Tony Cliff

Tony Cliff (born Yigael Glückstein, יגאל גליקשטיין; 20 May 1917 – 9 April 2000) was a Trotskyist activist.

Tony Cliff was born Yigael Glückstein in Zikhron Ya'akov in the Ottoman Empire's Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem (in what is now Israel), in 1917, the same year Britain seized control of the territory from the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

He was one of four children born to Akiva and Esther Glückstein, Jewish immigrants from Poland, who had come to Palestine as part of the Second Aliyah.

His father was an engineer and contractor.

He had two brothers and a sister; his brother Chaim later became a notable journalist, theatre critic, and translator.

Through his sister Alexandra, he was the uncle of Israeli graphic designer David Tartakover.

Cliff grew up in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine; notable Zionist and future Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett was a family friend and frequent visitor to his family home.

He had two prominent uncles: the noted doctor Hillel Yaffe and agronomist and Zionist activist Haim Margaliot-Kalvarisky.

His piano teacher was a sister of Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel, and his father's business partner was one of Weizmann's brothers.

Glückstein attended school in Jerusalem, then studied at the Technion in Haifa, before dropping out and studying economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In his youth, he came to identify with Communism, though he never joined the Palestine Communist Party, as he had not met any of its members before becoming a socialist activist.

A fifteen, he joined the youth section of Mapai, and then two years later moved to join Poale Zion.

By the late-1930s, he was a committed Trotskyist and anti-Zionist.

With the beginning of World War II, Glückstein was active in efforts to oppose mobilization of Jews to the British war effort, seeing the war as a struggle between imperialists.

In 1935 Glückstein worked for a year as a building worker, the experience "immunised me from the four-letter word: work".

After that he devoted himself to full-time political work.

He was arrested by the British in 1939, and imprisoned at Acre for twelve months.

In prison, he meet Meir Slonim, general secretary of the Palestine Communist Party, Avraham Stern and Moshe Dayan.

In 1945 he met, and then married, Chanie Rosenberg, a Jewish socialist immigrant from South Africa.

They moved to Tel Aviv that year, with Chanie supporting them financially by working as a teacher.

Born to a Jewish family in Ottoman Palestine, he moved to Britain in 1947 and by the end of the 1950s had assumed the pen name of Tony Cliff.

Cliff and Chanie moved to Britain in 1947, but Cliff was never able to become a British citizen and remained a stateless person for the rest of his life.

To the end of his life he spoke English with a distinct Israeli accent.

He was deported by the British authorities and lived in the Republic of Ireland for several years.

During this period, he was active in left-wing circles in Dublin, and was acquainted with Owen Sheehy-Skeffington and his wife, Andrée.

He was permitted to take up British residency due only to the status of his wife Chanie as a British citizen.

Living in London, Glückstein again became active with the Revolutionary Communist Party, on to the leadership of which he had been co-opted.

For most purposes, Glückstein was a supporter of the leadership of the RCP around Jock Haston, and as such he was involved with the discussions concerning the nature of those states dominated by Russia and the Communist parties initiated by a faction within the RCP.

This debate was linked to other discussions on the nationalised industries in Britain and the increasingly critical stance of Haston and the RCP as to the leadership of the Fourth International with regard to Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia in particular.

On the break-up of the RCP, Glückstein’s supporters joined Gerry Healy's group The Club although, having been deported to Ireland, Glückstein himself did not.

In 1950, he helped launch the Socialist Review Group, which was based on a journal of the same name.

This was to be the main publication for which Glückstein wrote during the 1950s, until it was superseded by International Socialism in 1960, eventually ceasing publication altogether in 1962.

By the time he gained permanent residency in Britain his supporters in The Club had been expelled due to differences on Birmingham Trades Council regarding socialist policy concerning the Korean War, where Glückstein's co-factionalists refused to take a position of support for either side in the war.

Owing to his lack of established residency rights in Britain, and during his earlier exile in Ireland, Glückstein used the name Roger or Roger Tennant as a pseudonym.

The first edition of his short book on Rosa Luxemburg in 1959 was possibly the first use of the pen name 'Tony Cliff'.

In the 1960s, Cliff would revive many of his earlier pseudonyms in the pages of International Socialism in which journal reviews are to be found by Roger, Roger Tennant, Sakhry, Lee Rock and Tony Cliff, but none by Yigael or Yg'al Glückstein.

Glückstein’s group was renamed the International Socialists in 1962, and was to grow from fewer than 100 members in 1960 until it claimed in the region of 3,000 in 1977, at which point it was renamed the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

A founding member of the Socialist Review Group, which became the International Socialists and then the Socialist Workers Party, in 1977.

Cliff was effectively the leader of all three.

Cliff remained a leading member until his death in 2000.