Neither Washington nor Moscow: Essays on Revolutionary Socialism

by Tony Cliff

Genres: Politics

288 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1982

About the author

Born in Palestine to Zionist parents in 1917, Ygael Gluckstein became a Trotskyist during the 1930s and played a leading role in the attempt to forge a movement uniting Arab and Jewish workers. At the end of of the Second World war, seeing that the victory of the Zionists was more and more inevitable, he moved to Britain and adopted the pseudonym Tony Cliff.

In the late 1940s he developed the theory that Russia wasn’t a workers’ state but a form of bureaucratic state capitalism, a theory which has characterised the tendency with which he was associated for the remaining five decades of his life. Although he broke from “orthodox Trotskyism” after being bureaucratically excluded from the Fourth International in 1950, he always considered himself to be a Trotskyist although he was also open to other influences within the Marxist tradition.

Reviews

[Carlos Martinez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skimmed. Lots of straw men get convincingly demolished with wit and style, and several generations of Western leftists get to feel justified in withholding their support from any form of actually existing socialism. If I had the time, I'd do a word frequency analysis to verify my suspicion that 'Stalinist' is the most often used word in this book - it appears so many times and in so many contexts that it loses all meaning beyond "things the author doesn't like".

Kinda interesting if you're studying the history of the Western left, but otherwise eminently missable IMHO.

[Andrew Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tony Cliff was an active revolutionary socialist all his life. As such his writing won't be to everyone's taste - academia has certainly turned his nose up at him. This is because he always wrote as he spoke - unapologetically trying to find the 'key link in the chain' to progress the class struggle.
The party he built was the SWP, and it's a complex legacy. On the one hand its forerunner the International Socialists threw off the dead hands of Stalinism and Orthodox Trotskyism to develop insightful new theory on the nature of the USSR, the basis of the long post-war boom and the reasons why socialist revolution had been deflected into other avenues. The best short summary of those ideas is in Marxism at the Millennium, but this collection brings together his analysis as events unfolded, and there's much of interest.
The other side of his legacy is suggested by the short piece included where he argues to turn the IS into the SWP - a consciously 'Leninist' organisation rather than the more heterodox libertarian Marxism of the IS. How fair it is to hold him responsible for the organisation in the two decades since his death is debatable, but certainly the 'my party right or wrong' attitude that he encouraged had a contributory effect to the attempt by loyalist members to cover up the 'Comrade Delta' scandal of 2013 (of which if you want to know more, there is plenty online).