Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy

The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy
By Bob Pitt
Contents
Chapter 1 (1913-1944)
Chapter 2 (1944-1950)
Chapter 3 (1950-1955)
Chapter 4 (1955-1958)
Chapter 5 (1958-1960)
Chapter 6 (1960-1964)
Chapter 7 (1965-1968)
Chapter 8 (1968-1971)
Chapter 9 (1971-1975)
Chapter 10 (1975-1985)
Chapter 11 (1985)
Chapter 12 (1986-1989)
Appendices
Statement on the Expulsion from WIL of G. Healy at the Central Committee
Meeting of 7 February 1943 - WIL Political Bureau
Letter to the "Club" - Jock Haston
The Methods of Gerry Healy - Ken Tarbuck
The Struggle against Revisionism - Gerry Healy
A Comment on the National Committee Decision to Form a Socialist League Ellis Hillman
An Open Letter to Members of the Socialist Labour League and Other Marxists Peter Fryer
Some Reflections on the Socialist Labour League - Gerry Healy
3
Preface
ITS NOT very often an author begins a book by urging readers to disregard
virtually everything that is written in it, but this is one of those rare occasions.
Let me explain.
The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy was first published as a series of articles in
the paper Workers News, beginning shortly after Healys death in 1989. Having
spent a couple of years in the Workers Revolutionary Party in the late 1970s,
and having been influenced by its politics over a much longer period, I was
concerned to find an explanation for the implosion of that organisation in 1985.
The conclusion I drew was that the underlying cause of the WRPs collapse was
Healys contempt for the basic political principles of Trotskyism.
This, I would argue, was not an entirely stupid conclusion. Reading through
the multi-volume Pathfinder collection of Trotskys Writings you cannot but be
struck by the political intelligence at work there, and by the gulf that separates
Trotskys method from Healys. The best of Trotskys writings (his articles on
the rise of Nazism in Germany are a case in point) represent a serious attempt
to grapple with the complexities of the political situation, in order to reach an
objective analysis and outline a practical strategy a method which contrasts
sharply with the subjective fantasy and ultra-left bombast which usually
characterised Healys approach.
Towards the end of his life, it is true, Trotsky did tend to lose his political
grip. The perspectives that inform the Transitional Programme imminent
economic collapse, the redundancy of bourgeois democracy, the threat of
fascism as the only alternative to socialism, the expectation that revolutionary
conflict was about to break out, and so on certainly provided the basis for the
catastrophism that was a feature of Healys political outlook throughout his
career. However, as I have argued elsewhere ("The Transitional Programme
and the Tasks of Marxists Today", What Next?, No.11, 1998) Trotskys false
analysis is understandable as a response to the developments he confronted in
the 1930s. He was guilty only of mistaking a particularly unstable phase in the
development of capitalism for the terminal crisis of the system, and would
undoubtedly have reassessed his perspectives had he lived to do so. Healy, on
the other hand, continued to parrot these predictions in circumstances where
economic expansion, the stability of parliamentary democracy and the distant
prospect of revolutionary struggle were self-evident facts.
Having said that, I dont think that an adequate critique of Healys politics is
to be found by counterposing Trotskyist orthodoxy to Healys combination of
infantile leftism and opportunist manoeuvring, as this biographical study does.
These days, I would reject much of the Leninist-Trotskyist tradition, which I
think serves as an encouragement to sectarianism. As far as political activity in
Britain at the present time is concerned, I believe the method of Marx and
Engels, with their emphasis on the need for Marxists to participate in existing
working class organisations, has far more relevance than the party-building
4
fetishism that distinguishes the various Trotskyist groupings, rendering them
irrelevant, disruptive or both. From that standpoint, I would now look more
favourably on the experience of the Healy Group in the 1950s, when it did at
least try to work in the broad labour movement. My criticisms of the Healyites
political practice in that period would now be from the right. Whereas in The
Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy I condemn them for liquidationism, my present
view would be that they werent liquidationist enough!
The version of The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy that appears here is an
expansion of the original articles from Workers News. The additional material
was, however, incorporated many years ago, and if I were to update the
biography now I would almost entirely rewrite it. But I have resisted any
temptation to do so. Life, to put it bluntly, is too short.
June 2002
5
Introduction
WHEN GERRY HEALY, the former leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party,
died on 14 December 1989, his ambition to establish himself as a figure of
world-historic significance lay in ruins. Despite his final efforts to curry favour
with the Gorbachev wing of the Soviet bureaucracy, Healy ended his life in
almost complete political isolation. His followers, who stuck with their infallible
leader to the finish, numbered no more than a hundred or so internationally,
and in Britain were reduced to a mere handful of acolytes mainly from the
theatrical profession whose roots in, understanding of, and influence over the
labour movement were approximately nil.
In truth, Healy had never been anything more than a very minor political
figure, whatever illusions he himself may have had on that score. It was only in
Britain that he ever built an organisation of any size or political weight, and
even there his achievements were, on the scales of history, extremely modest.
At the peak of its strength in the early 1970s the Socialist Labour League, as it
then was, had a membership of perhaps two thousand; it produced a daily
paper, albeit with a small circulation; it had established a base of support in the
trade unions; and it had drawn towards it a radicalised layer in the intelligentsia
and semi-intelligentsia (not to mention Vanessa Redgrave). But in none of
these departments membership, circulation of its press, industrial base,
influence on cultural and intellectual life did Healys organisation even rival
the Communist Party of Great Britain, which by general agreement was always
one of the weakest components of the official world Communist movement.
Nevertheless, a study of the career of this politically marginal figure is not
irrelevant. Over the years, tens of thousands of workers, youth and intellectuals
were recruited to Healys organisation in Britain. Furthermore, a multitude of
organisations worldwide, comprising thousands of militants, still identify with
the traditions of the International Committee, the tendency Healy helped to
found after the split in the Fourth International in 1953. As for the United
Secretariat, the largest of the international Trotskyist tendencies, its British
section produces a publication named Socialist Outlook after the paper around
which Healy organised his entry work in the Labour Party from 1948 to 1954,
and has at times published glowing references to the activity of Healys group in
the British labour movement of the 1950s. In fact a bewildering variety of
groups, many of whom would react with indignation to accusations of
Healyism, lay claim to this or that aspect of Healys political legacy. The
memory of Thomas Gerard Healy, it might be said, weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living.
What is striking is that those groups which base themselves on, or seek to
emulate, episodes from Healys past adopt entirely conflicting political
approaches in the present. They are able to do this because Healys career
comprised a series of unprincipled zigzags, in the course of which he furiously
denounced political positions which he had earlier enthusiastically supported,
and eagerly embraced policies which he had once bitterly opposed invariably
6
carrying out these abrupt reversals without the slightest trace of self-criticism.
Retrospective identification with particular points on Healys political trajectory
can thus be used to justify virtually any political line: from Stalinophobia to the
promotion of illusions in Stalinisms revolutionary potential; from sectarian
abstention on struggles within social democracy to liquidation into left
reformism; from a formal defence of the permanent revolution to sycophantic
adulation of bourgeois nationalists.
These sudden shifts in political line are not, of course, a feature of the
Healyite tradition alone. In the early 1990s the Militant Tendency, whose badge
of honour for decades had been its commitment to patient work inside the
Labour Party, launched itself into a self-destructive turn towards an
independent party. And the Socialist Workers Party, which had for years (quite
correctly) opposed calling for a general strike in circumstances where this was
demand was unrealisable, raised precisely that slogan in 1992 during the
campaign against pit closures at a time when industrial conflict in Britain was
at a historically low level. Healys various about turns were thus only
particularly extreme examples of a method employed by the leaderships of
virtually every far left group currently in existence.
For all these reasons, a detailed analysis of Gerry Healys political evolution is
not merely of historical interest but has direct relevance to the struggle to build
a socialist movement today.
7
Chapter 1 (1913-1944)
WE KNOW that Thomas Gerard Healy was born in Galway on 3
December 1913, the son of Margaret Mary Healy (formerly Rabbitte)
and her husband Michael, whose profession was listed on the birth
certificate as farmer. But the details of Gerry Healys early years remain
obscure. According to Healy himself, he joined the Young Communist League in
Britain in 1928, although this may be just another of the myths he cultivated
about his own history, along with claims that his father was murdered by the
Black and Tans and that he acted as a Comintern courier into Nazi Germany. 1
By 1936, Healy was living in Belgrave Road, Pimlico, and was a member of the
Communist Partys Westminster branch.2 He was then still a party loyalist and a
fervent anti-Trotskyist to the extent that he became a regular member of a
group of Stalinists who went to Hyde Park to argue with and, on occasions,
physically assault Trotskyist speakers.
One regular victim of the attentions of Healy and his fellow Stalinists was
Jock Haston, who was then a member of the Militant Group, a Trotskyist
organisation led by Denzil Harber which worked in the Labour Party. In the
course of their repeated arguments, Haston recalls, he succeeded in winning
Healy over to Trotskyism.3 Healy would later claim that Haston recruited me to
the movement after my expulsion from the Communist Party.4 According to
Healy, he was expelled from the CP for questioning the supply of oil by the
Soviet Union to fascist Italy.5 There is, however, no independent confirmation of
this version of events.
The date of Healys break with Stalinism is uncertain. Healy himself for many
years claimed that he joined the Trotskyists in 1936, although he later settled
on January 1937.6 In the spring of that year he appeared in Yorkshire, where
he had a job travelling round grocers shops setting up adverts for Sunlight
soap.7 There he worked with John Archer, a leading Militant Group member in
Leeds, helping to run open-air meetings for the group and sell its newspaper.
According to Archer, Healy was almost entirely ignorant of Trotskys writings,
but made a favourable impression with his energetic activity on behalf of the
organisation.8 At the Militant Groups national conference in August 1937, on
the proposal of Harber and Archer, Healy was formally accepted into
membership and joined the groups Paddington branch.9
It was false allegations against another new recruit to the Paddington
branch, Ralph Lee, concerning his past activities in the South African labour
movement, which formed the basis of a split in the Militant Group within
months of Healy joining. In December 1937 Lee walked out of the organisation
in protest at his treatment, accompanied by seven supporters including Jock
Haston, Millie Lee, Ted Grant and Healy. Although the Militant Groups
leadership undoubtedly mishandled the situation, it seems likely that this served
as a pretext for a split by young activists dissatisfied with what they saw as the
conservatism of the older leaders. Lee and his supporters formed a new
8
organisation, the Workers International League, and Gerry Healy became editor
of its duplicated journal, Searchlight.10
When James P. Cannon of the US Socialist Workers Party intervened on
behalf of the international Trotskyist movement to unite the British groups into
the Revolutionary Socialist League, the WIL refused to join, arguing that the
unification agreement which allowed those Trotskyists opposed to entry to
engage in open work was a violation of democratic centralism. In 1938 the
founding conference of the Fourth International recognised the RSL as the
official British section and censured the WIL for having split over mere personal
grievances. All purely national groupings, the official statement read, all those
who reject international organisation, control and discipline, are in their essence
reactionary.11 Healy, it should be noted, fully supported the WILs decision to
reject the authority of the Fourth International and retain its autonomy. The
subsequent fragmentation of the RSL he saw as a vindication of the WILs
position. Comrade Cannon, Healy was fond of saying, came to Britain and
unified four groups into seven.12
That the WIL itself managed to maintain its unity, however, was no thanks
to Healy. For it became increasingly clear that Healys egotism, contempt for
group discipline and subjective hostility to other leading comrades were not
easily compatible with the requirements of a Bolshevik organisation. In 1939,
when it was decided to change Youth for Socialism (successor to Searchlight)
from a duplicated to a printed paper, Healy resigned from the WIL because he,
as the nominal publisher, had not been consulted. Later that year, after the
outbreak of war, Healy joined the group established by the WIL in Ireland in
anticipation of illegalisation. There, as a result of a clash over minor tactical
issues, he again resigned, declaring that he would join the Irish Labour Party to
fight our organisation, and for this he was expelled from the Irish group. Only
after an intervention by Jock Haston, who was anxious not to lose Healys
organisational talents, was the expulsion rescinded.
Healy was sent back to Britain where he worked energetically for the WIL.
But in 1940, when he was working as WIL organiser in Scotland, he used his
position to build up factional support for his attempts to reframe the WIL
constitution on a federal rather than a centralised basis. Not only had he failed
to inform the leadership of his differences beforehand, but when his actions
were criticised Healy failed to put up any defence whatsoever, but instead
launched into a slanderous and personal attack upon two of the leading
comrades in the centre and resigned from the organisation. 13 That political
differences in a small organisation like the WIL should become entangled with
personal animosity is understandable, but Healys behaviour does suggest that
he was temperamentally ill-equipped for the responsibilities of revolutionary
leadership.
Nevertheless, despite these signs of personal instability, Healys energy and
organisational talents were evidently a considerable asset to this small group of
Trotskyists as they fought to overcome their isolation from the working class
9
and build a revolutionary cadre. Even Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson
scarcely paid-up members of the Gerry Healy appreciation society recognise
that Healy made a real contribution in this early period.14 Nor is there any
evidence that Healy had carried the ultra-left, sectarian politics of Third Period
Stalinism with him into the Trotskyist movement, as has sometimes been
suggested.15 In late 1940, when a minority tendency emerged in the WIL,
arguing for the downgrading of Labour Party entry work and for the building of
an independent organisation concentrating on agitation in industry, Healy
argued forcefully against this view. The Labour Party, he wrote, is historically
the political expression of the Trade Union movement, and our fraction work
must accordingly be carried out in both organisations if we are to win the
maximum support for our position. Moreover, an examination of working-class
struggle both here and on the Continent shows that such struggle always
commences on the economic field, that is, in the unions, and leads on to the
political field in which the masses of the people have been drawn in behind the
Labour and Social Democratic parties.16
What did remain a hangover from his Stalinist past and this was to remain
a feature of Healys politics to the day he died was a contemptuous attitude
towards the democratic component of democratic centralism. When the WIL
minority raised the further objection that the League was controlled by a clique,
Healy responded by advocating the bureaucratic-centralist method of
organisation proposed by Lenin in What Is To Be Done?, on the grounds that
this was necessary to defend the WIL against an imminent crackdown by the
state. We are entering a period of illegality, Healy asserted, when it will be
necessary to handle certain aspects of our work very carefully.... All these
functions can only be properly carried out by people who give their full time to
it.... In effect, in periods of illegality they would be in complete control of the
whole group apparatus.... At this juncture I can hear some comrades protesting
that this means bureaucracy, that it is an anti-democratic tendency, etc.
Precisely the same arguments were levelled at Lenin.17 The difference was, of
course, that Lenin put forward his organisational proposals under conditions of
extreme repression in early twentieth century Russia, where his organisation
really was illegal. What went for the Bolshevik Party in times of Czarist
reaction, ignorance and backwardness, a supporter of the minority pointed out
in reply to Healy, is not necessarily an unalterable guide for us.18
Another issue that became the subject of heated dispute in the WIL was its
adoption of the Fourth Internationals Proletarian Military Policy, which
attempted to drive a wedge between the defensist sentiments of the working
class and the war aims of the bourgeoisie by demanding military training under
trade union control. When a minority headed by Jock Haston criticised the
WILs interpretation of the military policy as capitulating to patriotic sentiments
in the working class, by portraying the British bourgeoisie as defeatists and the
Trotskyists as the true advocates of military victory over Hitler, Healy vigorously
defended the WILs political line. Trotskyists, he wrote, told the working class
that we are not against the defence of the country, only the capitalists are not
fighting to defend the country but only for profit and loot. Look what happened
10
in France, etc. The task of the revolutionary party is to expose the real aims of
the capitalists to the workers. Our Military Policy offers them a positive
alternative, which separates their aims from the bosses and assures their class
independence, when it says to fight Hitler you must take control into your own
hands. Britain must be your Britain and not the Britain of the coal, steel and
iron kings.19
All of this was virtually a paraphrase of Trotskys writings on the subject, and
showed that Healy had an ability to present Trotskyist politics in a popular
agitational form. When he tried to develop his own independent positions,
however, Healys touch was not so sure. His argument that the Home Guard
was potentially an embryonic workers militia was particularly ill-conceived, and
drew a sharp response from Haston, who pointed out that the Home Guard had
been used on behalf of employers as armed strike breakers.20 Whatever else,
Healys contribution to this controversy further demolishes attempts to portray
his political deviations as consistently ultra-left.
With activity in the Labour Party generally at a low level due to the wartime
electoral truce, and with the Labour League of Youth in which the WIL carried
out most of its fraction work rendered moribund by conscription, the League
soon came to concentrate on intervention in the trade unions. Healy now
emerged as the most enthusiastic proponent of this turn to industry, and in the
post of WIL industrial organiser he played an important role in recruiting a new
layer of militant trade unionists to the organisation. Indeed, by 1942 he was
arguing the case for the primacy of industrial work in much more extreme
terms that had the WIL minority faction two years earlier. The workers will
come to us on the basis of our industrial programme, he now asserted. From
there they will be won over to our political position.21
Towards the end of 1942, Healy yet again came into conflict with the WIL
leadership, this time over his campaign to build a rank-and-file organisation in
the trade unions, in co-operation with the Independent Labour Party and the
anarchists. Healy evidently believed that the scabby role played by the pro-war
Communist Party during a big strike at the Tyneside shipyards in October 1942
opened up an opportunity for anti-Stalinist militants in the trade unions. 22 At the
end of that month he met ILP leaders Fenner Brockway and Walter Padley to
propose joint activity in industry. The defence of militants against the union
bureaucracy and the CP, Healy wrote to Brockway at the end of October, would
lay the basis for providing a revolutionary alternative for the growing number
of militants who are moving towards the left, disgusted with the policies of the
trade union leaders and the Stalinists.23
At a Central Committee meeting in November, however, Healys proposal
that the WIL should use the base it had established in the Royal Ordnance
Factories to launch a new national shop stewards organisation was voted
down. Ted Grant and Jock Haston argued cogently that such a development
would arise when workers themselves had tested out their existing organisation
and recognised the need for an alternative rank-and-file movement. It was
11
therefore necessary first of all to pursue the fight through the official machinery
of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, rather than set up a paper organisation
along the lines that Healy advocated. Healys proposal that a small organisation
like the WIL should try and substitute its own initiatives for a real movement
within the working class was, Grant asserted, ultra-left.24
Despite his rebuff by the CC, Healy went ahead with his plans. The formation
on his initiative of the Committee to Co-ordinate Militant Activity in the Trade
Unions, which was essentially a bloc between the Industrial Committees of the
WIL and the ILP, was no doubt seen by Healy as an important achievement.
The committee met weekly, held a public meeting in London early in 1943 and
declared itself a great step forward towards the unification of the revolutionary
left inside the trade unions.25 It did at any rate have the effect of provoking the
AEU bureaucracy into expelling two of the committees leading members, Healy
himself and ILPer Don McGregor, from the union.26
But Healy was effectively acting in defiance of the decision at the November
CC. The WIL leadership argued that, instead of the loose joint body to
coordinate activity on specific issues authorised by the CC, Healys committee
was conducting public activities at variance with our perspectives, and which is
duplicating the activities and wasting the energies of our members.27 Matters
came to a head at a Central Committee meeting in February 1943 when, at the
conclusion of his industrial report, Healy announced that he was resigning from
the WIL to join the ILP, stating that his decision was not motivated by political
differences but his personal inability to continue further work in our
organisation in conjunction with J. Haston, M. Lee and E. Grant. 28 If Healy
hoped by this ultimatum to force the leadership to endorse his industrial policy,
the attempt badly misfired. The Central Committee voted unanimously for his
expulsion, and the Political Bureau issued a statement denouncing him to the
membership.
THE LACK of seriousness in Healys resignation from the WIL is

demonstrated by the fact that he almost immediately withdrew it and applied
for readmittance to the organisation. Fortunately for him, the leadership agreed
to rescind his expulsion and restored him to membership. (We always brought
him back, because he was a good organiser, Ted Grant later remarked
regretfully, although that was not sufficient reason to bring him back. 29) If
Healy anticipated a speedy return to the leadership, however, he was to be
disappointed. Not only did he lose his position as industrial organiser, but he
was also removed from the Political Bureau, the Central Committee and the
editorial board of the WIL paper, Socialist Appeal.30 Healys demotion was not
without its adverse effect on the group in his absence, the WILs industrial
work was reduced to a chaotic condition31 but the Political Bureau took the
view that Healy would have to undergo a testing period in the ranks before
again being allowed to hold positions of responsibility.32
12
It is against this background that Healys emergence as a spokesman for the
Fourth International, and its demand that the WIL should submit to
international discipline, must be evaluated. In 1938, it will be remembered, the
WIL had refused to unite with the other British Trotskyist groups to form the
Revolutionary Socialist League, and for this it was censured and denied
recognition by the founding conference of the Fourth International. Whatever
merits the WILs rejection of unification may have had at a national level and
the Leagues record in the class struggle over the following years was far more
impressive than that of the official section, the RSL it was undeniably an
evasion of international responsibilities. After all, if political differences
concerning national policy were to take precedence over the need to establish
the world Trotskyist movement on democratic centralist foundations, this was
effectively an argument against the very formation of the Fourth International.
The WILs position outside the International undermined its claim to be the
true representative of Trotskyism in Britain, and was used against it by both the
RSL and the Independent Labour Party. This unofficial status also weakened
the effect of WIL propaganda against Stalins dissolution of the Comintern in
1943. Although the June issue of Socialist Appeal carried the headline The
Third International is Buried! Long Live the Fourth International!, this rang a
little hollow given the WILs exclusively national existence. But the WIL leaders
had made only token efforts to discuss unity with the RSL, apparently in the
hope that the WILs growing influence in the working class, in contrast to the
stagnation and fragmentation of the official section, would eventually force the
International to recognise the WIL.
Within the WIL, there had been no more rigid opponent of unification than
Gerry Healy. He rejected discussions with the RSL as completely futile, and the
only approach to the Fourth International he would countenance was that of
demanding unconditional recognition for the WIL. For these reasons, Healy
refused to serve on a delegation to meet the RSL leadership. Convinced that
everything in the official section was rotten, he dismissed as a waste of time
the WILs efforts to win over the Trotskyist Opposition, a faction in the RSL led
by John Lawrence. And when Lou Cooper of the Socialist Workers Party (USA)
wrote an open letter to the WIL in March 1943, sharply criticising its refusal to
unite with the RSL under the discipline of the Fourth International, Healy not
only objected to the letter being circulated among the membership, but even
found an excuse to absent himself from a London aggregate called to discuss
the question.33
In August 1943, however, Healy performed a characteristic political
somersault. In a document entitled Our Most Important Task, followed up by a
letter to the Political Bureau, he adopted Coopers arguments as the basis for a
polemic against the WIL leadership.34 Healy now argued that discussions with
the RSL had not been pursued seriously, but were intended only to convince
the International Secretariat of the Fourth International that the WIL had done
its best to achieve unity. This was Bronx (i.e. petty-bourgeois) politics, Healy
asserted. As for the WILs claim that it implemented the Trotskyist programme
13
more consistently than the RSL, Healy pointed out that programmatic
agreement with the Fourth International was insufficient unless the WIL also
accepted the Internationals organisational discipline. Nor was it enough to build
a strong group in Britain if the WIL did not participate in the construction of the
World Party of Socialist Revolution, with sections in every country. The question
of becoming the official British section of the Fourth International, which could
be accomplished only through fusion with the RSL, was the most important
question facing the WIL, Healy insisted.
But at this stage he was far from appearing as the unequivocal upholder of
international democratic centralism beloved of Healyite mythology.35 Healy did
not dispute that James P. Cannon might have acted bureaucratically when
unifying the British Trotskyists in 1938, and he defended the WILs decision at
that time to defy the Fourth International by refusing to join the RSL. With
worker members being demoralised by the petty-bourgeois politics of the RSL
leaders, Healy wrote, it had been necessary to take a sharp stand if proletarian
elements were to be trained and protected from this type of politics. But Healy
claimed that this had been only a short-term expedient. He accused the WIL
leadership of turning it into a permanent principle, and of ignoring the fact that
now, when the WILs numbers would guarantee it an overwhelming majority in
a fused organisation, the opportunity for unification should be seized.
In reply, the Political Bureau argued that the WILs opposition to the 1938
unity agreement was not a temporary manoeuvre, but rather a political stand
against the right of a minority to follow its own policy against a majority
decision. Although readily admitting to a lack of enthusiasm for unity with the
RSL, they declared their willingness to undergo a merger in order to join the
Fourth International. But what would Healy say, the Political Bureau asked, if
the International Secretariat demanded fusion on the same basis as in 1938?
One pictures his face, red with rage, when Stuart made such a proposal less
than 12 months ago.36
Indeed, the suddenness of Healys political turnaround could only raise
suspicions as to its opportunist nature. Charging Healy with dishonesty in
blaming them for a policy which he himself had taken an active part in
formulating, the Political Bureau drew the conclusion that his abrupt change of
line was motivated by the realisation that his removal from the leadership was
not likely to be reversed for some considerable time. As for Healys accusation
of Bronx politics, this received a scathing response. The distinguishing features
of the petty bourgeoisie, the Political Bureau reminded Healy, included lack of
continuity, impressionism and eclecticism, denial of and contradiction of all they
swore by yesterday.... Need we hang a label around our critics neck?37
The WIL leaders arguments carried more weight than Healys new-found
principles with the members, and although Healy established a solid base in
his own South West London branch, elsewhere his support was restricted to
Hilda Pratt and Ben Elsbury in East London and Bob and Mickie Shaw in West
London,38 Healy was the only member of this group to be delegated to the WIL
14
conference in October 1943. There his lack of political credibility among the
WIL membership was demonstrated by his failure to gain any support for a
South West London amendment to the resolution on international affiliation.
The amendment, which proposed that the WIL should unite with the RSL on
terms decided by the IS, had to be formally seconded for purposes of
discussion, and received only one vote Healys own!39
However, the picture of Healy leading a bitter struggle for a united British
section of the Fourth International against the intense opposition of the WIL
leadership40 is just another Healyite myth. Shortly after the conference, a letter
was received from the IS containing a series of proposals for unification, which
included acceptance of the principle that the policies of the fused organisation
would be determined on a democratic centralist basis, by majority vote at
conference.41 This removed the major obstacle to fusion, and the WIL Central
Committee immediately passed a resolution agreeing to unification with the RSL
on those terms, thereby striking Healys main factional weapon from his hands.
Healys reaction was to shift his political ground yet again. Aligning himself
firmly now with the IS, he declared that the WIL had been wrong to reject the
1938 unity agreement, and he demanded that the Leagues leaders should
admit to their error and re-educate the membership on this basis.42 The Healy
groups campaign was thus reduced to condemning the way in which fusion
was being prepared by the WIL. While their identification of a nationalist
element in the WIL leaders attitude to the Fourth International was not without
foundation,43 this scarcely constituted an adequate political platform on which
to organise a faction in opposition to the elected leadership, and in January
1944 the Central Committee not unreasonably refused minority rights to Healy
and his supporters on these grounds.44
At the fusion conference of March 1944, which established the Revolutionary
Communist Party as the new British section of the Fourth International, Healys
minority still had not acquired any programmatic differences with the WIL
leadership. On all the main issues debated at the conference the open party
versus entry work, the Proletarian Military Policy, industrial strategy Healy and
his supporters were in complete agreement with the WILs policies.
Nevertheless, at the end of the conference, Healys group and the pro-IS
Lawrence faction from the RSL (with whom Healy had been collaborating for
some months) met with the Internationals representative, Sherry Mangan of
the SWP, to discuss their future tactics in the RCP.45
If the Fourth International had acted responsibly towards the new party, it
would have made every effort to work in co-operation with Jock Haston, Ted
Grant and the other RCP leaders, building on their very real strengths and
fighting to overcome their weaknesses in the course of joint political activity.
Instead the IS (and the SWP on which it was then dependent) wrote off the
British leadership as a nationalist clique, and set up their own faction in the
party. It was a faction with no political basis other than loyalty to the
international leadership, and headed by a man Gerry Healy whose
15
transparently personal motives for opposing Haston and Grant must have
severely damaged the confidence of the RCP rank and file in an International
which saw fit to use him as its agent.
The events of 1943-44 were clearly crucial to the rise of Gerry Healy. At the
beginning of this period he was in disgrace, reduced to the ranks for political
indiscipline; at the end of it, he had been elevated to the position of the Fourth
Internationals key man in Britain. By boosting Healys political fortunes in this
way, it must be said, the IS/SWP showed serious political misjudgement. If
Healy was to have made a positive contribution to the future of the Trotskyist
movement, it could only have been as a member, and under the control, of a
collective party leadership. Yet he was now given a free rein, beneath the
banner of internationalism, to pursue a factional struggle against the RCP
leaders. Over the following years, the endless unprincipled manoeuvring of
Healys internationalist minority was to have a thoroughly destructive effect on
the Fourth Internationals British section.
Notes
1. Marxist Monthly, February 1990.
2. Information from Arthur Shute, a contemporary of Healy in the
Westminster CP who also broke with Stalinism and went over to the Trotskyists.
3. S. Bornstein and A. Richardson, Against the Stream, 1986, p.275.
4. C. Lotz and P. Feldman, Gerry Healy: A Revolutionary Life, 1994, p.345,
emphasis added.
5. Marxist Monthly, February 1990.
6. The Marxist, December 1990/January 1991.
7. Information from John Archer.
8. J. and M. Archer, Some notes on Healys early years in the Trotskyist
movement, Healys Big Lie, 1976, p.30.
9. Bornstein and Richardson, p.275.
10. S. Bornstein and A. Richardson, War and the International, 1986, pp.3-5.
11. Documents of the Fourth International, 1973, p.270.
12. WIL internal bulletin, 11 September 1943.
13. WIL internal document, February 1943.
16
14. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.7.
15. J. Hansen, ed., Marxism versus Ultraleftism, 1974, pp.62-3.
16. WIL internal document, n.d., but probably autumn 1940.
17. Ibid.
18. WIL internal document, 26 October 1940.
19. WIL internal bulletin, 19 May 1941.
20. WIL internal document 21 April 1941.
21. WIL Central Committee, 7 November 1942, minutes.
22. For the Tyneside strike, see S. Bornstein and A. Richardson, Two Steps
Back, 1982, pp.105-6. It was at last possible, in the form of the Tyneside
strike, ILP Industrial Committee member Bill Hunter wrote, for fifty thousand
strikers themselves, and the masses throughout the country, to experience the
policy of the Communist Party for precisely what it is: a policy of classcollaboration (Free Expression, October 1942).
23. Industrial Organisers report, 4 November 1942, WIL internal document.
24. WIL Central Committee, 7 November 1942, minutes. Two years before
he died, Healy attacked Haston and Grant for having argued that a rank-andfile movement in the trade unions should be placed officially under the control
of the pro-war Executive Council of the AEU (Lotz and Feldman, Gerry Healy,
p.345).
25. New Leader, 27 February 1943.
26. AEU, Report of Proceedings of 24th Final Appeal Court, 1944, pp.43-5.
While McGregors expulsion was reversed on appeal, Healys was confirmed on
the grounds that he had made a false application in order to gain membership
of the craft section of the AEU. (I am grateful to Al Richardson for this
reference.)
27. Resolution adopted by Political Bureau and Industrial Committee, 14
February 1943, WIL internal document.
28. Statement of the Political Bureau on the expulsion from WIL of G. Healy
at the Central Committee meeting of February 7 1942, WIL internal document.
29. Ted Grant, interviewed by Sam Bornstein, 22 August 1982. Transcript in
Socialist Platform library.
17
31. WIL industrial bulletin, May 1943.
33. According to an account by the Political Bureau (WIL internal bulletin, 2
September 1943). This makes nonsense of Healys later claim that he rejoined
the WIL specifically to fight for affiliation to the FI: see Lotz and Feldman,
Gerry Healy, p.346.
34. WIL internal bulletin, 10 August 1943; G. Healy, letter to Political Bureau,
25 August 1943.
35. Cf. D. North, Gerry Healy and His Place in the History of the Fourth
International, 1991, p.11.
36. Stuart was Sam Gordon of the SWP, the Fourth Internationals liaison
man with the British Trotskyists.
38. Based on signatories to WIL minority statement, 12 December 1943.
39. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.103; WIL Central
Committee meeting, 15-16 January 1944, Report; M. Shaw, Fighter for
Trotskyism, 1983, p.205.
40. North, p.12.
41. International Secretariat, letter to WIL, 3 October 1943.
42. WIL minority, political statement on reunification, December 1943.
43. For example, the Political Bureaus reference to the democratic centralist
structure of the International as merely a formal connection (Bornstein and
Richardson, War and the International, p.100). This attitude, the Healy minority
pointed out, encouraged WIL members to look upon affiliation to the Fourth
International as the acquirement of a "label" and not at all as the
responsibilities of Bolsheviks towards a Bolshevik organisation.
45. Ibid., pp.107-10.
18
Chapter 2 (1944-1950)
THE FUSION of the Workers International League and the
Revolutionary Socialist League in March 1944, which established the
Revolutionary Communist Party as the British section of the Fourth
International, marked an important advance for the Trotskyist
movement in Britain. It also considerably strengthened the meagre factional
forces which Gerry Healy had been able to muster against Jock Haston, Ted
Grant and the other former WIL leaders who headed the new party. To Healys
own handful of followers were now added the more substantial numbers of the
Trotskyist Opposition from the RSL, providing him with an oppositionist
minority of some 50 members.1 What Healy initially lacked, however, was a
single distinct policy around which to conduct a struggle against the HastonGrant leadership.
This leadership was not without its political weaknesses. The decision to
launch as a party an organisation with less than 500 members, in the belief
that it was powerful enough to make an independent bid for the political
allegiance of the mass of the working class, indicated that their wartime
successes had encouraged illusions among the Trotskyists concerning the real
extent of their influence in the labour movement. The wave of radicalisation
which swept the working class during 1944-45 in fact poured into the traditional
political channel of the Labour Party, leading to the massive Labour victory in
the 1945 general election. Although the RCP campaigned vigorously during the
election under the slogan Labour to power on a socialist programme, the
failure to build a revolutionary tendency within the Labour Party in this crucial
period it has been persuasively argued let slip an opportunity for Trotskyism
to win a genuine mass base.2
Gerry Healy, it must be emphasised, had raised no objections at all to the
tactics of the party leadership on this question. At the RCPs founding
conference, he and his supporters had endorsed the independent party
perspective and were reportedly vociferous in rejecting the view that, in order
to facilitate fraction work, the fused organisation should adopt the more modest
title of league.3 When the Healy minority did issue a policy document in
opposition to the RCP leadership, in August 1944, this advocated a turn not to
the Labour Party but to the ILP, which was said to offer the best opportunities
for fraction work at the present time.4 Only on the very eve of the 1945 general
election did Healy discover that the logic of the Labour to power agitation
required entry into the Labour Party itself5 by which point the British
Trotskyists had effectively missed the boat.
