Socialist Worker is holding a meeting to celebrate the life of Tony Cliff
(1917-2000), who was active in the struggle to change the world from his
teenage years until his recent death in London, aged 82.
Cliff was born in Palestine into a Russian Jewish family and became
politically active around the time of the rise of the Nazis to power in
Germany in 1933. He became a Trotskyist shortly thereafter and remained
committed to the idea of workers' revolution from below for the rest of his
life.
He moved to Britain after the Second World War and there developed the
theories which laid the basis for the International Socialist tendency,
principally his Marxist analysis of the Soviet Union as state capitalist.
He began with a tiny group of co-thinkers; by the time of his death, the
group he had founded in Britain had become the Socialist Workers Party --
with 10,000 members, perhaps the largest revolutionary group in Europe. The
IS tendency links organisations in around 20 countries, from Australia to
South Korea and Zimbabwe.
Derided by the right and by the bulk of the left for his rejection of the
Soviet Union and its satellites, his theories were proven by the crisis
which brought down the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and which enabled new
generations of socialists to rescue genuine Marxism from the wreckage of
Stalinism.
He wrote important assessments of the work and ideas of Rosa Luxemburg,
Lenin and Leon Trotsky, along with many other articles and pamphlets. His
autobiography will be published in Australia shortly.
The meeting, A World To Win, will be held at Melbourne University Student
Union at 2pm on Sunday, April 30.
For more information, ring Luke on 0419 135 019.
LL.VD
--
Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html
Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop
Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink
Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
