The International Socialists
Links to biographies and writings of several recently deceased members of the International Socialists, archived on the Marxists Internet Archive.
In the late 1940s, the Trotskyist movement was wrestling with the fact that the Red Army had created “People’s Republics” across half of Europe, shortly to be joined by China, but Stalin’s reactionary bureaucratic caste remained firmly in control, whilst capitalism had restabilised itself in the West.
A majority of the Trotskyists adopted the idea of “deformed workers’ states” to decribe these states, an extension of Trotsky’s description of the Soviet Union as a “degenerated workers’ state.” Tony Cliff, however, developed the theory that Russia wasn’t a workers’ state but a form of bureaucratic “state capitalism.” It is this idea which has characterised the International Socialists ever since.
State Capitalism in Russia, Tony Cliff, 1955
Associated with the idea that the Stalinist states were “state capitalist,” was a corresponding hostile attitude to the labour and trade union bureaucracy. Tony Cliff was expelled from the Trotskyist Movement and founded the Socialist Review Group.
The Origins of the I.S., Duncan Hallas, 1971
Origins of the SWP, Jim Higgins, 1997
The International Socialist tendency extended its influence from Britain, at first to the other English-speaking countries, and especially in the 1980s and ’90s to every part of the world. Although fraught by differences from time to time over orientation to the workers’ movement or to the student or other social movements, the International Socialists have proved to be one of the most stable Marxist political organisations since the 1950s.
The following four writers are leaders of the International Socialists in Britain, who have died since 2000, and their works are archived on the M.I.A.
Tony Cliff (1917-2000) was born in Palestine to Zionist parents in 1917, and became a Trotskyist during the 1930s and played a leading role in the attempting to unite Arab and Jewish workers. At the end of World War II, he moved to Britain.
In 1950, after developing his theory of bureaucratic state capitalism, he was expelled from the Fourth International, but continued to consider himself a Trotskyist, though open to other Marxist ideas. Tony Cliff remained a foremost ideological leader of the International Socialists till his death in 2000.
Duncan Hallas (1925-2002) was born into a working class family in Manchester, and joined the Trotskyist Workers International League during World War II. Conscripted in 1943, Hallas participated in a mutiny in Egypt after the end of the War.
Back in Britain he supported Tony Cliff’s ideas and was a founder member of the Socialist Review Group, but drifted away soon after. In 1968, he rejoined the International Socialists, and from that time he was a leading member of the organisation, a great populariser of Marxism and an inspired speaker, until ill health forced him out of active politics in 1995.
Michael Kidron (1930-2003) was a leading theoretician of the Socialist Review Group and the IS, from the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s, when he dropped out of active politics.
Kidron developed the theory of the Permanent Arms Economy as an explanation of the long post-war boom; he also made a critique of the interpretation of Lenin’s concept of Imperialism.
Jim Higgins (1930-2002) was born into a working-class family in Harrow and joined the Young Communist League at 14. He broke with the CP in 1956 following Khrushchev’s “secret speech” and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, later joining the Socialist Review Group.
In the 1960s he was elected to the Post Office Union’s National Executive, but resigned to become National Secretary of the IS in the early 1970s. Quarrelling with other IS leaders, he resigned to built a new life as a journalist.
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Compiled by Andy Blunden