The Traveller in the Evening

[Imagination is] that in virtue of which an image occurs in us.Aristotle, De Anima History is essentially poiesis, not imitative poetry, but creation and ontological genesis in and through individuals doing and representing / saying.Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society Back in August 2024, I interviewed Joe Ruffell about the revolutionary career of the Greek / French activist, Cornelius Castoriadis, founder of the workerist group, Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1965), who broke with Marxism in the mid-60s in order to develop a theory of political autonomy which increasingly drew on his insights into the central role of the creativity of the producers under capitalism. Castoriadis generalised this insight into arguably the most radical theory of the imagination known to either politics or philosophy, though there are traces of it in Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger and others. The radicalism and depth of Castoriadis’s idea of the imagination has long been of interest to us here at The Traveller in the Evening as an analogue of Blake’s similarly radical idea of the imagination, according to which “The eternal body of Man is The Imagination /God himself / that is [Yeshua] Jesus.” The overlap and connection between Blake and Castoriadis is suggestive at least, and hints at deeper symmetries. It is the long-term ambition of the Traveller in the Evening to explore these mirrorings and affinities, and to that end we thought it time to follow up on Joe’s podcast interview with a follow-up Q&A with Castoriadis scholar, Stephen Hastings-King, author of Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing. The ultimate aim of such an exploration is to find what support there is in Castoriadis for illuminating how Blake’s idea of the imagination is fuel for more than the plastic arts, but underlies the construction of social reality itself, so that a revolution in the imagination would revolutionise society. Topics discussed: introduction to Castoriadis | the Marxist imaginary | Pattern Recognition Research Collective | Castoriadis vs. fascists and communists in Athens | Zinovievites and syndicalists in the PCI | bureaucratic capitalism or degenerated workers state | Socialisme ou Barbarie formed 1949 | Maurice Brinton, Ken Weller and Solidarity | Castoriadis after Marx | the project of autonomy | wildcatting | 1956 Hungarian uprising | post-Marxism | on the content of socialism | direct democracy | psychoanalysis and the imaginary institution of society | Guy Debord and Jean-Francois Lyotard | democracy and philosophy born together in Greece | Billancourt | interlocked workers councils | auto-nomos | reason and energy, imagination and the instituted imaginary | imagination as the devil | heteronomy as determinism, as Urizen | visions eascape the instituted imaginary | no desire without imagination | magma | society unable to recognise its own auto-institution | the unspoken sets of preconditions that enable desire | hellenophilia, against hellenophilia | Athenian germs | Sparta and Cybele | on Heidegger’s Greek | the so-called Dark Ages | the voice of honest indignation | neither perception nor reason | Wordsworth’s fancy | the unspoken, unformalizable dimension on which those things that are formalized depend | Western philosophy lacks the imagination | relaunching philosophy | aggressively constructing dialogue | autonomy or original sin | human perfection and the Council of Nicaea | church against Galileo | Milton, the light and the dark | Communist Histurians Group, Blake and the Ranters | implosion of the Marxist imaginary | a huge humanizing factor for Western capitalism | diamat dy’in out | competitions for symbolic capital in various academic contexts | the cognitive geography of finance Man is all Imagination God is Man & exists in us & we in himWilliam Blake Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is The bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.WIlliam Blake This is not the place to discuss Blake’s concept of imagination in detail, except to say that when he describes the imagination as “the body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity,” we are being invited to see the imagination as the primum mobile of mind, the unmoved mover, that which is not determined elsewhere within mind. In this conception, the imagination is at the basis of the totality of mind. This is a scandal to rationalising philosophy, which wants the seat of reason to be within reason itself, not in imagination. In Castoriadis, on the other hand, the imagination is at the root of the entire social imaginary. These two positions may amount in practice to the same thing, or something much the same as far as the implications for politics go. Final Thoughts Before Closing the Meetingfrom Comrade Cardan I think we are at a crossroads in history... One path… leads to the loss of meaning, the repetition of empty forms, conformism, apathy, irresponsibility, and cynicism, along with the growing takeover of the capitalist imaginary of unlimited expansion of ‘rational mastery’… and of technoscience racing ahead on its own, and obviously a party to domination by that capitalist imaginary. The other path would have to be opened up; it has not been marked out at all. Only a social and political awakening, a renaissance, a fresh upsurge of the project of individual and collective autonomy… can cut that path. This would require an awakening of imagination and of the creative imaginary.Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable What horrifies and irritates representatives of traditional philosophy… is the necessity of acknowledging the existence of a collective imaginary, and for that matter, of a radical imagination in singular human beings, as a creative force. Creation here means creation ex nihilo, bringing into being a form that was not there before, the creation of new forms of being. It is ontological creation: a form such as language, institution qua institution, music, and painting... Why is philosophy, in the forms we have inherited, unable to acknowledge the fact of creation? Because that philosophy is either theological, and therefore reserves creation for God… or it is rationalist or determinist, and therefore obliged either to infer everything that is from first principles… or else to produce it out of causes... But creation belongs to being in general… and creation belongs, densely and massively, to socio-historical being.Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable Get full access to The Traveller in the Evening at www.travellerintheevening.com/subscribe [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Timothy Morton [https://timothy-morton.com/] is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University [https://profiles.rice.edu/faculty/timothy-morton]. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appeared in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJV0Kx7oGxU&t=160s] with Jeff Bridges, and is the author of a series of radical works [https://timothy-morton.com/books/] on Ecology, culminating in last year’s Hell: Towards a Christian Ecology. Andy and Timothy Morton have been talking since Andy interviewed Tim [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/p/timothy-morton-the-marriage-of-religion] for the Blake Society in March 2024. There was a second interview [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/p/what-the-f**k] on the Traveller in the Evening (‘Throwing a Wrench of What the F**k Into the Machinery [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/p/what-the-f**k]’), and a feature review [https://bookshop.org/p/books/hell-in-search-of-a-christian-ecology-timothy-morton/20877860?ean=9780231214711&next=t] of Tim’s book, Hell: Towards a Christian Ecology [https://bookshop.org/p/books/hell-in-search-of-a-christian-ecology-timothy-morton/20877860?ean=9780231214711&next=t] (‘Retipped Arrows of Desire: Timothy Morton's Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/p/retipped-arrows]’). After that, the conversation really got going. The discussion took as points of departure, Tim’s ideas about with Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) and hyperobjects, and the Christian ecology he explored so thrillingly [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/p/retipped-arrows?utm_source=publication-search] in Hell; and Andy’s reading of Blake, in particular Blake’s emphasis on the imagination, and the possible political uses of the imagination, as imagined by the radical post-Marxist, Cornelius Castoriadis [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/p/blake-castoriadis-and-the-imagination]. A significant influence arrived with David Bentley Hart’ [https://davidbentleyhart.substack.com/]s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_Delusions] ("an unanswerable and frequently hilarious demolition of the shoddy thinking and historical illiteracy of the so-called New Atheists”), which they read in tandem, emerging on the other side with an expanded sense of how Christianity cuts through contemporary fascism and its war against empathy, which, with careless accuracy, it calls ‘woke’. Topics discussed: from Houston to Phoenicia and back | making it up as you go along | Vala, animism, OOO | spending time with the cat while throwing toys out of the pram | deleted every week | going blind vs allowing a structure you haven’t yet thought to endure | solid as a rock | saying lovely things | David Bentley Hart | atheist delusions | Gyrus’s drive North | galvanised by George Floyd | objects from the master-slave regime | the thing called a person starts to get deeper | making Christianity dangerous | the Emperor and the forces of nature | how to live the hyperobject | the kryptonite posture towards hierarchy | the war against empathy | the bomb that went off was Christianity | enthralled by the nation | tea and cake with King Charles and traditionalism | Steve Bannon, Jordan Petersen, Alexander Dugin, and the new pagans | KKK, SPQR, wink wink | reeling from my own torture | the lone and level sands | flies all green and buzzin’ | the bacteria that pooped out oxygen | the hierarchy itself is implacable | the mask comes off | working for the man in Buddhism | Stewart Home’s fascist yoga | falling in love with your guru | all the words are corrupted | the most subversive claim ever made | construct yourself | it’s always going to feel a bit ugly | Bullhead, Nipton and hi-tech nothingness | deliver some string beans | when you put the sugar in the tea | something more general than ideology | the primum mobile of thought | the shark social imaginary | Plato’s cave is what it feels like to be a Platonist | a structure of feeling that hadn't hardened into an ideology | wanting to be cute-sounding | a black opal fire. We decided it was time to throw some of the ideas we were developing before the public, not in a structured way, but by continuing the discussion in a podcast for the Traveller in the Evening, so we could see for ourselves where we were at. This is that podcast, hopefully the first of a series. Part two will drop when we think we’ve moved on. The fourth wall between the human subject and everything else evaporates. How to see global warming as part of the human drama, not as the end of it? How to rebuild the play when there is a fourth wall collapse, and when this collapse coincides with the actual theatre on fire? When being on fire is what causes this collapse, what happens? The play was s**t. We need another play.Timothy Morton, Hell The Christian view of human nature is wise precisely because it is so very extreme: it sees humanity, at once, as an image of the divine, fashioned for infinite love and imperishable glory, and as an almost inexhaustible wellspring of vindictiveness, cupidity, and brutality. Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.Which is, incidentally, the most subversive claim ever made in the history of the human race.David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions Get full access to The Traveller in the Evening at www.travellerintheevening.com/subscribe [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Mark Vernon, (2025), Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, London: C Hurst & Co., 368pp. The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible... We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations...William Blake The podcast discussion with Mark was hard to edit from almost two hours of recordings, as there were many spontaneous interruptions, often unfruitful, for reasons I try to address here. What remains is a podcast capturing a general introduction to the book from the author’s point of view and the gist of the argument between us, with digressions removed and gaps cauterised as best I could. It was not the discussion Mark had anticipated, though I had no way of knowing my approach would surprise him so (the orientation of this site being public [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/about], and since he and I had talked [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/p/i-hear-youre-a-hindu-now] previously). I’d hoped to tease out some of the controversial aspects of his reading of Blake, but my questions were not allowed to land, being shrugged off as irrelevant, misinformed, or senseless to his way of thinking. As an old friend of mine used to say, it felt like throwing slices of hot toast into a cooling fridge. My normal practice when interviewing someone about their book is to keep it apart from the written review, if for no other reason than that they are created separately and make sense in their own right, so there’s no advantage in having to prepare both for publication before sharing them. In this case, I’m merging the two, hoping my review notes help people make sense of the difficulties in the interview. What follows tries to tie arguments in the podcast discussion to points I would have made in a review. Without this, the podcast would sound like two people talking past each other, without any explanation of why. But first of all, I had to work out this ‘why’ for myself.travellerintheevening.com [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/p/awake-mark-vernons-imaginary-in-the-balance] Get full access to The Traveller in the Evening at www.travellerintheevening.com/subscribe [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Andy and Conor discussed how the focus of their attention has shifted in recent years from environmental crisis to the rise of fascism and illiberalism, particularly in the context of the Trump phenomenon. They also revisited the importance of William Blake for the blog, with Andy confirming that his appreciation for Blake has not changed. A Blake-Inspired Spiritual Journey Andy discussed his journey with William Blake, starting with his accidental discovery of Blake's work and his subsequent attraction to Blake. Andy shared how Blake's ideas influenced his understanding of the human imagination and its role in shaping our perception of reality. He also mentioned his relationship with Timothy Morton, who shares a similar perspective on Blake and the importance of the imagination. Andy's journey with Blake has led him to embrace Christianity, which he believes is a natural progression of his understanding of Blake's work. The Traveller in the Evening is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Christianity and Capitalism: A Philosophical Inquiry The discussion explores the resurgence of deeper societal critiques using Christian thought, with Andy and Conor reflecting on the role of empathy in capitalism and Christianity. Andy argues that Christianity offers a necessary response to capitalism, emphasising its communistic aspects and opposition to capitalism. The conversation then shifts to the popularity of various topics on Andy's blog and podcast, including the history of the British left, hauntology, and biblical analysis. They also discuss the importance of counterculture about Blake's influence and its potential for fostering alternatives to capitalism. The dialogue concludes with reflections on current countercultural movements and the overall project's focus on radical Christianity, counterculture, and philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality. Surrealism and Transpersonal Autonomism Andy and Conor discussed the relationship between Surrealism and magic, with Andy suggesting that Surrealism's automatism could be extended to include transpersonal elements. They explored the idea of the unconscious as a being rather than just a flip side to the conscious mind. Conor shared his own experiences with communicating with his unconscious through dreams and tarot cards, noting the importance of being in the right state of mind and using the right language for communication. The High and Low Art of Spectralism Andy and Conor discuss music and its perception, focusing on the importance of sound quality and timbre over traditional musical elements. They highlight an experience where Iancu Dumitrescu, a composer, performed at the Faust festival, bridging the gap between high art and industrial music audiences. The conversation then shifts to Andy's autism and how it has influenced his diverse interests and career paths. They conclude by discussing misconceptions about Christianity and the Catholic Church. Talking Bourgeois Politics Blues Finally, Andy shares his experiences of being moved by powerful speeches from a Baptist minister and Michelle Obama, noting how these experiences challenged his preconceptions about bourgeois politics and effective communication. The Traveller in the Evening is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Traveller in the Evening at www.travellerintheevening.com/subscribe [https://www.travellerintheevening.