The force of Healys argument was in any case weakened by his dishonesty
in trying to pin responsibility for the RCPs political course on the party
leadership, studiously ignoring his own earlier support for open work. It is the
19
fatal failing of Comrade Healy, the Political Bureau observed wearily, that he
never likes to admit that he has been wrong; that he has changed his position.6
Healys case was further undermined by his refusal to abandon the call for work
in the ILP, which allowed his tactical line to be dismissed as an attempt to ride
two horses at one time.7 But the major defect in Healys proposal for Labour
Party entry was undoubtedly its reliance on the erroneous political and
economic perspectives of the international leadership in particular of the
Socialist Workers Party (USA), on whose behalf the Healy group acted as an
undeclared faction against the RCP leaders.8
The perspectives Healy was given by the SWP consisted essentially of a
dogmatic adherence to Trotskys pre-war prognoses, which had anticipated
neither the long-term viability of bourgeois democracy nor capitalisms ability to
achieve a sustained economic recovery after the war. Whereas the RCP
leadership, following the example of the Goldman-Morrow opposition in the
SWP, grappled with the problem of re-evaluating the Fourth Internationals
perspectives in the light of actual developments, Healy merely parroted the
orthodox formulae of SWP leader James P. Cannon9 and, later, of the Parisbased International Secretariat of the Fourth International, headed by Michel
Pablo. Marxism, Healy informed the 1945 RCP conference, was a precision
instrument that enabled exact prognoses to be made,10 from which standpoint
no re-evaluation was of course necessary.
Thus Healy argued for entry on the grounds that in 1945 the historical
conditions for reformism no longer existed, and that this would provoke major
conflicts within the Labour Party. The loss of Britains industrial and financial
hegemony, he wrote, made it impossible to grant the slightest concessions to
the working class, and had thereby stripped the economic base from the
bourgeois democratic regime. Healy claimed that millions of workers, whose
elementary problems are insoluble under capitalism, were moving towards
political action. In response, the ruling class was already preparing extraparliamentary measures and would be compelled to turn towards fascism.11 A
year later, Healy was predicting economic catastrophe, insisting that British
capitalism was on the edge of an abyss.12 Despite his future somersaults on
the Labour Party question, the main threads of this analysis impending
economic collapse, the erosion of parliamentary democracy, a drive towards
right-wing dictatorship, and imminent revolutionary struggles were to remain
constant themes in Healys political pronouncements throughout his subsequent
career.13
The RCP leadership made a much more sober assessment of the situation.
Beginning with an understanding of the fact that capitalism was establishing
itself in post-war Western Europe on the basis of bourgeois democracy rather
than open dictatorship, Haston and Grant went on to reject the
SWP/International Secretariats economic perspective of stagnation and slump,
recognising instead the reality of a developing revival and boom. This
economic upturn, the RCP pointed out in 1947, had combined with the reforms
implemented by the Labour government to generate substantial working class
20
support for social democracy. No organised left wing was discernible in the
Labour Party, still less a centrist current moving towards revolutionary politics;
therefore Healys entry policy so the RCP leaders argued was inapplicable.14
They accused Healy of producing his tactical line with no regard for empirical
evidence concerning the state of the workers movement or the relationship of
political forces. Yet it was precisely in the field of tactics that empirical
adaption was necessary. When Comrade Healy learns this, the Political Bureau
advised, he will raise his stature as a Marxist.15
Healy tried to evade this challenge on the concrete details of his political
analysis by retreating into a specious debate on philosophy (a trick which he
would resort to on many subsequent occasions). Turning the factional struggle
against Haston and Grant into a caricature of Trotskys 1939 polemic against
Shachtman and Burnham, Healy seized on the phrase empirical adaption to
accuse the RCP leaders of renouncing Marxism in favour of empiricism. 16 Bill
Hunter, too, was found guilty of an epistemological deviation when he drew on
his many years experience in the ILP to refute the minoritys claim that this
represented a fruitful area of work only to find himself condemned by Healy
for trying to impress us with his knowledge of "the facts"!17 The dispute over
Labour Party entry, Healy announced in January 1946, had become
transformed into a discussion on the Marxist method. Consequently the
differences between the majority and minority have considerably deepened.18
In contrast to the later situation in Healys own organisation, however, the
RCPs intellectuals did not see their role as providing a veneer of Marxist
sophistication for Healys errors. On the contrary, former RSL leader Denzil
Harber in particular took a distinct delight in demolishing Healys theoretical
pretensions. At the 1945 RCP conference, when Healy made his ludicrous
assertion that Marxism offered a guarantee of precise predictions, Harber burst
into derisive laughter, justifying this by citing Plekhanovs dictum that, in the
face of absurdity, laughter was the only serious response! And after Harber had
demonstrated that there was an important empirical component to Marxism,
backing up his argument with a lengthy quotation from The German Ideology in
which this point was underlined by Marx and Engels themselves, nothing more
was heard from Healy on the subject of the RCP leaders alleged empiricism.19
Healys contribution to philosophy in 1945-46 did have the merit, in
comparison with his later excursions in this field, of at least being
comprehensible, but it was no less bogus. What determined Healys political line
was not Marxist methodology, but blind obedience to instructions from the
international leadership. This involved him in some farcical political
manoeuvring, notably over the issue of the Red Army and Eastern Europe. At a
Central Committee meeting in February 1946, Healy voted for an RCP resolution
demanding the Red Armys withdrawal. Two months later, pursuing what he
took to be the line of the IS, he reversed this position and began a fierce
campaign against the revisionist policy of the RCP leaders. Unfortunately for
Healy, in June the International Executive Committee of the FI came out in
favour of withdrawal. Confronted by the Political Bureau with a letter from the
21
IEC announcing the new line, according to Ted Grants account, Healy looked
momentarily stunned then he threw out his arms, and he looked at us, and
said, "Well, so we got agreement"!20
Healys mindless factionalising blighted political debate within the RCP,
preventing a serious examination of the partys political problems and spreading
demoralisation among the membership. It also produced widespread disgust at
Healys dishonest methods, with the result that he failed to gain the support of
more than a quarter of the RCPs members (reduced to little over 300 by 1947).
The Healy group now a formally declared faction therefore decided to
request that the IEC divide the RCP and allow the minority to enter the Labour
Party.21 They attempted to justify this by hysterical and almost entirely
baseless denunciations of the regime in the RCP, charging Haston and Grant
with creating an atmosphere of crisis and ideological terror in the ranks and
hounding worker critics with expulsions and threats.22 Despite the RCPs
protest against a disgraceful manoeuvre to get rid of the democratically elected
leadership of a section of the Fourth International, in September 1947 the IEC
acceded to the minoritys request, and the next month a special conference of
the RCP ratified the Internationals decision to split the party.23
In 1943, it will be recalled, Gerry Healy had formed an opposition tendency
in the WIL under the banner of uniting the forces of British Trotskyism within
the Fourth International. Now, four years later, after waging a bitter factional
struggle against the national leadership, this proponent of Trotskyist unity had
succeeded in breaking up the Fourth Internationals British section. To Healy,
and to his latter-day apologists, this achievement counted as a victory for
internationalism. In reality, it served only to demonstrate the destructive
consequences of his unprincipled politics.
****
IF ONE were to undertake to write the real history of British Trotskyism,
James P. Cannon wrote to Gerry Healy in 1953, he would have to set the
starting point as the day and the date on which your group finally tore itself
loose from the Haston regime and started its own independent work. What
happened before that is nothing but a series of squandered opportunities,
material for the pre-history of British Trotskyism.24 This statement combined
illusions in Healy, subjective hostility to the Revolutionary Communist Party
leaders and ignorance of British Trotskyist history in about equal proportions;
but it accurately conveyed the attitude of the Fourth Internationals leadership
to the movement in Britain. Unable to tolerate the independent political
judgement exercised by the RCP, this leadership had found in Healy an
unthinking mouthpiece for its political line. By imposing a split on the British
Trotskyists in 1947, the International Secretariat evidently hoped to shunt the
recalcitrant RCP majority aside and establish the Healy-led minority as the de
facto official section.
22
It was under the political direction of the IS that Healys anonymous group
secretly known as the Club began its work inside the Labour Party. The
object of this work, FI secretary Michel Pablo confidently asserted, was to win
over whole sections of the workers in the Labour Party and in the trade unions
affiliated with it to revolutionary action.25 Yet there is no evidence that prior to
entry either Healy or Pablo had made a serious study of the political situation in
the British labour movement. Had they done so they would have found that no
significant oppositional current yet existed in the Labour Party ranks. And
although an amorphous left wing did begin to develop after Herbert Morrisons
consolidation speech at the 1948 party conference, which heralded the Labour
governments retreat from further reforms, this left wing was by no means the
type of centrist formation, breaking with reformism and developing in a
revolutionary direction, the emergence of which had led Trotsky to advocate
total entry into social democratic parties in the 1930s. The Labour left did not
dispute the right wings view that the 1945 Labour government had
commenced the construction of socialism, but objected only that the Attlee
administration had not proceeded fast or far enough an outlook which was
summarised in the slogan More socialism, not less. In the late 1940s, even the
most militant of the Labour Party rank and file was convinced that a socialist
society was to be achieved, not by revolutionary action, but through
parliamentary legislation.26
In practice, the entrist strategy pursued by Healy involved abandoning any
fight for revolutionary politics in favour of liquidation into this left-reformist
milieu. Thus the first issue of Socialist Outlook, the paper launched by Healys
Club in December 1948, carried a front page editorial headed Back to
Socialism,27 uncritically echoing the illusion among Labour left wingers that,
with the right turn announced by Morrison, the Labour bureaucracy had
reneged on its socialist principles. Healy himself informed the readers of
Socialist Outlook that in order to win the 1950 general election the Labour Party
would have to adopt a full socialist programme today. Dilly-dallying around
with reforms and capitalist patch-work will be disastrous.28 But nowhere did
Healy suggest that a necessary step in the transition to socialism was the
establishment of independent organs of workers power and the overthrow of
the bourgeois state. As Jock Haston pointed out, such views were restricted to
the Clubs internal discussions: Publicly in the paper it is argued, not by right or
left wing Labour Party members but by Trotskyists, that the Labour Party is a
socialist party ... and that this party can transform society through
parliament.29
In contrast to his stated intention to build the revolutionary opposition within
the Labour Party, on the basis of a real socialist programme,30 Healy in fact
dedicated himself to organising an undefined left wing around a social
democratic platform. His chosen vehicle for this was the Socialist Fellowship,
which was launched at a Labour Party conference fringe meeting in June 1949.
Announcing this venture in Reynolds News, Ellis Smith MP, a leading contributor
to Socialist Outlook, explained that the aim of the Fellowships founders was to
resurrect the crusading spirit of the Labour Party pioneers. We shall
23
encourage comradeship and fellowship wherever we go, he wrote. ... We shall
sing songs again and mean them the great Socialist songs. 31 Such vacuous
sentiments attracted other left MPs like Fenner Brockway and Bessie Braddock
into the Socialist Fellowship, and Healy happily engaged in joint political work
with them not on immediate practical issues, as would have been permissible,
but on the basis of a common reformist programme.
If political liquidation into social democracy was the main feature of Healys
work in the Labour Party, a prominent sub-theme was his adaptation to
Stalinism. In this Healy expressed, in a characteristically crude manner, the
failure of the Fourth International to deal with the political problems posed by
Stalinisms post-war expansion. Having followed the FI leaders in denying the
reality of the social overturns in Eastern Europe, Healy enthusiastically
implemented the Internationals opportunist turn towards Tito after the SovietYugoslav split in June 1948. Although only two months earlier at the FIs
Second World Congress it had been characterised as still capitalist, Yugoslavia
was now hailed as a workers state, and a basically healthy one at that. From
then on Healy uttered not a word against Tito, the butcher of the Belgrade
Trotskyists, while a letter from Millie Lee criticising the Yugoslav Communist
Party was refused publication in Socialist Outlook.32
In 1950, Healy organised a youth brigade to visit Yugoslavia which came
back spouting eulogies to the YCPs success in building socialism in one country,
dismissing as groundless allegations that political repression existed under the
Stalinist regime there.33 Alas for Healy, the brigades return coincided with the
Yugoslav governments declaration of support for the United Nations in the
Korean War, a development which left Healy and his supporters floundering.
Mike Banda described Yugoslav Foreign Minister Kardeljs speech to the UN as
regrettable and appealed to this Stalinist bureaucrat to observe the moral
principles of Truth and Justice!34 Even in the Clubs internal bulletin, Healy
could do no more than criticise the Yugoslav decision as opportunist and in
any case subordinate to progressive developments in a YCP which had broken
with Stalinism and was returning in many respects to Bolshevik practice.35
As part of his strategy to build the left wing in the Labour Party, Healy had
cultivated figures like Jack Stanley of the Constructional Engineering Union, Jim
Figgins of the NUR and the MPs Tom Braddock and S.O. Davies. These were
essentially Communist Party sympathisers who were drawn to the Socialist
Fellowship because they rejected the cold war socialism of the Labour left
around Tribune, and Healy maintained his relationship with them by making
unprincipled concessions to their views in Socialist Outlook. On the plea that it
will drive these fellow travellers away from the paper if they criticise Stalinism,
Haston wrote bitterly of the Healyites, they refuse to tackle Stalinism sharply in
any aspect of its policy.36 So although Healy correctly defended the North in the
Korean War, he remained silent on the Stalinist character of the regime, while
the Chinese Communist Party received uncritical acclaim in Socialist Outlook.
Even the Soviet bureaucracy was treated tenderly, Stalins support for antiimperialist movements being described editorially as neither as consistent nor
24
as socialist as we would like it to be!37 It was only after this scandalous position
had opened Healy to attack inside the Trotskyist movement38 that factional
considerations forced him to take a clear stand against Soviet Stalinism.39
With the outbreak of the Korean War, the opportunist set-up which Healy
had stitched together in the Labour Party came apart at the seams, when
Smith, Brockway and Bessie Braddock walked out of the Socialist Fellowship in
protest at its condemnation of the United Nations. Nor had the Club itself
registered any numerical gains, despite the large circulation of Socialist Outlook
and the Healyites energetic pursuit of positions in the Labour Party (Healy
himself became chairman of Streatham CLP). As delegates to Labour Party
conferences, Club members Harry Ratner and Bob Shaw made a significant
impact with militant speeches demanding workers control of nationalised
industries and denouncing the Labour governments pro-imperialist line on
Korea.40 But having buried its real politics in order to acquire influence within
the Labour left, Healys Club understandably found considerable difficulty in
winning recruits to Trotskyism. And Healys politically unprincipled methods
guaranteed that the few new members who were made could scarcely be
trained as revolutionary Marxists.41
In the adverse political conditions of the late 1940s, the RCP too had
stagnated. Not only had the Labour Party retained the political allegiance of the
mass of the working class, but after its left turn in late 1947 the Communist
Party once more became a pole of attraction for those industrial militants who
had been the RCPs main source of recruitment. Realistically, the Trotskyists
task was now reduced to that of maintaining a semi-agitational propaganda
group in order to take advantage of future political opportunities, as a group of
rank-and-file RCPers argued.42 But Haston, demoralised by the failure to build a
mass party, began to argue for entry into the Labour Party on a political basis
even more liquidationist than Healys, a proposal which received the opportunist
backing of Grant who, though unconvinced by Hastons arguments, was
unwilling to face the break-up of the RCPs leading team. In July 1949 the RCP
formally dissolved itself, and its members joined the Labour Party. There, by
the edict of the IS, they were placed under the leadership of Healy, on the
absurd grounds that his utterly false political perspectives had been proved
correct. However, the former members of the RCP majority far outnumbered
Healys 80 or so supporters, and would certainly have deposed him at the
Clubs 1950 conference if Healy had observed elementary Bolshevik standards
of inner-party democracy.
At the 1949 Labour Party conference, Healy made a stirring speech in
defence of a democratic principle for which men and women have fought and
died in this Movement: the right to speak, to differ, and to have their opinions
democratically discussed without fear of expulsion and fear of threats.43 But
these words would have appeared somewhat ironic to the victims of the purge
which Healy now proceeded to carry out within the Club. In February 1950
Haston resigned, unable to tolerate the political atmosphere in Healys
organisation (there was a terrible atmosphere, Grant recalled, of a low
25
theoretical level, of a really ignorant character44), and a few months later
announced his complete break with Trotskyism. Healy then proceeded to expel
all those who refused to break personal contact with Haston.
Healy was just getting into his stride, Bornstein and Richardson recount. Up
and down the country he went, dissolving, amalgamating and splitting branches
apart at will.45 Grant, who had been transferred from his own branch into one
led by Healy loyalist Bill Hunter, was ordered to get a job in a factory, and
when he refused this instruction to become an industrial militant a proposal
which suggests that Healy was not without a certain warped sense of humour
he too was thrown out.46 In reaction to the pro-Stalinist line of Healy and the
IS, the state capitalist position of Tony Cliff had won a growing number of
adherents in the Club; but Healy, incapable of answering this faction
theoretically, resorted to organisational suppression as a substitute for political
argument, and the Cliffites were also expelled.
You cannot remove people and defeat their ideas by bureaucratic expulsion,
Healy had told the 1949 Labour Party conference. The truth of this statement
was to be demonstrated when in later years both Grant and Cliff built large
centrist groupings which complemented Healys own efforts in politically
misleading tens of thousands of genuine militants. In 1950, however, Healys
victory appeared to be complete. He had succeeded in smashing up what was
left of the RCP, driving the overwhelming majority of its members out of the
Fourth International and establishing his own exclusive domination over what
now passed for Trotskyism in Britain.
Notes
1. Bert Atkinson, interviewed by Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, 4
November, 1977. Transcript courtesy of Socialist Platform.
2. S. Bornstein and A. Richardson, War and the International, 1986, esp.
pp.142-3.
3. RCP Political Bureau statement, 20 July 1945.
4. RCP internal bulletin, 9 August 1944. The document appeared over the
names of Dave Finch and Bob Shaw.
5. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, pp.187-8.
26
8. Ibid., p.197.
9. Cannon took this as proof that Healy had broken with sectarian
nationalism and become a real internationalist (The Struggle for Socialism in
the American Century, 1977, p.182).
10. J. Callaghan, British Trotskyism, 1984, p.82. Trotsky took a
fundamentally different view: Every historical prognosis is always
conditional .... A prognosis is not a promissory note to be cashed in on a given
date (In Defence of Marxism, 1971, p.218).
11. RCP internal bulletin, 30 June 1945.
13. The origin of Healys politics in the immediate post-war programme of
the Fourth International no doubt explains why Ernest Mandel later preferred to
explain Healys ultra-leftism as the result of an early training in Third Period
Stalinism. See J. Hansen, ed., Marxism Vs. Ultraleftism, 1974, pp.62-3.
14. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, pp.174-7, 189-91.
16. Callaghan, p.35.
17. RCP internal bulletin, 27 November 1945.
18. RCP internal bulletin, March 1946.
19. Ibid.
20. M. Upham, The history of British Trotskyism to 1949, unpublished PhD
thesis, Hull University, 1980, pp.391, 404; Bornstein and Richardson, pp.197-8.
22. Callaghan, p.36, where the quotation is wrongly attributed to the IS. The
minoritys only legitimate complaint was that they were allowed no
representation on the Political Bureau. Yet the RCP leaders were denounced for
imposing a regime which systematically violates the elementary principles of
democracy in the service of a sectarian political line which departs more and
more from the traditional line of orthodox Trotskyism (RCP internal bulletin,
July 1947). In the light of Healys later organisational practices, this description
appears laughable.
23. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, pp.195-6.
27
24. C. Slaughter, ed., Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, vol.1, 1974, p.262.
26. For a useful account of the Labour left in this period, see D. Rubinstein,
Socialism and the Labour Party: the Labour Left and domestic policy, 1945-50,
in D.E. Martin and D. Rubinstein, eds., Ideology and the Labour Movement,
1979, pp.226-57.
28. Socialist Outlook, June 1949.
29. J. Haston, letter to the Club, 10 June 1950.
30. RCP internal bulletin, August 1947.
31. Reynolds News, 22 May 1949.
32. Haston, letter to the Club.
33. Socialist Outlook, October 1950; Bornstein and Richardson, p.212.
34. Socialist Outlook, October 1950; Healy later claimed that, at a reception
for the returning youth brigade given by the Yugoslav Embassy in London, he
instructed the Clubs members to criticise Kardelj (Slaughter, Trotskyism Versus
Revisionism, vol.1, p.145). If Bandas article is anything to go by, the criticism
must have been extremely mild.
35. Marxist Review, n.d., but early 1951 from internal evidence.
36. Haston, letter to the Club.
37. Socialist Outlook, August 1950.
38. Anon. [E. Grant], Letter to the BSFI [British Section of the Fourth
International], n.d., but 1950 from internal evidence.
39. Socialist Outlook, November 1950.
40. Labour Party Conference Reports: 1948, pp.137, 200-1; 1949, p.162;
1950, pp.81-2.
41. Cf. R. Kuper, ed., The Fourth International, Stalinism and the Origins of
the International Socialists, 1971, pp.97-8.
42. RCP internal bulletin, 14 February 1949. The Open Party Faction, as this
group was known, argued that the RCP should do fraction work in the Labour
28
Party but concentrate on intervention in the trade unions, combining this with
an emphasis on theoretical clarification and political education of the
membership.
43. Labour Party Conference Report, 1949, p.121. Healy was opposing the
expulsion of Stalinist fellow travellers Zilliacus and Solley.
44. E. Grant, lecture on History of British Trotskyism. Transcript courtesy of
Socialist Platform.
46. This account, which is based on Grants History of British Trotskyism,
has been condemned by Bill Hunter as typical of the imaginative tales of horror
about expulsions from the "Club" after the fusion. But Hunters own account is
only marginally different. (See B. Hunter, Lifelong Apprenticeship: The Life and
Times of a Revolutionary, vol.1, 1997, pp.237-9.) Grants expulsion was so
blatantly unconstitutional that it was subsequently withdrawn under instructions
from the FI. He was finally expelled at the FIs Third Congress in 1951, on the
proposal of Ernest Mandel.
29
Chapter 3 (1950-1955)
BY 1950, WHEN Gerry Healy secured his ascendancy over the
Trotskyist movement in Britain, the Fourth International had entered
a deep political crisis. Confronted by the stabilisation of capitalism, the
continued vitality of reformism, the expansion of Stalinism and the consequent
marginalisation of Trotskyism, the Internationals leaders had become deeply
disoriented. In an attempt to overcome the movements isolation, this
leadership in particular its secretary, Michel Pablo began to jettison some of
the main planks of the Trotskyist programme.
Although the Fourth Internationals political collapse really dates from 1948,
when a wholesale capitulation to Stalinism in its Titoite form took place, it was
at the Ninth Plenum of the International Executive Committee, in November
1950, that the International first embraced those programmatic revisions which
Healy would later furiously denounce as Pabloism. Healys own organisation in
Britain, however, had already anticipated this slide into Pabloite revisionism by
several months. The perspectives document adopted by the Club at its national
conference the previous August had defined the basic antagonism in the world
today not as the class struggle internationally, but as the conflict between US
imperialism and Soviet Stalinism. A developing economic crisis, Healys
document insisted, compelled the USA towards an armed showdown with the
Soviet Union and the colonial world. With imperialism forced to prepare for,
and then embark upon, a world war under extremely unfavourable conditions
for world capitalism, the stage was set for an international civil war in which
the Fourth International would be able to lead successful revolutionary
struggles.1
Typically, Healy sprang these new perspectives on the Club without giving
the membership any opportunity to discuss them before the conference. In a
manoeuvre which Ted Grant condemned as Zinovievist trickery, Healy
presented the conference with an entirely new document, while claiming that it
was merely an amended version of the original, and quite different, draft.2 In
imposing Pablos political conceptions on the British section in this way, Healy
demonstrated the utter contempt for Bolshevik methods of party organisation
which was a distinguishing feature of his political career.
There seems no reason, then, to dispute Livio Maitans claim that, when
Pablos famous essay Where Are We Going? was circulated for discussion
within the International early in 1951, Healy expressed no disagreement with it
whatsoever.3 Nor did Healy challenge the adoption, at the FIs Third World
Congress in August-September 1951, of a full-blown Pabloite programme. This
put forward the perspective that with the outbreak of another world war, which
was held to be both imminent and inevitable, the counter-revolutionary
character of Stalinist parties outside the USSR could be transformed. Following
the supposed examples of the Yugoslav and Chinese CPs, some of these parties
could be expected to break with Stalinist politics and project a revolutionary
30
orientation.4 All the British delegates to the Congress Healy, John Lawrence
and Bill Hunter voted for these perspectives. And in the Club itself only Betty
Hamilton and Charles Van Gelderen opposed the Third Congress decisions.5
The Parti Communiste Internationaliste, the French section led by Bleibtreu
and Lambert, did take a stand against Pablo at the Third World Congress. For,
while they were enthusiastic supporters of the ISs pro-Stalinist line on
Yugoslavia and China, they baulked at its application to France, where the PCI
had its base in the anti-communist Force Ouvrire trade union confederation.
Faced with the PCI leaderships stubborn resistance to his policy of entrism sui
generis6 in the French Communist Party and the Stalinist-dominated CGT
unions, in January 1952 Pablo abused his authority as FI secretary to suspend
the majority of the PCI central committee.
Needless to say, the French received no support from Gerry Healy. On the
contrary, when Pablos bureaucratic action was narrowly endorsed by five
votes to four by the IS, Healy sided with Pablo. 7 And at the IEC Twelfth
Plenum in November, Healy voted for the expulsion of the PCI majority from
the Fourth International.8 According to one account, Healy even turned up in
person at Pablos side to inform the Bleibtreu-Lambert faction that they had
been expelled and replaced as the official section by the Pabloite minority led
by Pierre Frank and Michele Mestre.9 Healy played a no less rotten role in
relation to the FIs Vietnamese section, within which a minority faction
supported the Bleibtreu-Lambert position. Before chairing a meeting of
Vietnamese comrades who were about to return from France under orders to
enter the Viet Minh, Healy approached his fellow IEC representative Peng Shuzi
who was to address the meeting, and persuaded him to remain silent about the
Mao regimes persecution of Trotskyists in China. Peng was left in no doubt that
this was an instruction or suggestion from Pablo.10 In order to defuse
opposition to the entrism sui generis tactic, Healy and Pablo thus conspired to
conceal from the Vietnamese Trotskyists the extent of the repression they could
expect at the hands of Stalinism.
Meanwhile, in Britain, the Club continued to pursue Healys unprincipled
approach to entry inside the Labour Party without any noticeable success. As
Jock Haston had pointed out, Healys technique of deep entry kept the
Trotskyists politics secret from the Labour Party rank and file, but failed to fool
the bureaucracy, who were well aware who the entrists were.11 In April 1951
the National Executive Committee decided to proscribe the Socialist Fellowship,
condemning it as a disruptive influence.12 Healy capitulated without a fight,
and immediately wound up the organisation. In a letter to the NEC, the Socialist
Fellowship national committee explained that the now liquidated Fellowships
supporters were loyal members of the Labour Party who have never had any
interests separate and apart from the Labour Party.13 This mangled paraphrase
of the Communist Manifesto only served to underline the depth of Healys
political opportunism.14
31
In any case, Healy soon had bigger fish to fry. The proscription of the
Socialist Fellowship was followed by Aneurin Bevans resignation from the
Labour government in protest at the decision to cut Health Service expenditure
in order to finance a massive armaments programme. After discontent had
been further fuelled by Labours defeat at the 1951 general election, Bevan
became the focus for rank-and-file opposition to the Labour Party leadership
and its right wing policies. In contrast to the mere front organisation which the
Socialist Fellowship had become, Bevanism was a genuine left wing movement
with a real base of support in the party. It was undoubtedly necessary for
Trotskyists to develop a political orientation towards this movement and carry
out work inside it. But Pablo, ignoring Bevanisms organisational
amorphousness and unambiguously left-reformist character, greeted this
development as the beginnings of a centrist tendency which could be won to a
revolutionary programme. Trotskyists could best promote such an evolution of
the Bevanite movement, Pablo wrote, by penetrating it and helping it from the
inside to develop to its last resources and consequences, thereby accelerating
its left centrist ripening.15
Healy eagerly seized on the opportunist implications of this perspective, in
order to transform British Trotskyism into a left component of Bevanism. Thus
Bevans speech to the 1952 Labour Party conference was hailed by Socialist
Outlook with the headline Bevan Gives the Lead that Workers Want. Bevans
election to the NEC on a record vote, and the replacement of right wingers
Dalton and Morrison by the Bevanites Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman, the
front page editorial stated, was the clearest indication that the rank and file
wanted socialism.16 A month later, next to a message of support from Michael
Foot on behalf of Tribune, the paper carried the headline Aneurin Bevan
Demands a Real Socialist Policy. Yet, by Socialist Outlooks own admission,
Bevan had done no more than defend political positions which were
commonplace in the Labour Party before 1945, and he had made it plain that
he had no desire to wage a serious struggle against the right wing.17
Healy provided a theoretical gloss to this political adaptation in his review of
Bevans book In Place of Fear. Not only did Healy accept Bevans reformist
conception of the working class advancing to socialism through the gate of
parliament,18 but in doing so he shamelessly echoed the patriotism
underpinning Bevans political philosophy. Great Britain, Healy wrote, can
never regain its position of world leadership under capitalist auspices.... Britain,
however, can rise to a newer and higher level of world leadership, provided the
Labour movement resolutely carries its struggle for Socialism to victory here in
the coming period. The chief conditions for success, as enumerated by Healy,
were: 1. Complete reliance on the organised power of the working class. 2. No
confidence in Britains capitalists or Americas imperialists. 3. Finish without
delay the job of nationalising, democratising, and reorganising industry along
socialist lines. 4. Put into effect a Socialist and democratic foreign policy. This
programme, which was to be implemented by a future Labour government,
was, Healy wrote, the only road to workers power and Socialism in Great
Britain.19
32
Tom Kemp has written that Healys attitude to Bevanism, as expressed in this
article, was that of a fully-fledged Pabloite20. But this only reveals the problem
in using the term Pabloism in reference to politics which had general support
within the Fourth International. Indeed, for all Healys later fulminations against
Pabloite liquidationism, if he had any difference with Pablo in this period it was
that Healy favoured a more thoroughly liquidationist course within the Labour
Party. After all, the FI leadership did take the view that, in addition to Socialist
Outlook, the British section should publish a theoretical organ, openly
defending revolutionary Marxism21 only to have their repeated requests to
this effect ignored by Healy.22 Indeed, Pablo himself would subsequently
criticise Healys adaptation to Bevanism as an opportunist application of the
entry tactic!23
When a struggle broke out within the American SWP between the proStalinist Cochran-Clarke faction, who took their inspiration from Pablo, and the
partys old guard headed by James P. Cannon, Healy was scarcely in a position
to take a political stand against Pabloism. His response was merely one of
anxiety that the dispute in the SWP might spill over into the International,
which according to Healy was making great strides under Pablos
leadership. Some very serious work in the mass movement is being done now,
Healy wrote to Cannon in February 1953, and in France in particular. Everyone
wants to get on with the job, and the nearness of the war adds to their
determination. My first feeling, therefore, is one of extreme worry are we
threatened with another international split? If so we must avoid it at all costs.
Our movement must not go into the war smashed up and divided!24
****
ALTHOUGH THE leaders of the SWP put themselves forward in 1953 as the
defenders of orthodox Trotskyism against Pabloite revisionism, the party had
in fact already established a lengthy record of political support for the European
leadership of the FI. The American section had failed to oppose the turn
towards Tito in 1948, endorsed with only minor reservations the decisions of
the 1951 Third World Congress, and in 1952 had assisted Pablo in expelling the
recalcitrant majority of the French section, against whom Cannon had defended
Pablos political positions as completely Trotskyist.25 It was only when a
minority faction in the SWP, with the backing of the Paris-based International
Secretariat, began to push for this pro-Stalinist line to be implemented in the
United States that the party leaders moved into opposition.
If the SWPs resistance to Pablo had been minimal, Gerry Healys had been
non-existent. Indeed, at the Third World Congress in 1951, Healy told the
exiled Chinese Trotskyist Peng Shuzi Pablo is my intimate friend. He is a genius
politically and organisationally, and even informed Pengs daughter that Pablo
should think of himself as the successor of Trotsky!26 So it is not surprising
that, when the SWP leadership came into conflict with Pablo, Healys initial
response was to try and straddle the two sides. Nevertheless, his fundamental
loyalty to the SWP, and to James P. Cannon in particular, was never in serious
33
doubt. It was, after all, the SWP leaders who had raised Healy from his position
of ignominy within the Workers International League in 1943, and had guided
his subsequent struggle for control of the British section. The publication of
Socialist Outlook, which by 1952 had become a professional-looking weekly,
would have been impossible without financial backing from the SWP.27 Healy
was even dependant on the US Trotskyist movement for his personal political
style, which he had developed into a crude caricature of Cannon, complete with
imitation American accent.
In aligning himself with the SWP majority, Healy performed his usual trick of
simply shifting his political position without explanation or self-criticism. At the
IEC Plenum of May 1953, during discussion of a draft resolution on Stalinism,
Healy suddenly announced that it would be a mistake to become over-optimistic
about developments in the Stalinist parties following Stalins death, citing the
example of Yugoslavia and the failure to anticipate Titos capitulation to
imperialism over the Korean war.28 This mild criticism provoked an angry
response from Pablo, who told Healy that he should refrain from expressing
views which were contrary to the political line of the International. And at the
end of the meeting the other British delegate, Socialist Outlook editor John
Lawrence, was taken away by Pablo for a two-hour talk.29 The method which
had been used against Haston and Grant adopting a member of the British
section as the FIs man, and organising a faction around him against the
established leadership was now to be employed against Healy himself.
Healy, however, completely misjudged the intensity of the factional struggle
which was about to erupt in the International. He saw no incompatibility
between acting as an advocate for Cannon and maintaining comradely relations
with Pablo, whose support for the SWP minority Healy explained as a
consequence of political impatience, due to lack of experience in leading a
national section. Healy was convinced that Pablo could be dissuaded from
making serious errors in relation to the SWP.30 As for the British section, Healy
envisaged that no trouble would arise for, as he wrote with characteristic
disregard for the facts, we have blasted conciliation to Stalinism here for some
time now.31
Immediately after the May IEC Plenum, Healy nevertheless took the
precaution of having the Executive Committee of the British section (now
known as the Group) elect him as its representative on the IS, in place of
Lawrence.32 But Healy proved politically incapable of using this position to
challenge the line of the Internationals leadership. In July, he agreed that The
Rise and Decline of Stalinism, Pablos draft document for the forthcoming
Fourth World Congress, should be sent out to the sections in the name of the
IS, and failed to record any differences with its political adaptation to
liberalising tendencies in the Stalinist bureaucracy.33 And when Pablos
document was discussed by the Groups EC in August, Healy stated only that he
would argue on the National Committee that certain changes were necessary in
order to strengthen it.34
34
As far as Pablo was concerned, even this represented an unacceptable
display of independence on Healys part, and in early September Healy was
summoned to Paris where he was put under heavy pressure to break with the
SWP leadership. It was this experience, following as it did the emergence within
the Group of an organised Pabloite faction headed by Lawrence, Hilda Lane,
Fred Emmett and Audrey Wise, which brought home to Healy that a fight was
unavoidable. Pablo, only yesterday a man whom Healy had felt extremely close
to and had grown to like considerably, was now found to embody all the old
cominternist vices. Pablos methods, so Healy told Cannon, sickened me to the
point that it almost made me physically unwell. He complained bitterly that the
FI leadership wanted an International of spineless creatures who will accept
revisionism to the point where they become the left cover for Stalinism.35
As this was precisely the role which Healy himself had performed over the
past few years, his modest claim that he was engaged in the greatest struggle
in the whole history of our movement to defend our basic principles 36 scarcely
carried much conviction. In the absence of a critical evaluation of his own
contribution, and that of the tendency he led, to the Fourth Internationals
political degeneration, the fight which Healy proceeded to wage in the Group
had the character of crude factional manoeuvring, devoid of political principle.
