Early life in Palestine 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 Israeli 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
Hayim Margolis-Kalwariski. 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. At fifteen, he joined the youth section of
Mapai, and then two years later moved to join
Poale Zion. After that he devoted himself to full-time political work. By the late 1930s he was a committed Trotskyist and anti-Zionist. 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 Glückstein.
International Socialists and SWP 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). Cliff remained a leading member until his death in 2000. He was central to the various reorientations carried out in the SWP to react to changes in the position of the working class. In particular, after the high level of strike activity in the early seventies, he argued in the late 1970s that the working-class movement was entering a "downturn" and that the party's activity should be radically changed as a result. A fierce debate ensued, which Cliff's side eventually won. Trotskyist writer
Samuel Farber, a long-time supporter of the
International Socialist Organization in the US, has argued that the internal party regime established by Cliff during this period is "reminiscent of the one established by
Zinoviev in the mid-twenties in the USSR" consequently leading to the various crises and splits in the group later on. Cliff's biography is, as he himself remarked, inseparable from that of the groups of which he was a leading member. Shortly before his death, he underwent a major surgical operation on his heart. == Ideology ==