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Bloom Had Gone #1 Our generation’s illusions are lived ones.John Game How the right appropriated what were once left wing causes – ‘no forever wars’ for ‘anti war’, ‘anti-globalism’ for opposition to neo-liberal globalisation and hostility to ‘elites’ for hostility to capitalism – is what led some on the left to believe that even in a period of unprecedented right wing reaction this was still their era. This ignores two things. Firstly, that the terminological shifts matter and have real content. ‘No Forever wars’ ‘globalism’ and ‘the elite’ stand for a conspiratorial worldviews as much as what they claim to stand against. Parochialism, ‘multi-cult’ and hatred of all liberal and progressive values at home and abroad are the real content of this stuff and they are at least as popular with the right’s base as the more left-wing concerns they appear to shadow. There is much that needs to be re-thought after a few decades where analysis was replaced with a strange doctrine of eternal return where every battle was treated as the occasion for the resurrection of old socialist slogans. A strange form of idealism where idealism was dressed up as materialism in an endless nostalgia for yesteryear’s battles, which eventually replaced the present in our own minds. Fans of the dialectic might enjoy the irony of a defeat for neo-liberal globalisation being the greatest defeat for the left and progressive values seen since the 1930s, where hope lies with the stock exchange putting some manners on right-wing politicians. But perhaps these dialectical paradoxes point to the completely false perspectives we’ve carried around for more than three decades. The power of the past hangs like a nightmare on the brain. And this was particularly true of older collectives of intellectuals on the left. The tragedy is that you need collectives and collaboration to work out new forms of politics. Today, there is almost nothing like that that doesn’t simply consist of repetition or self-affirmation. In some ways, this is the material basis for the revival of campism. All through the noughties as we built opposition to war and Islamophobia, UKIP was growing. The infiltration of the left by reactionary discourse was the blurring of distinctions between right-wing forms of isolationism and left internationalism, which happened because people overestimated their own influence and vastly underestimated the growth of KIPper discourse. This was seen clearly with the increasing difficulties in even being able to mobilise against the EDL effectively. By the next decade Stop the Wars’ talking points on Ukraine to Syria were almost indistinguishable from the right’s weird mix of conspiracy theory and parochialism. This is the real story. George Galloway was only the clearest example of this degeneration.John Game, 2025-04. Now what is happening around the Greenham Common women is tokenism. You can’t just say they are feminists, or separatists. That is not the real reason for their actions. We have to ask why tokens come to the front. Tokens come to the centre when there are not any real forces to solve the problem… Tokenism is at the centre of the downturn here. The trouble is it does a fantastic amount of damage.Tony Cliff, ‘Building in the Downturn’, speech to SWP National Committee [https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1983/04/building.htm], 1983. The Collapse of the SWP and Decline of the Far Left John and Andy discuss the growth of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the 1980s, the party's response to the miners' strike defeat, and the shift in international perspective from "Neither Washington nor Moscow" to a more anti-American stance. They also reflected on the history of the revolutionary left in Britain, the aftermath of 9/11, the formation of the Respect party, and the legacy of the Russian Revolution. They discuss the history and internal dynamics of the SWP, the economic and social transformations in India during the 1980s and 1990s, and the rise of right-wing populism in India. The discussion concludes with John and Andy reflecting on their past involvement with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and their current views on Marxism and the legacy of the Russian Revolution. John expresses his belief that the Bolshevik revolution was disastrous for the left, as it severed the connection between communism and democracy. He argues that the repression began almost immediately after the revolution, contrary to common narratives. Both John and Andy acknowledge the need for a more nuanced and critical understanding of socialist history, particularly regarding the Soviet Union and its impact on Eastern Europe. They suggest that the traditional Marxist framework is no longer adequate for addressing