Thus, at the Groups National Committee meeting later in September, Healy
used as a pretext for his attack on Pablos supporters the publication in Socialist
Outlook of an article arguing that a future world war would be an openlydeclared war of ideologies, Communism against capitalism, with the world split
into two warring camps. This, the very same line which he himself had been
instrumental in imposing on the British section, was now held up by Healy as
evidence that the whole Pablo gang are capitulatory from top to bottom.37 And
although Healy persuaded the NC to endorse a series of amendments to The
Rise and Decline of Stalinism, one member of Healys faction Harry Ratner
recalls that he was at first sight rather impressed by Pablos thinking and was
not at all convinced when Healy and others said it would open the road to
Stalinism.38 It is not surprising, therefore, that Healy found difficulty getting an
NC majority for his organisational measures against the Pabloites. When he
proposed to remove Fred Emmett from his full-time post on the staff of
Socialist Outlook and replace him with Bill Hunter, both Ratner and Bob
Pennington indicated that they would vote against this, and Healy was forced to
adjourn the meeting until the next day in order to bully his erring supporters
into accepting Emmetts sacking.39
While organising with characteristic belligerence in order to maintain his hold
over the British section, Healy still believed that the dispute could be contained
within a united International. The SWP leaders, however, had other ideas.
Ignoring a succession of letters from Healy urging that they should campaign
for an Emergency Conference of the FI rather than provoke a split, 40 in
November 1953 the SWP issued the famous Open Letter, publicly denouncing
Pablo for having betrayed the Trotskyist programme and declaring that no
compromise is possible either politically or organisationally with the FI
35
leadership in Paris.41 The split was formalised a week later with the founding of
the International Committee of the Fourth International, comprising the US,
British and Swiss sections of the FI, together with the expelled majority of the
French section.
Confronted with this fait accompli by the SWP, Healy moved quickly to carry
out a purge in the Group. In this he was assisted by Pablo giving his British
followers the Internationals authority to defy the discipline of the national
section. On 20 November the National Committee suspended Lawrence,
Emmett and four others from the organisation, and the following day the
Pabloites announced the formation of a new official section of the FI. 42 Healy
and Pablo between them thus succeeded in imposing a split on the British
Trotskyists before a conference was held or a thorough discussion carried out in
the ranks. The result was that many members took sides because of personal
allegiances rather than on a political basis.43
The low political level of this struggle was reflected in Socialist Outlook. The
not exactly world-historic issue around which the Healyites and Pabloites waged
their initial public fight was Lawrences proposal to launch a petition demanding
that the Tory government resign.44 Although Healy rightly rejected this idea on
the grounds that you couldnt fight the Tories with bits of paper, and accused
the Pabloites of capitulation to reformism,45 he ignored his own role in
generating reformist illusions among British Trotskyists. And the mass working
class action which Healy counterposed to the circulation of petitions was
discredited by the familiar Healyite practice of exaggerating the existing level of
consciousness in the working class. Already many workers are asking, Healy
supporter Jim Allen insisted, not "will there be a general strike" but "when?".46
In March 1954 Lawrence utilised a review of Isaac Deutschers Trotsky
biography to push a classically Pabloite line on the Chinese revolution. The
theory of permanent revolution, Lawrence asserted, had found confirmation in
China where the Communist Party is ... compelled to undertake a socialist
revolution in order to solve the bourgeois tasks of national independence and
freedom from landlordism. Mao Zedong, according to Lawrence, was acting
although not consciously as a Trotskyist.47 Yet, instead of Healys faction
taking the opportunity to publicly lash this manifestation of Pabloite
revisionism, it was left to Mike Kidron of the state capitalist Socialist Review
Group to expose Maos record as a butcher of Trotskyists.48 Healys silence was
understandable. At the IEC Eleventh Plenum of April 1952, he himself had
argued vigorously for a resolution on the Chinese revolution which incorporated
an identical analysis to that now put forward by Lawrence.49
If any clear political differences emerged during the course of the dispute,
this was largely because of the Lawrence factions speedy evolution towards
openly Stalinist positions. Thus Healy was able to make some correct points
against Lawrences attitude towards the popular frontist Paris Peace Congress
against German rearmament of March 1954.50 But such political questions took
second place to the organisational battle for control of Socialist Outlook, which
36
involved winning a majority among the shareholders of the Labour Publishing
Society, the papers legal owner. At the LPS annual general meeting in May
1954, the Healy faction were able to defeat the Pabloites and take over the
management committee and editorial board.51 This victory, which is presented
in Healyite mythology as a major political triumph over Pabloism,52 is put into
perspective by Harry Ratner, who points out that the result did not necessarily
reflect the real measure of support for the respective camps.... It just happened
that we were better organised, worked harder and got round to more people.53
During the struggle of 1953-54 the British section produced not a single
independent theoretical contribution to the struggle against Pabloism.54 Nor
was any attempt made to analyse the origins of the Fourth Internationals
political crisis. Indeed, throughout the fight with the IS and its supporters,
Healy following his mentors in the SWP continued to protest his adherence
to the very Third World Congress decisions on which the Pabloites policies were
so evidently based. In the face of such confusion and downright political
dishonesty, the 1953 split in the International, far from upholding the continuity
of Trotskyism, could serve only to deepen the political disorientation of the
movement.
****
THE 1953 SPLIT in the Fourth International may have forced Healy to take a
confused half-step back from the pro-Stalinist line he had pursued over the
previous five years, but it failed to alter his course of political liquidation into
the Bevanite movement. This was one aspect of Pabloism which Healy had no
intention of challenging. In September 1953, at the very time that he was
flaying the capitulatory politics of the Pabloites, Healy was telling Socialist
Outlook readers that the forthcoming Labour Party conference presented an
opportunity to deliver the knock-out blow to the bureaucracy. And how was
this to be achieved? It is to be hoped, Healy wrote, that the Bevanites on the
platform will join forces with the rank and file on the floor and thus guide the
conference in a real Socialist direction.55 This approach which has been
summarised as hope the Lefts fight!56 offered not the slightest warning as to
the real willingness of the leaders of the Labour left to take on and defeat the
right wing.57
Healys problem was that his attacks on Pablos British supporters threatened
to damage his relations with the Bevanites, who stood closer politically to John
Lawrences group than to Healys. Healy evaded this difficulty with his usual
political dishonesty. Thus he denounced as a shameful cover for the hideous
facts of class collaboration Lawrences endorsement of the Paris Peace
Congress,58 yet he refused to criticise Jennie Lee for having attended the same
conference.59 And while he condemned Lawrences readiness to build a
campaign against German rearmament in co-operation with anti-German
chauvinists,60 Healy remained silent on the fact that some of the worst
examples of such chauvinism were to be found in the Bevanite journal
Tribune.61
37
In order to counter the accusation that his polemics against Lawrence also
reflected on the Bevanites, Healy stepped up his sycophancy towards Aneurin
Bevan to unprecedented levels. Bevans resignation from the shadow cabinet in
April 1954, in protest at Attlees support for US warmongering in South East
Asia, prompted a breathless eulogy from Healy. Implicit in the position put
forward by Bevan, Healy wrote, is the recognition that what the world faces
today in its struggle for survival is an international class struggle. Implicit in the
statement of policy he proposes is a rallying cry for international working class
action. Implicit in his attack on the counter-revolutionary plans of American Big
Business is an appeal to the great and traditionally militant American working
class .... Our task is to aid in spelling out the programme for Labour implied in
his stand.62
At this time the Bevanites were also being courted by the Communist Party,
which was attempting not unsuccessfully to draw the Labour left into a
cross-class peace campaign. Healys Group, small though it was, represented
an obstacle to the Stalinists aims. It was scarcely accidental, therefore, that in
March 1954 the CP weekly World News published an attack on Trotskyism
which included potted political biographies of Healy and other former RCPers
involved with Socialist Outlook. The Labour Party right wing gratefully accepted
the political ammunition provided by the Stalinists, and the following month the
National Executive Committee pronounced that anyone associated with Socialist
Outlook was ineligible for membership of the Labour Party.63
Healy launched a campaign against the ban Join the Labour Party today
was the fighting slogan, And Ssh! Still read Socialist Outlook64 and he was
able to rally broad support within the labour movement, in particular among the
Bevanites, who were themselves under threat of expulsion.65 Nevertheless, at
the 1954 Labour Party conference the reference back of the NECs report on
Socialist Outlook, moved by Jennie Lee, was lost by 1,596,000 votes to
4,474,000.66 Speaking at a Socialist Outlook meeting during the conference,
Healy had demagogically warned the right wing that no matter what they fixed
by the use of the block vote, they would not prevent the Outlook from
appearing or becoming a bigger paper.67 But this proved to be so much hot air.
In October 1954 Socialist Outlook ceased publication, and the Healyites turned
to selling Tribune. It was in co-operation with the Bevanites paper that Healy
carried out his intervention in the Blue Union struggle of 1954-55.
In the course of this struggle thousands of dockers in the northern ports,
disgusted by their union officials collaboration with the employers, deserted the
Transport and General Workers Union and joined the National Amalgamated
Stevedores and Dockers Union (known as the Blue Union because of the colour
of its membership cards). The NASDU leadership proceeded to lead successful
actions against compulsory overtime and against attempts to deny its members
employment under the Dock Labour Scheme. But a six-week strike to enforce
negotiating rights for the Blue Union, which began in May 1955, went down to
defeat. The NASDU leadership turned out to be no real alternative to that of the
TGWU. Not only did it do its best to sabotage the recognition strike, but it tried
38
to force its thousands of new recruits back into the T&G, under instructions
from the TUC. The Blue Union membership had to take its leaders to court in
order to secure the democratic right to join a trade union of their own choice.68
The mass exodus from the T&G was not a purely spontaneous development,
but the outcome of a strategy consciously worked for by the Healyites. As early
as 1953 Healy had met with a group of Birkenhead dockers who produced the
rank-and-file paper Portworkers Clarion, and it had been agreed to prepare a
breakaway. In August 1954 Healy himself, who was introduced as a
sympathiser from London, addressed a mass meeting during the Hull dock
strike which initiated the large-scale defections to NASDU. Indeed, the Group
played a crucial organisational role throughout the ensuing struggle.69 John
Archer goes so far as to describe this intervention as Healys greatest
achievement.70 Given Healys political record, however, a more critical attitude
seems appropriate.
Certainly, the T&G members who marched out to join the NASDU did so out
of a healthy hatred for the union bureaucracy, and it was absolutely necessary
to defend them against both the attacks of the right wing and the scabbing of
the Stalinists. But it was quite a different matter to set out, as Healy did, to
engineer a breakaway movement. Instead of working patiently to build a rankand-file opposition to the TGWU leadership, which would have been the
principled course of action, Healy tried to find a shortcut to establishing a
political presence on the docks. Such methods can only be described as
thoroughly opportunist. And Healys attempt to use an essentially conservative
craft union like NASDU as a vehicle for his aims proved disastrous. It was one
of Healys star recruits, NASDU secretary Dick Barrett, who tried to lead a
return to work in London during the 1955 recognition strike. 71 In retrospect it
was a fiasco, one latter-day supporter of Healys strategy is forced to concede.
It led to a split on the docks and even to a certain amount of non-unionism.72
Tribune gave full coverage to the Blue Union struggle, which it saw as an
opportunity to undermine the Bevanites enemies in the T&G leadership, and
the Group enthusiastically promoted the papers sales in the docks. As a result
of Healys efforts, Bevanism was able to acquire what it had previously lacked
a base in the trade union movement. After the collapse of the upsurge on the
docks, the Healyites continued to work closely with Tribune, for example in
organising meetings for the Bevanite MPs Crossman and Mallalieu in
Yorkshire.73 In exchange for such services, members of the Group were
occasionally allowed a letter or short article calling for a programme of
nationalisation without compensation under workers control or for a sliding
scale of hours in response to automation. 74 But if Healy had been minded to
draw up a political balance sheet in terms of what he got for what he gave, the
answer would have been very little. For Healy, of course, no such question
arose. His purpose was not to build a revolutionary tendency in the Labour
Party, but to pursue Pablos strategic line of assisting the evolution of
Bevanism into a supposedly centrist movement.
39
Healys own contributions to Tribune were shallow, journalistic pieces which
did nothing to introduce Trotskyist politics to leftward-moving workers within
the Bevanite current. But he did give his readers a taste of what passed for
orthodox Trotskyism within the International Committee of the Fourth
International. In November 1955 Tribune published Healys fawning account of
his visit to Messali Hadj, the Algerian National Movement leader held under
house arrest in France. In an article notable for its total lack of political analysis,
Healy paid tribute to the amazingly confident personality of Messali Hadj and
to his ability to create an atmosphere which is unique for its calm, impressive
feeling.75 Clearly, crawling to Third World nationalists was not something Healy
invented in the 1970s! But this was no mere personal deviation on Healys part.
He was visiting the Algerian leader to convey a message of political solidarity to
the MNA from the International Committee, which earlier that month had
passed a resolution hailing Messali Hadj as a living symbol of the struggle
against imperialism.76
The IC had in fact proved to be politically stillborn. In November 1953,
James P. Cannon had imagined that the authority of the SWP was such that the
mere publication of the Open Letter would be sufficient to win the world
Trotskyist movement away from Pablo and the official FI leadership. But most
sections of the International, unable to understand why a split had been
publicly declared before documents had even been circulated and a proper
discussion held within the International, observed organisational discipline and
refused to break with the International Secretariat. Most significantly, the only
section with a real mass base, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party of Ceylon,
declined to join the IC, even though its leaders were politically sympathetic to
Pablos opponents.
In July 1954 the LSSP delegates to the FIs Fourth World Congress visited
Britain and proposed to Healy that a parity commission should be formed to
discuss the possibility of reuniting the IC and IS. Healy eagerly supported this
initiative, reasoning that Pablo had been seriously weakened by the defection of
the Lawrence, Clarke and Mestre groups at the World Congress. Indeed, when
IC secretary Gerard Bloch refused to participate in the parity commission Healy
demanded his resignation and took over the secretaryship himself. However,
after a single meeting of the commission the US leadership announced its
opposition to continued negotiations. In compliance with the SWPs instructions,
Healy reversed his position, and on his proposal the IC unilaterally wound up
the parity commission in April 1955.77
The International Committee itself remained no more than a loose federation
of national groupings, and as such had nothing in common with Trotskys
Fourth International. It lacked even a functioning international centre which
could pose as an alternative to Pablo and Mandels IS. After 1955 the IC led an
increasingly shadowy existence, gradually lapsing into almost complete
inactivity. Such was the outcome of what Healy in 1953 had laughably
described as the greatest struggle in the whole history of our movement.
40
Notes
1. British Perspectives: final draft which includes all accepted amendments,
Club internal document.
2. Anon. (E. Grant), Statement to the BSFI [British Section of the Fourth
International].
3. R. Prager, ed, Les Congrs de la Quatrime Internationale , 1989, vol.4,
p.9.
4. International Secretariat Documents, 1951-1954, 1974, pp.25-30.
6. Entrism of a special type. Pablo explained that the bureaucratic character
of the Stalinist movement made it impossible for entrists to appear openly as
Trotskyists. So it would also be necessary to combine deep entry with the
maintenance of an independent organisation, defending the line of the Fourth
International and intervening in the Communist Party from outside.
(International Secretariat Documents, p.37.)
7. Les Congrs de la Quatrime Internationale, vol.4, pp.15, 373.
8. Ibid., p.375.
9. R. Stephenson, The Fourth International and Our Attitude Towards It,
1976, p.13.
10. International Committee Documents, 1951-1954, 1974, p.170. For
political reasons he is writing after the 1953 split in the FI Peng omits to
name Healy. I am obliged to Al Richardson for the identity of the anonymous
chairman.
11. J. Haston, letter to the Club, 10 June 1950.
12. M. Jenkins, Bevanism: Labour's High Tide, 1979, p.103; Labour Party
Conference Report, 1952, p.14.
13. Jenkins, p.104.
14. The Communist Manifesto states that Communists have no interests
separate and apart from the proletariat. As Keith Hassell comments: The
sleight of hand whereby "proletariat" becomes Labour Party speaks volumes
(Workers Power, March 1983.)
41
15. International Secretariat Documents, p.35. During one of his subsequent
political zigzags, Healy gave a revealing account of his tendencys perspectives
during this earlier entrist period. Our politics, he told the Socialist Labour
League summer camp in 1964, was determined by a conception that it was our
task to encourage a centrist movement who we were to provide with a
leadership. This left the question open how we were then to lead it.... And it
was from this that the Pabloite orientation took place. Pabloism began in
England. We had not understood then the nature of Trotskys theories of entry
(SLL internal document).
16. Socialist Outlook, 3 October 1952.
17. Ibid, 28 November 1952.
18. Healy took the phrase from Trotskys Where is Britain Going? Trotsky,
however, emphasised that a workers government created by parliamentary
means would be forced to construct new revolutionary organs for itself, resting
upon the trade unions and working class organisations in general. This had
nothing in common with Bevans commitment to a parliamentary road to
socialism.
19. Labour Review, August/September 1952.
20. News Line, 3 November 1985.
21. Resolution adopted unanimously by 8th Plenum IEC, Club internal
document, 1950.
22. As late as August 1953, when Healy was already involved in his historic
battle against the liquidationism of the International Secretariat, the IS was
still urging in vain, as far as Healy was concerned the publication of a
genuinely revolutionary, Marxist, Trotskyist periodical which openly defends the
full line and programme of the Fourth International (SWP International
Information Bulletin, September 1953).
23. M. Pablo, Trotsky and His Epigones, 1977, p.23.
24. International Secretariat Documents, p.82. Strangely enough, this letter
does not appear in the official Healyite documentary history, Trotskyism
versus Revisionism.
25. International Committee Documents, p.24.
26. How Healy and Pablo Blocked Reunification, 1978, p.76.
27. The SWP reportedly put up the then considerable sum of 5,000 to
finance the paper. (Charles Van Gelderen, interviewed by Al Richardson, 4
October 1979. Transcript courtesy of Socialist Platform.)
42
28. Not that Healy accepted any responsibility for the FIs adaptation to
Titoism. According to him, it was all the fault of the French and the IS. In
Britain, by complete contrast, the policy had supposedly been carried out on
the basis of traditional Bolshevik experience (International Committee
Documents, p.63).
29. Ibid., pp.60, 170.
30. Pablo suffers badly from isolation in Paris, Healy explained to Cannon.
It really is impossible to hold an international centre together when you have
no national section to help it(ibid., p.51). Healy was apparently oblivious to the
fact that Pablos isolation was due to his having expelled, with Healys support,
the majority of French Trotskyists from the FI.
31. Ibid., p.52.
32. Ibid., pp.60-1.
33. Ibid., p.100.
34. Ibid., p.102.
35. Ibid., pp.51, 108-9.
36. Ibid., p.109.
37. Ibid., p.110.
38. Harry Ratner, interviewed by Sam Bornstein, 4 February 1987. Transcript
courtesy of Socialist Platform.
39. H. Ratner, Reluctant Revolutionary, 1994, pp.192-3.
40. Healys letters of 9, 12 and 13 November 1953, have never been
published. For the SWPs reply, see International Committee Documents,
pp.125-7.
41. Ibid., p.137.
42. Ibid., p.176.
43. This point is underlined by Lawrence supporter Alex Acheson,
interviewed by Al Richardson, 12 June 1986. Transcript courtesy of Socialist
Platform.
44. This resulted in the immortal headline, The Tories Must Resign, Lets
Have a Petition to Get Em Out! (Socialist Outlook, 27 November 1953).
43
45. Ratner interview.
46. Socialist Outlook, 8 January 1954.
47. Ibid., 12 March 1954.
48. Ibid., 26 March 1954.
49. Tasks of the Fourth International, May 1990, pp.25-6; Peng Shuzi, The
Chinese Communist Party in Power, 1980, p.138.
50. Socialist Outlook, 9 April 1954.
51. Ibid., 21 May 1954.
52. Cf. Bill Hunters article in Labour Review, December 1983.
53. Ratner interview.
54. The Healyite faction did produce a document entitled The struggle
against revisionism, which attempted to explain the sudden outbreak of
factional struggle as the culmination of a number of conflicts with Pablo and
Lawrence. (In one of these Pablos criticism of the Healyites for blocking with
Transport House in expelling Stalinist fellow-travellers from the Labour Party
Pablo was plainly in the right.) Although the document appeared under the
name of Burns (one of Healys pseudonyms), it consisted largely of passages
lifted from the SWPs polemics against Pabloism. The one innovation in Healys
document was his argument that the Pabloites underestimated capitalistrestorationist tendencies among the Stalinist bureaucracy. Ironically, when the
bureaucracy under Gorbachev did turn restorationist in the late 1980s, Healy
believed that the political revolution was underway! I am grateful to Paolo
Casciola of the Centro Pietro Tresso for providing a copy of this document.
55. Socialist Outlook, 18 September 1953.
56. Keith Hassell in Workers Power, March 1983.
57. Michael Foot states that the 1953 party conference was a restrained,
inconclusive affair. Over the previous months, the Left had resolved not to open
a new front against the Right (Aneurin Bevan, vol.2, 1975, p.405).
59. Ibid., 23 April 1954.
60. Ibid., 7 May 1954.
44
61. Later, Healy suddenly shifted his position and openly criticised the
Bevanites attitude to German rearmament (see Socialist Outlook, 17, 24
September, 1 October 1954). He probably did so in response to the publication
of Ted Grants pamphlet Socialism and German Unity, which took a distinctly
more principled line than Healy had on this issue.
63. Jenkins, pp.182, 241-2.
64. Socialist Outlook, 13 August 1954.
65. Tribune, 13 August 1954, carried a front page article by Michael Foot
denouncing the ban, under the headline I Call This An Outrage.
66. Labour Party Conference Report, 1954, p.165.
67. Socialist Outlook, 1 October 1954.
68. See Bill Hunters account in Labour Review, January-February 1958.
69. See J. Archer, The Trotskyists and the Merseyside Docks Strikes, 19541955, lecture to WRP Public Forum, 24 May 1990. This account is based on
research by Steve Lloyd.
70. Ibid.
71. Tribune, 1 July 1955.
72. J. OMahony in New Problems New Struggles, Socialist Organiser
pamphlet, 1989, p.39.
73. Tribune, 9 November 1955.
74. Ibid., 11 February, 16 September, 28 October 1955.
75. Ibid., 25 November 1955.
76. C. Slaughter, ed., Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, vol.4, 1974, pp.132-3.
77. For Healys zigzags over the parity commission, and the subsequent
evolution of the IC, see Peng Shuzis account in How Healy and Pablo Blocked
Reunification, pp.77-8
45
Chapter 4 (1955-1958)
AT THE END of 1955, Gerry Healys political fortunes were at a low
ebb. The split with John Lawrence two years earlier had cost Healy half his
membership, including leading trade unionists and most of the youth.1 His
submission to the Labour right wings ban on Socialist Outlook had left him
without a public organ, while the Groups press had been bankrupted by a libel
action, forcing it into liquidation. The Bevanite movement, on which Healy had
pinned his political strategy, was in decline after Labours defeat in the May
1955 general election. And his attempt to win an industrial base by organising
the Blue Union breakaway on the docks had ended in failure. Healys only
success that year was the recruitment of the Marxist Group from the Labour
Party League of Youth. One of its members, Ellis Hillman, recalls that by early
1956 Healy had become very, very demoralised. There were points at which
one began to wonder whether Gerry was thinking of chucking the whole thing
in. I clearly remember him looking through the window at Sternhold Avenue
and desperately asking his Executive Committee: What the hell are we doing
here? None of you are prepared to take any initiative whatsoever. I have to do
everything! It was a genuine cry of despair.2
Healy was saved by the crisis which broke out in the Stalinist movement in
1956. The CPSU 20th Congress in February, and the subsequent leaking of
Khruschevs secret speech denouncing Stalins crimes, was followed in
November by the bloody suppression of the Hungarian revolution, an action
fully supported by the British CP leaders. As a result, the Communist Party of
Great Britain lost about a third of its 30,000 members. While most of these exCPers renounced Marxism or abandoned politics altogether, Healy was able to
win a number of important recruits (perhaps as many as 200) to the Group.
Two of them Cliff Slaughter and Tom Kemp were to remain with Healy until
his expulsion from the WRP almost 30 years later.
It is necessary, however, to demolish the myth that Healys successful
intervention in the CPGB was made possible on the basis of the 1953 split in
the Fourth International, or by the clarification which had been achieved
through the struggle against Pabloite revisionism.3 In fact, Healys initial
response to the 20th Congress was the purest Pabloism. Basing himself on
Mikoyans speech to the Congress attacking the cult of the personality, Healy
announced to a stunned London area aggregate of the Group that the political
revolution had now begun in the Soviet Union and that Anastas Mikoyan
represented the Reiss (i.e. the revolutionary) tendency in the bureaucracy!4
Healy quickly retreated from this position. But his only published reaction to the
1956 Congress, while emphasising that the restoration of democratic rights in
the Soviet Union required a successful struggle against the bureaucracy,
stopped short of spelling out the need for a political revolution to overthrow the
Stalinist regime.5
46
The Groups impact on the CPGB crisis was the product not of any political
clarity on Stalinism, but of Healys considerable organisational skills. His ability
to spot a political opportunity and go for it with everything he had, which in
other situations led to grossly opportunist results (if not outright betrayals), in
this case enabled real political gains to be made. With characteristic energy and
pugnacity, Healy now directed all the Groups resources towards the CP. Labour
Party work was temporarily put on the back burner and Group members who
had spent the best part of a decade pretending to be left social democrats
found themselves agitating openly as Trotskyists at CP meetings. I dont think
there can be any doubt about this, Hillman states. It was Healys attack that
broke the morale of the CP after the 1956 Congress.6
An early recruit to the Group was Nottingham CPer John Daniels who wrote
in to Tribune explaining that he had begun a fundamental criticism of Stalinism
and offering like-minded comrades a suggested reading list which ranged from
Arthur Koestler to Leon Trotsky.7 John Archer immediately replied on behalf of
the Group, steering Daniels away from anti-Communist writers and towards the
revolutionary critique of Stalinism contained in The Revolution Betrayed.8 This
exchange led to Daniels visiting Archer in Leeds for a discussion, and soon after
he became a member of the Group.9 Healy himself was to make a particularly
effective use of literature in his political assault on the Stalinist movement. In
the following period he would visit hundreds of CP dissidents, providing them
with a basic reading course in Trotskyist writings.10
In the course of 1956 Healy managed to raise the finance for a new printing
press.11 These facilities, modest though they were, played a crucial role in
cementing political relations with Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker correspondent in
Hungary during the revolution. Having returned to Britain to find that his
sympathetic reports on the workers uprising had been spiked, Fryer turned to
the capitalist press to publicise his story and this was used by the CP leadership
to justify his expulsion from the party. Healy arranged a meeting with Fryer and
offered to print his appeal against expulsion, an offer which Fryer gratefully
accepted. Healy also organised a series of meetings for Fryer to explain his case
to the labour movement.12
With the new press, in January 1957 Healy was able to relaunch the journal
Labour Review in a new, larger format explicitly aimed at the Communist Party
milieu, with John Daniels and veteran Healyite Bob Shaw as co-editors. The
journal was instrumental in attracting further CP rebels to the Group, notably
the historian Brian Pearce,13 who was able to contribute a number of pioneering
articles on the Stalinist degeneration of the CPGB.
In his pamphlet Revolution and Counter Revolution in Hungary, Healy urged
dissident CPers to immediately demand a special Congress to repudiate the
leaderships line on Hungary. STAY IN THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND FIGHT IT
OUT.14 This, indeed, was the approach adopted by the CP oppositionists, and in
April 1957 a special party congress, the first in the CPGBs history, was held in
Hammersmith. Healy organised a major intervention. Fryers appeal, published
47
in pamphlet form as Hungary and the Communist Party: An Appeal Against
Expulsion, was distributed at the door, while inside the congress Brian Behan, a
militant building worker who had joined the Group, acted as one of the main
spokesmen for the anti-Stalinist opposition. Fryer, meanwhile, laboured through
the night to produce a daily bulletin reporting and commenting on the congress
proceedings.15
The congress was packed so efficiently by the CP leadership that on all the
disputed issues Hungary, inner-party democracy and Fryers expulsion the
opposition was overwhelmingly defeated.16 But the political ferment in the CP
did not abate. A week after the Hammersmith congress, the Socialist Forum
movement launched by CP dissidents to provide an organisational framework
for political discussion held a national conference at Wortley Hall in Yorkshire.
Here Healy, who attended with a small delegation from the Group,
demonstrated an admirable degree of tactical subtlety. Instead of crowing over
the Stalinists crisis and proclaiming that Trotskyism had been vindicated, as
many there no doubt expected him to do, Healy advised the conference: This is
the season for reading books, not burning them. Read and study. Examine
every point of view.17 He left it to Brian Pearce to put forward a Trotskyist
historical analysis of the Lessons of the Stalin era.18 Given Pearces reputation
as a CP historian, this obviously made a much greater impact on the conference
than a lecture from a known Trotskyist would have done.
Impressed by Fryers work on the Hammersmith bulletin, Healy took him on
as a full-timer to produce a weekly paper for the Group. This appeared in May
1957 as the Newsletter. The paper claimed editorially that it had no sectional
axe to grind,19 but its real purpose, as Healy explained to Fryer, was to provide
a pole of attraction for CP dissidents so that we can catch them for our
movement.20 Healy allowed a fairly free hand to Fryer whose journalistic talents
guaranteed a high standard of partisan working class reporting. As usual with
Healy, there was undoubtedly a strong opportunist element in all this.
Nevertheless, along with the theoretical work in the bi-monthly Labour Review,
the Newsletter enabled the Group to become the focal point for both
intellectuals and militant workers breaking with Stalinism. By contrast, the small
ex-RCP groups led by Ted Grant and Tony Cliff were able to make virtually no
gains from the CP crisis, having been completely outmanoeuvred by Healy.
However, although Healy employed the literary heritage of Trotskyism to
good effect in recruiting from the CP, there was an evident gulf between the
revolutionary content of Trotskys classic writings and the actual practice of the
Group, buried as it was deep in the Labour Party. One former CPer, in a
contribution to the internal bulletin, while putting forward an ultra-left
argument against Labour Party work, nonetheless made some telling points
against the Healyites promotion of Tribune. This he characterised, not
inaccurately, as feeding mass illusions to the workers by the mass sale of
reformist literature. He dismissed the prospect of an imminent split in the
Labour Party, which Healy in 1956 had apparently predicted within six months,
and rejected Bevans credentials as a leader of the left.21
48
In reply, Healy accepted that Bevan was a parliamentary reformist incapable
of providing the working class with revolutionary leadership. Tribune, however,
Healy assured his critic, is different! Indeed, according to Healy, pressure from
the Tribunites had forced Bevan further and further to the left. 22 This
judgement was to be falsified within a matter of months. At the 1957 Labour
Party conference, when Group member Vivienne Mendelson moved a resolution
from Norwood CLP in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, it was the
leftward moving Bevan himself who put his rhetorical powers at the service of
the right wing in order to secure the defeat of what he condemned as an
emotional spasm.23
If Healys approach to social democracy was at odds with the principles
Trotsky had fought for, his attitude to internationalism was no less so. The
withdrawal into national Trotskyism, inherent in the federal structure of the IC,
is confirmed by Ellis Hillmans experiences on joining Healys organisation in
1955. I do recall continuous denunciations of Pabloism, he states. But I
cannot recall a single report from any of the so-called sections of the
International Committee. It appeared to be a totally insular group.24 The
numerical and political strengthening of Healys organisation during 1956-7, due
to the influx of former CPers, only reinforced this nationalist outlook.
It never seemed to have occurred to Healy that the expanded resources of
the Group might be used to build up the IC, whose effectiveness as an
international leadership may be gauged by the fact that it had failed even to
issue a statement on the CPSUs 20th Congress.25 Healys main concern was
that his organisation in Britain should no longer be regarded as the poor
relation of the SWP, but recognised as an equal partner. As he explained to
Cannon, whereas in the past the British section had been politically dependent
on the US Trotskyists, it was now reaching a position where we can help our
American comrades.26 Peng Shuzi commented irately that Healys offers of
assistance would be better directed towards the weak IC sections in France and
Italy, where Stalinist parties of much greater size and political significance than
the CPGB were also in crisis. Yet, despite repeated requests from Peng, Healy
failed even to stump up the finance for the Italian group to send a delegate to
IC meetings.27 And this was the man, it will be recalled, who in the 1940s had
broken up the British section in the course of a vicious factional struggle waged
under the banner of internationalism!
****
THE 1956 HUNGARIAN revolution, which had enabled Healy to replenish the
depleted forces of the Group with recruits from the CP, also put him under
increased pressure at an international level. For the apparently orthodox
response to Hungary by the International Secretariat, who unequivocally
demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops, encouraged the Socialist Workers
Party leadership to look more favourably on the prospect of reunification with
the Pabloites. The split between the IS and its American supporters, followed
by the effective dissolution of the Cochran-Clarke group as a rival political
49
organisation, had in any case removed Pabloism as a threat in the USA. If he
could be given guarantees of non-interference by Pablo in the SWP, James P.
Cannon could no longer see any major obstacle to unity with the IS.
Healy, however, was in a different position. After being deserted by the
Lawrence group, who had broken with the FI in 1954, Pablo had collaborated
with Ted Grant, Sam Bornstein and other former members of the RCP majority
in forming a new IS section, the Revolutionary Socialist League, which held it
founding conference in 1957. A merger between the International Committee
and the IS would therefore have required Healy to unite with political
opponents he had driven out of the movement back in 1950, who would
undoubtedly have formed a faction against him. It seems evident that such
narrowly national concerns, rather than any desire to uphold the principles of
the 1953 split, determined Healys resistance to international reunification.
Not that Healy argued his position openly and honestly. Instead, he declared
his agreement with Cannon it is worth doing everything possible to get one
world organisation28 urging only that reunification should be preceded by
political discussion, while at the same time manoeuvring to sabotage progress
towards unity. In June 1957, in a move which Cannon condemned as factional
ultimatism,29 Healy informed Grants group that before negotiations could begin
in Britain the RSL would have to abandon open work and, furthermore,
repudiate The Decline and Fall of Stalinism, Ernest Mandels draft resolution for
the forthcoming FI Fifth World Congress.30
A month earlier, Bill Hunter had written a polemic against Mandels
document, entitled Under a Stolen Flag. This the first critique of the
International Secretariats politics produced by the Group since the beginning of
Healys conflict with the FI leadership four years before! sought to
demonstrate that the gulf between Pabloite revisionism and ourselves grows
wider and wider.31 Not only did Hunter fail to prove this assertion, but his
legitimate criticisms of the IS document, with its emphasis on the role a
revolutionary wing of the Stalinist bureaucracy would play in the political
revolution, were undermined by his misrepresentations of Mandels arguments.
Healys denunciations of the pro-Stalinist politics of the IS did not prevent
him from turning a blind eye to his protg Mike Bandas sympathies for
Maoism. A Labour Review article by Banda depicting bureaucratisation as only a
potential threat under the Chinese Stalinist regime32 was criticised by Ellis
Hillman,33 but neither Healy nor Hunter took a stand against Bandas thoroughly
Pabloite position on China. This showed quite clearly, as Hillman points out,
that Healys intransigence towards Pablo and Mandel was not based on any
principled analysis of Stalinism, or of the problems of the political revolution,
but was rather motivated by purely factional considerations.34
Healys real commitment to a discussion of the issues underlying the 1953
split is illustrated by the case of Harry Ratner, the Groups industrial organiser,
who resigned in 1957, unable to swallow Healys Stalinist-style demand that
50
members should unquestioningly accept the leaderships line on Pabloism.
After six weeks, having reconsidered his position, Ratner applied to rejoin.
