Cliff Slaughter, 1928-2021: a Life for Revolution and Its Challenging Legacy

Terry Brotherstone

doi:10.1080/03017605.2022.2050530

Cliff Slaughter, 1928-2021: a Life for Revolution and Its Challenging Legacy

Terry Brotherstone^* (Corresponding Author)

^*Corresponding author for this work

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Abstract

Cliff Slaughter's life (1928-2021) was dedicated to working-class internationalism and socialist revolution. A scholarship boy in post-World-War-II Cambridge he became a university lecturer in his native Yorkshire doing important work in social anthropology. But it was the theory and practice of Marxism that guided him. After leaving the Communist Party at the time of the 1956 Stalinist crisis, he joined the Trotskyist group led by Gerry Healy and worked tirelessly for the Socialist Labour League, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) and the International Committee of the Fourth International. Increasingly at odds with Healy's political prognoses, pragmatic practice and subjective philosophising, Slaughter finally broke with him in 1985, when his morally corrupt, abusive exploitation of idealistic young comrades was exposed.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	251-266
Number of pages	16
Journal	Critique: journal of socialist theory
Volume	50
Issue number	1
Early online date	27 Jun 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2022.2050530
Publication status	Published - 2022

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Cliff Slaughter, 1928-2021: a Life for Revolution and Its Challenging Legacy

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