contemporary issues like environmentalism. The End of the Miners’ Strike SWP's Growth and Political Shifts John and Andy discuss the growth of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the 1980s despite the grim political climate. They explore themes like the party's response to the miners' strike defeat, the shift from industrial militancy to a focus on building the party, and the transition in international perspective from ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ to a more anti-American stance. They analyse how the SWP adapted its strategy and rhetoric during this period of change in left-wing politics. The discussion will cover the party's growth, internal dynamics, and eventual decline, while also touching on broader trends affecting the revolutionary left. Andy and John discussed the history of the revolutionary left in Britain, focusing on the period after the defeat of the miners' strike in 1985. They highlighted the paradox of the 1980s, where, despite the grim situation, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) grew in membership. They attributed this growth to the general political polarisation created by Thatcher, the desire for ideological resistance, and the SWP's ability to relate to a highly political situation. They discussed the shift in the SWP's approach, from defending past positions and the centrality of the working class to addressing political questions and being tribunes of the oppressed. However, they note that this shift led to a culture of unanimity and voluntarism, which became problematic. They touch on the SWP's involvement in the Respect coalition, which they saw as a manifestation of the organisation's problems. 1983-85: Liverpool Council The Poll Tax The SWP were late to the Anti-Poll Tax campaign, having started by insisting on the need for council workers to take action to defeat the tax, they took a while to join in with the Militant-led campaign on community non-payment. Stop the War Coalition (StWC) StWC was established on 21 September 2001 to campaign against the impending war in Afghanistan. It then campaigned against the impending invasion of Iraq. StWC never clarified the basis of the anti-war movement, which increasingly was explained in conspiratorial terms shared by the far right, with their talk of ‘forever wars’. Just a Little Respect In 2004 the SWP decided to gamble everything on an alliance with George Galloway, with whom they formed the Respect Party. Respect Party and Anti-War Sentiment The discussion covers the aftermath of 9/11 and the formation of the Respect party in the UK. John explains that Respect was presented as a way to capture anti-war sentiment, particularly among Muslim voters, but in reality was about avoiding allying with more militant anti-war activists. He notes that while some criticised Respect for making too many concessions to Muslims, he is proud they stood up to Islamophobia. John observes that during this period, many on the left had an overly charitable view of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leadership and failed to recognise the rise of UKIP and the far right. The conversation touches on broader shifts in left-wing politics following the fall of the Soviet Union, with anti-Americanism becoming a dominant framework. John argues this led to conspiratorial thinking and a failure to properly analyse events like the Arab Spring. The Delta Rape Case and the Splits in the SWP In 2013 it emerged that the SWP Central Committee had buried accusations of rape against their National Secretary, Martin Smith. Huge numbers of members flooded out of the organisation to create the groups, the IS Network and RS21. Neither of these made a significant break with SWP politics: the ISN soon floundered, while RS21 maintains a ghost life not unlike that of its parent organisation.. The Bloom Had Gone #2 The bloom had gone off radical left politics long before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The crisis of Social Democracy was visible from the early 1970s. The developmentalist state of various nationalist socialisms was well in train even by the period of the late African decolonisations of the time. The revolutionary left survived mainly as the radical edge of (distinctly non-revolutionary) battles against the restructuring of capital as the old models began to disintegrate. These battles formed my own politics, so I’m far from condescending concerning them. But it was the fag-end of a series of defeats and disorientations which had their roots a decade earlier. ‘Actually existing socialism’ had been dead as any source of real ideological inspiration to anyone other than its opponents since the tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, abolishing forever any illusions in the possibility of a rejuvenation of the Soviet system as a post-Stalinist ‘socialism with a human face’. In China, any illusions in ‘the Cultural Revolution’ were ditched even by the regime. The rise of illiberal democracy can be traced back to the period of Bush’s war on terror, one of whose features was politicians manipulating state institutions rather than the other way about. The disorientation of radical politics after a brief mini-boom led to a profound misunderstanding of the causes and the dynamics of these events. This is why the old left language about ‘the deep state’ has become the language of the radical right. It’s a complete misdirection. By ‘deep state’, they mean functioning liberal institutions, which, of course, are their main target. This is the problem with hanging onto older radical languages, both those that were once true and those which were not.John Game Nigel Harris: Review