Obituaries

Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00

Jock Barnes 1907-2000 / Tony Cliff 1917-2000

Andrew Cooper

Jock Barnes: 17 July 1907 - 31 May 2000

Jock Barnes was one of New Zealand's greatest working class leaders. His greatness was to be found in his intransigent defence of workers' interests, despite all hardship and persecution, and his steadfast loyalty to those he represented.

For this he was also one of the most loved and respected people in the country. He was a true leader to the wharfies of Auckland who stood shoulder to shoulder with him through the five cruel months of the 1951 waterfront lockout and who never once turned on him for the sacrifices that they all endured. He was an inspiration to the thousands of freezing workers, drivers, railway workers, and coal miners who took action in support of the waterfront workers, knowing that they were part of the same struggle to throw back the vicious Sid Holland Tory Government. Many of these same workers and still more of their children and grandchildren packed out his funeral service and the union tribute that was organised on the following day by his old friend Frank Barnard, past secretary of the Auckland Freezing Workers Union. Last but not least, he was loved by his extended family of grandchildren and great grandchildren whose pictures covered the walls of his tiny Ellerslie flat.

Jock was also one of New Zealand's most loathed people. His haters included the shipowners, the military brass, the stay at home heroes, the mayor of Auckland and Sid Holland's National Government, stuffed as it was with farmers, businessmen and lawyers. It was on their behalf that the newspaper editors of the time poured waves of abuse and slander on Jock in an attempt to isolate and break him.

But by far the greatest hatred came from those supposedly on "the same side," the side of the workers. These included Peter Fraser, Paddy Webb, and Bob Semple of the Labour Party and F.P. Walsh, Angus McLagan, Alexander Croskery, and Ken McLean of the Federation of Labour. These people hated Jock because, unlike them, he had maintained his principles and had not betrayed the workers' cause. He had not taken the soft option of a parliamentary career or some plum job under the Labour Government of 1935-49. He had not followed all the other time serving union seat warmers standing in line before the Arbitration Court to gratefully receive a few pennies on the workers' wage while taking backhanders in pounds from the bosses.

Instead, by his words and his actions he demonstrated to all New Zealand workers that the leaders of the Federation of Labour and the Fraser Government were pompous hypocrites who mouthed their sympathy for the workers' cause but who were as vicious as the Tories in attacking militant trade unionists and campaigners against Cold War military jingoism.

Lenin once said that the ruling class make heroes of their bitterest opponents on their deaths once their bodies are cold in their graves. No such fate awaits Jock, whose legacy even today is enough to unleash the bitterest denunciation from all those who would gladly have hanged him in 1951. Former Lange Government Minister, Michael Bassett, was given space in The Dominion for a filthy hatchet job. The editorial writers of the same paper followed this up with an attack which described him as a "domineering bully." Jock and his family can take attacks from these parasites as a vindication of his life as powerful as the plaudits that have rained on him since his death.

The owners of The Dominion understand that, far from marking "the passing of an age of trade unionism," Jock's death has reminded New Zealand unionists what great things can be achieved by steadfast activism and militancy and a resolute determination to fight for workers' rights.

Jock lived his final years in modest circumstances in a small flat with little in the way of creature comforts, but was in his mana and number of friends one of the richest people in the land. New Zealand socialists and trade unionists are the poorer for his passing.

Tom Bramble

(Tom Bramble was the editor of Jock Barnes' memoirs, Never a White Flag, published in 1998 by Victoria University Press.)

Tony Cliff: 20 May 1917 - 9 April 2000

Tony Cliff, one of the most important revolutionary Marxists of the twentieth century, died in London on April 9, aged 82.

Cliff, who founded and led Britain's Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), probably the largest revolutionary organisation in the world today, also developed the theory of state capitalism, which helped enormously in understanding what had gone wrong in the Soviet Union.

He was born Ygael Gluckstein in the year of the Russian revolution, 1917. His family were relatively prosperous Jews living in what was then British occupied Palestine, present day Israel. From a very early age, the young Cliff became acutely aware and angry about the gross inequalities he saw all around him - between Jews and Arabs - and between different classes within both communities.

At about 16 he joined the local Communist Party, which was staunchly pro Moscow and Stalinist, but soon left to join a tiny Trotskyist group, which he spent the next few years trying to build. But apart from recruiting the editor of the Communist Party's newspaper to his group, Cliff had little success in building in Palestine.

Shortly after the end of World War Two, with the political climate becoming increasingly dangerous to work in, he moved to Britain, adopting his new name and promptly being deported to the Irish Republic, where he spent five miserable years in poverty before finally being allowed to settle in Britain.

One of Cliff's reasons for coming to Britain had been to write a book vindicating Trotsky's theory that the Soviet Union was a "deformed workers' state" and that the Second World War would end in the same way as the First - with economic chaos and revolutionary upheavals. This was the politics of so-called "orthodox Trotskyism." But as he researched his book, Cliff came to reject key aspects of Trotsky's ideas.

Trotsky (who was assassinated in 1940) believed that the Soviet Union was still "partly socialist," a "deformed" or "degenerated" workers' state, because the economy remained under state control and this represented a lasting gain from the revolution.