Summoned before the Executive Committee, he was told that it was not
enough to publicly defend the Groups policies, but that he must also withdraw
his reservations concerning the official line on Pablo. As Ratner recalls: I replied
that this was ridiculous. You know damn well Ive got reservations." They
insisted: "You must drop them if you want to be readmitted." At one stage Mike
Banda said, "Soon, in the revolution, we shall be shooting Pabloites. So youd
better be clear. All the committee Healy, the Banda brothers, Bill Hunter
kept on repeating this ultimatum.... Eventually, Healy said, "Youd better make
up your mind or youre out!" Faced with this ultimatum, Ratner was forced to
state that he no longer had any reservations.35
Healys opposition to the Pabloite IS shaded over into hostility towards a
centralised International as such. He was determined, he told Cannon, that
there should be no return to the pre-1953 FI, with its constant spate of
meetings in Paris which meant sections raising funds to send representatives.36
But the weakness of the International Committee obviously strengthened the
hand of those advocating unity with Pablo and Mandel. From 1957, therefore,
Healy tried to give the IC some semblance of political life by pushing for an
international congress, which he attempted to dub the Fourth World Congress
of the FI until being dissuaded by the SWP.37 When the congress met in Leeds
in June 1958, it not only failed to give any direction to the work of the sections,
but even passed a resolution denying the IC the authority to intervene in its
constituent national groups.38
In Britain, Healy was faced with the task of integrating former CPers, both
intellectuals and militant workers, into the Group. With the new recruits Healy
was like a young lover in the first flush of his infatuation, Harry Ratner
remembers. Behan could do no wrong. John Daniels could do no wrong. Peter
Fryer could do no wrong. When sometimes some of us would make some
criticism of these people Gerry would say you had to be tolerant, they had a lot
to unlearn from their period in the CP.39 But the more liberal regime that
resulted did not represent a move towards genuinely democratic-centralist
methods. Rather, Healy seems to have played a mini-Bonapartist role within the
organisation, maintaining his dominance by balancing between the various
groupings.
The intellectuals were encouraged to pursue their theoretical work through
Labour Review, which stressed that it was not a sectional Trotskyist journal,
and opened its pages to all who wish to put a point of view on how Marxist
science is to be evolved.40 There was nothing wrong in principle with this
approach, which had an obvious appeal to intellectuals breaking from the
stultifying atmosphere of Stalinism. But what was more urgently needed was a
thorough reassessment of the post-war crisis of the FI, which a number of
recruits from the CP were theoretically equipped to carry out. At one point,
indeed, Healy did propose to undertake an objective study of the development
of the world Trotskyist movement since 1945.41 But there were too many
51
skeletons in the closet for Healy to risk such an enterprise. Not surprisingly, the
objective study failed to materialise.
The old Healyites of pre-1956 vintage continued their established practice of
deep entry in the Labour Party. But the Labour left was in a demoralised state
after Bevans renegacy at the 1957 annual conference. By contrast, there was
an upsurge of activity in the trade unions. Healy therefore empirically shifted
the Groups efforts towards intervention in industrial struggles, with the
Newsletter producing a series of strike bulletins in which rank-and-file trade
unionists were given space to put their case.
Healy was able to use the extensive network of contacts, particularly in the
building industry, which Brian Behan had brought with him from the CP. Behan
himself played a prominent role in the 1958 dispute at McAlpines Shell-Mex site
on Londons South Bank, where pickets were subjected to police violence and
numerous arrests were made, with Behan himself receiving a six-week jail
sentence.42 Characteristically, Healy went completely overboard on this. Weve
got the bourgeoisie by the throat! he informed one London aggregate, ignoring
the fact that the dispute, bitter though it was, was limited to a single building
site. But this was part of the apocalyptic concept Gerry had, Hillman observes.
There it was the final showdown! And everything had to be poured into
support for it.43
Ken Weller, who was active in the Groups AEU faction, argues that a real
window of opportunity had opened up for revolutionaries in the trade unions in
this period, when a whole layer of militants, disillusioned with the CP, were
looking for a new direction. But Healy blew his chance to build an effective
industrial base. As Weller explains: One of the consequences of this crisisology of Healys was that every five minutes everything had to be dropped ...
and we had to do something else. We were being rushed off our feet every
night of the week ... working in the print shop, doing this, doing that, never
being able to do any systematic work. And of course what happens is that
people begin to drift away.... So that by the time I left, when I was expelled in
1960, that window of opportunity had closed.44
The potential for building a revolutionary organisation in industry, and
Healys failure to capitalise on this, were both demonstrated at the Rank and
File Conference of November 1958. The gathering, organised by the Group,
drew an audience of between five and six hundred, the bulk of them
representing workers on the shop floor, according to a report in the Times.45
Yet, even though Labour Review had earlier advocated the formation of a
national network of rank-and-file bodies, with efficient liaison and a central
organ,46 Peter Fryer announced after the conference that there was no plan for
a permanent organisation.47 Fearing that a mass rank-and-file movement might
escape his personal control, it seems, Healy preferred to use the conference to
impress attending militants and recruit a few of them to a small sect where his
domination was secure.48
52
Nor did the conference arm workers with a Marxist political strategy. The
Charter of Workers Demands it adopted did correctly call on industrial militants
to take up a political fight against the Labour Partys Gaitskellite leadership. But
this was presented in reformist terms familiar from the days of the Socialist
Fellowship, workers being urged to bring the party back to its original purpose
and restore the socialist vision and energy of the pioneers of our movement.
Adaptation to Labourite illusions was combined with the usual catastrophist
predictions. Fryer declared that the capitalist class aimed to smash us and
break us and drive us back to the hungry Thirties, while Behan warned of the
danger of the unemployed being won over to fascism.49 Although Healy himself
did not address the conference, the perspectives outlined here were
distinctively his own.
Healys low profile was probably due to the witch-hunt launched by the
capitalist press in the run-up to the conference. A front-page expos appeared
in the News Chronicle, which sent a reporter to Healys home in Streatham to
interview the evil genius behind the Red Club. (Healy refused to co-operate.
Print what you like. Its a free press, isnt it? 50) The campaign no doubt
boosted Healys sense of his own importance, but it was based on a somewhat
exaggerated view of the Groups influence. A more sober assessment was made
in a Times editorial, which pointed out that a conference which failed to set up
a permanent organisation posed no serious threat to the established order. As
for the Red Club itself, the Times noted presciently that the composition of the
group is so diverse that it would be surprising if they were to cohere for long.51
Notes
1. When we finished fighting with Pablo, Healy later recalled, ... we had 24
members in London and 23 in the provinces (SLL internal document, 1964).
2. Interview with Ellis Hillman, 28 December 1990. Executive and National
Committee meetings were held at Healys house in Sternhold Avenue,
Streatham.
3. G. Pilling et al., in Tasks of the Fourth International, May 1990; D. North,
Gerry Healy and His Place in the History of the Fourth International , 1991, p.28.
These writers merely echo Healys own fraudulent claim: cf. How Pablo and
Healy Blocked Reunification, 1978, p.34.
4. Hillman interview. The reaction of the comrades was a mixture of
amazement and bafflement, Hillman recounts. Even Mike Banda looked a bit
astonished!
5. Tribune, 9 March 1956. With unconscious irony, Healy noted that the
congress decisions were unanimous and unopposed a method sharply in
contrast with the tradition of Lenin.
53
6. Ellis Hillman, interviewed by Al Richardson and Sam Bornstein, 19 June
1978. Transcript courtesy of Socialist Platform.
7. Tribune, 22 June 1956.
8. Ibid., 29 June 1956.
10. D. Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1956-68, 1976, pp.60-1; Peter Fryer,
interviewed in Workers Press, 13 September 1986.
11. Anon., The disunity of theory and practice: the Trotskyist movement in
Great Britain since 1945, Revolutionary History, vol.6, nos.2/3, 1996. According
to this account, Mike and Tony Banda were a major source of finance for the
new press.
12. Fryer interview.
13. Brian Pearce interviewed in Workers Press, 6 December 1986.
14. G. Healy, Revolution and Counter Revolution in Hungary, 1957, p.14.
16. Daily Worker, 22-23 April 1957.
17. Newsletter, 10 May 1957.
18. Pearce interview. The speech is summarised in the Newsletter report, but
Pearce is not named because he was still a CP member.
19. Newsletter, 10 May 1957.
21. Forum, February 1957.
22. Ibid.
23. Labour Party Conference Report, 1957, pp.165-6, 181.
24. Hillman interview, December 1990.
25. How Healy and Pablo Blocked Reunification, p.77.
26. Ibid., p.34.
27. Ibid., pp.77, 79.
54
28. Ibid., p.32.
29. Ibid., p.62.
30. Ibid., p.40. The RSL was an open organisation in that, unlike Healys
Group, it had a name, organised public meetings and published an avowedly
Trotskyist journal, Workers International Review.
31. Ibid., p.41.
32. Labour Review, July-August 1957.
33. Ibid., September-October 1957.
34. Interview with Ellis Hillman, 28 December 1990.
35. H. Ratner, Reluctant Revolutionary, 1994, pp.218-9.
37. Deep Entryism and Pablos Anti-Unity Offensive, 1978, p.7.
38. Ibid., p.10.
40. Quoted by J. Callaghan, British Trotskyism, 1984, p.223.
42. See Bob Penningtons account in Labour Review, October-November
1959.
43. Interview with Ellis Hillman, 4 January 1991.
44. Interview with Ken Weller, 17 April 1991.
45. The Times, 17 November 1958.
46. Quoted by M. Hoskisson and D. Stocking, The rise and fall of the SLL,
Workers Power, February 1986.
48. Cf. anon., The disunity of theory and practice. This makes the point that
the organisations growth was always obstructed by the domination of the
Healy clique, because the bigger becomes the group, the greater the potential
55
danger that control will slip out of the cliques hands. Ex-members assert that
this is the reason why no permanent continuing body emerged from the rankand-file conference.
49. Newsletter, 22 November 1958.
50. News Chronicle, 13 November 1958.
56
Chapter 5 (1958-1960)
DURING 1958 THE entryist strategy which Healy had pursued inside
the Labour Party since 1947 came under attack from two sides. Not
only had the Groups intervention in industrial struggles prompted a witch-hunt
in the capitalist press, but a number of ex-CPers headed by Brian Behan
were pushing for the declaration of an open party. Faced with this situation, a
genuine revolutionary leadership would have opened a thorough discussion on
the whole question of entryism, drawing up a balance sheet of the 11 years
work in the Labour Party. Needless to say, this was not an approach that Healy
would countenance.
Instead he pre-empted any debate over the Groups future strategy by
launching a new policy of confrontation with the Labour bureaucracy. Having
kept his head down at the Rank and File Conference of November 1958, a few
weeks later Healy suddenly changed tack and called a press conference, where
he announced that he was joining the Newsletter editorial board. Journalists
were handed copies of an article by Healy denouncing the press campaign,
which was to appear in the next issue of the Newsletter.1 The article later
reproduced as a pamphlet, Our Answer to the Witch-hunt and Our Policy for
Labour featured the usual Healyite exaggerations. The employers were
supposedly plotting to make the trade unions part of the official machinery of
the state, while renewed activity by the Mosleyites was sufficient to convince
Healy that unless the Labour Party takes real socialist measures to solve the
problems that capitalism places before the British people, then the middle class
will be won over to fascism.
The Newsletter described the article as the most trenchant and hard-hitting
political document that has appeared in any left-wing paper in Britain for years.
And its author was introduced in no less hyperbolic terms. Gerry Healy,
readers were told, brings to our paper a rich experience of working class
struggle. He is known throughout the country for his firm adherence to socialist
principles, his forthright opposition to both Stalinism and right-wing reformism,
and his insistence on speaking the truth to the working class.2 The cult of the
personality might have been dispensed with in Moscow, but it was clearly
undergoing a revival in Clapham.
This raising of Healys public profile can only have been calculated to stoke
up the press campaign against him. In his home base of Streatham the witchhunt was vigorously pursued by the local Tory rag, the Streatham News. It had
little effect on his standing in the Streatham Labour Party, which in December
rejected a right wing motion calling on the National Executive Committee to
investigate Healy.3 And in January 1959 Healy was re-elected chairman of his
ward party. It was, the Streatham News conceded, an indication of the
popularity of the genial Mr Healy. His foes may find it difficult to dislodge him.4
57
His foes could no doubt scarcely believe their luck when Healy called another
press conference in February, this time to announce that the Group had
transformed itself into the Socialist Labour League. This aim of the League,
Healy explained, was to carry forward the fight for socialist policies inside the
trade unions and Labour Party.5 The new organisation was not a political
party, he insisted, and its members would work for Labour candidates in the
forthcoming general election.6 Healy sent off a letter to Morgan Phillips, the
Labour Party secretary, requesting that the SLL should be given the same
rights of affiliation to the Labour Party as the Fabian Society or Victory for
Socialism.7 Given that there wasnt the remotest possibility of this request being
granted, it can only be seen as a deliberate provocation. As Healy himself would
later boast: It was not Transport House that picked a fight with us, it was we
who picked a fight with Transport House.8
Throughout his career, Healy had made a speciality of changing his political
line abruptly and without explanation. But this was his most dramatic U-turn
yet. For years past, Healy had insisted dogmatically on the necessity for total
entry into the Labour Party. Indeed, when Ted Grants open RSL was formed,
Healy had furiously denounced this as a Pabloite plot designed to sabotage the
Groups Labour Party work.9 Yet Healy now launched his own open organisation
in such a provocative manner that the Pabloites themselves condemned his
actions as monstrously irresponsible.10
In 1960, Healy would retrospectively justify his change of course on the
grounds that the Groups recruitment of industrial militants had required a
more open organisation ... to educate and train them for the forthcoming
struggle inside the Labour Party. Therefore ... when we faced a wave of
expulsions that could not be avoided as well as the need to compete more
openly with the Communist Party in the trade unions, we proposed to launch
the SLL.11 But this was very much rationalisation after the event. The real
explanation, according to Ellis Hillman, is that Healy panicked, because he
thought his own position was being threatened in Streatham, so he formed the
SLL as a panic reaction ... that was the real basis. And secondly, it served his
purpose in that it could make a concession to the pressure from Brian Behan to
form an open party.... So he killed two birds with one stone, as it were.12
That a combination of open and entry work was needed should have been
obvious to Healy long before. But at the Groups annual conference in 1958,
when Hillman had proposed the formation of a Marxist League to prepare for
the expulsions that were plainly in the pipeline, Healy had strongly opposed
this.13 Yet Healy now launched a turn to open work in such a way as to make
continued work inside the Labour Party virtually impossible.14 Hillman himself
attacked Healys new turn as a serious blunder, pointing out that it was
contrary not only to conference policy but to everything the Healy tendency had
stood for since the days of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The circle has
been completed from ENTRY to EXIT, he wrote, with this difference. Whilst the
old RCP hammered the issue out in a serious and responsible if prolonged
discussion ... the abandonment of the work resulting from the old discussion
58
appears to require but a few desultory and confused contributions and points of
view from the National Committee.15
When the Labour Party NEC responded by immediately proscribing the SLL,
Healy adopted a policy of open defiance, circulating a letter to Constituency
Labour Parties throughout Britain appealing for support for the SLL. The
Streatham News noted gleefully that Healy had thereby sealed his automatic
expulsion.16 Healy successfully moved a resolution on the Streatham general
management committee demanding that the NEC withdraw its proscription of
the SLL.17 The refusal of the Streatham party to expel Healy only resulted in its
suspension, however, and the party was subsequently reorganised, with known
SLLers like Healy excluded.18
Other members prominent in the Labour Party were ordered to provoke their
own expulsion. Hillman, who was a London County Councillor, was hauled up in
front of a provisional national committee of the SLL and instructed to publicly
announce that he was a member of the League. When he refused, he was
expelled from an organisation he had never joined in the first place! 19 In
Salford, Harry Ratner was assured by Labour Party members that they would
cover for him if he denied being a member of the SLL. But Healy told him to
proclaim his membership and demand the right to remain in the Labour Party
a course which effectively guaranteed that Ratner would be thrown out.20
This crisis in Healys organisation in Britain coincided with a mounting conflict
inside the International Committee. The IC conference of June 1958 had passed
a resolution calling for the reorganisation of the Fourth International, but this
formulation was opposed by the US Socialist Workers Party, who advocated
unity with the International Secretariat on the basis of parity leadership. In
November, therefore, Healy met with Cannon and other SWP leaders in
Toronto, where it was agreed that he would argue for the SWP line within the
IC. A subsequent IC meeting in Paris, however, issued a call for an international
conference open to Trotskyists all over the world, which provoked further
objections from the SWP. Healy found himself caught between his own and the
French sections hostility to unification, and his long-established organisational
loyalty to Cannon. Instead of defending his position against the SWP, Healy
offered to break with the French and join Cannon in seeking unity with Pablo
and Mandel.21
Under pressure at both a national and an international level, and incapable of
handling these problems on the basis of political principle, Healy showed
increasing signs of personal instability, repeatedly throwing fits of rage on the
least pretext. On one occasion in the print shop, Celia Behan tried to defend a
young comrade from an unjust attack by Healy. This led to a row which lasted
a whole hour during which Cde Healy shouted and raved, he kicked the wall
and banged on it with his fist. He said I had no right to criticise him, that he
had been 30 years in the movement ....22 It was after one especially irrational
tantrum by Healy in February 1959 that Newsletter editor Peter Fryer walked
59
out. And although he was persuaded to return for a few more months, in
August Fryer left the SLL for good.
Fryer explained his reasons for quitting in an Open Letter to Members of the
SLL and other Marxists. The SLL he described as being ruled by the general
secretarys personal clique, which will not allow the members to practise the
democratic rights accorded to them on paper, and which pursues sectarian aims
with scant regard for the real possibilities of the real world. Fryer revealed how
the panel for the elections to leading committees at the Leagues founding
conference in June 1959 had been drawn up by Healy himself. The Executive
Committee was no more than a sounding board for the general secretary,
packed with his own nominees who not merely never raised their voices against
him but in some cases never raised their voices at all. Fryer quoted Healys
bizarre claim I am the party, characterising this as a form of solipsism which
provided the philosophical underpinning to the fantasy world Healy inhabited
a world in which Healy could claim to have all the ports of Britain watched in
order to prevent Fryer leaving the country, when Healy had in cold fact, less
than 400 members!23
The next prominent figure to go was Labour Review editor John Daniels, who
had entertained doubts about the organisation for some time, particularly with
regard to the policy of support for Messali Hadjs MNA in Algeria. 24 For Daniels,
the final straw came when he went on a working holiday in France with two
other comrades one of whom, questioned disapprovingly by Bob Shaw as to
what they would be doing there, replied drily that, apart from lying on the
beach and swimming, there was always Pablo to see! On the basis of a report
of this conversation, relayed to him by Shaws daughter Aileen, Healy informed
the SWP that Pablo continues his relentless work against this section.... John
Daniels is now the proud bearer of a ticket to Cannes to see Pablo. 25 Another
report emanating from Shaw, concerning a contribution by Daniels to a branch
meeting where he had argued that the British economy was undergoing a
partial upturn, was taken by Healy as proof that Daniels doubts the whole of
our economic analysis.26 Daniels returned from his vacation to find a stern
letter from Healy demanding that he should explain his visit to Pablo and put
down in writing his differences with the League. Unable to tolerate such
hysteria, paranoia and outright lying, Daniels too broke with the SLL.27
****
WHAT IS THE situation in which the Socialist Labour League is born ...?
asked a 1959 Labour Review editorial. If we were to choose one word to sum
up the salient features of this period, on a world scale, that word would be
"crisis".28 In Britain, Healys perspective was the familiar one of economic slump
producing an automatic escalation of the class struggle. But whereas he had
previously envisaged a mass revolutionary current emerging from within the left
wing of the Labour Party, in the late 1950s industrial action became the
centrepiece of Healys strategy. He believed that the upsurge of strikes was
60
driving towards a showdown between the classes towards another 1926 but
with far more revolutionary possibilities.29
The period following the formation of the SLL, however, saw the focus of
struggle in the labour movement shift from industrial to political action. After
Labours third successive general election defeat in October 1959, party leader
Hugh Gaitskell proposed to attract the middle class vote by junking Clause Four
which formally committed Labour to the common ownership of the means of
production, distribution and exchange thereby provoking an outcry in the
party ranks. Moreover, from 1959 successive trade union conferences
registered votes in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, a development
which culminated in the passing of a unilateralist resolution at the 1960 Labour
Party conference.
In response to this changed situation, Healy directed his forces back towards
the Labour Party. In doing so, he replaced the ultra-leftist policy of provoking
expulsions with a new right-opportunist line. This was already evident at the
SLLs National Assembly of Labour in November 1959, where Healy went out of
his way to deny the Leagues role in promoting industrial militancy. The SLL
was not a strike-happy organisation, Healy insisted. Just because supporters
of the League might be selling their paper around the area of the strike, we will
not allow the Press to create the situation that we are responsible for the
strike. Healy condemned the trade union bureaucracy, not for selling out
workers struggles, but for dragging their members into industrial disputes
without adequate preparation.30 Harry Ratner, who was a leading participant in
the Assembly, comments that the spectacle of Gerry Healy striking the pose of
a "responsible" workers leader was unusual31 to say the least!
In adopting this new respectable image, Healy no doubt had an eye on the
forthcoming Labour Party conference. But the right wing was able to use
Healys own record of authoritarianism against him to win the conferences
overwhelming backing for the proscription of the SLL. The NEC spokesman
argued that, while Healy had a great deal to say about democracy and the
right of Trotskyists to be members of the Labour Party, he refused to tolerate
any political deviations in the ranks of his own organisation. The speaker
pointed to the cases of Peter Cadogan, recently expelled from the SLL for
advocating a cross-class movement against nuclear war, and Peter Fryer, who
had resigned from the SLL in protest at Cadogans expulsion.32 The Leagues
general secretary, Fryer had written in a letter to the Guardian, has made it
clear that he will not tolerate free discussion, any more than [CPGB secretary]
John Gollan will; and his methods of silencing dissenters and critics are
odious.33
The National Assembly of Labour was followed in early 1960 by a series of
regional Assemblies, the purpose of which, according to Healy, was to
strengthen existing socialist organisations such as Victory For Socialism inside
the Labour Party.34 This involved the usual wholesale adaptation to left
reformism. Healy ditched his organisations long-standing policy of
61
nationalisation with no compensation, advocating reduced compensation
instead, while the demand for workers control was quietly forgotten. The SLLs
defence of Clause Four was thus reduced to uncritical support for
nationalisation in its established Labourite form. The slogan Ban the Bomb and
Black the Bases was also dropped, presumably because of its call for direct
industrial action.
The logic behind this right turn was Healys conviction that the Labour Party
would inevitably break apart over the disputed issues of nationalisation and
nuclear disarmament. Right Wing Threatens Labour Split. Plan to Smash the
Party and Keep the Bomb, read the headline to a front-page Newsletter article
by Healy in June 1960.35 The process of change under the surface of political
life in Britain is about to be transformed qualitatively into the emergence of
powerful new trends, Healy announced portentously. That is why all the Kings
horses and all the Kings men, supported by the Fabian Society, cannot put the
Humpty Dumpty of Transport House together again. The possibilities of a
satisfactory compromise seem remote indeed. A new stage in the long process
of revolutionary change opened up by the election of the Labour government in
1945 is now on the agenda.36
Another traditional feature of the Healyite world-view to be temporarily
shelved was the short-term prediction of economic collapse. Healy informed the
National Assembly of Labour that the SLL did not say that a slump was
imminent, and by January 1960 he was arguing that the recession of 1958 has
given way to an upswing in the economy.37 The extent of this turnaround is
underlined by Harry Ratner, who points out that only a few months earlier John
Daniels had been roundly denounced by Healy for daring to suggest such a
thing.38
The new line on the economy not only served to justify Healys rightward
lurch, it also had the purpose of undermining opposition from Brian Behan, who
upheld the old perspective of an intensifying economic crisis necessitating a
turn to open work, with the main emphasis on intervention in industry.
Although the seven-member Behanite faction scarcely represented a serious
threat to Healy, this did not prevent him from lashing out furiously against
them. What he always feared, Ellis Hillman explains, was the emergence of a
proletarian tendency which could challenge him politically and organisationally
that was his fear all the way through.39
Politically, Behan could offer no serious alternative to Healys opportunism,
his call for the proclamation of a revolutionary party by a few hundred militants
being foolishly ultra-leftist. But, contrary to Healyite mythology, Behan was not
so sectarian that he denied the need for fraction work in the Labour Party. Nor
was he incapable of making some correct criticisms of Healys unprincipled
political manoeuvring. The zig-zags of policy from "right" to "left" and back
again, Behan wrote, result from the opportunist considerations of a small
clique .... Those who opposed the turn to open work a year ago were
62
denounced as reformists and capitulators to the right wing, but now the
leadership are fighting to return to the old form of work in the Labour Party.
It was on the organisational question the concentration of power in Healys
hands that Behans attack really hit home. Not only did Healy hold the posts
of SLL general secretary, IC secretary and, in practice, League treasurer and
print shop manager, Behan pointed out, but he hired and fired full-timers and
purchased expensive equipment, all without prior consultation with the
Leagues elected bodies. Behan also opposed as grossly undemocratic Healys
control of the organisations assets, the SLLs press being jointly owned by
Healy, the Banda brothers and Bob Shaw. Behan described it as farcical that
even if the whole conference should decide on a change of policy, four people
could frustrate the will of the conference by simply splitting and walking away
with the assets. He proposed to place all the Leagues property under the
control of the membership.
The Behan faction also exposed the anti-communist methods Healy
employed in order to maintain his domination over the organisation. Celia
Behan accused Healy of repeatedly humiliating SLL members by haranguing
them at great length, preferably in front of a room full of people, for the most
trifling errors. Worse still was Healys use of the personal chat, where he
flatters the listener by making "in confidence" quite serious criticisms (usually of
a personal nature) of another comrade.... Every comrade without exception is
subjected to this behind the scenes denigration. By such means, Healy crushed
comrades confidence in themselves and each other. The biggest condemnation
of Comrade Healy as a communist, Celia Behan alleged, is that he has
surrounded himself by a crowd of petty-bourgeois yes-men who, when they
hear any criticism of him, spread their hands and say "Yes, but who but
Comrade Healy could lead the movement?".40
There was no way that Healy could tolerate such criticisms. In May 1960,
when Behan was attending a North London branch meeting to put the
minoritys case, in marched Healy with a group of majority supporters. Ken
Weller, a member of Behans faction who was present that evening, describes
the scene: They take over the branch meeting, and start shouting and
screaming and threatening. "Where do you stand on this? We demand an
answer. You deserve a good hiding" this sort of thing. They were actually
trying to provoke a fight .... So we just walked out. And then we were expelled
for walking out of the meeting!41
Even some of Healys political supporters baulked at this. The "trial of the
Behan group, Bob Pennington wrote, was reminiscent of the best traditions of
Stalinism and the Catholic Inquisition. He and another National Committee
member, Martin Grainger (Chris Pallis), developed a series of criticisms of the
SLLs political positions, ranging from its uncritical line towards the SWP and the
LSSP, to Healys refusal to oppose Mike Bandas completely Pabloite attitude to
the Chinese Revolution. Grainger described how the leaderships obsessional
fear of mildly unorthodox views or of simple questions for which readily
63
prepared answers are not available had reduced intellectual life in Healys
organisation to the level of a religious service.
But Healy utilised a report by Jack Gale of a personal conversation, in which
Pennington and Grainger had admitted to sympathy with the anti-Trotskyist
journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, in order to ban their faction for holding views
contrary to the principles of the League. Pennington and Grainger were
summoned to a meeting of the London Executive Committee, where
Pennington was subjected to a 20-minute diatribe from Healy, consisting
entirely of personal abuse. When he and Grainger tried to leave, they were
forcibly prevented from doing so and physically assaulted. Disgusted with
Healys methods, Pennington and Grainger renounced Trotskyism and founded
the libertarian Solidarity group. The crisis will deepen, was Graingers parting
prediction for the SLL. The inevitable ideological ferment will be bottled up, or
will erupt periodically in a violent manner. Intimidation will continue. Cases of
assault within the organisation will either be denied or referred to Control
Commissions (themselves carefully controlled).42
Notes
1. News Chronicle, 4 December 1958.
2. Newsletter, 6 December 1958.
3. Streatham News, 19 December 1958.
4. Ibid., 23 January 1959
5. Daily Herald, 26 February 1959.
6. News Chronicle, 26 February 1959.
7. Healy, letter to Morgan Phillips, 24 February 1959 (Labour Party archives).
Healys request was in any case nonsensical. Even aside from the fact that
Victory for Socialism was not an affiliated organisation, the Labour Party had
closed its list of affiliated organisations back in 1947, in order to block a
Communist Party campaign for affiliation.
8. Socialist Leader, 23 November 1959.
10. Deep Entryism and Pablos Anti-Unity Offensive, 1978, p.43.
11. Forum, March 1960.
12. Hillman interview.
64
13. Ibid.
14. At the time, Healy denied that the launch of the SLL meant an end to
entry work. In a speech to the SLL summer camp in 1964, however, Healy
stated that in 1959 an open break with the Labour Party was necessary so that
we could establish an open platform and have public cadres (SLL internal
document).
15. Forum, February 1959.
16. Streatham News, 10 April 1959.
17. Ibid., 17 April 1959.
18. E. Shaw, Discipline and Discord in the Labour Party, 1988, p.132.
19. Hillman interview.
20. H. Ratner, Reluctant Revolutionary, 1994, p.240.
21. Deep Entryism, pp.10-18.
22. SLL Internal Bulletin No.5, June 1960.
23. P. Fryer, An Open Letter to Members of the SLL and Other Marxists,
19 September 1959.
25. Deep Entryism, p.28.
26. Fryer, Open Letter.
27. SLL internal bulletin, February 1960.
28. Labour Review, April-May 1959.
29. Healy Group internal document, quoted in News Chronicle, 13 November
1958.
31. Ratner, p.239.
32. Labour Party Conference Report, 1959, p.104.
65
33. Guardian, 10 November 1959. When Fryer had been expelled from the
CP, Healy had defended his right to criticise the party in a bourgeois
newspaper. Yet he now condemned Fryer for having run to the capitalist press
(Newsletter, 28 November 1959).
34. Newsletter, 23 January 1960.
35. Ibid., 18 June 1960.
36. Ibid., 25 June 1960.
37. Ibid., 23 January 1960.
38. Ratner, p.239.
41. Ibid; interview with Ken Weller, 17 April 1991.
42. By Their Words Ye Shall Know Them, Solidarity pamphlet No.4, 1960.
66
Chapter 6 (1960-1964)
BY MID-1960 ALL the potential for reforging the Trotskyist
movement in Britain, which had arisen from the 1956-7 crisis in the
Communist Party, had been squandered by Healy. Many important
recruits from the Communist Party John Daniels, Peter Fryer and Brian Behan
among them had been driven out of the SLL. Even veteran Trotskyists like
Ellis Hillman, Harry Ratner and Bob Pennington had been expelled or had
resigned after questioning Healys methods and perspectives.1 In the course of
these developments, any vestige of democracy in the SLL had been destroyed
and Healys complete domination over the organisation established. It was to
be another 14 years before he again faced a significant challenge to his
authority.
Harry Ratner warns against laying all the blame for this on one man. Healy
could not have acted as he did, he points out, without the support of a whole
group of other people around him in the leadership.2 Healy himself was well
aware of this, and made a specific point of involving other leading SLLers in his
attacks on political opponents. In September 1959, for example, when two
dissidents were visited in the middle of the night and entry forced into their
house, he had insisted on taking Cliff Slaughter along because, Healy
explained afterwards, it was important to commit people like Slaughter. 3 Tom
Kemp was brought in by Healy to rubbish Behans economic analysis an
analysis which was, in reality, indistinguishable from the catastrophist views
traditionally expounded by Healy himself. And Kemp happily gave his advance
endorsement to Behans expulsion, without even attending the National
Committee meeting where the decision was taken.4
Indeed, throughout the 1959-60 purges, Healy succeeded in committing
each of his victims to the suppression of earlier critics. When he expelled Ellis
Hillman for opposing the unconstitutional and undemocratic proclamation of the
SLL, this was done with the agreement of all those who would later denounce
the bureaucratic character of the Healy regime. Before his own expulsion, Brian
Behan was an enthusiastic proponent of disciplinary action against the so-called
Stamford faction,5 while Bob Pennington played a prominent role in crushing
opponents of the leadership, only to fall beneath the Healyite guillotine himself
soon after. Healy was thus able to implement a version of the salami tactic,
isolating and destroying a series of opposition groupings one by one.
Healy apparently regarded his record in expelling political opponents as
cause for boasting. At an Executive Committee meeting in September 1959,
according to Peter Cadogan, he reeled off a list of them from Jock Haston to
Ellis Hillman. He then snarled across the room at me: "I am determined to put
you out now".6 But such internecine warfare, taking place as it did against the
background of a downturn in the class struggle, inevitably had its destructive
effect on the SLL. By June 1960, when the Leagues second conference was
held, membership had plummeted to less than 300 under half the figure
67
claimed at the foundation conference the previous year and the circulation of
the Newsletter had slumped from 5,000 a week to below 3,000.7 As his
organisations size and influence continued to decline, Healy reportedly found a
ready explanation: Police spies! GPU men!8
In a Newsletter article entitled Cause for Revolutionary Optimism, Healy
tried to boost the morale of his depleted troops, assuring League members that
a developing crisis in the Labour Party would have decisive repercussions on
the evolution of the struggle against imperialism.9 When Gaitskell declared that
he would fight, fight and fight again against the 1960 Labour Party conference
vote in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, Healy asserted that the
Labour leaders purpose was clear and unmistakeable: having decided to
emulate [Ramsay] MacDonalds betrayal, Gaitskell was systematically
preparing to split the Labour Party.10 In Healys mind, the perspective on which
he had begun entry work in 1947 that of a militant Labour left breaking from
the right wing, with the Trotskyists standing by to take over the leadership
was about to reach fruition.
But Healy completely misjudged the situation. Just as the dispute over public
ownership had ended with the right wing still in command (Clause IV being
retained in principle but renounced in practice), so too did the battle over
nuclear disarmament. For although the conflict in the party culminated in the
withdrawal of the Labour whip from Michael Foot and a handful of other MPs
early in 1961, the Tribunite parliamentarians defiance soon crumbled, as did
that of the left trade union leaders who had swung the block vote behind the
unilateralist resolution at the party conference. The task of the Left, Healy
explained to his members in May 1961, is to lead the fight for unilateralism
along the lines of the class struggle. Lacking any understanding of this kind of
struggle, the centrists [sic] are unable to fight.11 It became clear even to Healy
that the so-called "leaders" of the Left wing have no intention of widening the
breach with Gaitskell.12 Healys mistake was in supposing that they ever did
have any such intention.
At the Leagues 1961 conference a new slogan, Build the Marxist Left in the
Labour Party, was adopted. This was to be accomplished, Healy argued, not
primarily through work in the adult party since many of the older Labour
Party members are tired and demoralised but through intervention in the
Young Socialists. Marxists must combine with these new youth to organise the
Left wing, Healy urged, ... and lead the fight to conduct the next election
campaign on a unilateralist policy.13 Indeed, since the launch of the YS in 1960
the Healyites, organised around the paper Keep Left, had made major gains in
this area, prompting the Labour Party NEC to demand that YS branches cease
sponsoring the paper. By recruiting large numbers of working class youth
through dances and other social events, the Keep Left tendency rapidly
emerged as the dominant force on the left of the YS. While there was nothing
necessarily wrong with such methods of recruitment, so long as they were
backed up by serious political education, for Healy there was an obvious appeal
in an increased reliance on politically raw youth who would present less of a
68
threat to his domination of the SLL than the more experienced converts from
the CP had done.
