Michael Kidron was a part of the leadership of the International Socialists (forerunners of the SWP) through the sixties and seventies when that group briefly held the possibility of developing a revolutionary politics that was more than a pallid reflection of the ideas of long dead Russians.
Born in South Africa to a family of Zionists Kidron was a leading theoretician of the Socialist Review Group which he joined on immigrating to Britain from the Israeli state in the early 1950's. In the early years of the SRG he was to be found in the extended Cliff family which was the informal core of the group and was in fact Chanie Rosenburgs younger brother. He would also serve as editor and writer on various group publications through these years.
It is Kidron's name that appears as publisher of the first public edition of Cliff's central work State Capitalism in Russia which appeared in 1955. A small pamphlet on Automation appeared in 1956, which although not dissimilar to the ideas of the Johnson-Forest Tendency or Socialisme ou Barbarie, did not simply dismiss existing workers organisations as they tended to do. Unlike other unorthodox Trotskyist tendencies the SRG did not fall into a facile and impotent ultra-leftism. From then on Kidron was a major source of theoretical writing within the SRG and later the International Socialists.
Among his many writings were Western Capitalism Since the War and Capitalism and Theory. His main contribution was to develop the theory of the Permanent Arms Economy which argued that capitalism had been temporarily stabilized by the production of arms which acted as a counter tendency to the falling rate of profit. Crisis then was not eliminated from the system merely postponed. This came at a time when other tendencies were emblazoning their publications with banner headlines proclaiming that capitalism had entered it’s final crisis. Related to this was the conception that state capitalism was a distinct period within the imperialist stage of capitalism and not simply a new label to be plastered upon the Russian state.
These ideas and experience of the workers movement in Britain were to develop a deep rooted understanding in Kidron’s writings that the revolutionary movement must be democratic in order to fit the working class to rule. The PAE also meant that this analysis was reflected in the understanding of the IS that the ‘locus of reformism’ had moved from parliamentary bodies to the shop floor. In short workers were seeking gains through localized class struggle at the point of production where the institution of the elected and recallable shop steward was key. The task of revolutionaries was to generalize and politicize such struggles.
Kidron was critical of the move within IS to a more traditionally Democratic Centralist structure in the wake of the events of 1968 and as IS grew moved away from it’s core both physically, obtaining an academic post in Hull, and politically. None the less he took no direct part in the factional struggle which saw a disastrous split in the central IS cadre in 1975. It would seem that he was as alienated from both sides in the muddied debate which to some degree had the character of a personal struggle for power in a fashion that is strikingly similar to the split which wracked the American SWP in 1940.
Always thinking critically his last major articles in the International Socialism journal cast doubt on his own earlier work but without renouncing Marxism as so many former revolutionaries would during the downturn of class struggle that marked the eighties. Yet following a debate in the pages of the International Socialism Journal with Chris Harman, who defended what was by now the traditional IS position, he was to leave active revolutionary politics.
Closely associated with Pluto Press since the early 1970s, indeed the IS had helped set up the company in it’s first period, his talents were largely squandered on producing State of the World Atlases and such like trivia. For a lesser man they would have been considerable achievements but for such a talent.... Kidron however remained a Marxist committed to changing the world and therefore understood the necessity of developing a theoretical understanding of how the world works precisely in order to change it. It is pleasing then that his final article appeared in the Autumn 2002 issue of the International Socialism Journal on The Decline of Capitalism and speaks of a sure and certain knowledge that another world is not just possible but demanded. As ever the revolutionary role of the working class in the core countries of capitalism is reasserted and the goal of a communist society reaffirmed.
