Roger Cox was among the earliest members of the Socialist Review Group (SRG), founded by Tony Cliff in the 1950s, a group that would later evolve into the International Socialists (IS) and then the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). As one… Continue Reading
Two reviews of Ian Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist For His Time (Bookmarks, 2011), £15 What a remarkable man Tony Cliff was. Readers of this journal may find this hardly worth saying, even a slight, but for someone outside that… Continue Reading
In Tony Cliff’s original four-volume series on Lenin published in the 1970s, the second volume was entitled All Power to the Soviets and the third Revolution Besieged.1 Besieged may not mean destroyed, but the civil war, which began in May… Continue Reading
“Trotsky is the one for whom there is no room either in pre-1990 Really Existing Socialism or in post-1990 Really Existing Capitalism, in which even those who are nostalgic for Communism do not know what to do with Trotsky’s permanent… Continue Reading
In his 1938 Transitional Programme (entitled “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International”), Leon Trotsky had predicted an imminent collapse of the Soviet Union and an equally imminent crisis of Western capitalism. However, the world… Continue Reading
If Tony Cliff credited the theory of permanent revolution as Trotsky’s most outstanding and original contribution to Marxism, then Cliff’s own revisions to the theory in 1963 were similarly remarkable. An appraisal of Cliff’s work, ten years after his death,… Continue Reading
Revolutionaries do not determine events, nor do they predict them.1 Lenin was surprised by both 1905 and 1917. What revolutionaries can do is understand events and develop a strategy to take advantage of them. “All revolutions in history have begun… Continue Reading