Political work in the YS required a clear and principled policy towards the
semi-pacifist Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which had attracted
thousands of youth since the success of the first Aldermaston march in 1958. In
particular, it was necessary to take a firm stand in defence of the Soviet Unions
right to retain the H-Bomb while it remained under threat of attack from the
imperialist powers. Healy, to his credit, did take up this issue in the
correspondence columns of Tribune. However, as had been the case a decade
earlier during the Korean War, his political line tended towards an adaptation to
Stalinism. Thus he referred to the socialist economic basis of the Soviet
Union,14 a classically Pabloite formulation.15 And he counterposed to
Khrushchevs call for peaceful co-existence, not the revolutionary programme of
the Fourth International but the foreign policy of the Chinese Maoist regime!16
Moreover, while Healy used the position of Soviet defencism to polemicise
against both left reformists and the state capitalists of Tony Cliffs Socialist
Review Group, Keep Left took a much less open stand on this issue. Yet it was
among the youth that the SLL wielded its greatest influence at this time. In a
letter to Tribune in January 1961, the question was posed point blank to Keep
Left: Does the unilateralist editorial board agree with Mr Gerry Healys public
support for the Soviet hydrogen bomb?17 But this received no definite answer.
It seems that Healy was more concerned with winning numbers than with
training a cadre among the youth, and he was prepared to compromise on
political principles in order to achieve this.18
The 1961 Labour Party conference vote to abandon unilateralism appears to
have convinced Healy that there was no longer any point in fighting the
bureaucracy from within the Labour Party proper. The power of the right wing,
the SLL now decided, rested on the carcass of a party, not on a living
movement.19 The usual apocalyptic pronouncements were employed in order to
justify the shift away from opportunism towards sectarianism. Healy claimed
that by early 1962 Britain was gripped by an economic crisis so deep that the
working class faced the most serious threat to its wages and conditions since
the defeat of the 1926 general strike and even the imminent prospect of
dictatorship and fascism. In these circumstances, there was absolutely no
room for a compromise with capitalism.20 With reformism supposedly finished,
the SLL now saw its central task as constructing a revolutionary organisation
outside the Labour Party. The need to build independent Marxist parties in
order to provide alternative leadership, it was declared, is the most urgent task
of the day.21
This change in line was a response not only to domestic but also to
international pressures. For, from mid-1960, the US Socialist Workers Party had
been drawing closer to the International Secretariat of Pablo and Mandel, the
rapprochement being cemented by a common opportunist response to
developments in Castros Cuba. This was held to have evolved into a healthy,
69
uncorrupted workers state, and the role of Trotskyists was not to build a
revolutionary opposition to the Castro regime, but to enter as a loyal tendency
into the party that the Fidelistas formed with the Cuban Stalinists. Healys
sudden conversion to the principle of the independent party is to be explained
in part, therefore, as a factional manoeuvre to block unity with the Pabloites.
Not that Healy had made any effort to prepare his organisation for the
conflict that now erupted within the International Committee over the SWPs
moves towards reunification with the IS. The Fourth International as far as the
rank-and-file membership of the SLL is concerned is virtually non-existent, the
Behan faction had complained in 1960. Information of a serious character on
the world movement ... is conspicuous by its absence.22 Bob Pennington, too,
had condemned the SLLs failure to criticise the growth of Pabloism in the
SWP.23 Nor did Healy make any serious attempt to grapple with the theoretical
and programmatic challenge posed by the Cuban Revolution. Instead, the SLL
ignored the wholesale expropriation of the bourgeoisie which had been carried
out in 1960, and insisted that Cuba remained a capitalist state a position
which had the advantage of raising another obstacle to unity with the IS. There
was, of course, the small problem that the SLLs analysis bore not the slightest
resemblance to the facts. This problem was overcome by the simple expedient
of denying that facts had anything to do with Marxism.
For this purpose, Healys fraudulent philosophical polemic of 1945-6 against
the empiricism of the Revolutionary Communist Party leadership was
resurrected, and acclaimed as part of the priceless theoretical heritage of
Trotskyism! If there was one thing Haston and Co. taught us, Healy
pontificated, it was around the vital necessity of the Marxist method. Before we
became the leadership of the British movement, we went through many long
years as a minority battling it out against the empiricists and impressionists....
We have been working with that political capital ever since.24
In the immediate post-war period, Healys ignorance on matters of theory
had been ridiculed by RCP intellectuals like Denzil Harber.25 By the early 1960s,
however, he was able to rely on some rather more compliant members of the
intelligentsia. Cliff Slaughter was called in to attack the view that Marxism
shared with empiricism a respect for the facts as a philosophical heresy, which
inevitably resulted in capitulation to petty bourgeois political leaderships.26 The
SLLs political analysis was thereby freed from the constraints of empirical
evidence and the world was what G. Healy declared it to be! 27 The road was
opened to the SLLs evolution into an increasingly bizarre cult, divorced from
political reality and doomed to sectarian irrelevance.
****
SINCE 1957, when the Socialist Workers Party leadership first responded
favourably to proposals for reunification with the International Secretariat,
Healy had been playing a double game with his US comrades. For, while he was
plainly opposed to unity and did his best to obstruct progress towards a
70
merger, he nevertheless failed to mount an open struggle against the SWP. In
fact, during discussions with the Americans, Healy always declared his support
for their line on reunification. Early in 1960, when Healy held a second meeting
in Toronto with Jim Cannon and other SWP leaders, he had agreed with them
that the political differences between the two international currents were not
sufficient to justify continued separation, and he had endorsed the SWPs
proposal to seek unity with the IS on the basis of parity leadership. The only
objection Healy raised was the difficulty of persuading the French section of the
International Committee to go along with this.28
However, when a movement towards unity got under way later that year,
Healy had second thoughts. In June 1960, SWP leader Joseph Hansen entered
into correspondence with an Indian IS supporter, in the course of which he
expressed enthusiasm for reunification and dissociated himself from Healys
public polemics against Pabloism. In December, the IS, while retaining its deep
hostility to the SLL, began to make overtures to the SWP in the form of two
flattering letters from Pierre Frank. A worried Healy immediately wrote to SWP
national secretary Farrell Dobbs declaring his opposition to the new unity
offensive, designed to split the SWP from the SLL.29 And in January 1961, the
SLL sent off a long letter to that months SWP National Committee Plenum, in
which Healy for the first time came out openly against reunification. It is time
to draw to a close the period in which Pabloite revisionism was regarded as a
trend within Trotskyism, the SLL stressed. Unless this is done we cannot
prepare for the revolutionary struggles now beginning. We want the SWP to go
forward with us in this spirit.30
When the SWP Plenum both endorsed the leaderships lurch towards
Castroism and launched a turn towards international reunification, the SLL
made another sharp intervention. A second letter took up the Pabloite
deviations which had characterised the SWPs regroupment drive in the late
1950s (about which Healy had, of course, remained silent at the time). It
argued, in relation to Third World nationalist leaderships, that it was not the
job of Trotskyists to boost the role of such nationalist leaders (quietly
forgetting Healys personal courting of Messali Hadj). And the letter
emphatically denied that workers states could be established in the absence of
organs of workers power (ignoring the fact that, by this criterion, the SLL
would be forced to deny the formation of workers states in Eastern Europe and
China).31
Despite the inconsistencies of the SLLs political line, Healys defence of
orthodoxy was welcomed as an alternative to the SWPs opportunism by a
dissident grouping in the US party. Headed by Tim Wohlforth, James Robertson
and Shane Mage, this still inchoate opposition had come into conflict with the
SWP leadership over the latters uncritical attitude towards the Cuban regime,
Wohlforth having acted as the sole opponent of the partys pro-Castro line at
the January Plenum. From early 1961, the group began corresponding with
Healy, and proceeded to organise their faction under his guidance.32
71
This unprecedented challenge by Healy to the SWP leadership combining
as it did sharp polemics against the SWPs politics with the promotion of a proSLL tendency within the party provoked an angry reaction from Cannon.
Abandoning his hitherto avuncular attitude towards the British section, in May
1961 Cannon wrote a number of letters severely criticising the SLL, which were
then published in the SWP internal bulletin. The SLL was off on an Oehlerite
binge,33 Cannon asserted, and its line on Cuba had been adopted for purely
factional purposes. The breach between us and Gerry is obviously
widening ...., he wrote. In my opinion, Gerry is heading toward disaster and
taking his whole organisation with him.34
Healy was not yet ready to break with Cannon, though. In his advice to the
SWP minority, which became the Revolutionary Tendency, he urged a longterm perspective of working as a loyal opposition with an orientation towards
the SWPs proletarian kernel.35 As Wohlforth recalls: Healy insisted that the
main cadre of the SWP, workers around Dobbs and Cannon, remained
revolutionaries and it should be our aim to win them over to our perspectives in
time.36 So the RTs main document In Defence of a Revolutionary Perspective
presented the minority as party patriots, who saw the SWP as still essentially
Trotskyist and sought to return it to a consistently revolutionary programme.37
While this approach was firmly supported by the Wohlforth section of the RT,
the current around Robertson adopted a harsher attitude towards the SWP,
which they came to regard not inaccurately as a rightward-moving centrist
party.38 Fearing that the Robertsonites factionalism would provoke a split with
Cannon and Dobbs, in November 1962 Healy drew up a document which all
members of the RT were required to sign. This stated that the tendency must
not make premature characterisations of the leadership of the SWP, and that
the majority of this leadership was not a finished centrist tendency. There
were, Healy conceded, elements of centrism in its thinking and activity, but
these do not predominate. When the majority of the RT refused to bow the
knee to Healy on this matter, he simply excluded Robertson and his supporters
by reorganising the tendency.39
A split was thus imposed on the RT, as Wohlforth himself later recognised,
in typical Cominternist style.40 For what was at issue was not the tactical
question of whether it would be counterproductive to openly denounce the SWP
as centrist (this characterisation was in fact made in a document intended for
circulation only within the RT). The real issue was that Healys intervention
amounted to an ultimatum that, as the price of remaining in the SLL-recognised
group, the RT majority would have to renounce their political views. Healy had
at any rate given notice of the sort of organisational practices he would later
employ in his own International.
Healy might have succeeded in postponing a split with Cannon, but he had
done so at the cost of dividing and weakening the SWP opposition. Party
members were now confronted with the spectacle of two rival pro-SLL
groupings, which scarcely gave the impression of political seriousness.
72
Moreover, Healys increasingly bitter polemics against the SWP leadership cut
across the tactical line he had agreed with the official tendency. As Wohlforth
observes, it was not easy for his group to argue convincingly that they believed
the SWP to be a revolutionary party, when their sponsors in Britain were
producing documents such as Trotskyism Betrayed The SWP Accepts the
Political Method of Pabloite Revisionism.41 This contribution from 1962 was
followed up the next year by another, entitled Opportunism and Empiricism, in
which Cannon and Co. were condemned as American pragmatists who had
renounced the theory of Marxism.42
Healys tactics in relation to international reunification were equally confused.
As Peng Shuzi pointed out, the SLL leaders could proclaim the necessity of
uncompromisingly separating ourselves ... from the Pablo gang, while at the
same time blithely declaring that they were not against unity.43 The
contradiction was not resolved by Healys insistence that he would accept
reunification on the basis of fundamental political agreement, for he had made
it perfectly clear that with the Pabloites no such agreement was possible. Yet
in August 1962, on the SLLs initiative, the IC proposed the formation of a
parity committee with the IS to prepare for reunification, and in September this
committee began a series of meetings.44 Healys intention was presumably to
delay fusion by engaging in a prolonged political discussion. He may even have
hoped to attract some dissenting elements from within the IS, for he had earlier
expressed the view that there were undoubtedly people in Pablos organisation
in different countries who can be won to our position.45
But Healy had considerable difficulty in winning anyone to his position on
Cuba, which he portrayed as a capitalist state with Castro in the role of a
bourgeois Bonaparte. It is hardly surprising that, as Wohlforth reveals, Healy
did his best to try to avoid a discussion of the class nature of Cuba, feeling
quite defensive about his own theory.46 When Joseph Hansen attempted to
raise the question at an SLL National Committee meeting in February 1962,
Healy just ignored him. He preferred to concentrate on such weighty matters as
Hansens refusal to defend him during a confrontation with Isaac Deutscher at
Natalia Trotskys funeral, where Deutscher had accused Healy of sectarianism
towards the IS.47 Yet, given the centrality of Cuba in the pre-unification
discussions, without a coherent theory on this issue Healy could scarcely hope
to hold most of the existing IC sections, still less to attract forces from the IS.
Hansen certainly took advantage of the SLLs mistaken line on the Cuban
Revolution in order to dismiss the Healyites as ultra-left sectarians.48
Later that year, with the aim of putting the Cuban question in its historical
context, Wohlforth began work on his Theory of Structural Assimilation, which
represented a serious attempt to grapple with the theoretical problem of the
post-war expansion of Stalinism. But his efforts were received with total lack of
interest on the part of Healy and the SLL leadership. I informed him of every
step of my work, Wohlforth recounts, and sent him the draft as I produced it. I
got no comments. This seemed strange to me because the heart of Healys
critique of the SWP had been his contention that the party had abandoned
73
Marxist theory. Here I was trying to develop an inclusive theory of post-war
Stalinism the very issue which was at the heart of so many of the disputes
and splits in our international movement and Healy couldnt have cared
less.49
By 1963 Healy found himself under severe pressure, with an IC Congress
scheduled for April and a majority for unification with the IS a virtual certainty.
Worse still, the SWP had dropped its demand for parity leadership, thereby
removing the ISs one objection to fusion. In March, however, Nahuel Moreno
of the ICs Argentinian section wrote to Healy asking for a deferment of the
Congress until July or August. As IC secretary, Healy had until then shown
complete contempt for the ICs Latin American affiliates, failing to answer their
letters and ignoring their requests to publish their theses in the international
bulletin,50 and he had apparently viewed the Argentinians entry work in the
Peronist movement as a variety of Pabloism.51 Now, seizing on Morenos letter
as an opportunity to delay fusion, Healy suddenly developed a deep concern for
the Latin Americans rights. He wrote to the SWP urging that the IC accede to
Morenos request and postpone the Congress.52
But the SWP leaders would have none of it. Demonstrating their own
contempt for the international current of which they were part, the Cannonites
organised a breakaway meeting of those IC sections favouring immediate unity,
and in June 1963 led them into the IS at its Seventh World Congress to form
the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. The official IC Congress met
in September, attended by the British, French, Hungarian and Greek groups
the only sections opposed to unification. The Latin American sections, who
opposed the SWPs unprincipled split but themselves favoured unification, broke
with the IC shortly afterwards and joined the USec. The end result of Healys
manoeuvring was thus to leave the SLL holding joint ownership with the French
of a rump IC, which was isolated from the vast majority of those currents
throughout the world claiming adherence to Trotskyism.
****
THE SITUATION Healy faced in 1964 was thus very different from today,
when what passes for the international Trotskyist movement is fragmented into
a multitude of competing tendencies. For, after the reunification of the
International Secretariat and the majority of the International Committee, very
few Trotskyist forces remained outside the United Secretariat. If Healy had
possessed a correct political line (which he didnt), it would probably have made
sense to participate in the reunification and fight out the differences inside the
USec. As it was, Healys decision to go it alone placed the Socialist Labour
League in a position of national isolation.
The situation undoubtedly accelerated Healys retreat into the insularity
which had always been encouraged by the federal structure of the IC itself. He
developed a political outlook which Ernest Mandel dubbed Trotskyism in One
Country,53 whereby his work at national level became a substitute for or
74
rather, in Healys mind, identical with the struggle to rebuild the Fourth
International. This reasoning was expressed quite openly by Healys political
attorney Cliff Slaughter, who explained that the SLL was fulfilling its
internationalist obligations by demonstrating in practice the correctness of its
orientation towards the construction of independent revolutionary parties.
Building the SLL in Britain, Slaughter asserted, is fighting in the front line of
the reconstruction of the Fourth International.54
Healys readiness to pursue his own national course was reinforced by the
organisational gains registered by the SLL in this period. According to one
account, during 1962-4 the Leagues membership grew from 300 to 1,000.55
While such forces were tiny in relation to the multi-millioned British working
class, the SLL was nevertheless the largest organisation claiming adherence to
Trotskyism that had ever existed in Britain, and was far bigger than any of the
USecs European sections. As a result, Tim Wohlforth argues, Healy became
convinced his methods worked and those of his competitors did not. 56 From
this standpoint, the International would be rebuilt when groups in other
countries saw the need to emulate Healys superior political methods.
The SLLs advances were the product of its effective intervention in the
Labour Party youth movement. Despite the proscription of its paper Keep Left
in 1962, and the subsequent suspension and expulsion of some of its leaders,
the SLL faction in the Young Socialists took a majority of seats on the National
Committee at the 1963 and 1964 YS conferences. As he had done during the
1956-7 crisis in the Communist Party, Healy completely outmanoeuvred his
opponents on the left. Despite pooling their resources to bring out the paper
Young Guard in competition with Keep Left, the SLLs rivals Tony Cliffs statecapitalist tendency, Ted Grants supporters and the forerunners of the
International Marxist Group were unable to equal the gains made by Healys
faction. Furthermore, Young Guards willingness to compromise with the Labour
leadership compared shabbily with the young Healyites defiance of the
bureaucracy, leading to charges of scabbing from Keep Left. Conflict between
the groupings reached a peak at the 1964 YS conference, when Healys car was
mobbed by Young Guard supporters demanding that he stop interfering in the
YS, while NEC representative Reg Underhill looked on approvingly.57
A number of important individuals were won out of the YS. Roger Protz, for
example, resigned as editor of the official YS paper New Advance in 1961 to
become editor of Keep Left. And it was in this period that Sheila Torrance, the
future assistant general secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party, joined
the movement. The Leagues youth work also attracted militants from the
Young Communist League, and in 1964 there was a furore which spilled over
into the capitalist press when Jean Kerrigan, daughter of a leading CPer, came
over to the SLL. Healy was able to assemble a staff of able full-timers from such
recruits, which greatly strengthened his organisation.
But the success of the Keep Left tendency stemmed from its ability to recruit
thousands of working class youth, either unemployed or in low-paid jobs, which
75
the post-war boom had passed by. These youth were used as Healys shock
troops the phrase is Tim Wohlforths58 against the Labour bureaucracy.
Here again, as in 1956-7, Healys talent for spotting a political opening and
directing his organisations resources towards it paid real dividends. By
September 1964, on the eve of the general election which ended thirteen years
of Tory rule and put Harold Wilsons Labour government in office, Keep Left
mobilised 3-4,000 youth on a Fight the Tories demonstration. 59 These
advances were reflected in the expansion of the SLLs press. The Newsletter
reached a weekly circulation of 10,000, and by September 1963 Healy was
talking of transforming the paper into a daily.60
However, and here there is another parallel with his earlier intervention in
the CP, Healy showed his incapacity to use the forces won from the YS in a
revolutionary way. One of the problems, as Wohlforth observes, lay precisely in
the rebelliousness and rootlessness of these youth [who] took to the
revolutionary rhetoric of the SLL more easily than trade unionists, as they had
little or no experience in the major institutions of the class, the British Labour
Party and the trade unions. This could and did encourage Healy to escalate his
rhetoric.61 Thus by 1963 Healy was projecting a scenario in which an economic
slump, combined with the political crisis which the Profumo scandal had
produced in the Tory Party, would give rise to a revolutionary situation. The
problems of the British economy are so acute, a resolution at that years SLL
conference declared, and the relation between capital and its agents so full of
contradictions, that the problem of power is in fact continually posed.62
Of course, ultra-left bombast had always been a feature of Healys political
style. And to the extent that his more exaggerated pronouncements reflected a
euphoria generated by his organisations impressive growth, there was an
element of honest self-delusion in all this. But it has been argued that there
was already a more cynical purpose behind Healys rhetoric.63 Rather than
restrain and give political direction to the impatience of young workers, whose
hatred of capitalism was not easily harnessed to a long haul perspective for its
overthrow, Healy sought to exploit this impatience by motivating them to feats
of extreme activism with the promise of short-term revolutionary results.
Aside from boosting the circulation of his press, and providing bodies for the
SLLs demonstrations, the activism of his young followers had two main
advantages for Healy. First of all, it kept the rank and file so occupied with
organisational work that they had little time to give critical thought to the
leaderships political line. And, secondly, it led to a high turnover of members,
with the result that, during their short time in the League, members never
achieved the level of political experience which would enable them to mount a
challenge to the ruling clique. Healys bureaucratic stranglehold over the
organisation was thereby considerably tightened.
That the youths energies were directed into such activities as paper selling
and organising for the SLLs meetings and marches also had negative
consequences. For it became a substitute for serious work in the basic
76
organisations of the working class, where young revolutionaries would have
been forced to grapple with the domination of reformist ideology over the
movement. This freed Healy from the need to develop a programme to break
workers from social democracy, and allowed him to indulge instead in sectarian
propagandism. Symptomatic of this transformation of the WRP into a sect,
walled off from real developments in the working class, was the increasing
tendency for the Newsletter to hail the Leagues own achievements as
milestones in the history of the workers movement.
Ultra-left sectarianism went hand in hand with the familiar adaptation to
parliamentarianism, as embodied in Healys call for a Labour government
pledged to carry out socialist policies. Such policies included the nationalisation
of basic industries under workers control, and for the capitalist state to be
abolished and replaced with a socialist one in short the economic and
political expropriation of the bourgeoisie. All of which, apparently, was to be
carried out by a Labour majority in the House of Commons! Transitional
demands were completely absent. Indeed, according to Healy, the
implementation of workers control was to be secured, not through the class
struggle at the point of production, but through parliamentary legislation.64
Healys one foray into the international arena during this period was in
response to the Lanka Sama Samaja Partys entry into a bourgeois coalition
government in Ceylon. This betrayal by the USecs largest section was a major
calamity for Trotskyism, and one which Healy was eager to blame on the evils
of Pabloite revisionism. However, quite aside from the fact that, within the
USec, Pablo himself was the main opponent of a soft line towards the LSSP
leaders, Healys own record on this question scarcely stood up to examination.
In fact it had been one of the criticism levelled at Healy by the PenningtonGrainger opposition back in 1960 that he had failed to take a stand against the
degeneration of the LSSP.65 And despite the fact that two leading members of
the SLL Mike and Tony Banda had close links with the movement in Ceylon,
Healy had taken no action regarding the LSSP during the following years, apart
from an opportunist attempt to recruit LSSP oppositionist Prins Rajasooriya
during a visit to Britain in 1963.66
In June 1964, however, on the eve of the conference which was to endorse
the partys entry into the government, Healy suddenly flew to Ceylon in a lastminute attempt to intervene in the LSSP. Having been preceded by no political
preparation whatsoever not even a letter to the LSSP to inform them of his
impending arrival, still less a request that he should be allowed to address the
conference Healys intervention amounted to little more than a crude attempt
to gatecrash the proceedings, to which he was not surprisingly denied entry.
The articles Healy wrote afterwards for the Newsletter later published as a
pamphlet, Ceylon: the Great Betrayal were shoddily written and politically
inaccurate, and can have done little to convince militants in the breakaway
LSSP(Revolutionary) that the IC represented a serious alternative to the USec.67
77
On his return to Britain, Healy apparently used the betrayal in Ceylon as a
pretext to withdraw his forces from the YS68 presumably on the basis that the
example of the LSSP showed the need to split the revolutionaries from the
reformists. This decision, which was announced to the membership at the SLLs
summer camp in July-August 1964,69 was subsequently justified on the grounds
that attacks by the Labour bureaucracy on the SLLs youth made further
revolutionary work in the YS impossible. But there seems to be little truth in this
assertion.
The Keep Left tendency was faced with increased repression by the
bureaucracy in the run-up to the general election, it is true, but the expulsions
fell far short of the thousands claimed in Healyite mythology. 70 In early 1965,
Keep Left was claiming that just over 50 leading members had been expelled
nationally.71 As Healy himself explained at the summer camp, it is we who have
chosen the moment of split because we now believe it is possible to recruit
large numbers of working class youth.72 This bears out the accusation that, far
from being driven out of the Labour Party, the SLL leadership decided on an
organised break ... in the face of witch-hunting and limited expulsions, and
thereafter they set out, by being awkward and provocative in local Labour
Parties and elsewhere, to have as many people as possible expelled and
branches closed down. The bureaucracy did not need much provocation!73
Notes
1. Harry Ratner resigned from the SLL early in 1960, having found Healys
predictions of growing working class radicalisation completely at variance with
his own experience in the labour movement (H. Ratner, Reluctant
Revolutionary, 1994, pp.242-3).
2. Ibid., p.228.
5. Named after the town where it met in September 1959, the Stamford
faction was not really a faction at all but a loose association of oppositionists
which included John Daniels, Peter Fryer and Peter Cadogan.
6. Socialist Leader, 16 September 1961.
7. By Their Words Ye Shall Know Them, Solidarity Pamphlet No.4, 1960,
pp.2, 8.
8. So Walter Kendall claimed in Socialist Leader, 9 September 1961. Healys
obsession with agents, which was to achieve its full flowering in the paranoid
fantasies of the Security and the Fourth International campaign in the 1970s,
78
was evidently well established in this earlier period. Celia Behan had already
noted Healys readiness to create a spy mania which has nothing to do with the
necessary vigilance in protection of a communist movement. I was in the print
shop once when Comrade Healy grilled a young comrade for almost an hour
because he had in his possession a list of comrades addresses. This comrade
was accused of being an agent and was subjected to a tirade of threats (SLL
Internal Bulletin No.5, June 1960).
9. Newsletter, 25 June 1960.
10. Ibid., 29 October 1960.
11. Ibid., 27 May 1961. Healy habitually referred to left reformists as
centrists or even left centrists.
12. Ibid., 30 September 1961.
13. Ibid., 27 May 1961.
14. E. Heffer, Never a Yes Man, Verso, 1991, p.91.
15. Cf. the dispute between Morris Stein and George Clarke in 1953
(International Secretariat Documents, 1974, pp.114-6).
16. Tribune, 25 November 1960; 27 January 1961.
17. Ibid., 13 January 1961.
18. Not that this was anything new. Socialist Review supporter Peter
Sedgwick pointed out that under Fryers editorship the Newsletter had argued
that the Soviet Union should abandon the bomb unilaterally without (as far as I
am aware) any objection from Comrades Healy, Pearce or Slaughter ( Tribune,
10 February 1960).
19. Labour Review, Winter 1961.
20. Newsletter, 27 February 1962.
21. Labour Review, Winter 1961.
23. By Their Words Ye Shall Know Them, p.13. There was a certain irony in
this, for Pennington later became a leader of the Pabloite International Marxist
Group.
24. C. Slaughter, ed., Trotskyism versus Revisionism, vol.3, 1974, p.149.
79
25. See above, chapter 2.
26. Labour Review, Summer 1962.
27. C. Bailey, Theoretical Foundations of Healyism, WRP Internationalist
Faction document, 1988, reprinted in New Interventions, April 1992.
28. Letter from Tim Wohlforth, 16 November 1991.
29. Deep Entryism and Pablos Anti-Unity Offensive, 1978, pp.82, 86, 87.
30. Slaughter, p.49.
31. Ibid., pp.46-55.
32. Excerpts from the correspondence can be found in T. Wohlforth, What Is
Spartacist?, 1971, pp.5-9, and in D. North, Gerry Healy and his Place in the
History of the Fourth International, 1991, pp.37-39.
33. The reference was to Hugo Oehler, a US Trotskyist who opposed
entryism in the 1930s, arguing that the maintenance of an independent
revolutionary party was an absolute principle.
34. Slaughter, pp.71-3.
35. Wohlforth letter.
36. T.Wohlforth, Memoirs, unpublished draft (later published in a revised
form as The Prophet's Children, 1994).
37. Marxist Bulletin No.1, Spartacist, New York, 1965, p.18.
38. Ibid., No.2, 1965, p.22.
39. Ibid., No.3, 1968, passim.
40. Wohlforth, Memoirs.
41. Ibid.
42. Slaughter, pp.236-68; vol.4, pp.76-107.
43. Ibid., p.139.
44. Ibid., vol.4, pp.2-6.
45. Healy, Letter to Geoff White, 20 December 1961.
46. Wohlforth letter.
80
47. SLL National Committee meeting, 3 February 1962, extract from minutes.
A heavily edited version of this document can be found in Slaughter, vol.3,
pp.177-84.
48. Ibid., vol.4, pp.20-71.
49. The Prophets Children, p.115. When I went to England in 1964,
Wohlforth continues, Gerry told me to talk to Cliff Slaughter, his top
intellectual, about my project. Slaughter gave me ten minutes on a bench in a
railway station. While he did not disagree with my projects overall thrust,
Slaughter made some vague methodological points. We went ahead in the
winter of 1964 and published the document on our own. I never heard another
peep from the Healy people about the theory over the next ten years, one way
or another.
50. See Ken Moxhams article in Workers News, September 1991.
51. Deep Entryism, p.86.
52. Slaughter, vol.4, pp.112-14.
53. Ernest Mandel, in J. Hansen, ed., Marxism Vs. Ultraleftism, 1974, p.66.
54. Labour Review, Summer 1963.
55. T. Whelan, The Credibility Gap: The Politics of the SLL, 1970, p.6.
57. Keep Left, May 1964.
59. Newsletter, 3 October 1964.
60. Ibid., 22 February 1964; 28 September 1963.
62. M. Hoskisson and D. Stocking, The rise and fall of the SLL, Workers
Power, February 1986.
63. J. Cleary and N. Cobbett, Labours misspent youth, Workers Action,
28 July 1979. A revised and updated version of this useful account has been
published as a Workers Liberty pamphlet, Seedbed of the Left (1993).
81
65. By Their Words Ye Shall Know Them, p.13.
66. Workers News, October/November 1990.
67. When the IC established its own Ceylonese section, the Revolutionary
Communist League, only two of its members were won from the LSSP(R).
68. So Mike Banda later claimed (Workers Press, 7 February 1986).
69. Whelan, p.6.
70. Charlie Pottins in Workers Press, 7 December 1991.
71. Keep Left, January 1965.
72. SLL internal document.
73. Cleary and Cobbett.
82
Chapter 7 (1965-1968)
HEALYS DECISION to break his youth section from the Labour
Party, and launch an independent Young Socialists, marked the end of
an entry tactic which he had supported for fully two decades. As usual,
this turn was implemented with the minimum of discussion and political clarity.
In February 1965, just before the conference which formally launched the
independent YS, Healy was still emphasising that this development had not in
any way altered our conception that it is necessary to build up a strong
movement in the Labour Party to fight the right wing.1
Such a combination of open and entry work would have enabled Healy to
preserve his youth organisation in the face of expulsions by the bureaucracy,
while at the same time intervening inside the party against the policies of
Harold Wilsons newly-elected Labour government. In practice, the new turn
carried the Healyites in an increasingly sectarian direction. Already we are a
thousand times stronger than Foot, Mikado and company, YS national secretary
Dave Ashby boasted in January 1965.2 And although the independent YS
conference the next month attracted no more than 1,000 youth, this did not
prevent Ashby from hailing the gathering as one of the most important events
in the history of the British working class movement.3
This mindless triumphalism, for which Healy himself undoubtedly bore
primary responsibility, was combined with the usual exaggerated predictions.
Tony Gard, who was elected to the YS National Committee at the February
1965 conference, recalls that the perspective presented to the youth was that
there was going to be a major economic crisis, which would lead to a break
between the working class and the Labour government, and that we would be
in a position to intervene as an independent leadership in that situation.4
Gard remembers that during the conference Healy met with the new YS
National Committee to instruct them on the organisation of a YS apprentices
strike. Only a few months before, an apprentices committee based in the North
West, and involving the Young Communist League, Ted Grants RSL and the
SLL youth, had called a strike for better wages and conditions. The Healyites
had denounced this as premature, withdrawn from the committee and
effectively scabbed on the action. Yet Healy now believed that the YS wielded
sufficient influence to launch a strike under its own banner. This was soon
revealed for the self-delusion that it was, and the projected YS-led strike failed
to materialise.
It was at this time that Healy began to concretise his proposal for a daily
newspaper, which he had first broached in 1963. The purchase of expensive
new equipment for this purpose was announced in June 1965 at the SLL annual
conference, where Healy informed the delegates that the daily paper was the
whole essence of Leninism. And he cited Lenins call in What Is To Be Done?
for an all-Russian political newspaper ignoring the fact that Lenin wasnt
83
proposing a specifically daily newspaper at all. If we can launch that paper at
the height of the crisis of leadership of the labour movement, Healy assured his
members, we are set for a transformation. We can transform the SLL from the
present organisation into a mass organisation.5
Healys belief that the SLL was about to become a mass party was based on
the delusion that the Labour Party was rapidly losing its influence over the
working class. British social democracy, it was now confidently asserted, was
breaking up, while Labours 1965 budget was described as an epitaph for
reformism in Britain.6 Healys call to bring down the Labour government,
which the WRP was to employ to such self-destructive effect in the 1970s, now
made its first appearance. They disgrace the name of socialism, Healy
declared, denouncing the Wilson government at an SLL public meeting in April
1965. It is better that they should be brought down. They divide and weaken
the working class.7 That the SLL, whose membership barely reached four
figures, could overthrow the government was obviously ridiculous. But Healy
seems to have convinced himself that his organisation was now in a position to
confront the Labour Party as direct challengers and contenders for power, or
so he told the 1965 SLL conference.8
The SLL did continue to argue, correctly, that the task of revolutionaries was
to remove Wilson and Co from positions of leadership in the labour
movement.9 However, any idea of building a fraction inside the Labour Party in
order to further this objective was soon dropped in favour of an exclusive
emphasis on independent work. Healy organised a 2,000-strong demonstration
outside the 1965 Labour Party conference, yet the SLL didnt have a single
representative inside. The real place to fight Wilson, Healy told an SLL rally
afterwards, was not in the Labour Party but in the factories through strong
organisation, on the streets, and in the youth movement, to provide an
alternative leadership to take this movement to power.10
Healys sectarian stupidity reached its culmination during the Hull North byelection of February 1966, when Labour left-wingers were attacked for having
swallowed their principles and gone out canvassing for their partys Wilsonite
candidate.11 The by-election in fact produced a substantial swing to Labour,
making nonsense of Healys firm prediction eight months earlier that it was no
secret that the Tories are on their way back.12 Healy now executed a swift
about-turn. Previously the Newsletter had informed its readers that virtually
nobody has any more illusions in the right-wing Wilson government.13 Now, on
the eve of the general election, it was forced to admit that millions of workers
will vote Labour, refusing to return to Toryism, but not yet understanding the
extent to which the Wilson leadership betrays the interests of the working
class.14
Healys change of tack came too late to prevent his Third Period line on
reformism causing serious damage to the organisation. According to one
account, following the abandonment of Labour Party work the Healyites proved
totally unable to recruit, despite enormous efforts on the part of the rank and
84
file. Many rankers and some leaders resigned. Even full-time workers were
displaced. And so, in the following months, tired of knocking their heads against
brick walls, hundreds of demoralised youth left the YS and the SLL. Branches
were closed down. By the time the Labour government was re-elected in March
1966, with a majority of nearly a hundred, the membership of the SLL was
probably cut by half.15
Healy met with no more success in his efforts at Rebuilding the Fourth
International the title of an International Committee statement which was
circulated in preparation for the ICs Third World Congress. This repeated the
familiar IC mythology about Pabloite revisionism, but did at least have the
merit of recognising that the FI had been destroyed. 16 When the congress met
in London in April 1966, though, it was prevailed upon to accept an SLL
amendment, moved by Mike Banda, putting the entirely contrary position that
the FI had successfully resisted and defeated the attempts ... to destroy it
politically and organisationally.17 The motive for this change was accurately
identified by the French Voix Ouvrire group, who attended the congress as
observers. Anyone who says that the International has been destroyed, they
pointed out, must analyse the causes of its destruction; this, however, would
force the IC to submit its own past to a severe and painful criticism.18 And this,
of course, was something Healy refused to countenance.