Cliff however, showed that it isn't whether the state controls the economy or not that matters, but what form the state itself takes. You either have workers' power or you do not. In Russia, workers were denied the most elementary rights to organise in free trade unions or express political opinions. How the hell could this be "socialism" of any kind?

True, the economy remained nationalised, but in the post war period economic planning and nationalisation (state control of industry) had gained widespread acceptance in both East and West anyway. In reality, although there was little if any internal competition between economic units within the Soviet Union, the Soviet economy as a whole competed with other countries as part of the world capitalist system. Capitalism by any other name is still capitalism.

Further, Marx had always argued that only the working class could make socialism - it couldn't be imposed from above. How then, could the East European "socialist" states, founded and propped up at the point of Red Army guns, be socialist in any way?

The main Trotskyist organisation in Britain, the relatively large Revolutionary Communist Party, had collapsed into at least three different splinter groups after the war over just these questions. In the late 1940s, Cliff became the leader of one of these, the current that would become the International Socialists (IS) and eventually the SWP.

Sooner or later the politics of orthodox Trotskyism would completely disorientate the other currents. Some would degenerate into a sort of semi-religious sect, retreating into a fantasy world where imaginary armies of proletarians stood permanently on the verge of insurrection. Others, somewhat more politically healthy, still tied themselves in knots over "critical" support for the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc.

Only the IS/SWP completely rejected the idea that the state capitalist dictatorships had anything to do with real socialism, and of the numerous Trotskyist groups in Britain, only they emerged unharmed from the East European revolutions of 1989.

Cliff was an eccentric but very likeable person, genuinely respected by party members. He had a rare gift for explaining complex ideas in a straightforward everyday language, delivered in a thick Middle Eastern accent peppered with his own inimitable expressions.

One comrade remembers the first IS meeting he attended, where Cliff criticised members for not working hard enough. "The comrades have got to pull their socks!" he kept saying.

He could also cut through the crap to get to the real political point. When a comrade raised objections to the slogans chanted by protesters on the huge anti-Vietnam War Grosvenor Square demonstration in March 1968, Cliff responded, "If 5,000 people storm the American Embassy, who cares what they're chanting!"

Cliff did something very important during this time (the late 1940s to late 60s). Like Trotsky in the 1930s, alone amongst the survivors of 1917 keeping alive the spirit of genuine socialism from below; so too Cliff during a period when most believed that workers had become too prosperous to be interested in revolution, or at least had illusions of some sort in the Soviet style dictatorships, kept alive the idea that socialism could only be built by workers' themselves, and most importantly, that in order to fight for a democratic society you must have a democratic workers' organisation.

Unfortunately and to a steadily increasing degree, Cliff's organisation, the British IS (renamed the SWP in 1977) failed to live up to this last principle.

In the early 1990s, the SWP did in fact grow substantially through work in antifascist and other campaigns. But at the same time it adopted its disastrous "1930s in slow motion" perspective, with Cliff arguing that the 90s would see 1968 style revolutionary upheavals and major growth in party membership. By now the democracy of the group had degenerated to the point where its leaders were not only riding roughshod over their own members, but acting as a central committee for the sizeable collection of socialist organisations around the world who had based their politics on those of the SWP (the so-called "IS tendency" of socialist groups in about two dozen countries).

By the end of the decade, far from the predicted mass growth and revolutionary upheavals confidently predicted, many of the groups in the tendency had collapsed or suffered devastating faction fights as Cliff and the other SWP leaders attempted to operate the overseas groups as offshore branches of the SWP.

Should we in New Zealand care about any of this?

Absolutely. Today, our own organisation, the NZ International Socialists, is trying to do what Cliff and the other early leaders of the IS did -to build a radically democratic socialist organisation based on the best traditions of the great Marxists - during a period of prolonged capitalist crisis. So how do we ensure that we avoid going along the same path as so many other small socialist groups, into becoming just another sect?

Firstly, we must recognise that the political degeneration of Cliff's organisation does not reflect some kind of "original sin" of socialist politics. Rather, it is the all too common outcome when small revolutionary groups, lacking working class roots and the ability to properly grasp the level of workers' consciousness at any given time, misread the political climate and try to substitute themselves for what they regard as the militancy workers are about to - or at least should be - adopting.

Having a flawed analysis of the political nature of a particular period needn't necessarily be a group's death sentence so long as it maintains thoroughgoing democracy - and honesty - with itself and its wider supporters. We do this by rigorously controlling and reigning in our leaders if they act undemocratically or fail to take our opinions into account, by keeping a realistic outlook on the world and what we can hope to achieve at any one time, and by maintaining organisational structures which help to achieve these things.

For us, democracy is not just important, it is the only thing that really matters.

Lenin, as Cliff shows so well in the following article, believed that the members of socialist organisations had a responsibility to correct the mistakes of their leaders - and to replace them if necessary. Cliff's analyses were so sharp, so relevant - yet his performance as a political leader often left much to be desired. As one dissident member put it so well, he often found himself "defending Cliff's politics against Cliff's policies."

The Cliff who deserves to be remembered is a man who above and despite all else kept alive the spirit of revolutionary socialism from below, and without whom this publication or the organisation that produces it would not exist.

International Socialists

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