of Ian Birchall’s Biography of Tony Cliff: A Marxist For His Time Tony Cliff: A Marxist For His TimeIan Birchall Cliff knew, better than anyone, that a revolutionary party without a revolution cannot fail to become a sect, driven first and foremost by faith and the need for self-perpetuation. The cadres cannot keep their consciousness on ice, waiting for the next bus of history to pass by (a dreadful mixed metaphor, worthy of Cliff himself, and rightly subject to a sharp Birchall rap of the knuckles). What might have saved something was to turn back to the strategy of the 1950s, rewind the clock to the old political club and start to confront what was now revealed as a theoretical vacuum on the left, drawing the lessons of the failure of the upsurge – especially, as it seemed, the radical decline of the working class and the atrophy of its trade union and political institutions, economic globalisation and the redistribution of the world working class from Europe and North America to Asia. Perhaps that is what Cliff thought he was doing in writing a four-volume biography of Trotsky, but it smacked of iconography more than ‘learning lessons’. Ian cannot avoid a sober comment: “As the 20th century approached its end, the Russian Revolution…remained the solitary success story for revolutionary socialism. That Cliff in his last years had to return to the inspiration of 1917 (rather than, say, examining the nature of the British working class) was a sign of the weakness of the movement”. Worse than that, even where workers were involved – in Lech Walesa’s Poland or Lula’s Brazil – workers merely reinforced reformism. It might seem that it was only the voluntarism of the intelligentsia that made a revolution ‘proletarian’; was Marx himself coming apart? But retreat was impossible (for example, ending the pretence of any longer being a party). It might have destroyed what was left, demoralising the members. They had been groomed for history and would not settle for mere faith. On the contrary, Cliff seemed not to embrace the emerging world but to retreat to the verities of his teenage years, symbolised in his preposterous description of the times as “the 1930s in slow motion”. All Cliff’s savage mockery of the Fourth International’s efforts to pretend continuous slump and mass unemployment persisted through the boom of the 1950s (because Trotsky said this was the nature of the times in 1938) seemed to have faded. It was worse than that – as massive slump and dereliction supposedly racked the system, China and East Asia soared ahead with rates of annual growth of more than 10 percent per year – and an unprecedentedly resulting massive reduction in world poverty. India was not far behind. If this was a capitalism in terminal decline, it might seem to the millions marvellous beyond words. Cliff could not avoid some of these issues even if he seemed theoretically on 1938 autopilot. Ian cites a Cliff riposte that shows he was aware of some of the problems of the new world: “the growing integration of the world economy meant that not only was it impossible to have socialism in one country, it is stupid to speak even about capitalism in one country.” He was scornfully dismissive of those who talked of the decline of the old working class, saying triumphantly that the Korean working class was now bigger than the whole working class in Marx’s time, but with nimble sophistry avoiding the question of what should be the role of a Marxist in this little corner of the globe when the world working class had decamped to east Asia. And if there was to be no repetition of 1917, what was now to be the strategy to achieve collective universal self-liberation? A continual contemplation of the heroic victories of the past strongly suggested there was no future: these were not lessons of history but epitaphs. In such circumstances, could Marxism avoid becoming a religious cult, false consciousness itself, faith defying all the evidence, will defying intellect? Had Cliff become a tragic prisoner of his own creation? That marvellous facility to reinvent himself – so vividly displayed during the years of upsurge – failed. He was captive to his combat group, requiring continuous campaigns (some of them were excellent initiatives) to perpetuate its mere survival. There was no time to return to the tasks he did so well in the 1950s in reconstructing theory, much less gather around himself the thinkers required to contribute to this process as was briefly attempted with Mike Kidron in the early 1960s in the creation of the International Socialists. He had become a vested interest with its own dynamic. Theory had become mantra, to be repeated in unison, not applied. Of course, it is quite unfair to reproach Cliff, after such a life, for not undertaking in his declining years such an immense task, the reconstruction of a critique of contemporary global capitalism, and defining the realistic means to overcome it. But he had built a structure and selected a cadre, defined an agenda and a culture which meant they too could not undertake these tasks. Instead the criterion of success became survival (with some spectacular successes – the Anti Nazi League, the Stop the War movement, etc), self-perpetuation, and compared to the miserably low standard of other tiny revolutionary groups (a measure Cliff would have indignantly rejected in his heyday – it was not the task of a revolutionary just to survive). Meanwhile, the older cadre slipped away quietly – into having children, pursuing careers, golf or opera.Nigel Harris, review of Ian Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist For His Time. 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