Under Healys urging, the IC which from its foundation in 1953 had seen
itself as no more than a faction within the world Trotskyist movement now
suddenly proclaimed itself to be in effect the Fourth International. The adoption
of Healys bogus theory of continuity did not stop the congress accepting
another amendment, from Pierre Lamberts French IC section, which declared
that the International Committee was not a democratic centralist organisation
and that its decisions should be based on the principle of unanimity.19 This was
reflected in a congress resolution which defined the task of the IC as working
towards a centralised international leadership.20 How this could be squared with
Healys assertion that the FI still existed politically and organisationally was not
explained. Indeed, Healy even turned down the suggestion, made to him
privately by the Greek sections leader Loukas Karliaftis, that the IC should elect
a Secretariat in order to provide a collective leadership. Healys excuse was that
differences between the SLL and the OCI made this impossible.21
The Third Congress turned out to be a complete shambles. The IC itself
could muster only a handful of sections apart from the British and French,
delegates were present from Michel Vargas Hungarian group and Karliaftiss
Greek organisation. There were also representatives from two ex-SWP
groupings, led by Tim Wohlforth and James Robertson, between whom Healy
was trying to organise a fusion. In order to make up numbers, observers were
invited from Voix Ouvrire, from groups in Africa and Germany, and from a
state capitalist tendency in Japan, along with individuals from USec sections in
Ceylon and Denmark. The politically confused basis on which the congress was
put together was indicated by Healys angry announcement, halfway through
85
the proceedings, that he had no idea that Voix Ouvrire held a state capitalist
position on China, and that if he had known he wouldnt have invited them.22
The incoherence of the ICs own position on the workers state question was
brought out in a contribution by James Robertson, who criticised the SLLs
absurd analysis of the Castro regime as a capitalist government ruling on behalf
of a weak bourgeoisie. If the Cuban bourgeoisie was weak, Robertson
commented sarcastically, this could only be because it was exhausted after its
long swim to Miami, Florida!23 This was too much for Healy, who evidently
decided that it was necessary to whip this insolent American into line. As one
eyewitness recalls, Healy marched into the congress later that day and he
came up to Robertson, and started shouting and screaming at him and banging
his fist and saying that Robertson was a petty bourgeois. 24 The latters crime
was to have missed the session where his contribution had been attacked by
SLL speakers, and Healy demanded that Robertson make a self-criticism before
the congress. The purpose of this provocation was presumably to crush
Robertsons independence, compromise him politically and give Healy a hold
over him.
After refusing to comply with Healys demand, Robertson recalls, he was
called into Healys room, with Banda in a shadowy corner, and Healy quite
drunk, and he said, "Listen, Jim" very friendly then, the sudden switch "we
can work this out. The fusion can go through. Just go and make a good act of
contrition.... I care nothing for Wohlforth youll go back home the leader"....
And we got out of the room as fast as we could .... We got downstairs at the
end, and Gerry was ... running around and he was visibly working himself up
into a punchout ... it was Lambert who intervened to cool Healy off, and we got
out of there.25
Not only did Healy lose the majority of his projected US section, but he
succeeded in thoroughly discrediting the IC in the eyes of everyone else at the
congress. As one of the Ceylonese observers recalls, it was quite clear to them
that Healy had just brought together a whole group of disparate people who
had no real political agreement. What made the thing bizarre was his
behaviour.... Here at what was supposed to be a world congress, with so many
different people present, we find the most senior person behaving in the most
abominable manner .... And that was the thing that really finally broke it up,
because it was obvious to everybody that there was not going to be a free and
meaningful exchange of ideas.26 Healy provided a further insight into his
commitment to the free exchange of ideas a few months later, when USec
supporter Ernest Tate tried to sell a pamphlet exposing the fraud of the Third
World Congress outside an SLL public meeting. At Healys instigation, Tate was
beaten up by a group of SLL stewards and hospitalised.27
****
FROM LATE 1966, the Socialist Labour League began to recover from the
decline which had followed Healys break from the Labour Party, and entered
86
another period of sustained growth. Partly this was due to mounting
disillusionment throughout the working class with the second Wilson
government. Having been re-elected in March 1966 with a comfortable majority
of 96 (as compared with four in 1964), Labour was now expected by many of
its supporters to carry out measures in their interests. Instead, Wilson
attempted to resolve the problems of British capitalism which centred on a
chronic balance of payments deficit and consequent pressure on the pound at
the expense of the working class. The Labour government fought viciously
against the seamens strike of May-June 1966, denouncing it as communistinspired, and then proceeded to impose a legally binding wage freeze. The
SLLs attacks on Wilson, which by the Newsletters own admission had earlier
found little resonance in the class, now won the Healyites a hearing among
militant workers.
Another reason for the SLLs recovery was Healys retreat from the ultra-left
excesses of the earlier period. This retreat, admittedly, was only partial.
Predictions of an ever-deepening economic crisis continued unabated. And in
September 1966 Healy was asserting that the most conscious sections of the
bourgeoisie were convinced that even a Tory government cannot extricate
capitalism from its current crisis and were therefore looking for a British Hitler!
28
However, calls for the overthrow of the Labour government and declarations
that the SLL was an immediate contender for state power were temporarily
shelved. Healy now conceded that even an open clash with the government like
the seamens strike did not mean that the question of political power is on the
agenda,29 and that it was not a question of bringing down the Labour
government.30
Towards the end of 1966, following the formation of the Tribune Group of
Labour MPs, Healy launched his campaign to Make the left MPs fight. This was
a further indication of adjustment to political reality, since less than two years
earlier the SLL/YS had believed itself to be a thousand times stronger than
these same Labour lefts. The SLL, Healy stated, explaining the new tactical
turn to a special League conference in November 1966, calls upon all those left
MPs to fight inside the Parliamentary Labour Party in order to remove Wilson
with the other right-wingers from the leadership, and replace them with MPs
who will fight for socialist policies.31 This campaign did have the merit of
countering the syndicalist limitations of purely industrial struggle, and focusing
militants attention on the need to fight the existing political leadership of the
labour movement. Nevertheless, Healys tactic was seriously flawed in a number
of respects.
First of all, it sowed the usual confusion about what exactly socialist policies
were. It was entirely correct to demand that the left MPs take up a fight against
the Wilson leadership, but there wasnt much sense in calling on them to form a
government, based on a majority in the House of Commons, which would
introduce a policy of nationalisation of the major industries under workers
control (i.e., carry out the complete expropriation of the big bourgeoisie). Nor
was there much point in proposing that the left MPs should put down a motion
87
in the PLP demanding Wilsons resignation,32 given that the parliamentary party
was overwhelmingly dominated by Wilson loyalists. Healys campaign could
have had practical relevance only if it had been based on an opposition
movement against Wilson within the ranks of the Labour Party. As it was, in the
absence of any organised opposition, many party members expressed their
anger at the Labour governments betrayals by resigning, or lapsing into
political inactivity, which only strengthened Wilsons hold over the party.
But Healy refused to link the Make the lefts fight slogan to any work inside
the Labour Party. Ironically, he justified this position with the identical
argument used by his opponents in the RCP back in the 1940s, when he himself
had argued for entry into the Labour Party. Healy now defined entry as a shortterm tactic, applicable only when there arose within social democracy a left
wing moving in a revolutionary direction which, as he pointed out, was not
the case today.33 All the evidence suggests that, despite having temporarily
ditched the more extreme manifestations of sectarianism, Healy still held to an
essentially ultra-left perspective. He believed that there was a pre-revolutionary
situation in Britain, that the majority of workers had broken from right-wing
reformism (hence the tactic of placing demands on the Labour lefts rather than
on the Labour leadership) and that it only remained for the SLL to expose the
left reformists in order to win the mass of the working class to an independent
revolutionary party.
Not the least of the factors in the SLLs late-1960s expansion, of course, was
Healys own energy, hard work and organising ability. Tim Wohlforth, Healys
US collaborator, recounts how Healy would typically snatch four or five hours
sleep before being picked up at 7am to attend an editorial board meeting at
eight. Gerry then usually headed out of town to make a meeting with an
important comrade in Oxford or Reading. He might return around two pm to
check copy for the paper or for other meetings only to dash off again in the
evening for a meeting in some other part of the country. He was not
exaggerating much when he had written to me that he travelled 1,200 miles a
week! The SLL leaders approach, Wohlforth continues, was personal and
energetic. Healy was deeply involved in every aspect of party and youth work
and he got to know almost every comrade pretty well, even when the
movement had one thousand or more members. No man ever personally drove
an organisation the way Healy did. Healy could claim quite rightly much of the
credit personally for the growth and successes of the SLL in the 1960s.34
This picture is confirmed by Alan Thornett, an ex-CP shop steward at the
BMC car factory in Cowley, who joined the SLL in 1966 along with a group of
fellow militants. Thornett describes how the SLL set up a factory branch to
organise our work. We met weekly with Healy in attendance. It was
dramatically different from the CP, strongly organised and strongly political.
Meetings always started with an up-to-date report and discussion, relating the
work we were doing in the plant to the industry, and to national and world
politics. They were very impressive meetings. Healy kept himself closely
informed on the factory situation. He would want to know the tactics of the
88
management, the situation in the unions, the details of current disputes and
what the other political influences such as the CP were doing. It was very much
what we were looking for.35
That the SLLs numerical gains were not greater, however, was due largely
to Healys sectarian attitude towards the protest movement that developed
against the Wilson governments support for US imperialisms war in Vietnam,
and towards the youth radicalisation which arose from the movement. The SLL
should have been well-placed to take advantage of this development, as the YS
had pioneered demonstrations in 1965 against Wilsons backing for US
aggression, campaigning for Victory to the Vietcong. But the Vietnam Solidarity
Campaign, which brought together a broad-based coalition of left-wing forces
opposed to US imperialism, was evidently regarded by Healy not as an arena in
which to intervene but as a rival to his own organisation which, in Healys
mind, was the established revolutionary leadership to whom all others had to
defer.
The SLL was involved in the VSCs first major public meeting in August 1966,
and was even able to put up Mike Banda as a platform speaker. But SLL
contributions from the floor concentrated their fire on the crimes of Stalinism
rather than on the need to oppose US imperialism, and the chairman Bertrand
Russells secretary Ralph Schoenman prevented Healy from speaking and
physically wrested the microphone from another SLLer.36 Healy then used this
as an excuse to break off all relations with the VSC. To Messrs Schoenman and
Russell we say: To hell with your rotten "united front" of state capitalists,
Pabloites, Stalinists and centrists, Mike Banda wrote in the Newsletter. Your
campaign stinks.37
While the VSC leadership probably held a rather opportunist conception of
united front activity, according to which joint practical work precluded sharp
criticism of rival political tendencies, it is difficult to see the SLLs intervention as
anything other than a provocation. The motive for Healys action, according to
one leading participant in the VSC, was that the campaign was building a
relationship with the Young Communist League who rejected the official CP
line of refusing to call for victory to the Vietnamese revolution and Healy was
intent on sabotaging this.38 The same rationale apparently lay behind Healys
performance at a demonstration against US aggression in Vietnam at Liege in
October 1966, which was organised by Ernest Mandels Belgian section of the
United Secretariat. Here again, the organisers had built a united front with the
Communist youth organisation, which was similarly in conflict with the adult
party. And, once more, Healy launched a wrecking operation. He had the YS
contingent raise a banner commemorating the 1956 Hungarian Revolution,
which caused the Communist youth to withdraw from the march,39 as indeed
was Healys purpose.
One thing is certain, Healys actions were not the product of any principled
opposition to Stalinism as such. In early 1967, Mike Bandas admiration for
Maoism was allowed full rein in the Newsletter, which devoted several articles
89
to enthusiastically supporting the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards.40 A
year later, in an editorial in the theoretical journal Fourth International, Banda
delivered a eulogy to the guerrilla warfare strategy of Mao and Ho Chi-Minh. 41
After protests by the Lambert group, a correction was pasted into the next
issue of the journal, making the excuse that the article should have appeared
under Bandas byline and was not an editorial at all.42 But Healy failed to
distance himself or his organisation from Bandas views, or take up a struggle
against them.
The biggest Vietnam demonstration, in London on 27 October 1968, which
drew an estimated 75-100,000 people, was condemned as a diversion by the
SLL. It refused to participate, and issued a leaflet headed Why the Socialist
Labour League is not marching, which denounced the demonstration as no
more than a publicity stunt hatched by the capitalist media in order to
undermine the work of Healys own organisation. 43 This conspiracy theory,
which verged on clinical paranoia, was subsequently spelt out in detail by Cliff
Slaughter. The content of the October 27 demonstration, he wrote, the
essential aim of the VSC and its political directors was ... the rallying together
of some alternative to the building of the SLL as the revolutionary Marxist
party.44
A front-page article by Healy in the next issue of the Newsletter pursued this
theme. The demonstration had only encouraged confusion amongst students
and young people around the all-important issue of the building of the
revolutionary forces, Healy asserted. He dismissed out of hand the idea of any
joint work with other political tendencies on the left around the specific issue of
the Vietnam war. And although he argued, correctly, that the mobilisation of
British workers for a revolutionary struggle against their own ruling class was a
vital part of the struggle against imperialism, according to Healy this could only
be done by the SLL, and not by middle class protest movements.45
That the movement against the Vietnam war was a protest movement, and a
largely middle class one at that, is not in dispute. But it was the elementary
duty of a self-styled revolutionary grouping to intervene in such a movement
not to denounce it from the sidelines. Healys abstentionist and ultimatist
attitude to the VSC denied the SLL the opportunity to recruit students and other
middle class youth and turn them towards the working class. Tony Cliffs state
capitalist International Socialists, for their part, won over hundreds of students
and grew into a significant organisation as large as, if not larger than, the
SLL. The British section of the United Secretariat, the International Marxist
Group, also underwent a considerable expansion. The days when Healy could
enjoy almost complete domination of the far left in Britain were now over.
Notes
90
2. Keep Left, January 1965.
3. Ibid., March 1965.
4. Interview with Tony Gard, 10 May 1992.
5. Newsletter, 12 June 1965. Healy put the cart squarely before the horse, it
has been pointed out. The mass daily is the result of the winning of mass
influence by the revolutionaries. It cannot create that influence for a small
propaganda grouping. (Workers Power, February 1986.)
6. Newsletter, 13 February, 10 April, 1965. The quotations are from Robert
Black and Tom Kemp respectively.
7. Ibid., 3 April 1965.
8. Ibid., 12 June 1965.
9. Ibid., 1 May 1965.
10. Ibid., 2 October 1965.
11. Ibid., 12 February 1966.
12. Ibid., 12 June 1965.
13. Ibid., 19 June 1965.
14. Ibid., 19 March 1966.
15. T. Whelan, The Credibility Gap: The Politics of the SLL, 1970, p.12.
16. Fourth International, August 1965.
17. C. Slaughter, ed., Trotskyism versus Revisionism, vol.5, 1974, pp.5-6.
18. J. Hansen, ed., Marxism Vs. Ultraleftism, 1974, p.99.
19. Ibid., p.85.
21. Documents of the Workers Vanguard, 1979, p.72.
22. Marxism Vs. Ultraleftism, p.93.
23. Spartacist, Winter 1985-86, p.39.
24. Interview with Upali Cooray, 10 May 1992.
91
25. Spartacist, Winter 1985-86, p.23.
26. Interview with Upali Cooray.
27. Marxism Vs. Ultraleftism, p.108.
28. Newsletter, 3 September 1966.
29. Ibid., 4 June 1966.
30. Ibid., 10 December 1966.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 3 December 1966.
33. Ibid., 1 April 1967.
34. T. Wohlforth, The Prophet's Children, 1994, pp.197-8.
35. A. Thornett, From Militancy to Marxism, 1987, p.82.
36. C. Slaughter, A Balance Sheet of Revisionism, 1969, p.6.
37. Newsletter, 3 September 1966.
38. Information from Al Richardson.
39. Spartacist, May-June 1967.
40. Newsletter, 21, 28 January 1967.
41. Fourth International, February 1968.
42. Ibid., August 1968.
43. The leaflet is reprinted in D. Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1976, p.349.
44. Slaughter, p.7.
92
Chapter 8 (1968-1971)
ALTHOUGH THE election of the second Wilson government in 1966
saw a partial reversal by Healy of the ultra-left turn which had
accompanied the launch of the independent Young Socialists, this
proved only temporary. During 1968-69 Healy suffered a renewed outbreak
of leftist delusions. He became convinced that the SLL was about to replace the
Labour Party as the political leadership of the working class and that the
struggle for power was on the immediate agenda. This was underpinned by the
usual nonsense about the capitalist economy heading towards its final collapse.
Mike Banda would later compare Healys economic perspectives to the
breakdown theory of early German social democracy, citing the front page
article by Healy headlined Crisis, Panic, Crash with which the Newsletter
responded to the threat of dollar devaluation in March 1968.1 Every serious
attempt to analyse world economy was frowned upon, Banda wrote, and the
intellectuals were forced to toe the Healyite line: apocalypse now!2 Not that
some of them required much forcing. Geoff Pilling, for example, had apparently
been happy to endorse Healys belief that the growth of automation was
plunging world capitalism into deepening crisis, if not total destruction,3 and it
was he who had pioneered the line (enthusiastically adopted by Healy) that the
mounting instability of the international monetary system would sound the
death knell of capitalism.
The only intellectual prepared to take a stand against Healys catastrophism
was Tom Kemp. At the 1967 SLL conference Kemp submitted an alternative
document on economic perspectives which, as Robin Blick recalls, criticised
cataclysmic projections and said that the economy was perfectly capable of
sustaining various recoveries, and that the end was far from being in sight. He
got up and defended the document, and the only person to vote for it was Tom
Kemp and he wouldnt back down, he wouldnt yield. And Pilling was the main
torpedo fired at him, of course .... Healy lambasted him in a knockabout
manner "lacking faith in the revolutionary perspective" and all this but
Pilling actually tried to take it apart, nuts and bolts. 4 As a result of his defiance,
according to Banda, Kemp was virtually driven out of leadership and almost out
of the party.5
Healys ultra-leftism was also fuelled by the gains the SLL was making in the
unions. Though he had previously denied the need to build a specifically
industrial organisation, in February 1968 Healy launched the All Trades Unions
Alliance as the political arm of the SLL in industry. This repeated on a larger
scale the mistakes of Healys attempt at establishing an industrial base in the
late 1950s, using impressive conferences aimed at individual recruitment as a
substitute for organising a real movement within the unions.6 Nevertheless,
Healy did succeed in winning a number of militants and extending the SLLs
influence in industry. When the Wilson government produced its white paper In
Place of Strife in January 1969, which outlined plans to impose legal shackles
93
on the trade unions, the SLL took the initiative in calling for a May Day strike
against this, which was supported by almost a quarter of a million trade
unionists.7
The fact that militant workers were bitterly opposed to the Wilson
governments anti-union policies, together with a more general disillusionment
with Labours record in office reflected in large-scale abstentions by Labour
voters in by-elections was enough to persuade Healy that social democracy
had now run its historical course in Britain. The SLLs 1969 conference
proclaimed that the desertion of the reformist party was almost complete,
and stated unequivocally that no section of the working class will ever again
look to the Labour Party for leadership.8 As for the Labour government, Healy
declared that it was out to destroy the trade unions an objective which
Trotskyists have traditionally regarded as the defining feature of a fascist
regime!9 The SLLs task, therefore, was to fight now for socialist policies
against the Labour government, to bring it down.10
The French events of May-June 1968 were taken by Healy as confirmation
that revolutionary battles were imminent in Britain. SLL central committee
member Cyril Smith was doubtless echoing Healy when he told students at the
London School of Economics that there were perhaps 18 months in which to
prepare for a struggle similar to that in France. 11 A developing political crisis
would carry us in the immediate future into the struggle for power, a
resolution at the 1969 SLL conference asserted.12 And the Newsletter explained
that the working class faced the stark choice: EITHER the dictatorship of
Wilson and, after him, a right-wing semi-fascist dictatorship of Tories, OR a
workers government based on workers councils and the trade unions with a
socialist home and foreign policy.13
Healys grotesque misreading of the political situation prevented the SLL
from intervening effectively in the real crisis which the Labour leadership faced
in its attempt to impose In Place of Strife. The Communist Party was
denounced for raising the illusory hope that Wilsons government can be forced
to adopt different policies by pressure, and for failing to recognise that only a
general strike would halt Wilson.14 In the event, faced with a revolt in the party
and the trade unions (which, however, fell far short of a general strike), the
government was indeed forced to back down and withdraw the proposed antiunion laws. This did not prevent Healy from announcing smugly that the
perspectives of every group and party except ours are in ruins.15
It was a measure of the SLL leaders political disorientation that in the
following months they were increasingly reduced to issuing bombastic, pseudorevolutionary declarations which avoided addressing any programmatic or
tactical questions. A political committee statement of October 1969 was typical.
This rambling, disjointed piece, evidently written by Healy himself, contained
not a single transitional demand, not a single policy on which militants might
fight in any union or industry, not even a suggestion as to how to organise such
struggles, as one contemporary critic pointed out.16 Healys only practical
94
proposal was that workers should join the SLL and build the revolutionary
party.17
It was against this background of galloping sectarianism that Healys
longstanding plan to transform the Newsletter into a daily finally reached
fruition, with the appearance in September 1969 of Workers Press. The daily
paper was Healys prestige project, his Aswan Dam, Tim Wohlforth writes. I
spoke with Healy within weeks of the launching of the daily ... and he had not
yet figured how he was going to distribute it. Almost to the last day he was
considering a commercial newsstand distribution. Healy appeared to be
unaware that the physical production of a daily paper was the easy part of it,
especially with modern web offset printing. The real problems were how to
sustain such a paper financially and how to maintain a circulation that would
make the effort worthwhile.18 But the print run for Workers Press, in
Wohlforths estimation, was no more than 6,000 during the week and 10,000
for the weekend edition.19 Healy was immune to such considerations. We have
only just begun, he told a rally celebrating the launch of the daily. We are
going to tear down the capitalist system shred for shred. We are now going to
use this paper to build the mass revolutionary party.20
Another product of Healys ultra-leftist lurch was his attempt to mount an
electoral challenge to Labour. This policy was first agreed at the SLLs 1968
conference, which proposed to stand candidates in the next general election
with the aim of exposing and defeating the "parliamentary" leaderships of the
working class. It was given a trial run in the Swindon by-election of October
1969. The Young Socialist candidate, Frank Willis, was a well-known local trade
unionist, and a six-month campaign was organised which brought in YS
members from all over the country. Yet Willis received only 446 votes (1.1 per
cent), a result which completely demolished the argument that large sections of
the working class were breaking from Labour to the left. Healy, however,
pronounced the intervention to have been absolutely correct, while Keep Left
went so far as to declare it a great victory!21
As it became clear that, with a general election and the threat of a Tory
government looming, workers were rallying to the Labour Party, Healy executed
a characteristic about-turn. At the SLLs 1970 May Day rally, he denied that he
was one of those revolutionaries attacked in the capitalist press for believing
that revolution was just around the corner they must have been thinking of
Tariq Ali of the IMG, Healy remarked disingenuously. And in the run-up to the
June general election the SLL reverted to its demand for a genuinely socialist
Labour government, calling for a Labour vote on the (correct) grounds that
returning the reformists to office would provide the best conditions for
defeating Wilson and his anti-working class policies and replacing him with a
socialist leadership.22 As for Healys plan to stand SLL candidates against
Labour, it had been quietly abandoned.
****
95
IF THIS ACCOUNT of Healy in the late 1960s has been lacking in an
international dimension, it is because there is so little to say on this score. For,
in Healys view, his political activity in Britain was his international work. As he
put it in 1966, by transforming the SLL into a mass revolutionary party and
leading the British working class to power he would inspire revolutionists in all
countries to build similar parties to do the same.23 This Anglocentrism would
later provide the method behind Healys construction of his own International,
consisting of groups modelled on, and completely dominated by, the SLL.
But it was impossible for Healy to exercise such control over the Lambert
group in France, which had its own political positions, few of which tallied with
those of the SLL. The French sections dual defeatist line on the 1967 Middle
East war was diametrically opposed to the Healyites support for the Arab
revolution, while Bandas backing for Mao and Ho Chi Minh was anathema to
the bitterly anti-Stalinist Lambertists. And the latters emphasis on the need to
reconstruct the Fourth International, which they correctly argued had ceased
to exist as a centralised world leadership, was an implicit challenge to Healys
bogus theory of continuity.24 Under the common anti-Pabloite banner of the
International Committee, the two groups in fact carried out their own political
activities completely independently of each other.
Their relationship became somewhat warmer at the time of the 1968
struggles in France, in which the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (as
the Lambertists had become) achieved some prominence. Healy now publicly
acclaimed the OCI as the SLLs sister organisation, campaigned against its
illegalisation by De Gaulle and raised a 1,000 support fund. But the dramatic
growth of the OCI by February 1970 it was able to hold a 10,000-strong
youth rally at Le Bourget airport outside Paris threatened to make it the major
force within the IC, and Healys attitude cooled again.
In an attempt to find some programmatic agreement between the two
sections, in September 1969 the OCI submitted a document entitled For the
Reconstruction of the Fourth International to the IC pre-conference, which
eventually met in July the following year.25 At this meeting, Robin Blick
recounts, Stephan Just of the OCI tried to open a discussion on the document.
And do you know what Healy talked about? He talked about philosophy, for
about four hours. Tim Wohlforth, who had actually tried to address the
programmatic issues raised in the French document, was hauled off to Healys
office at the end of the first session and told to stick to philosophy. That was
the only way they could stop a discussion, you see, Blick comments.
When the meeting resumed, the OCI attempted to discuss the Transitional
Programme, the workers united front and the political struggle in Europe. And
Healy, and Slaughter and then Wohlforth got up and did his thing all talked
about method and philosophy. There were two worlds which never met. So at
the end of the conference, with time ticking away, and Just looking at his watch
and saying he had a plane to catch, there was a one-paragraph resolution
passed which said that the French document was within the traditions of
96
orthodox Trotskyism, and that discussions would continue upon it. Which they
never did, because not long after that the two organisations split.26
As the conflict between the British and French sections of the International
Committee escalated towards an open break, Healy responded with his usual
combination of evasions, political zigzags and dishonest polemic. Instead of
attempting to clarify the issues involved, he pursued his dispute with the OCI
on a thoroughly unprincipled basis, for which his repeated appeals to Marxist
theory and dialectical materialism merely served as a cover.
At the 1970 SLL summer camp, which took place a few weeks after the IC
pre-conference, Healy declared that he was launching a fight against all those
who display arrogance against theory in this camp and in the International
Committee, against sections which think they are superior because they have
had some success in struggle, but which refuse to recognise that, with their
snobbishness towards Marxist theory, they are leading the International to
destruction .... I was very shocked at the pre-conference to hear the French
comrades argue that Marxist theory does not exist. I declare war on them.27
It might have been supposed that this statement, made as it was in front of
an OCI delegation attending the camp, was intended to unleash a sharp
political struggle inside the IC. Yet, when Pierre Lambert wrote to him asking
for an explanation of these remarks, Healy sent back a conciliatory reply,
assuring Lambert that he was no more and no less in conflict with you and the
OCI than at any moment in the past. Challenged by Lambert to produce a
detailed critique of the political document the OCI had presented to the preconference, Healy simply prevaricated.28
Healy was at this time more interested in a political dialogue with the
revisionists of the United Secretariat than he was with his French comrades.
Having for years denounced the hated Pabloites as traitors to the working
class, in April 1970 Healy suddenly dispatched a friendly personal note to USec
leader Pierre Frank proposing informal talks on matters of mutual interest. As
a result, Healy held two meetings with Frank and other USec representatives in
Paris the following month. According to Franks report, Healy stated that the
situation had changed since 1963 when the SLL had rejected reunification, and
that he now believed joint discussions, perhaps a conference, would be useful.
The clear implication was that unity between the IC and the USec had become
a practical possibility.29
What was Healy up to? That he genuinely intended to test out the possibility
of unity with the Pabloites seems improbable to put it mildly. It is more likely
that he saw an opportunity to win some oppositionists from the USecs
European sections, which had experienced a substantial growth since 1968.
Healys search for international recruits to reinforce his faction in the IC was
given urgency by the fact that the OCI was busy establishing fraternal relations
with organisations such as Guillermo Loras POR in Bolivia. On the eve of the
pre-conference, Healy proclaimed a new, Irish section of the IC (acquired by
97
imposing a premature split on the League for a Workers Republic, with whom
the SLL was holding discussions) in order to provide himself with another vote
to use against the French.30
If Healy hoped to pick up some additional forces from the USec to
strengthen his hand against Lambert, he was to be disappointed, for the USec
leaders refused to play ball. Publicly they took the line that the ICs slanderous
attacks on them ruled out any prospect of discussions,31 while internally they
justified their decision on the grounds that Healys overtures are a
manoeuvre.32
Undeterred, in July 1970 Healy published an article in Workers Press
repeating the proposal for a joint conference.33 And he issued another
statement in September offering to refrain from public polemics against the
USec while discussions took place. Healy went out of his way to play down the
political differences between the IC and the USec, openly embracing Mandel,
Frank and Co. as fellow revolutionaries. Both the organisations of the
International Committee and the Unified [sic] Secretariat, he wrote, are thrust
more and more into the bitterest struggles against the counter-revolutionary
forces of Stalinism and social democracy. The building of mass revolutionary
parties based on the working class is within our reach in a number of important
countries.34
Not only did Healys appeal fail to move the USec, but it led to a further
deterioration in relations with the Lambertists. In late September, the French
sent the SLL a letter bitterly criticising Healys opportunist adaptation to
Pabloism and reasserting the principles of IC orthodoxy. Healys proposal for a
joint conference, the letter pointed out, had no basis in the decisions of the IC,
which had only authorised him to approach the USec for discussions. As
national secretary of the SLL, the OCI wrote, he counterposes his orientation
to that of the International Committee for which, nonetheless, he himself
voted. He violates the most elementary rules of the functioning of the IC. The
letter concluded by demanding a recall of the IC pre-conference. Healy,
however, didnt even bother to reply.35
As had been the case during his break with the SWP in the early 1960s,
Healys readiness to defy his longstanding international partners was
undoubtedly related to the growth of his own organisation in Britain. The Tory
victory in the June 1970 general election, and the assault on the trade unions
embodied in the Heath governments Industrial Relations Bill, produced an
upsurge of anger in the working class. This was reflected in a significant
expansion in the SLLs influence. In February 1971, a YS anti-Tory rally at
Alexandra Palace was attended by over 4,000 people by far the biggest
meeting Healy had yet organised.36 The conclusion which Healy drew from
these developments was made clear at an IC meeting early in 1971. It is we
who struggle against the Tory government, the centrists and the Stalinists, he
boasted. ... It is in England that the situation is explosive. It is by starting there
that the Fourth International will be able to overcome the crisis.37
98
The first public rupture between the British and the French took place at the
international youth rally which the OCI organised at Essen in July 1971. It was
the YS delegation which provoked this open declaration of differences by
presenting the rally with a resolution which called for youth to dedicate
themselves to the study of Marxist theory, on the basis of the one-sided (and
essentially idealist) assertion that political opportunism in the workers
movement was caused by revisionism in the sphere of theory. The 5,000-strong
rally overwhelmingly rejected the YS resolution, with the OCI voting against it in
company with a number of organisations hostile to the IC.38
Although Healy subsequently claimed that the conflict at Essen marked the
real split in the IC, this argument seems to have been thought up after the
event. In fact a strong OCI delegation attended the SLL summer camp shortly
afterwards. And Lambert himself was invited to give the closing speech to the
camp, on the subject of dialectical materialism. He made it clear that what the
French rejected was not Marxist theory as such, but the SLLs attempt to
separate philosophical issues from the basic practical tasks of tactics, strategy
and programme. Lambert was able to underline this point with a quotation from
The German Ideology in which Marx argued that, with the development of a
materialist approach recognising the primacy of practical activity, philosophy as
an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence.39
Perhaps this was what finally decided Healy to make a complete break with
the French. But the pretext on which the split was carried out was the role of
the POR during the right-wing coup in Bolivia in August 1971. Barely had the
new military regime been installed than Tim Wohlforth of the US Workers
League published, at Healys instigation, an article holding the Lora leadership
of the POR responsible for the Bolivian workers defeat. In October the OCI, the
POR, Michel Vargas Hungarian group and the Mexican section of the IC issued
a statement defending Lora and attacking his critics, whereupon Healy
immediately announced that a de facto split had taken place in the IC. And
despite repeated appeals by the OCI that the differences should be fought out
at the forthcoming World Congress, Healy refused to budge.
Although Healy declared the split in the name of a majority of the IC, this
claim was questionable to say the least. Indeed, it was one of the products of
the loose, decentralised character of the IC (for which Healy himself was mainly
to blame) that it was far from clear who the ICs sections actually were! The
SLLs split statement was co-signed by the Workers League, the Revolutionary
Communist League of Ceylon, the Workers Internationalist League of Greece
and the League for a Workers Vanguard of Ireland. But the OCI pointed out
that the Greek section no longer existed, as it had split into two organisations
back in 1967. The SLL, for its part, having earlier hailed the POR as a member
of the IC, now denied that the Bolivian party had ever joined at all.
As for the political issues in dispute, the Healyites documents criticising the
OCI (which were finally produced after the split!) simply added to the
confusion. In addition to the usual abstract dissertations on philosophical
99
method, the SLL now attempted to outline some programmatic differences with
the Lambertists, condemning both their syndicalist line during the 1968 general
strike and their opportunist interpretation of the united front tactic, which
centred on the demand for a joint Socialist-Communist candidate in the 1970
presidential election. But the SLLs critique was extremely light on alternative
proposals. Similarly with the POR, the Healyite documents accused Lora of
capitulation to a nationalist wing of the Bolivian military, but were almost
entirely devoid of suggestions as to what the POR should in fact have done.
Healy and the SLL intellectuals like Cliff Slaughter who presumably wrote
the documents could pontificate endlessly about the Marxist method, but
they were incapable of seriously addressing questions of Marxist programme.
(The main programmatic statement produced by the SLL in Britain at this time
the Charter of Basic Rights around which the big February 1971 rally was
organised was a jumble of elementary democratic demands and ultimatist
calls on a future Labour government to abolish capitalism.)40 Far from
addressing practical issues concerning the class struggle, the purpose of the
SLLs anti-OCI polemics was to justify the ludicrous fantasy that Healy and his
supporters were the sole embodiment of revolutionary continuity.
In April 1972, Healy tried to give this myth of continuity some organisational
basis by holding his own Fourth World Congress of the IC, minus the OCI and
its allies. The congress voted to draw up a constitution based on the original
statutes of the Fourth International, in order to facilitate centralised work and
guidance to the sections.41 In reality, the IC was now a thoroughly bureaucratic
set-up which bore no resemblance to the democratic centralist International
envisaged by Trotsky. Indicative of Healys method of international organisation
was his treatment of the Greeks. An exile group in London led by Dimitri
Toubanis was adopted by Healy as the official section, while the Karliaftis group
in Greece which had made the mistake of raising political disagreements with
the SLL was demoted to the status of a sympathising section.42 The OCI
commented that there was nothing new in all this: It is merely a caricature of
the Zinovievist conception of the Communist International.43
This point is endorsed by Tim Wohlforth. At least the old IC, he writes, was
an arena for two reasonably sized, and somewhat politically distinct, parties to
discuss with each other and negotiate an occasional joint international venture.
Now the IC was nothing but a collection of satellites hovering around the Great
Guru, Gerry Healy. At least this is what Healy now clearly wished it to be. There
was still a bit of sorting out to take place before the IC could be completely
purified of deviations, or even potential deviations, from the British model.
Healy got the international movement he wanted. The price he had to pay was
the impotence of his international worshippers.44
Notes
1. Newsletter, 19 March 1968.
100
2. Workers Press, 7 February 1986.
3. Fourth International, January 1966. Pilling made the further prediction
that the devaluation of the pound would virtually spell the end for the City of
London and for British capitalism more generally!
4. Interview with Robin Blick, 15 August 1992.
6. One critic wrote of the ATUA at this time that its main "activity" seems to
be the frequent conferences. These, however, very rarely get down to any
discussion of building a movement, either on a national level or on that of one
industry ... the leaders dont really want to build a movement ... rather than
have an oppositional movement of the masses of workers in any particular
union, the League wants to recruit a few individuals (T. Whelan, The Credibility
Gap: the Politics of the SLL, 1970, p.45).
7. A. Thornett, From Militancy to Marxism, 1987, pp.139, 143.
8. Quoted by R. Black, Fascism in Germany, 1975, p.1077.
10. Black, p.1077.
12. Black, p.1077.
13. Newsletter, 19 April 1969.
14. Ibid., 19 April, 3 May, 1969.
15. Black, p.1075.
16. Whelan, p.41.
17. Workers Press, 25 October 1969.
18. T. Wohlforth, The Prophets Children, 1994, p.226.
19. Wohlforth, Memoirs, unpublished draft (later published in a revised form
as The Prophets Children).
20. Workers Press, 30 September 1969.
21. For the Swindon by-election, see Whelan, pp.2, 62-70.
101
22. Workers Press, 28 May 1970.
23. C. Slaughter, ed., Trotskyism versus Revisionism, 1974, vol.4, p.270. It
would be a mistake, however, to see this as a sudden descent into nationalism.
Cliff Slaughter was putting forward an identical argument three years earlier
see chapter 6.
24. Ibid., vol.5, pp.84-132.
25. Ibid., vol.6, p.47.
26. Interview with Robin Blick, 14 August 1992.
27. Bulletin of Trotskyist Discussion, February 1986. (This is a translation of
an article by Gerard Bloch which originally appeared in the OCI publication La
Vrit, April 1972.)
28. Ibid.
29. International Marxist Group internal document.
30. See D. Whelan, The SLL and Irish Marxism (1959-1973) a disastrous
legacy, reprinted in Workers News, September 1989.
31. Intercontinental Press, 27 July 1970.
32. Statement by the Secretariat on the Report of Discussions between Healy
and the Fourth International, 7 July 1970 (IMG internal document).
33. Workers Press, 7 July 1970.
34. Ibid., 8 September 1970.
35. Bulletin of Trotskyist Discussion, February 1986.
38. Material relating to the SLL-OCI split can be found in Slaughter, vol.6.
40. Fourth International, Winter 1970-71.
42. Documents of the Workers Vanguard, 1979, p.68.
102
103
Chapter 9 (1971-1975)
IF A DETAILED account of Gerry Healys political career has a
justification, it lies mainly in the period up until the late 1960s. For two
decades before that, the organisation led by Healy was the only significant
political grouping in Britain to the left of the Communist Party, and any study of
British Trotskyism during those years would necessarily concentrate on the
Healyite movement. By the early 1970s, however, there were some much more
positive developments than the SLL on the far left. Tony Cliffs International
Socialists were by then engaged in building rank-and-file movements in the
trade unions, while Ted Grants Militant Tendency was beginning to make some
headway with its entrist strategy in the Labour Party. The International Marxist
Group, for its part, was pursuing its orientation towards the students and
womens movements and Irish solidarity campaigns.
Healys orthodoxy (which was in fact characterised by ignorance of, and
contempt for, the political positions of Leninism and Trotskyism) offered no
revolutionary alternative to those he dismissed as revisionists. Healy could
attack the ISs intervention in industry for its syndicalism and economism, but
the SLL made no attempt to organise a real opposition to the bureaucracy
inside the unions. And while Healy could deride Militants aim of transforming
the Labour Party, the SLL failed to carry out even the most minimal fraction
work in the party which still held the political allegiance of mass of the working
class. As for the IMG, its uncritical attitude to the IRA and its turn away from
the labour movement in search of new vanguards were lambasted by the SLL.
However, Healys response to the Irish liberation struggle was to denounce the
reactionary, indiscriminate violence of the Provisionals1 (while engaging in a
short flirtation with the leadership of Official Sinn Fin) and to hold the
occasional SLL public meeting when Ireland hit the headlines. No serious
activity was carried out by the YS among students, and the SLLs position on
the womens movement was distinguished by downright political backwardness.
Not that Healy ignored the post-1968 politicisation of a layer of the middle
class. With his eye for the main chance, he was not averse to recruiting from
among the very petty bourgeois radicals who were otherwise the object of the
SLLs scorn. From the end of the 1960s, Healy began holding classes with a
group of producers, directors, playwrights and actors who had been drawn
towards Trotskyism.2 As he had with the dissident intellectuals from the CP back
in the 1950s, Healy approached these potential recruits with a degree of
subtlety. There was always give and take at these meetings, much more so
than at regular party events, Tim Wohlforth writes of Healys classes. The
cultural people received special kid gloves treatment from Healy who spent
many, many hours with each of the key people in this milieu carefully nurturing
their development.3 Healys intervention in this milieu was preserved for
posterity in Trevor Griffithss play The Party, in which the Healy character
(named John Tagg) was played by no less a figure than Sir Laurence Olivier.
104
For some of these artists, Wohlforth observes, involvement with the SLL
allowed them to enjoy a vicarious identification with the struggles of the
working class while maintaining their own comfortable existences. For others,
notably two of Healys most celebrated recruits from the theatrical world, Corin
and Vanessa Redgrave, their commitment was much more serious. Corin
impressed me, Wohlforth recalls. He seemed extremely interested in Marxist
theory and quite willing to do everything other members did. He would go out
at five in the morning to sell papers at plant gates and deliver papers door to
door in working class neighbourhoods. It was Corin who brought his more
famous sister around the organisation. I met Vanessa on several occasions and
she seemed equally as serious as her brother and more than willing to carry out
any party task she was asked to do.... Clearly, I told myself, these two can
make a real contribution to the movement.4
At its most cynical level, Healys turn to the radical middle classes was
motivated by the straightforward pursuit of cash. According to one perhaps
apocryphal story, Healys response to the recruitment of C. Redgrave was Its
the big one Im interested in, the one with the money namely Corins wealthy
sister.5 Another probable motive on Healys part was that such recruits, who
had no real background in the workers movement and were won to the SLL
mainly on the basis of admiration for Healy the individual, were a useful source
of uncritical political support. This would seem to be the only explanation for
the immediate elevation to leadership positions of the Redgraves and others
such as Alex Mitchell, a former Sunday Times journalist who became editor of
Workers Press in 1971.6 The consequence was to encourage in these people a
combination of arrogance and ignorance which destroyed any potential they
had as revolutionaries.7
The rise of political competitors like the IS and IMG did not mean that the
SLL went into decline; on the contrary, the early 1970s were the years in which
Healys organisation enjoyed its most spectacular growth. For this was a period
marked by the most intense industrial conflicts in Britain since the pre-1914
Great Unrest. And although the predominant form of these struggles was wage
militancy, the attempts by Edward Heaths Tory government to shackle the
unions through its state pay laws and National Industrial Relations Court gave
these industrial battles an extremely sharp political character. Tens of
thousands of workers were radicalised by their experiences, and the SLL and YS
intervened energetically among them.
On the face of it, Healys successes in this period were very impressive, at
least so far as the SLLs ability to win a wide audience for its politics was
concerned. A rally at the Empire Pool Wembley in March 1972, which marked
the culmination of a YS national Right to Work march, drew a crowd of over
8,000 (though some of them were no doubt there partly for a concert featuring
such attractions as the rock group Slade).8 A year later at the same venue a
Pageant of Working Class History, in which the SLLs playwrights and actors
collaborated with trade unionists and youth to stage large-scale dramatisations
of earlier workers struggles, was attended by 10,000 people.9 During Healys
105
speech at this event, which the SLL hailed as the greatest day in the history of
British Trotskyism, a forty-foot high enlargement of the great leader was
projected onto a screen in front of the assembled multitude!10
To Healy, who had spent the best part of his political career in small
revolutionary groups, it must have seemed that he had finally cracked it. Yet
these rallies were more a tribute to Healys talents as a political showman than
a reflection of the SLLs real influence in the working class. Indeed, for Healy
such mass spectacles became a substitute for a serious fight to establish a solid
political base in the mass movement. As Mike Banda would later comment,
Healy came to suffer the delusion that by marches, pageants, pop concerts and
various other politically exotic devices ... he could replace historical experience
and the long arduous struggle of the party and persuade thousands of workers
to abandon social democracy and become Trotskyists.11
The essentially sectarian relationship which Healy developed between the
SLL and the mass struggles of the working class seems to have been based on
a particularly dogmatic reading of Lenins What Is To Be Done?, with its onesided, and ultimately false, emphasis on revolutionary consciousness being
brought into the workers movement from without.12 Thus Workers Press,
despite being a daily, remained essentially a propaganda organ which gave little
agitational guidance to militant workers. Healys line was that trade unionists
should be left to get on with the practical details of industrial struggles, while
the SLLs role was to argue for the general strategic line of bringing down the
Tory government and electing a Labour government pledged to carry out
socialist policies. This meant that leading trade unionists in the SLL were often
allowed to behave in a thoroughly opportunist fashion in their union work.13 It
also produced the familiar sight of SLL members intervening at labour
movement meetings in a woodenly propagandist manner which failed to
address any of the immediate issues under discussion.
Nor was Healy capable of providing the working class with a Marxist analysis
of the economic and political developments underlying the class struggle. When
Nixon broke the dollars link with gold in August 1971, Healy asserted that this
had provoked an economic crisis which was the worst in the history of
capitalism14 and was driving the system towards complete collapse.15 The
Tories response to this ever-deepening economic crisis, according to Healy,
was to try and establish through its industrial relations legislation a corporate
state along the lines of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, in which independent
trade unions would be destroyed. And in this project, bizarrely enough, the
Tories supposedly had the support of the right wing of the union bureaucracy,
who Healy claimed were getting ready to accept the governments laws and
join the corporate state!16
Predictions of imminent economic catastrophe and incipient right wing
dictatorship were of course nothing new for Healy. He had been saying this sort
of thing as far back as 1945-46.17 But whereas at that time Healy had employed
such arguments to advocate total entry into the Labour Party, he now drew
106
precisely the opposite conclusion that reformism was finished and that it was
necessary to set up an independent revolutionary party. The result, in
November 1973, was the transformation of the SLL into the Workers
Revolutionary Party. As was often the case with Healy, ultra-left bombast went
hand in hand with opportunist practice. The fantasy that Heath was intent on
imposing a Bonapartist dictatorship, in preparation for massive state
repressions against the working class and the Marxist movement18 was used to
justify a programmatic emphasis on the defence of democratic rights. The
perspectives document for the new party, which appeared as a central
committee statement in February 1973, was based on the Charter of Basic
Rights from 1970, and had a predominantly reformist character. 19 Not a word
was said about the dictatorship of the proletariat as the strategic objective of
the socialist revolution in Britain, it has been pointed out. The perspectives did
not explain and expose the class nature of bourgeois democracy .... The
document had nothing to say about the struggle against British imperialism, nor
did it say anything about the relationship of the British working class struggle to
the national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles throughout the world. The
programmatic section of the document did not call for Irish self-determination.
In its content and underlying conception, the programme on which the WRP
was founded had nothing to do with Trotskyism.20
The WRPs founding conference, which was attended by 3,000 delegates
and visitors, should have indicated to Healy that, for all the gains of the
previous few years, he was still a long way short of creating a truly mass
revolutionary party of the working class. But Healys head was filled with visions
of an imminent struggle for power. We say the preconditions for the social
revolution are maturing rapidly, he assured the conference. There is no middle
road either we defeat this government and smash its state apparatus or they
will destroy us. The conflict ahead in fact poses this question of dual power.21
The problem of the continuing hold of social democracy over the labour
movement was easily disposed of. Workers know, the first statement by the
new WRP central committee blithely asserted, that what is posed today is ... a
revolutionary political confrontation in which the whole question of power is
posed.22 Subsequent political developments were to deal harsh blows to such
illusions.
****
THE TRANSFORMATION of the SLL into the Workers Revolutionary Party
was immediately followed by the final upsurge of struggle against the Heath
government which was to culminate in the historic defeat of the Tories by the
National Union of Mineworkers. In November 1973, when the NUM began an
overtime ban in pursuit of a pay claim which breached the Tory pay laws, Heath
declared a state of emergency, followed in January 1974 by a three-day week
in industry to conserve energy supplies. In the face of the governments
continued refusal to concede their claim, in February the miners declared a
national strike, and Heath responded by calling a snap general election, hoping
to win the middle class vote with a union-bashing campaign. In the event, he
107
suffered a humiliating rejection. Labour emerged from the election as the party
with the largest number of seats and was able to form a minority government
under Harold Wilson.
In this situation of intense industrial and political conflict, a genuine
revolutionary organisation, even one of the WRPs relatively small size, could
have played an important role in clarifying political issues for advanced workers
and outlining the tasks ahead. But the WRP leadership was in a state of
complete political disorientation. During the election campaign Healy proclaimed
that Heath was intent on installing a police-military dictatorship, and Workers
Press carried a series of bloodcurdling headlines to this effect. However, when
the maverick Tory Enoch Powell made his intervention just prior to the election,
urging his supporters to vote Labour because of its commitment to a
referendum on the Common Market, Heath was deposed from his position as
aspirant British fuhrer and replaced by Powell. Healy assured a WRP eve-of-poll
meeting that the two-party system is breaking up and that the coming conflict
would be between the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Powellite
movement!23
The WRP stood nine of its own candidates in the general election. They
received votes ranging from a derisory 52 for Workers Press journalist Stephen
Johns in Dunbartonshire East, to a relatively respectable 1,108 for WRP miner
Dave Temple in Wallsend (compared with 41,811 for the successful Labour
candidate). These results indicated that at best only a very narrow layer of the
working class was responsive to pseudo-revolutionary appeals to break from
Labour, and that the overwhelming majority of class-conscious workers retained
their political allegiance to social democracy. Yet Healy failed to take this
question at all seriously. The WRP leadership deluded itself that a Labour
government would be quickly discredited among militant workers, who would
then rally to the alternative revolutionary leadership of the WRP.24
It all turned out rather differently. The Wilson government proceeded to
settle the miners pay claim, end the state of emergency and the three-day
week, and abolish the Industrial Relations Act. Far from breaking from
reformism, the advanced sections of the working class remained loyal to
Labour, and at a second general election in October Wilson was returned to
office with a narrow overall majority.
But Healy was oblivious to the real political situation. Having surrounded
himself with middle class sycophants from the journalistic and acting
professions, and cut himself off from all but the most intermittent contact with
the working class, Healy was able to allow his political fantasies free rein. Thus
he could argue, in all seriousness, that a situation of dual power had been
ushered in by the fall of the Heath government. In the October election the
WRP again stood its own candidates, scarcely bothering to argue for a Labour
vote. Healy set a target of 3,000 new recruits for the election campaign, and
members were signed up to what was supposedly a Bolshevik party on the
108
most minimal anti-Tory basis. The WRP candidates did no better than in
February, and the partys numbers continued to decline.
All the conditions for a major crisis in Healys organisation were present, and
it was not long in breaking. The catalyst was provided by a group of former SLL
members linked with the French OCI Robin Blick, Mark Jenkins and John and
Mary Archer who in January 1974 began publishing a regular Bulletin aimed
at WRP members. Although the Bulletin group held an unduly positive opinion
of Healys earlier deep entry in the Labour Party, they were very effective at
exposing the anti-Marxist absurdities of his current political line. In particular,
the group emphasised the need for transitional demands instead of Healys
ultimatist calls for the immediate nationalisation of major industries and the
banks.
Healys reaction was to ban WRP members from reading the Bulletin, and to
change the partys constitution, removing the right of expelled members to
appeal to conference.25 Even loyal party members baulked at this. Alan
Thornett, the leading figure in the WRPs factory branch at British Leyland
Cowley, voted against Healys constitutional changes on the central committee.
A furious Healy demanded, and got, from Thornett a written retraction of this
vote. When the issue was put to the partys special conference in July 1974
another Cowley WRPer, Tony Richardson, made the mistake of asking a
question of clarification. He was hauled off to Healys office and forced to
admit, on pain of expulsion, that he was wrong even to have asked the
question.
Hamstrung in their industrial work by Healys sectarian ultra-leftism, and
faced with a party regime which prevented any serious reassessment of the
WRPs policies, Thornett and his supporters opened up discussions with the
Bulletin Group, and began with the latters assistance to organise a faction
against Healy. In September, Thornett presented a document in his own name
urging a return to the Transitional Programme, which was in fact written in
large part by Robin Blick. It demonstrated irrefutably that the WRPs politics
were utterly divorced from Trotskyism.26
Healy responded to this challenge with his usual anti-Bolshevik methods.
Thornetts views were dishonestly misrepresented to the membership and
denounced as a form of Menshevism, while Workers Press editorials suddenly
began including the very transitional demands sliding scales of wages and
hours, etc which Thornett had accused the WRP leadership of rejecting. As it
became clear that he was incapable of answering Thornett politically, Healy
abandoned any pretence of democratic procedure. In October, Tony Richardson
was summoned to the partys Clapham headquarters and physically assaulted
by Healy. A control commission set up to inquire into the violence against
Richardson was then rigged by Healy to provide trumped-up charges against
Thornett and his supporters in order to justify their expulsion. Some 200
members were thrown out of the WRP, and its main base in industry liquidated.
109
The effects of Healys wrong perspectives, sectarian politics and bureaucratic
centralism were not restricted to Britain, but were felt throughout the WRPs
International Committee. In the United States, Workers League leader Tim
Wohlforth was encouraged by Healy to implement a new orientation towards
youth in imitation of the SLLs YS work, trying to attract young African
Americans and Puerto Ricans to politics by means of dances, socials, etc.27 On
Healys instructions, Wohlforth waged a bitter struggle against the
conservative forces in the League who resisted this new turn. The results were
devastating. By Wohlforths own calculations, around 100 members, including
some of its oldest and most experienced cadres, were hounded out of the WL.28
Healy, for his part, regarded all this as a great success. At the Fifth Congress of
the IC, in April 1974, he argued that the loss of the old propagandists was a
necessary part of the WLs turn to the working class, and recommended the
Leagues work to the other sections of the IC as an example to be emulated.
After contact with a group of former WL members, however, Healy
apparently woke up to the disastrous consequences of the new turn. That he
himself was directly to blame for this situation was not, of course, something
that Healy could accept. Instead, Wohlforth recounts, Healy immediately
concluded that the loss of leading members over the past year was the work of
the CIA! ... After all, as he saw it, the League was breaking up. The CIA would
like to see the League break up. Therefore the CIA must be at work. The chief
agent was identified by Healy as Wohlforths partner, Nancy Fields, on the sole
basis that her uncle, with whom she had broken all relations years before, was
a former CIA employee.
Healy attended the WLs summer camp in August 1974 in order to deal
personally with the matter, having first sent Cliff Slaughter on ahead to check
that the great leaders life would not be under threat! The purging of Wohlforth,
who was essentially set up as a scapegoat for the results of Healys own
policies, was carried out at a WL central committee meeting in the middle of
the night. Healy started the discussion, charging Wohlforth with gross
irresponsibility for not reporting Nancy Fields CIA connection. One by one, the
participants rose to denounce Wohlforth and Fields. The comrades, Wohlforth
writes, had been up since six am or earlier, were clearly bleary eyed, dazed
and caught up in the isolated world of the camp with its tensions, guards and
continuous discussion of the outside world in terms ever more stark and unreal.
An atmosphere of complete hysteria dominated the meeting.... Healy, with his
face getting ever redder and in an extreme emotional state, stood in the centre
of the circle, facing me. Finally it was just too much for me. I stood up. I ... I
disagree with the entire proceedings, I stammered. Healy rushed up to me and
shook his fists within an inch of my face shouting I will destroy you.
At Healys instigation, Wohlforth was removed as WL secretary, while Fields
was suspended from the League. Healy then returned to London to call a
meeting of the IC which retrospectively endorsed his actions, for which he had
in fact no constitutional authority whatsoever. An internal inquiry into Fields
subsequently found that there was no truth at all in Healys paranoid
110
accusations. By this time, however, both Wohlforth and Fields had left the WL
in disgust.
Another victim of Healys arbitrary methods was L. Sklavos (Dimitri
Toubanis), the secretary of the ICs Greek section, the Workers Internationalist
League.29 In April 1975, Sklavos put forward a short draft resolution to the WIL
central committee, arguing that the Leagues call for the immediate overthrow
of the government did not correspond to the actual state of the class struggle
or the existing level of political consciousness of the working class. And, to
make matters worse, in an international school later that year, Sklavos had the
nerve to question Healy and Slaughters exposition of dialectics. At the WIL
congress that summer, Sklavos and his supporters found themselves in a
minority, and Mike Banda, who attended on behalf of the WRP, organised the
removal of Sklavos as editor of the Leagues paper.
After being repeatedly postponed, an international discussion on philosophy
was held in Athens in January 1976. Healy, who seems to have been worried
that his intervention in the Workers League had too blatantly revealed his
corrupt organisational practices, did not address the conference, but remained
in his Athens hotel room directing operations against the opposition. Sklavos,
who was refused the right to relate the disputed philosophical issues to
differences over practical political questions, resigned as secretary in order to
fight for his positions among the membership and was promptly expelled for
doing so! As had happened in the Thornett case, this was followed by a
wholesale purge of oppositionists.
It would be a mistake to see the events of the mid-70s in the WRP and IC as
representing the degeneration of what had once been a healthy revolutionary
tendency. If this study of Healys career has demonstrated anything, it is that
the organisation he led was never more than a degenerate fragment of
Trotskys Fourth International. But the bureaucratic thuggery and sheer political
craziness which became synonymous with Healyism certainly intensified from
this time onwards. In retrospect, the only surprising thing about the collapse of
Healys organisation, which occurred a decade later, was that it did not happen
long before.
Notes
2. Interestingly, this group also held discussions with Tony Cliff, but were
more impressed with Healys revolutionary hardness than with an IS which had
then only just emerged from its libertarian phase to adopt a formal Leninism.
(Interview with Robin Blick, 14 August 1992.)
3. T. Wohlforth, Memoirs, unpublished draft (later published in a revised
form as The Prophet's Children, 1994).
111
4. Ibid.
5. Tasks of the Fourth International, May 1980.
6. These points are made in D. North, Gerry Healy and His Place in the
History of the Fourth International, 1991, pp.54-57. North, however, apparently
holds the anti-Marxist view that it was impermissible in principle for Healy to
recruit from this petit bourgeois milieu.
7. I was shocked when I next met them, Wohlforth writes of the Redgraves.
It was at an International Committee meeting held in 1973 and Corin and
Vanessa were the SLLs delegates to the conference! This seemed unreal to me
as Vanessa had been in the movement barely a year and Corin only a couple of
years basically as a rank and filer. They had become Healys special pets, the
mask of humility was being dropped, and a kind of arrogance emerging. Both
made rather lengthy and totally hollow presentations to the meeting asserting
as if they had just discovered something the critical importance of the
revolutionary party and theory in the next period of the capitalist crisis, etc, etc,
etc (Wohlforth, Memoirs).
8. Workers Press, 13 March 1972.
9. Ibid., 12 March 1973.
10. D. Widgery, The Left in Britain, 1976, pp.499-50.
12. Trotsky never accepted that Lenins formulation was correct. See his
Stalin, 1968, p.58; also P. Pomper, ed, Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-35, 1986,
p.84.
13. See the comments in Workers Socialist League, The Battle for
Trotskyism, 1976, pp.78-80.
14. Workers Press, 20 October 1971.
15. A US Treasury prediction of another 1929 could be the understatement
of the year, one editorial stated (ibid., 31 March 1973).
16. Ibid., 20 February 1973. For an analysis of Healys stupid and incoherent
positions on corporatism, see R. Black, Fascism in Germany, 1975, pp.1088ff.
17. See chapter 2.
18. Workers Press, 20 January 1973.
112
19. Draft Perspectives to Transform the SLL into the Revolutionary Party , SLL
pamphlet, 1973.
20. Fourth International, Summer 1986.
21. Workers Press, 5 November 1973. (Healys speech to the WRP founding
conference was later published by the Redgraves in their Marxist Monthly,
December 1992/January 1993. Strangely enough, none of his barmier
predictions concerning the imminence of dual power, of the struggle to smash
the capitalist state, etc, appeared in this version.)
22. Workers Press, 12 November 1973.
23. Ibid., 1 March 1974.
24. Thus Cliff Slaughter argued (ibid, 8 January 1974) that, if the Heath
government were brought down by industrial action, in a general election that
followed, the reformist Labour leaders would be exposed by the demand that
they carry out socialist policies and by the refusal of workers to call off their
action simply because Labour was elected.
25. This account is based on the Workers Socialist Leagues The Battle for
Trotskyism, 1976.
26. When the details of this collaboration were revealed some years later by
Robin Blick, Healy predictably accused the Thornett group of having conspired
with the WRPs political enemies behind the backs of the party. But such
conspiratorial methods were entirely justifiable, given the regime that existed in
the WRP. The only criticism of the Thornett group is that, after their expulsion
from the WRP, they continued to deny that they had collaborated with the
Bulletin Group during their factional struggle against Healy.
27. This account is based on the draft of Tim Wohlforths Memoirs, on the
published version, The Prophets Children, pp.231-45, and on a document by
Wohlforth serialised in Intercontinental Press, February-March 1975.
28. C. Slaughter, ed., Trotskyism versus Revisionism, vol.7, 1984, p.172.
29. This account is based on a document by the Sklavos group (the
Communist Internationalist League), serialised in the Thornettites paper
Socialist Press, October-December 1976. I am obliged to V.N. Gelis for this
reference.
113
Chapter 10 (1975-1985)
THE ELECTION of a majority Labour government in October 1974
posed a major challenge to Marxists. It wasnt difficult to predict that the
administration headed by Harold Wilson (and, after his resignation in 1976, by
James Callaghan) would respond to the economic problems of British capitalism
by attacking the working class. Nor did it require much foresight to recognise
that these attacks would provoke resistance from a class which had achieved
such a high level of organisation and militancy during the anti-Tory battles of
1970-74. What was necessary was to develop tactics and strategy which would
take forward the political struggle against the Labour leadership. This was the
challenge that Healy failed to grapple with.
The WRPs political line towards the Labour government followed an identical
course to the one the SLL had pursued after 1964. It was based on the same
delusion that under the impact of social democratic betrayals workers would
inevitably break from Labour and rally to an alternative revolutionary
organisation. And in mid-1975, after the Wilson administration imposed a pay
limit below the rate of inflation, Healy issued the same foolish call to bring
down the Labour government. But whereas in the mid-1960s Healy had pulled
the SLL back from this suicidal policy, he now plunged headlong into ultraleftism. The WRP continued to repeat its mindless call for the overthrow of the
Labour government right up to 1979, when the government was finally brought
down by the Tories.
This sectarianism towards the Labour Party made even less sense than it had
a decade earlier. For, in the course of the fierce conflicts between the trade
unions and the Heath government, Labour had recovered from its late-1960s
decline and the Constituency Labour Parties had returned to political life. The
row which erupted in 1975 over Newham CLPs deselection of its right wing MP,
Reg Prentice, was an opening shot in the battle over party democracy which
was to be central to the rise of the Bennite movement. But Healys abstention
from work inside the Labour Party meant that the WRP was unable to intervene
effectively in these developments. The projected mass party was reduced to a
shrinking sect shouting ultra-left slogans from the sidelines.
The WRPs failure to correct its self-destructive course was partly due to
Healys own withdrawal from active organisational work. Though the Healyite
tendencys lack of internal democracy had always prevented the membership
from critically evaluating its experiences in implementing the party line, Healy
had to an extent been able to overcome this through his active involvement in
the work of the branches. But the energetic, hands-on approach of the 1960s
was now long past. These days Healy didnt even bother to attend Central
Committee meetings all the way through, often leaving before the reports from
the regions had been heard. The expulsion of a whole layer of worker militants
around Alan Thornett, and Healys increased reliance on middle class followers
114
like the Redgraves, further removed him from actual developments in the
working class.
Healy tried to extricate the WRP from its political isolation, and the
consequent slump in membership and income, by closing down Workers Press
in early 1976, pleading financial collapse. In fact his real purpose was to move
operations to Runcorn, where the party had set up its own print shop and could
replace printworkers on union rates with party members on subsistence wages.
The daily paper was relaunched in May 1976 as the News Line. An attempt at a
mass-circulation popular tabloid, the new paper drew on the undoubted talents
of former Sunday Times journalist Alex Mitchell. Its political level, however,
marked a sharp decline even in comparison with its predecessor. True, the
paper enabled the WRP to get a hearing from workers in struggle, notably
during the long firefighters strike of 1977-8. But, having got a hearing, the
party had nothing sensible to say to them.
In fact the WRPs politics had by this stage become completely crazed.
Having announced that a revolutionary situation had been ushered in by the
Labour governments attacks on the working class in 1975, Healy now
proclaimed that the struggle for state power was directly engaged. This is the
end of a whole historical era of parliamentarianism and class compromise which
began approximately in 1848, he informed the membership at the end of 1977.
The struggle for power opens up ... the WRP has been emphasising this since
the beginning of August before the firemens strike.1
In the face of this political idiocy the WRPs numbers went on declining and
the circulation of the new mass paper stagnated, resulting in a chronic
financial crisis. On 31 December 1977 a special conference in fact made up
of leading party members selected by Healy himself was called to deal with
the deteriorating situation. After the assembled delegates failed to come up
with the required 25 per cent increase in News Line orders, Healy called a
meeting of the Political Committee and got it to agree to the expulsion of nine
leading members. When, at 4.00am on the morning of the 2nd January 1978,
the conference finally reassembled, one participant recalled, G. Healy claimed
that it was clear that no one, apart from himself, was capable of defending the
party in its crisis. He proposed that expulsions be rescinded only on the basis
that he be given personal powers to expel whomsoever he saw fit from the
party over the next period. The proposal was passed unanimously by the tired
delegates.2
In search of further scapegoats for the partys difficulties, Healy then
proceeded to carry out a purge of the News Line editorial board. This provoked
resistance from one of the victims, Jack Gale, whose hitherto unquestioning
loyalty to the organisation had resulted in him being used for years past as
Healys whipping boy on the Central Committee. In an internal document, which
was suppressed by the WRP leadership, Gale demolished Healys rantings about
a revolutionary situation and an immediate struggle for power, and he savaged
Healys use of philosophy as a substitute for serious political analysis. The
115
party now starts not from a study of objective reality, Gale wrote, ... but from
an ironclad assumption that its analysis of the objective situation cannot be
wrong and that any failure of real life to live up to the partys expectations is
the subjective fault of individual comrades which must be combatted by
sackings, expulsions, hysterical denunciations and threats.3
Healy was now able to use the WRPs College of Marxist Education in
Derbyshire to inflict his bogus and almost entirely incomprehensible version of
dialectics on the membership. This full-time college was in fact well beyond the
requirements of a group the WRPs size, and new members recruited on a
minimal political basis were frequently pressured into attending courses there to
make up numbers. Complaints by one of them an actress named Irene Gorst
about the treatment she received were featured in a 1975 Observer article,
and this was used as a pretext for a police raid on the college. The WRP
subsequently sued the Observer for libel, and when the case came to court in
1978 the partys witnesses (undoubtedly on Healys instructions) disgraced
themselves by equivocating over revolutionary principles in a vain attempt to
persuade the jury of the WRPs respectability.
Convinced that he would soon be standing at head of a revolutionary
government in Britain, Healy sought to build the international connections that
would provide both the resources for the struggle for power and also the
alliances necessary to sustain the resulting socialist regime. A WRP delegation
was reportedly sent to Libya in April 1976 to request money for a new printing
press for the News Line, and Healy himself apparently visited in August 1977 in
search of further financial assistance from the Libyan regime. 4 Not surprisingly,
adulatory articles about Colonel Gaddafi were one of the notable innovations of
the new paper. News Line gave equally uncritical support to the Arafat
leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and to the Baathist regime
in Iraq. Healys new turn had its roots in the SLLs position on the Arab
Revolution a decade before if not earlier, in his uncritical support for Algerian
nationalist leader Messali Hadj during the 1950s. But the new policy went well
beyond this. In the late 1970s, Healy achieved a level of sycophancy towards
Third World nationalists which outdid anything the derided Pabloites of the
United Secretariat had ever managed.
Under these circumstances, political criticisms of the USec became
increasingly difficult to sustain. Instead, Healy launched the Security and the
Fourth International campaign. This investigation, which was conducted by
Alex Mitchell and American Healyite leader David North, began by charging US
Socialist Workers Party veterans Joseph Hansen and George Novack with being
accomplices of the GPU because of their failure to counter Stalinist penetration
of the Fourth International. It went on to denounce Hansen as a GPU/FBI
double agent, and ended up by accusing the entire SWP leadership of working
for the FBI on sole basis that many of them once attended the same college!
In 1977 a public meeting was held in London where representatives of virtually
every other tendency claiming adherence to Trotskyism condemned this
Stalinist-style frame-up.
116
Meanwhile, the Labour government lurched from crisis to crisis. In 1976,
faced with a collapse in the value of sterling, it turned to the International
Monetary Fund for a loan, and this was granted only after massive cuts in
public spending had been agreed. With the trade union bureaucracy having
imposed a policy of wage restraint in support of the Labour leadership, the
working class suffered a sharp decline in living standards. The so-called social
contract collapsed with the winter of discontent in 1978-9, during which the
Callaghan government was assailed by successive industrial disputes. All this
fell far short of a pre-revolutionary situation, never mind the full-blown
revolutionary crisis of Healys imaginings. What it posed was not the struggle
for power, but the necessity of a fight to remove the right-wing Labour
leadership and the union bureaucrats who supported it.
