Tony Cliff was born in Palestine in 1917 with the name Ygael Gluckstein. He became a Trotskyist in the 1930s and emigrated to Britain shortly after the Second World War, where he joined the main Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party. After writing State Capitalism in Russia, which advanced the theory that the Soviet Union was a state capitalist entity, Cliff was expelled from the Revolutionary Communist Party and formed the Socialist Review Group. This group initially comprised Cliff and a small group of his adherents. It operated within the Labour Party and became known as the International Socialists. In the mid 1960s the International Socialists changed tactics and began to operate independently. The International Socialists became the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1977. The SWP launched the Anti-Nazi League in 1977 and partly as a result its membership grew rapidly at that time. Tony Cliff was the author of a number of books, which explained his theories. These books included biographies of Lenin and Trotsky, and State Capitalism in Russia, republished by the Pluto Press in 1974. Tony Cliff died in April 2000, at which time the SWP had over 10,000 members.
Reference: Tony Cliff, A World to Win - life as a revolutionary, (2000, London).
From the guide to the Tony Cliff papers, 1945-2002, (Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick Library)
