Ian Birchall
Tony Cliff: a Marxist for His Time (London: Bookmarks, 2011)
Ian Birchall has written a special book, one that — like the Bible, Finnegans Wake and the works of J. H. Prynne — shall require the attention of many readers, both to its pages and to each other, before it's properly understood. Since the departure of Lindsey German and John Rees (and several other leading comrades) from the SWP to form the George Galloway-friendly organisation Counterfire, there are big changes going on in the party where the AMM learned its politics. If these changes are going to be for the best, then Cliff's legacy will need to be understood, openly discussed and sometimes (perhaps frequently) criticised. Birchall's book is an incredibly painstaking account of Cliff's life (one hundred and eleven in-person or telephone interviews; the consultation of seventy-three written testimonies, along with letters, meeting minutes, newspaper clippings and books …). Birchall writes history with Trotsky's fierce commitment to the factual record, to the truth: you can trust him. He worked with Cliff, he didn't always agree with him, and he explains why. Because of this scrupulousness towards fact, Birchall's biography provides a solid foundation for a "truth and reconciliation" process which — in the AMM's opinion — should engulf the SWP and result in (a) the reinstatement of local branches; (b) the restoration of proletarian honesty in politics and proletarian forthrightness in theory; (c) an apology for the expulsion of Andy Wilson in 1994 (and salutes to the comrades who resigned in protest at his expulsion); and (d) at least one member of the AMM running for a position on the SWP Central Committee. But back to Tony Cliff, without whom I would never be writing ultimatums like that! In my twenties it was once pointed out to me, an aspiring music journalist, that the two people who influenced European civilisation most — Socrates and Jesus — never wrote a word, they spoke. The best definition of "dialectics" I know, a term which has been doused in philosophical perfumes by Hegelians and Frankfurters, is discussion or democracy. The kernel of Birchall's book for me is pages 215 to 221, where Birchall describes Cliff as an orator, i.e. a live speaker. In the room, staring at you as he said what he had to say. His Yiddish version of English never lost a throat-rasp on the "r". His internationalist bad-English esperanto was like some kind of immigrant's revolt against Oxford English. Going right against his professed Saussureanism, Birchall celebrates the effectiveness Cliff's "bad" English. "Never miss a Cliff meeting!" said Leeds SWP member Martin Bennell, who in his efforts to recruit Caroline Arscott ended up with me too ("Oh no-o-o-o!" — to the tune of Zappa's "I Don't Wanna Get Drafted!"). After I'd witnessed Cliff in action, I knew what Bennell meant. Cliff was alive, and he made you come alive. If you wanted to show someone why you were an activist, you dragged them to a Cliff meeting. He thought, if you couldn't explain a point in Marxism to a roomful of workers, it wasn't worth explaining. Cliffism is the opposite of Althusserianism (currently seeing a rebirth among SWP members who never saw Cliff in vivo). Althusserians think that if you can explain something to a roomful of workers, it's wrong (it's "ideology"). Birchall's book is written from the testimonies of people whose lives were changed by encountering Cliff. Birchall, thankfully, is no Althusserian; his unusual mix of revolutionary Marxism and British empirio-scepticism stains every paragraph. Cliff listened to you. He told me the Hospital Workers Action Group were a left front for the union bureaucracy, that it was necessary to recruit direct to the party (he was right, when it came to the big meeting in Leeds Town Hall, Erica Laredo bottled the criticism of the TUC's strategy we all wanted to make — "a rolling strike won't work, all out with minimum coverage!"— and meekly toed their line). I banged the Leeds Trades Club with my fists, shouting "They are the best! They are the best people! We've got to talk to them!". Cliff wasn't outraged that here I was shouting at a "leading member"; he watched me coolly, weighing the specific gravity of my anger. This attention made me realise he'd taken my point aboard, and I calmed down. When the SWP Central Committee decided to close down Womens' Voice as part of recognition of the late-70s "downturn" in workers' fightback, Cliff went on tour, starting with attacks on feminism which sounded, well, aboriginal. Arscott saw him at the start and the end of the tour: "He's listening to what we're saying, he's changed his whole argument." Arscott left the SWP because of the undemocratic way she thought the close-down was handled, but she nevertheless was impressed by Cliff's ability to learn from those he talked to. Two books to take on a long holiday: Birchall's Cliff, and Through the Eyes of Magic, John French's biography of Captain Beefheart. (Yes, only at the AMM can you make such comparisons and get away with it! Why not? Don't political revolutionaries need revolutionary music too?). Both books immerse you in the excitements and adventures and perils of being near someone who thinks that, in the end, discussion