bureaucratic state capitalist route.
Cliff’s theory reminds us that the state does not lie somehow beyond capitalism or offer an alternative to it, it’s an intrinsic part of capitalism.
While we might advocate for public control of utilities, nationalisation is not socialism. Socialism requires workers’ control, which can only be the product of workers’ mass revolutionary struggles.
Today we are seeing a partial return to state capitalist methods. In part this is because capitalism has become so crisis prone that states feel obliged to bail out the system. It also reflects the rise of China, where firms owned or directed by the state continue to play a central role.
Other states—including the US under Joe Biden—have responded to this by giving their own state a more explicit role in the economy.
Similarly, Labour’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves’ recent speech in Washington was full of references to the “active state”, to meet the challenge of “a rising China”.
We should have no illusions in Labour’s attempt to buttress the state to strengthen British capitalism. Nor should we have any illusions that China represents an alternative to capitalism—it is a rising capitalist and imperialist power.
Above all else, Cliff’s theory is about retaining Marxism’s central idea, that workers’ self-activity is the only thing that can bring about liberation.
Jude Mckechnie spoke to the workers leading the fightback against outsourcing
Judy Cox reviews End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor
