Tony Cliff - Ideology

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.

Cliff was one of several leading Marxists of his era (including Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James) to develop a version of the theory that Russia and the 'glacis countries' (buffer states), as they were referred to in the Fourth International at the time, were "state capitalist". This theory was not at the time as iconoclastic as it came to appear later. The Fourth International held until 1951 that the 'glacis' states had remained capitalist even while the FI maintained the position that Russia was a degenerated workers' state. In fact one leader of the Fourth International (Ernest Mandel, writing under the name Germain) remarked that the ideas that both Russia and the glacis were capitalist, or that both Russia and the 'glacis' were workers' states, were both obviously incorrect and had no place in the Fourth International. However within months he would adopt the viewpoint that both Russia and the 'glacis' were workers' states.

Since then the consensus in most Trotskyist groups has been that all the states dominated by Stalinist parties and characterised by state planning and state ownership of property are to be seen as 'degenerated workers' states' (The Soviet Union) or 'deformed workers' states' (other Stalinist states, including much of Eastern Europe). In many ways Cliff was the main dissident from this idea although some of his opponents have sought to associate his state capitalist view with other ideas, for example the theory of 'bureaucratic collectivism' associated with Shachtmanite Workers Party in the United States. However Cliff himself was insistent that his ideas owed nothing to those of Max Shachtman, or earlier proponents of the theory such as Bruno Rizzi, and made this clear in his Bureaucratic Collectivism - A Critique. Nevertheless, in the 1950s his group distributed literature published by Shachtman's group and the theory of the 'permanent arms economy' which was considered one of the pillars of what became the International Socialist Tendency originated with Shachtman's group though it is sometimes alleged that Cliff refused to acknowledge this publicly.

Besides Cliff's theory of state capitalism, and an adaptation of the idea of permanent arms economy, central to the ideology of the International Socialist tradition has been Cliff's theories on "Deflected Permanent Revolution," and the social roots of reformism.