can solve everything, that there is no mystery which should be left veiled, that there is no "private" explanation that should be respected, that "agreeing to differ" is actually an excuse for compromise, inertia and non-communication: death. Talk, talk and more talk can sort everything out, including the world. And, of course this project is dangerous! Superbly articulate in the spheres which fascinated them — Cliff in communist history, theory and economics; Beefheart in Modern Art and R&B lore — their talk aimed at the same thing: what are we, what are we doing on this planet, and what can we do about it? Talk as flame to singe the wings of moths. Talk about it! Listen to how Cliff treated Andy Wilson and Keith Fisher once Cliff was persuaded that Wilson's insistence on a debate about Lukacs would "wreck the party", and it's just like hearing ex-members of the Magic Band. Radicalism as ludicrous cult abuse no normal person would stand still for. Stories told by the damaged. Appalling! But what would life be like without such disturbance? As flat and even and dull as a book by Emile Durkheim or Erich Fromm, or airport music by Brian Eno or Neil Tennant. Tony Cliff & Captain Beefheart: life as it was possible to live it. Once. And now! Why should we shut up, old guys still hating the 80s, in order to give way to some blogger "in touch with …". What exactly? Truth? Or hits? Or "the youth" as some kind of ghastly vague amalgam of the two? We've been through this before, the calculated equation of subaltern expression with market penetration, but if you think the Beatles and Boy Bands are an identical phenomenon, you need your head examined. Watch the scene in Hard Day's Night where the Beatles mock the upper-class marketing consultant who wants to find out what shirts "the kids" are buying: this is the class war which "advanced theory" is forever finding naïve, undertheorised, wrong. For those committed to manipulation (aka "capitalist reality"), money made explains everything (the concept eats up the things conceived, and labour is "subsumed") — whereas to the Marxist, it doesn't. But, some detail from Birchall's bio. About Cliff's orality, for example … In 1972, Cliff's argument for revolutionary socialism was effective enough to recruit Jim Higgins, then a well-established trade-union official in the Post Office Engineering Union. Higgins took a salary cut and lost his pension in order to work with Cliff. He instituted regular branch circulars and kept files. Cliff however, got annoyed at the quantity of paper issuing from the party centre: "I wish I could throw that typewriter out of the window!" he exclaimed to a young comrade busy typing Higgins' communiqués. "Cliff, meanwhile, toured the country tirelessly, enthused comrades, argued with them, and spent hundreds of hours on the telephone, persuading - and listening." (p. 345). Refusing official "culture". Official values. The "news". That's where the AMM stands. To us, that stance should unite socialists, anarchists, freaks, punks, DIY artists and militant unfunded intellectuals of whatever class provenance. It's a 60-year-old immigrant from Palestine without a passport deciding Johnny Rotten is "fantastic" (p. 403). Cliff loved political debate and therefore learned to feel at home in the British pub, but he wasn't a drinker. Indeed, he was a family man. He'd change nappies while arguing with contacts about the Korean War. New contacts would move into the chaotic family home. The glimpses Birchall provides of Cliff's home-life are inspiring (at least, to revolutionary house-husbands in the realm of Marxism, maybe less for those who treat socialism as a career opportunity or office job). Cliff lived a refutation of the bourgeois separation between home, work and ideas. Birchall's bio reveals that Cliff had the same hostility towards higher education which fired Beefheart and Zappa. Try listening to "Wind Up Workin' in a Gas Station" (Zoot Allures, 1976), while reading the following about Anna, Cliff's daughter: "She was under no pressure to succeed academically; Cliff hated academic elitism and once offered Anna £5 for every examination she failed." (pp. 389-390). And, like Zappa, Cliff taught his children to watch TV critically: "Anna learned not to trust authority by the way her father shouted at the television and laughed scornfully when someone was presented as an 'expert'." (p. 390). This example of paternal care makes you (almost) feel sorry for the over-educated shit-heads who must learn such "anti-hegemonic strategies" from the texts of Antonio Gramsci and Guy Debord; as Till Death Us Do Part and The Royal Family showed on British TV, for working-class kids, if you had a great dad, you got straight to the revolutionary point (or by opposition to Alf Garnett, dialectically etc; but do you get what I mean?). Cliff's household was not the bourgeois, "dinner-party" domain of Perry Anderson and Tariq Ali, i.e. the mums and kids entertained elsewhere while the men (and wimmin men) talk concepts. Shit! Can I say this aloud? This stuff fucking matters, even if I do sound like a 70s feminist! House-husbandry wreaking its havoc on "proper politics", I suppose … Let's get back to the book I'm reviewing, man … Birchall's conscientiousness as a historian was honed by membership of the Revolutionary History collective, a prickly bunch of independent scholars who take seriously Trotsky's commitment to factual veracity versus Stalin's pragmatic and cynical use of lies. Cliff's adage was "never lie to the class"; the glory of revolutionary politics is that it short-circuits the blatant lying ("diplomacy") which is elementary in bourgeois politics (and allows a systematic blackmailer like Rupert Murdoch to treat "democratic" representatives like puppets). When a British representative to the Comintern said he couldn't — as advised — pretend to disband the minority movement in the TUC yet carry on organising, because "that would be a lie", the Soviet delegation collapsed laughing, and the laughter "then spread all through Moscow" (according to Ignatio Silone, the Italian anti-Stalinist — see Helena Sheehan's Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, p. 418). The idea that "real" politics necessarily involves lies is bourgeois through and through. It's one reason Respect broke up, and John Rees was expelled from the SWP. The appeal of revolutionary politics for working-class people is that is doesn't involve the lies, hypocrisy and corruption they witness among the political classes; without this freshness, unguardedness, this honest indignation (the voice of God according to William Blake), it's just another putrid "political" option deserving of your ignorance. Birchall's conscientiousness as a historian derives from this politics. It also means Birchall has to cede a point to Jim Higgins when he characterised Cliff's method in writing Lenin as dredging up an idea from his own subconscious and then going in search of "buttressing quotes" from Lenin's oeuvre (p. 390). I've had run-ins with Birchall both here at the Unkant website and elsewhere. When interpreting surrealist and situationist texts (i.e. poetry!), I find Birchall's empirical obtuseness and denial of readerly subjectivity a real block. However, his adherence to historical fact makes A Marxist for His Time inspiring, an entrée to a genuine dialectic: us talking to each other about how socialists should organise and seize power. Of course, those who prefer to "talk about the future" and speculate about commercial or electoral success (marketeers!) will patronise Birchall's research as being "merely about the past". Bring on Galloway! Clap clap clap! You got hit on the head at Welling? Never mind, there's a "Save the NHS" demo to organise for next week! No chance to talk of what went wrong just now. "That's the past, don't dwell on that!" Can "Marxists", historical materialists, really say these things? Apparently. But what is this rosy "future" which smells like the stuff they put in the toilet paper? It's a blank, a screen for the projection of dreams of power. That's why Walter Benjamin's angel of history faced backwards, you idiots, only able to see the debris and wreckage of history as it piled up. Those who "bravely face the future" are Microsoft work teams and Stalinist tractor drivers, people directed by others, the advertorial fantasy of "the young". For people who need to analyse and understand what they are now and what they are doing, there is only the past, it's the only material we can examine together, democratically, collectively, without knowing already what we'll find. Crack open some of these nuggets from SWP history supplied by Birchall and there, fossilized, are miniature pictures of choices before us now. Historical materialism is our only social science, the rest is a specious spiel invented to hypnotise grant-committees and investors of capital — hocus pocus, smoke and mirrors. Marketing! One of the issues alive and debated within the AMM is science, and the correct attitude of revolutionaries towards "bourgeois" science. Committed to a democratic concept of science — the object scrutable by anyone else too, and no claims to intuitive genius — Wilson and Fisher were surprised to be characterised as "Althusserians" and "Callinicosites" (which is worse? the mind boggles, but I hope the first!) during their SWP faction fight in 1994. The AMM holds that there IS a dialectic of Nature (even if we appeal to Wilhelm Reich and William Burroughs rather than Stalin in order to support Engels), whilst remaining intensely suspicious of anyone incapable of commenting on the nature seething within themselves. So where is "the objective"? Funnily enough, this is the central dilemma of Leninist "praxis", and Birchall's biography of Cliff lets us see it. Cliff described Lenin's most important gift as "an unsurpassed ability to detect the mood of the masses". Against this, Birchall warns: "A reliance on intuition can all too easily lead away from scientific and democratic politics." (p. 398). When Birchall says this, he's echoing criticisms of Cliff made three pages before by Andy Wilson (p. 395, endnote 395). If we focus on principles of socialist organisation, Marxist ideas which academics churn into endless complexitude become stark and simple. Against the tide of "theory" (and against some of Birchall's own positivist pronouncements), Cliff pointed out that revolutionaries create facts (page 512). This is a genuine "Marxist epistemology", and far more accessible than most. I wish I'd had Birchall's Cliff to hand when I was fending off a recent fund-raising phone call from the SWP. The full-timer was telling me we live in capitalist times, so money was essential in runing the party. I'd have quoted from page 401: "Moscow distributed large financial subsidies — a ‘financial bonanza’ — to national sections, but this was often unhelpful when, as happened in Germany, the party acquired 27 daily papers, but did not have the experienced militants to write for them." Unlike the WRP, the SWP never took money from foreign regimes, but its reliance on standing orders from sleeping members (they joined as students, they don't go to meetings any more, but still feel "morally obliged") has been a corrupting influence. Identity politics, despite moments of heat when particular grievances are first expressed, quickly becomes part of the armoury of the right: those who rebel are always wrong because they don't tick off all the politically-correct boxes. Perfect souls sit on their backsides knowing that everyone else is tainted. The opposite of this is the actions taken by gay comrades during the miners' strike, although Birchall does not go into the lurid happenings which created pockets of lesbianism among miners' wives (the miners went down to defeat but the fight had revolutionary moments). I was reminded of amazing moments on the Right To Work March of 1978 when Paul Furness arrived with pro-gay stickers and everyone wanted them; a phalanx of punks and skins went up the road — "They're all gay!" exclaimed a policeman in disbelief. When you move into complete opposition to capitalism, all things are possible … How many books do you read where a footnote (p. 445) suggests a bus-stop sticker to cover over the National Front ones appearing where I live? Birchall reprints a page of notes made by Cliff assesing the mood of branches in 1987 (p. 490). Cliff wasn't like a classical or rock musician, presenting an identical fixed "piece" to dissimilar audiences, he operated like a free improvisor, dialoguing with each new situation, noting the differences — and often in the same venues, although until the advent of the AMM, no-one has pointed this out (although the regular attendance of Chanie Rosenberg, Cliff's widow, at the Klinker Club on the Hackney/Islington borders showed an enthusiasm for Free Improvisation's musical communism sadly absent from SWP cultural punditry). Despite its size and its monumental massing of fact, A Marxist for His Time is not definitive. I don't think it's meant to be either. Cliff galvanized thousands of people, the best people of the time in fact, and they all have stories to tell and opinions to express. Birchall hasn't done what Plato did to Socrates and what St Paul did to Jesus, which was to freeze their revolutionary dialectic into an idealist system, an ideology, a religion. Birchall's book is a hub for argument, a forum for further dialectic. Maybe Jim Higgins is right, and Cliff's turn towards the students in 1968 spelled disaster for a genuine revolutionary working-class Trotskyism. Maybe not. But what's definitely true is that, without learning from Cliff's attempts to organise working-class dissidence, "anti-capitalism" remains bloodless and middle-class, a merely ethical gesture. The working class IS the real-life contradiction. It cannot be abstracted away by vogue jargon like "real subsumption" or "ideological state apparatuses". As Rosa Luxemburg put it (quoted on p. 187): "Abstracted from the contradictions of capitalism, the urge towards socialism becomes merely an idealistic chimera."
Endnote: This was written for Unkant.com, so I didn't use footnotes, as that requires scrolling up and down the screen, and it's taxing. Which leads to my one criticism of Bookmarks. They present Birchall's book very well. The print is clear and the book's good value. I only spotted two typos: a missing "by" in "death police" on page 437; and Birchall saying Jim Higgins was "now in his 1940s" on page 345, but the latter's so funny I think it should be left in! My criticism is the use of endnotes rather than footnotes. The idea that footnotes make a book "inaccessible" derives from the bourgeois split between work and leisure, where the model of leisure is reading a throwaway novel on a sandy beach. This has led to the idiotic practice of hiding footnotes at the back of factual books, as if making footnotes hard to find makes reading a book "accessible"! Here, there is nothing at the top of the page to indicate which chapter you are in, while the endnotes are divided into chapters at the back of the book. So in order to find out who criticised Cliff's "stick-bending" as intuitive and scientific, you can't just glance to the bottom of the page and read "Andy Wilson interview, June 2008", you have to flip back to see which chapter you are in, then flip forward to the endnotes at the end of the book — all while keeping your place in the middle. Books without footnotes may "look" easier to read when you buy the book (if you're a novel reader, that is), but they actually do a disservice to the attentive reader. It's a pity that Bookmarks here follow bourgeois-academic convention rather than constructing books
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