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The SWP's origins lie in the Revolutionary Communist PartyThe Revolutionary Communist Party was a British Trotskyist political party, formed in 1944 and active until 1949, and publishing the Socialist Appeal fortnightly newspaper, a theoretical journal Workers International News and an entrist paper for its Labo (RCP), which Tony CliffTony Cliff (May 20th 1917 May 9th 2000) was a Trotskyist politician. Born Yigael Gluckstein in a Jewish Zionist family in Palestine. Opposed to Zionism, he changed his name to Ygael although in later years he would become far better known by his pen name joined on his arrrival from Palestine where he had been the central leader of that countries small section of the Fourth International (FI). Given his international reputation Cliff was co-opted onto the leadership body of the RCP although his impact was small at the time given his limited command of English. Indeed his idiosyncratic use of the English lanuage was to be a subject of jest by both Cliff and his supporters in later years.
In the RCP Cliff was a supporter of the majority tendency of that party around Jock Haston and Ted Grant. Therefore he supported the perspectives of the RCP at the end of the Second World War which placed the small party in opposition to the new leadership of the Fourth International around Ernest Mandel, then known as Germain, and Michel Raptis, better known as Pablo, which was backed by the American Socialist Workers' Party. In this capacity he wrote 'All That Glitters is not Gold' in which he showed that contrary to the International Secretariat of the FI there was not going to be a major slump.
Cliff also backed Haston when he disputed the growing sympathies of the FI for Tito's Yugoslavia. But by this time Haston was growing demoralised and would soon drop out of revolutionary politics entirely. Cliff however was beginning to develop the idea that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a bureaucratic state capitalist society, prompted in part by earlier arguments pointing in this direction from Haston. Much later Cliff in his autobiography would acknowledge the debt he felt to Haston. There is an irony in thisas it has been suggested that Cliff had been briefed by the leadership of the FI, while passing through France, to oppose Haston on just this question although no proof of this has been made public.
More importantly at the time Haston's collapse and the hostility of the FI to the RCP meant that the party was forced to join the Labour Party. Once inside the Labour Party it's members were instructed to work under the direction of Gerry Healy in his entrist group The Club. This led to many former members of the RCP leaving politics in reaction to Healy's brutal regime and in turn Healy embarked on a campaign of expulsions against anyone who opposed his authority. One consequence of this was that a number of comrades who supported Cliff's state capitalist position began to act as a faction. Cliff himself was unable to participate in this work having been deported to Dublin from which he was not to return permanently until 1952.
With the Korean War passions in The Club became more aroused and after a vote on Birmingham Trades Council in which Cliffs supporters, including Percy Downey, voted for a neutral position they were expelled en masse from The Club. Cliff himself being a member of the, almost non-existent irish section of the FI, could not be expelled. The final result of these events was the foundation of the Socialist Review Group organised around the magazine of the same name.
The Socialist Review Group (SRG) was founded at the end of September 1950 at a conference in Camden Town in London. 33 members were claimed of whom 21 were present on the day. Asides from Tony Cliff among the more notable members can be listed Bill Ainsworth, Geoff Carlsson, Ray Challinor, Percy Downey, Duncan Hallas, Peter Morgan, Anil Munisighe, Jean Tait and Ken Tarbuck. It was in essence a fragment of the RCP of which party all its members had been adherents of. It was in the milieu of former members of the RCP that the new SRG saw its audience too.
The new group adopted the magazine Socialist Review as it's central organ and it was to run from 1950 to 1962. Asserting their political continuity with Trotskyism they argued that they stood on the ideas of Leon Trotsky and Bolshevik Leninism except in so far as they differed as to their analysis of the states dominated by Stalinist parties. To this end they adopted three documents as summarising their viewpoint; The Nature of Stalin's Russia (the first edition of Cliff's famous State Capitalism in Russia), The Class nature of the People's Democracies and Marxism and the Theory of Bureaucratic Collectivism. In closing their first conference the group sent greetings to Natalya Sedova Trotsky, the widow of Leon Trotsky, who like them held state capitalist convictions.
In regard to it's international connections the new group contacted various dissident currents coming out of the disintegrating Fourth International among whom can be enumberated Raya Dunayevskaja in the USA, Chaulieu in France, Mangano in Italy and Jungclas in Germany. The named individuals and their tendencies came from both the right and left of the Fourth International and unsurprisingly nothing came of these contacts. Of more importance was a loose liaison with the International Socialist League in the USA and the journal of that group, New International, was distributed by the SRG until it ceased publication in 1958. Moreover Socialist Review would reprint material from it's pages, for example from Chinese and Ukrainian revolutionaries, and Cliff would contribute to New International in his turn.
Early editions of Socialist Review closely mirror the concerns of the SRG in it's first years as they sought to recruit from former RCPers and in the Labour Party. A great deal of the material in the magazine concerns Stalinism and world politics in general terms. One particular example would be the attempt to provide the Socialist fellowship, a grouping of left wing Labour Party members stongly influenced by Gerry Healy's Club, with an alternativer statement of policy. This may be taken as a first general statement of programme by the SRG given it's all encompasing nature and, apart from it's position on Stalinism, is informed by a conception of transitional politics that is characteristic of Trotskyism. Meanwhile entrist work in the Birmingham Labour Party led to the expulsion of SRG members from the Labour Party.
The SRG also had its internal controversies of which the first was the expulsion of Ellis Hillman, later a London councillor, who argued that the Stalinist parties were embryonic state capitalist societies. In this he was echoing the positions of the Johnson-Forrest tendency, CLR James and Raya Dunayevskaya, and directly challenging Cliff's analysis of state capitalism. He also argued, in a spectacularly eclectic fashion, for what he called the organic unity of the SRG and Ted Grant's group of fellow ex-RCPers. He was replied to with regard to the Stalinist parties by Duncan Hallas whose article was later reprinted in the collection The Origins of the International Socialists. In the event he was expelled and groups politics as a Trotskyist tendency differing only in it's analysis of Stalinism was confirmed.
Although it began by asserting its fidelity to Trotskyism the SRG would move way from the 'orthodox' Trotskyism which they took from their origins in the RCP. Prior to this development but setting the scene for it the group experienced something of a change over of leading figures from 1952 to 1954. Most importantly of all Tony Cliff was permitted to return to London from his exile in Dublin and for the first itime was able to function as an active leader of the group rather through others or during visits to his family. Cliff's centrality to the group cannot be overemphsied in these years as his wife, Chanie Rosenberg, was also an active member and in September 1952 Mike Kidron, Cliff's brother in law, trravelled to britain from Israel. Kidron would later recruit Seymour Papert, later to becme an important pioneer in the filed of computers, who would also play a considerable role in the SRG. Others joining at this time were Stan Newens, later a labour MP, and Bernard Dix, later prominent in the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE). Significantly as the group was renewed by such new recruits it lost some of its earlier character as figures like Bill Ainsworth, Ken Tarbuck, later to pass through a number of left groups, and Duncan Hallas left. Duncan Hallas would return 14 years later and again play a leading role in what was by then the International Socialists.
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