In March 1979 the Callaghan government was defeated in a vote of
confidence in the Commons, and a general election was called for May. The
WRP put up 60 candidates, which strained the organisations resources to
breaking point, in order to qualify for a five-minute television election
broadcast. It began its campaign by condemning rival left groups for arguing
that Labour represented any political alternative to the Tories. After all,
according to Healy, the era of parliamentary politics was now over. The stage
is set in Britain for a general strike and a civil war, whoever wins the coming
General Election, News Line declared.5 However, where its own candidates
were not standing, the WRP called on workers to vote Labour in solidarity
against the Tory enemy, but without any confidence in the class collaboration
of the Labour leaders.6
What this ignored was that workers did have at least some confidence even
in the Labour Partys reactionary leadership. In one of his more sober moments,
Healy noted the reluctance to break with Callaghan of the masses of the
working people of this country. It is not that they believe Callaghan is going to
make much difference. It is because they feel that what they have seen of him
is more acceptable than a return to the years 1970-1974 of the Tory
government of Heath.7 But the WRPs stupid ultra-leftism prevented it from
addressing this problem. Indeed, the perspectives document for the partys
Fourth Congress, held on the eve of the general election, explicitly condemned
calls for the expulsion of the Labour leadership as reformist!8
Support for the WRPs candidates ranged from Roy Battersbys 95 votes in
Dundee to Simon Piranis 820 in Ormskirk all of them, needless to say, lost
their deposits. Healy dismissed this humiliation with the argument that the WRP
wasnt standing to get votes but to put forward its revolutionary programme, a
rationalisation which ignored the fact that the votes the WRP got were a clear
indication of its abject failure in winning workers to this programme. The defeat
of Labour and the election of an extreme-right Tory government under
Margaret Thatcher were also brushed aside by Healy. No need to be depressed,
he told a London area aggregate immediately after the election, the arrival of a
Tory administration would blow away a few cobwebs.9 During the coming
117
years of vicious attacks on the labour movement, the Thatcher government
would succeed in blowing away rather more than that.
****
FROM THE end of the 1970s, Healys adaptation to bourgeois nationalist
regimes and organisations in the Third World proceeded apace. After the Shah
of Iran was overthrown in the 1979 revolution, the WRP soon gave up any
attempt at Marxist analysis in favour of unconditional support for Khomeinis
Islamic regime, to the extent of endorsing its suppression of the Iranian USec
group. In Zimbabwe the Popular Front, and in particular Joshua Nkomos ZAPU,
were given uncritical backing. News Line notoriously justified the execution of
Iraqi Communist Party members by the Baathist regime, and even published a
glossy brochure extolling the glories of Iraq under the leadership of Saddam
Hussein. Formal references to the permanent revolution still appeared
occasionally in WRP and International Committee statements, but these served
only as a cover for a political line which depicted Libya under Colonel Gaddafi as
a society in transition to socialism, and renounced the fight to construct
independent working class parties in those countries where Healy had
established opportunist relations with the existing nationalist leaderships.
Indeed, by the late 1970s Healy had abandoned any serious attempt to build
his own world party of socialist revolution, the International Committee.
The IC by this time was in poor shape. In large part this was due to the
destructive effects of the policies which its constituent organisations had
adopted under the instructions of Healy and the WRP leadership. The
Revolutionary Communist League of Sri Lanka was forced to renounce its initial
support for an independent Tamil state, thus isolating itself from the Tamil
national struggle. In Peru, the Communist League pursued the bogus Security
and the Fourth International campaign by attacking Hugo Blanco, the popular
leader of the countrys USec section, as a supporter of CIA agents (i.e. the SWP
leadership), which completely discredited the CL among militant workers. And
the IC sections in Germany and Australia were required to imitate the WRPs
ultra-leftism towards the Labour Party, calling for their respective reformist
governments to be brought down. The WRP leadership made no effort to
analyse the specific situation in any of the countries where the IC was
organising. Instead, the fantasy of a world-wide revolutionary situation of
uniform development was adopted. In any case, Healy had effectively lost
interest in the small groups of the IC, except as a source of finance for the
WRP. He now had more important international relations to cultivate.
Whether Healy succeeded in raising much cash from these relations is
doubtful, however. The 1985 report on Healys financial shenanigans, compiled
by David North and other representatives of the IC, indicated the receipt of
over 1 million from Libya. But Dave Bruce, who oversaw much of the WRPs
commercial printing, argues that of the thousands of pounds that came from
the Libyans to the WRPs printing company, most of it was for the printing of
two newspapers. That was about 10,000 a month, 120,000 a year, which
118
sounds an enormous amount of money. But of the 120,000 over half covered
the cost of raw materials. Further income came from a contract to print
250,000 copies of Gaddafis Green Book. In all these cases the contracts were
won in competition with other printing companies, by quoting a low price,
which was itself made possible by party members working extremely long hours
for very low wages.
Regarding the daily paper, the production of which was commonly attributed
to the WRPs receipt of Libyan gold, Bruce argues that the actual month-tomonth running costs were covered by income from the sales of the News Line,
the funds and the commercial printing. I have no evidence whatsoever and I
was a director of the company, so I got to know the books fairly well that any
Libyan money went towards the printing of the News Line. And the only
evidence there is, is contained in a report produced by the author of Security
and the Fourth International!10
Indeed, by 1981 Healy was reduced to writing begging letters to Gaddafi
(We greatly regret having to approach you with such matters, since you have
so many more important affairs to contend with), but with no apparent
success.11 As for Iraq, it would seem that the Baathists were too astute to
swallow Healys claims of mass political influence in Britain, and refused to put
much money into a politically irrelevant sect like the WRP. Dave Bruce recalls
hearing rumours to the effect that the Baathists were pressurised by Healy to
give large sums of money to fund the newspaper, but when they saw the
results of the [1979] election, where we stood 60 candidates, at that point they
more or less decided that the WRP was a joke, and they backed off. 12 All in all,
there is no question that Healy tried to sell himself to the Arab bourgeoisie.
What is rather more doubtful is whether they thought it was worth paying very
much for him.
It was significant that Healys betrayal of revolutionary principles, and his
adoption of policies which only a few years earlier would have been denounced
as Pabloism, produced so little opposition within the WRP or the IC. Mike
Banda did raise a protest on the WRP Central Committee over News Line
defending the Baathists' execution of Iraqi CP members, but got no support. It
was not until 1984 that David North of the US Workers League challenged the
WRPs general line on bourgeois nationalism, and he found himself completely
isolated. It was the same with the bogus dialectics. When North criticised
Healys fraudulent philosophy, Cliff Slaughter and Mike Banda quickly withdrew
their initial support and gave their backing to Healy. In both cases, North
himself was eventually forced to bow the knee.
Not surprisingly, the power given to Healy in 1978 to discipline and expel
committees and individual members on his own authority was confirmed
unanimously (how else?) by subsequent party congresses. At the Fifth
Congress, in February 1981, a resolution to this effect was moved by Slaughter
and enthusiastically supported by other future leaders of the anti-Healy faction
in the 1985 split, who would later claim that they were carrying out a
119
subterranean struggle for Marxism in the WRP during this period!13 The
outcome was the formation of a Central Committee Department, consisting
exclusively of Healy himself, which took decisions without reference to any of
the WRPs elected bodies. What this demonstrated conclusively was that the
organisation was a rotten sect whose politics, theory and constitution were little
more than props for a degenerate leader-cult.
Although Healys grovelling to bourgeois nationalist leaders was presented to
the membership as a principled anti-imperialist stand, it was notable that he
failed to take any such stand against British imperialism. When the Malvinas
war broke out in 1982, Healy initially adopted a plague-on-both-your-houses
position and refused to call for the defeat of his own ruling class. It was only
after an intervention by Mike Banda that the WRPs line was reversed. In the
case of Ireland, Healy evidently feared that a firm defence of the liberation
struggle would provoke state repression against the WRP, and the News Line
indulged in increasingly shrill denunciations of the IRA which contrasted sharply
with the papers soft attitude towards terrorism in the Middle East. One YS
member, Rufus Boulting, had the courage to condemn the WRPs double
standards on this issue, only to find himself stitched up by Healy hatchet-man
Simon Pirani.14
Healys galloping opportunism wasnt restricted to international politics.
During the 1980 steelworkers strike, the friendliest relations were established
with steel union president Bill Sirs, as they were with the National Graphical
Association bureaucracy in the Warrington print strike of 1983. Healy also
cosied up to Labour lefts like Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight, leaders
respectively of the Greater London and Lambeth Councils, and the WRP cooperated with them in publishing the left reformist paper Labour Herald.
Not that the WRP abandoned the sectarianism of 1970s. Healy remained
convinced that reformism in Britain was finished, and he now called for the
Tories to be overthrown and replaced by a workers revolutionary government.
In the 1983 general election Healys party continued its established policy of
masquerading as a serious electoral alternative to Labour with even less
impact than before. (The best result achieved by the WRPs 21 candidates was
417 votes for Stuart Carter in Salford East, while Corin Redgrave with 72 votes
in Tooting was just edged out of last place by Peter Gibson with 71 in
Lewisham East!) Combined with the feting of Livingstone and Knight, this
sectarian ultra-leftism produced a schizophrenic political line embodied in the
WRPs call for Community Councils, which could be portrayed as embryonic
organs of workers power while at the same time providing a useful platform for
Healys left-reformist allies.
Hobnobbing with union bureaucrats and prominent Labour lefts no doubt
gave Healy the illusion that he was wielding real political influence. But these
relations at the top were no substitute for building a rank-and-file movement
in the unions or a Marxist tendency in the Labour Party. Healys mass party
was as far away as ever and, despite large-scale sports coverage and the use of
120
new technology to bring in colour photography long before Fleet Street did so,
there was a drastic fall in News Line sales. It was only with the outbreak of the
year-long miners strike of 1984-5 that the WRPs fortunes experienced a
temporary upturn.
This historic and bitterly-fought episode in the class struggle rallied
enormous support from the rank and file of the labour movement. But Healy
responded to the resulting solidarity campaign with characteristic sectarianism,
banning the WRP membership from participation in the miners support groups.
These were held to be largely controlled by regional TUCs comprising Stalinists,
revisionists and reformists whose sole purpose is to de-politicise the miners
strike and confine it to the level of baked-beans-some-cash-and-solidarity. 15
Healy preferred to build small and ineffective Community Councils, which could
be dominated by the WRP, rather than fight it out politically as a minority within
the real movement.
Although the daily paper gave the WRP an advantage in this situation of
intense class conflict, the News Line provided no political lead to the miners.
From mid-April 1984, the paper began calling continuously for the TUC to
launch a general strike. This demand did have direct agitational relevance at
some points during the miners strike, when the prospect arose of other
workers taking industrial action. But the WRP reduced it to a general
propaganda slogan which failed to relate to the actual course of the class
struggle.
The WRPs incessant call for a general strike was also based on a wild
overestimation of the political situation. The beginning of the miners strike
coincided with the Thatcher governments banning of unions at GCHQ. This,
and the massive police operation directed at picketing miners, was taken by the
WRP as evidence that the traditional system of capitalist rule through
parliamentary democracy is a thing of the past. In its place is Bonapartism a
regime of crisis relying on the armed national police force, directly confronting
the organised working class on the streets.16 The WRP insisted that the miners
strike could not be won outside the struggle for power, and that if the miners
were defeated Thatcher would impose a police-military dictatorship. If we dont
take the power we will have fascism, Healy declared in February 1985, on the
eve of the strikes collapse. Make no mistake, if we dont do it, there will be
fascism.17 This hysterical ultra-leftism completely evaded the real political task
to bring down the Tory government and replace it with a Labour government
under conditions which would have favoured a successful fight to remove the
treacherous Kinnock leadership.
Behind the pseudo-revolutionary bombast, Healy was busily adapting to the
NUM bureaucracy. While the WRP correctly argued that the miners could not
defeat the Tory government on their own, NUM president Arthur Scargill was
convinced that the strike could be won on a sectional basis. But the WRP, which
had earlier attacked Scargill for his syndicalist, reformist and pro-Stalinist
politics, now gave him the most unquestioning support. This was justified with
121
the argument that the developing crisis would automatically resolve the
problem of leadership. No matter if the miners leaders failed to call for a
general strike and the struggle for power, the WRPs Seventh Congress
declared in December 1984 the logic of this revolutionary situation drives
unalterably towards such a conflict.18
When the NUM executive voted for a return to work in March 1985, a WRP
Central Committee statement blithely denied that the miners had suffered a
defeat (we insist and proudly proclaim that the miners were not defeated 19).
And in a personal letter to Scargill the following month, Healy assured him that
a massive confrontation between the capitalist state and the working class,
with the miners again in the forefront, is building up.20 The struggle by Labourcontrolled councils against the Thatcher governments imposed ceiling on local
government rates, which Healy had been convinced would bring other sections
of the working class into action alongside the miners, was now seen as the
battle which would inaugurate the British revolution.
In reality, not only had the miners strike been defeated, but the struggle
against rate-capping was also crumbling. One by one Labour councils
abandoned their defiance of the Tory government and voted to set a legal rate.
The first to do so was the GLC, and News Line dishonestly covered up for
Livingstones own role in the capitulation, blaming it on Labour right-wingers
who broke ranks to set a rate.21 What is more, Healy worked to undermine
efforts by the Labour left to hold the GLC leader to account for his action.
Livingstone himself relates how, the day after he had survived a vote of
censure on the Greater London Labour Party executive, he went to a
confidential meeting with a leading figure of the left to discuss the ramifications
of the previous week. After long discussion we agreed that unless the rift was
healed it could grow into a split which would weaken the left.22
With the WRPs perspectives in shreds and its members demoralised and
disoriented, assistant general secretary Sheila Torrance had the idea of
diverting attention from the partys crisis by organising a march to demand the
release of those miners imprisoned for their role in the strike. On the face of it,
this was an impressive campaign, culminating in a rally of 4,000 at Alexandra
Palace in June 1985. Healy delivered a speech along the usual lines, informing
the audience that Thatcher wasnt preparing to call a general election but to
crush the organised labour movement. He repeated the standard call for a
general strike which, he asserted, would launch a civil war and the struggle for
power.23 Unfortunately for Healy, the only civil war that was in prospect was the
one inside his own organisation.
Notes
1. WRP internal document, 31 December 1977.
122
2. N. Lewis, The Struggle for Revolutionary Leadership: Why the WRP Fails,
1981, p.4.
3. J. Gale, The WRP and the 'Revolutionary Situation', 1989, p.9.
4. International Committee Commission, Interim Report. This document was
reprinted in Workers News, April 1988.
5. News Line, 7 April 1979.
6. Ibid., 17 April 1979.
7. Ibid., 28 April 1979.
8. WRP internal document.
9. Authors recollection.
10. Interview with Dave Bruce, 5 October 1993.
11. D. North, Gerry Healy and his Place in the History of the Fourth
International, 1991, pp.72-3.
12. Bruce interview.
13. North, pp.94-5.
14. Workers News, May 1987.
15. Resolutions Adopted by the Seventh Congress, 1, 2 and 3 December
1984, WRP internal document, p.75.
16. News Line, 29 March 1984.
17. Ibid., 4 February 1985.
18. Resolutions Adopted by the Seventh Congress, p.81.
20. Fourth International, Summer 1986.
22. K. Livingstone, If Voting Changed Anything, They'd Abolish It, 1987,
p.328. I am grateful to Ken Weller for this reference.
23. News Line, 1 July 1985.
123
Chapter 11 (1985)
IN 1985 THE WRP plunged into terminal crisis. Within a matter of
months, this most monolithic of far-left groups split into two rival organisations
which themselves promptly broke up into further fragments, with the WRPs
International Committee fracturing along similar lines. Healy himself, whose
domination of the organisation had seemed total, swiftly found himself isolated
and politically discredited, as the majority of his hitherto loyal followers
demanded his expulsion. What caused this sudden disintegration of the Healyite
movement?
One factor was the shattering of the WRPs perspectives with the defeat of
the miners strike. Of course, this was not exactly the first time that Healys
fantasies had wrecked themselves against reality. But now, perhaps because of
old age he was showing distinct signs of senility he had lost his old ability to
pragmatically shift his political line, and was unable to reorient his demoralised
followers.1 Indeed, beneath the pseudo-revolutionary bombast Healy seems to
have become thoroughly demoralised himself. Convinced that police-military
dictatorship was imminent, he had 20,000 in cash and a BMW car secretly
stashed away in order to flee the country in the event of a fascist coup!2
On top of this, the WRP was faced with a massive financial crisis, the primary
cause of which was Healys megalomaniac insistence that the organisation
should behave as though it were a mass party. Not only had he purchased huge
quantities of printing and other equipment, far in excess of the WRPs needs,
but he had also acquired a bloated apparatus of some 90 full-timers in a
party whose active membership didnt even reach four figures. The situation
was aggravated by a severe reduction in the WRPs income resulting from the
slump in News Line sales which followed the miners defeat. Healys own refusal
to consider any evidence that contradicted claims about the partys growing size
and influence prevented the deteriorating situation being addressed by the WRP
leadership until the organisation was on the point of bankruptcy.
The final nail in Healys political coffin was the eruption of a sexual scandal
centring on his corrupt relations with women comrades. Again, there was
nothing new in this. Back in the early 1950s, Healy had been in trouble after
propositioning of daughter of a prominent figure in the Fourth International. 3 In
1964 an SLL control commission had been held over Healys relationship with a
leader of the Young Socialists.4 And one of the background issues to the 1974
split in the WRP was the rejection of Healys advances by a woman supporter of
Thornett.5 All of this, however, had been kept from the membership, the
majority of whom reacted with shock and outrage after Healys corruption was
exposed in a letter by his longtime secretary Aileen Jennings.
What was the character of this sexual abuse? It was later stated that the
women Healy pressurised into having sexual relations with him mistakenly
believed that the revolution in the form of the "greatest" leader demanded
124
this, the most personal sacrifice of all. They were not coerced ... physically, but
every pressure was brought to bear on them as revolutionaries. The situation
was not so much rape but ... sexual abuse by someone in a position of power
and trust.6 It was, Dave Bruce comments, wholesale sexual corruption in a
manner analogous to these religious sects. Theres a very close parallel.7
The initial form the WRPs crisis took was the outbreak in the spring of 1985
of a fierce conflict between Healy and WRP assistant general secretary Sheila
Torrance. In contrast to Healys deeply pessimistic conclusions concerning the
outcome of the miners strike, Torrance clung to the view that the miners were
undefeated and that Britain was on the verge of a revolution. As Richard Price
points out: Both these were different sides of the came coin basically, which
were frequently deployed throughout the WRPs history, either to scare people
into greater activism "if you dont recruit that many members or sell that
many papers, then the military coup is round the corner" or, on the other
hand, the onward and upward side was that the struggle goes on and achieves
new profound, dialectical heights, etc, etc. So naturally these two positions
came into conflict, even if they were linked. Specifically, Healy in this frame of
mind would be looking for scapegoats to blame for the failure of the
perspective. And that in the first instance was Torrance, because she was chief
organiser, and other elements ... who had some connection with her, which
included the youth leadership ... and the London district committee leadership.8
To which it might be added that Torrance, with her falsified News Line
circulation figures and empty claims of 10,000 members, made herself an
obvious target.
Healy threatened to have Torrance suspended or moved to the provinces,
and viciously attacked those among the party activists and the youth who
defended her. Stuart Carter, a CC member from Manchester who opposed the
witch-hunt against Torrance, was beaten up by Healy at a Central Committee
meeting on 27 April and subsequently expelled. Richard Price, the secretary of
London district committee, which Healy considered to be a nest of Torrance
supporters, was publicly denounced by Healy while chairing the WRPs May Day
rally.9
For a while, the situation seemed to be heading for a split. Torrance was
overheard screaming at Healy before a Political Committee meeting in June:
Youre twisted, this time youre going to come unstuck, Ill take it to conference
and then youll see.10 At the same time, an opposition grouping had developed
at the party centre in Clapham. As Dave Bruce recalls: There was Dot Gibson,
myself, Robert Harris became involved in it, Charlie Brandt, Torrance for a
while, although she didnt half rat on us in the end.... There were four or five of
us who quite consciously were organising in opposition to Healy.... Every letter
Healy got was opened, photocopied and passed on to us before Healy ever got
it, and re-sealed. Then we bugged his premises so we knew what he was
doing.... We felt that, if you couldnt fight corruption in your own movement,
why call yourself a Trot?11 It was at the instigation of this group that Aileen
Jennings who was about to leave the party and disappear wrote her letter
125
exposing Healys sexual activities and naming 26 of the women involved. This
bombshell was consciously timed to go off when it would be least expected
the day after the apparently successful rally at the end of the march to free the
jailed miners. It was also bloody obvious that if we didnt do something wed
be expelled, Bruce points out, because that had happened to everybody else.
Wed studied the Thornett experience, and the mistakes that Thornett made,
and how he got outmanoeuvred, so we werent going to make the same
mistakes.12
When Jennings letter was read to a Political Committee meeting on 1 July, it
produced the anticipated explosion. Vanessa Redgrave was screeching at the
top of her voice that this was the work of the Black Hundreds, Richard Price
recounts. Thats a memory I cherish. And Banda gave this bizarre, rambling
speech about how all sorts of great leaders had had little vices ... that Tito had
been a bit of a womaniser and Mao as well.... You had one wing of the
Healyites saying this is lies, lies, lies, and another wing Banda in particular,
and to some extent Mitchell working out excuses. And the weirdest thing of
all was Healy himself, because at one point he was saying "This is a
provocation", and at another point, like a harpooned whale, he spread his
hands and said, "Well, I have many friends"!13
Although Torrance was among the PC majority who voted for a resolution
rejecting the Jennings letter as a provocation (there were three votes against
and two abstentions),14 she was not averse to using the situation to undermine
Healy. A week later, at her insistence, Healy was forced to sign an agreement
to cease immediately my personel [sic] relations with the youth.15 Price argues
that this was a body blow Healy never recovered from. He tried to keep up the
pretence of being in charge, but effectively hed been holed below the waterline. But this was carried out as a PC manoeuvre, behind the back of the CC. Of
course, this was in fact how the WRP had always operated. The CC was always
subordinate to the PC, never mind what it said in the constitution.... The deal
was struck behind the scenes.... Clearly what was envisaged was that there
would be a bloodless transfer of power to Banda and Torrance, who would be
the new leadership.16
Mike Bandas initial support for Healy quickly crumbled, Price recalls: Initially
what he did was he decamped to the provinces, and toured around lining up
everyone against this Clapham-based opposition. It seems that he switched
sides having had discussions with parents of some of the youth mentioned in
Aileen Jennings letter. But I cant be authoritative about that. All I know is that
he completely flipped from one side to the other within a short period of time.
Even at that [1 July] PC meeting knowing how aggressive and hot-tempered
he could be already he seemed punctured. After all, Banda had spent a lot of
the miners strike in the coalfields. I think probably he knew deep down that the
line that had been peddled was nonsense. Or at least this was coming home to
him. I think Banda over a whole period of time had consciously covered up for
Healy, on many fronts, including his relations with women. There was an
element of political shipwreck and of remorse.17
126
Throughout this period, there had been increasing demands by the YS
leadership and Dave Hyland, a full-timer in Yorkshire, for a control commission
into Healys sexual abuse. Banda apparently tried to pressurise the parents of
Healys victims into withdrawing this demand, while Torrance used the WRPs
warped version of democratic centralism to obstruct discussion of the subject
outside of the PC.18 In an attempt to deflect calls for a control commission,
Banda and Torrance decided to retire Healy, supposedly on the grounds of age
and ill-health, although he would be allowed to attend CC and PC meetings in
an advisory capacity. The agreement they reached with Healy in early
September was that his retirement would not reflect adversely on his 49 years
in the movement. Indeed, it was intended to hold a public meeting to celebrate
his political career.19 Torrance really believed that they would have the
bloodless transfer of power, Price observes. Banda would be able to speechify,
but essentially she would run the show, and would inherit the mantle of Healy.
She thought this heritage had great stock.... What about her attitude to Healys
abuse of women? Well I would say Torrance probably did want it to stop, but
only really because she knew it had gone too far. Because Im convinced
through having talked to people subsequently that she knew all about this
anyway, for years and years and years. So you can see why on the one hand
she wanted to ease him aside, but on the other hand she didnt want Pandoras
box opened.... She wanted a kind of tamed Healy.20
Meanwhile, a sharp discussion had developed over the WRPs political line.
Torrance herself was critical of Healys relations with trade union bureaucrats
and Labour lefts, and even began to develop the theory that there had been a
political degeneration, albeit of recent origin, in the WRP. At a CC meeting in
August she, Price and Bruce attacked the partys cover-up for Ken Livingstone. 21
However, while she could criticise the partys opportunism, Torrance was
entirely uncritical of its ultra-leftism.
It was Dave Bruce, in a discussion document presented to the CC in late
August, who launched an attack on the WRPs sectarianism. Rejecting the view
that the working class had broken with its existing reformist leadership, Bruce
emphasised that the WRP had to pursue united front tactics in order to win the
majority of the class. The weakness of Bruces document was its failure to
break sufficiently from the established ultra-leftist line. It upheld the view that
the Thatcher government had failed to inflict a single decisive defeat on any
section of the organised working class, and put forward the slogan Demand
the TUC organise the general strike.22
For Torrance, however, this represented a right-opportunist deviation of
monstrous proportions! A document replying to Bruce, which appeared on
21 September in Torrances name but was probably written by her partner
Paddy ORegan, was an exercise in pure Healyite gibberish. According to
Torrance, Britain was in a revolutionary situation ... which is deepening
continually. Healys retirement, she asserted, had given the green light to
conservative, unprepared and sceptical sections of the party leadership, who
have become intense focal points of bourgeois pressure, are turning towards
127
Left Reformism and are in a frenzy to turn the party to the Right. Significantly,
Torrances document also featured a fervent tribute to Healy, claiming that his
greatest contribution to the building of the party has been to pioneer the
struggle for dialectical logic, the dialectical method and to emphasise the
importance of abstract thought!23
****
AS WITH MOST other decisive episodes in his political career, in order to give
an accurate account of Healys expulsion from the WRP it is necessary to
separate reality from myth. At the time, because of the well-deserved contempt
in which Healy was held by most of the left, few questioned the story that a
heroic band of anti-Healyites had suddenly risen up to throw out the old tyrant
along with what were commonly dismissed as his most mindless followers. 24
The truth, however, is rather more complex. In fact the October 1985 split in
the WRP was the messy outcome of a confused factional struggle which
developed over a period of months and was characterised by a number of
unstable and shifting alliances.
The loose alignment of anti-Healy oppositionists that had appeared in the
early summer the Clapham-based grouping around Dave Bruce, Dot Gibson
and others, together with Sheila Torrance and her allies in the London District
Committee and YS leadership soon broke up. Torrances obstruction of the
demand for a control commission into the allegations against Healy had the
effect of losing her the backing of both the youth and a substantial section of
the LDC. Indeed, in the course of September, and behind the backs of her own
supporters, Torrance mended her fences with Healy and his personal clique, of
which the Redgraves and Alex Mitchell were the most prominent
representatives.
Torrance and the Healyites now established a new bloc, with the avowed
objective of defending the WRPs Seventh Congress perspectives, which called
for the overthrow of Thatchers Bonapartist regime through the organisation
of the General Strike and the creation of a Workers Revolutionary
Government.25 The campaign against Healy, they argued, was merely a cover
for a right-wing liquidationist tendency in the WRP which wanted to overturn
these revolutionary perspectives.
Meanwhile, Healys erstwhile lieutenant Mike Banda, whose politics were
oscillating wildly, had turned into Healys most vitriolic opponent. And Cliff
Slaughter, who at the August CC meeting had staunchly defended the WRPs
cover-up for Ken Livingstone, returned in late September from a holiday in
Greece to become another born-again anti-Healyite. These two men,
themselves deeply compromised by their long history of support for Healy
which had involved framing, expelling and, on occasion, beating up his
opponents emerged as the new leadership of the anti-Healy forces. As details
of the allegations against Healy gradually leaked out, increasing numbers of the
WRP membership, quite rightly appalled by these revelations, rallied behind
128
Banda and Slaughter. In their insistence on calling Healy to account for his
abuse of women, and their recognition that his sectarian ultra-leftism had led
the organisation into a blind alley, these comrades were undoubtedly correct.
The question remains as to why so many other WRP members refused to go
along with this. The assertion that the majority of them were motivated by the
desire to defend their idol26 will satisfy only those who have renounced political
honesty in favour of self-justifying fairy tales.
The low esteem in which both Banda and Slaughter were held by many party
activists was one important factor in their failure to attract more support. Banda
was regarded by some as a bit of a windbag, Slaughter as a supercilious
academic who refused to soil his hands with any practical work Torrance, by
contrast, had won respect among the party rank and file as a hardworking and
effective organiser. Another factor was that, within the wild ultra-leftist
perspectives, there was an grain of truth to some of Torrances accusations
against the Banda-Slaughter camp. Richard Price argues that, as far as Banda
was concerned, there were some indications, from my experience, that the guy
was finally elements of this had always been present but he was finally
heading off to a left-Stalinist position. I dont say hed arrived at it, but he was
heading that way. I remember he said, and my jaw dropped, that hed learned
far more from Mao Zedong on philosophy, I think than hed ever learned
from Trotsky. Torrance was therefore able to point to some of the leaders of
the anti-Healy faction and say that they were breaking from Trotskyism. Thats
undoubtedly true, Price points out. Some did become Stalinists.27
The obvious solution to the WRPs crisis was to set up a control commission
into Healy, and to pursue a systematic discussion over political perspectives.
This, in fact, was the course that Torrance herself came to advocate. At the first
of two CC meetings in September, which confirmed the decision to retire Healy,
Price recalls that Mickie Shaw appeared Aileen Jennings mother appealing
for the CC to find the whereabouts of her daughter, and calling for a control
commission.... Torrance was very sarcastic with her, implying that she knew
perfectly well where Aileen was and that this was a load of hogwash. But I
remember her saying words to the effect of "Well, if you want your control
commission, have one". And there was actually a vote formally taken that the
next CC meeting would set it in motion. But the next CC didnt discuss the
question of the control commission at all. It was devoted to a political
discussion which was in fact a showdown between the returned Slaughter and
various others, and Torrance, in which Torrance was attacked for her mindless
ultra-leftism.28 In fact it was at Mike Bandas insistence that the question of the
control commission was deferred until the next CC meeting, due on
12 October.29
At this stage, it still seemed possible that the related issues of the partys
political perspectives and Healys sexual corruption could be resolved without a
split. On 2 October, however, Healy entered the partys Clapham headquarters
in what was apparently an attempt to reassert his position within the
organisation. A meeting of the Political Committee held that he was in breach of
129
the terms of his retirement and banned him from the premises. But at the next
PC meeting on 9 October the ban was overturned, causing Banda and his
supporters to walk out in protest. On his own authority and without waiting for
the CC to meet (although a majority of the CC subsequently endorsed his
actions), Banda then instructed the Runcorn print plant to halt production of the
News Line, and called staff at the Clapham centre, the WRPs bookshops and
the College of Marxist Education out on strike. This coup, it should be noted,
was accompanied by considerable political violence.
In the course of this developing crisis some truly mindless followers of Healy
had turned almost overnight into his hysterical enemies. There were some
quite remarkable conversion experiences, Price recalls, from people whod
been absolute toadies in the past. Some of these were quite wondrous to
behold. Members of Healys security department, who had happily burgled
other left groups premises for him, now transformed themselves into selfrighteous defenders of revolutionary morality the slogan around which the
Slaughter-Banda faction launched their bid for control of the organisation. And
when the definitive Healyite apparatchik Simon Pirani ended up on the antiHealy side of the split, even members of his own faction were left scratching
their heads in astonishment. The use and justification of violence by the BandaSlaughter grouping against their opponents in the party is perhaps to be
explained by the fact that, in many cases, this somersault in political allegiance
was not accompanied by any fundamental change in political method.
For example, Ian Harrison then a rank-and-file WRP member recalls a
morning in September 1985, towards the end of a nights guard duty at the
Clapham headquarters, when Healy had suddenly appeared, accompanied by
his driver Phil Penn. Healy was looking very white ... very nervous, and he
shook Phil Penn like Penn was his older brother saying "Tell him, Phil, you tell
him". And Penn pointed a finger at me and said, "Youre withholding Gerry
Healys mail. We want all his mail". Ignoring Harrisons assurances that Healys
own mail had already been sorted and sent up to his office, Penn then pushed
into the guardhouse and scooped up letters which were addressed to the WRPs
various companies along with obvious business circulars. And he pointed his
finger at me ... saying "Ill break your legs if you take Gerrys mail". When
Harrison next went to the centre for guard duty a few weeks later, after Healy
had been banned, he was summoned to see Penn, who launched into a tirade
against Healy, and concluded: If you let that bastard through the gates, Ill
break your legs!30
A further irony of these new factional alignments, Richard Price points out,
was that while many of Healys toadies had flip-flopped, most of the TorranceHealy faction on the Central Committee (with the obvious exception of the
Redgraves and Mitchell) werent really Healys people, in terms of his intimate
set. These were Ben Rudder, Simon Vevers, Ray Athow, Dave Oatley, Frank
Sweeney these were not the inner circle. These were people basically who
wanted to maintain the existing line. They justified their refusal to back the
campaign against Healy with the argument that there was the personal and the
130
political, and while the personal had been pretty shocking, dire and everything
else, there were nonetheless politics to be fought out, and on these things
these people [the Banda-Slaughter faction] were wrong. This was the
psychology of the ordinary Torranceites those without some big stake in
covering things up. Of course, there were other people who had a stake in
covering lots of things up people like Mitchell and the Redgraves.
Price adds that the use of violence against the minority cant be condoned
because a lot of these people who went with Torrance ... were basically
ordinary, honest people that was no way to educate them. However, you can
entirely understand it. And of course we were totally wrong, really, politically
and in many other ways and of course over the control commission business,
and this warped democratic centralism.31
When members of the Torrance-Healy faction arrived at the Central
Committee meeting on 12 October, they found themselves confronted by a
mass lobby of Banda-Slaughter supporters. Although this was presented as an
exercise of democratic rights by the WRP rank and file, given that only
supporters of one faction were present it really amounted to organised
intimidation of their political opponents. In the CC meeting itself, Price
recounts, there was a kind of lynch atmosphere. People were jumping up and
down volunteering to get Healy, bring him here and deal with him now. Tony
Banda was screaming at the top of his voice "We are now a military faction".
This sort of stuff.... It was extremely difficult for anyone who wasnt with the
majority to speak I mean, they were allowed to speak, but they were heckled,
interrupted, there was a very, very hostile atmosphere.... People like Ben
Rudder and Athow spoke in quite a reasoned way this was one of the peculiar
things about it. Of course the politics were completely out of the window. But
the other side had no coherent line at all. There were people like Dave Hyland
saying that there never had been a Trotskyist movement in Britain, and I think
Peter Jones had a similar kind of position. Well this meant ... that really it had
all been a complete waste of time, this is what it felt like. So you can see a bit
of the psychology of why people would react against that.32
The meeting opened with a 90-minute contribution by Mike Banda, the major
part of which was devoted to his own rambling personal reminiscences,
suggesting that he was in the throes of a breakdown. Bandas speech also
featured an account of Healys coercive relations with women comrades going
back many years, and in such detail as to indicate that Banda must have known
about this all along. The meeting lasted some 12 hours. When it reconvened
the following day, however, the majority guillotined the debate, arguing that
the tension which they themselves were of course primarily responsible for
creating made further discussion impossible. The CC then voted by 25 to 11
to charge Healy for expulsion on the grounds of violence, slander and abuse of
women members. It also decided to sack three full-timers Torrance, Price and
Corin Redgrave for the crime of backing the opposition. Counter-proposals by
the minority to resume publication of the News Line, and to charge Banda with
131
assaulting Healy supporter Corinna Lotz, were voted down by a similar
margin.33
****
ONE POINT WHICH needs to be emphasised in any account of the breakup
of the WRP is that there was a right side and a wrong side to the split in
October 1985, and those who opposed Healys expulsion were unquestionably
on the wrong side. But this doesnt absolve the anti-Healy majority faction of
responsibility for carrying out the split so abruptly, and under conditions of such
political and organisational chaos, that many honest WRP members, some of
them far from uncritical of Healy, ended up with the minority.
From the standpoint of politically educating the membership, the Central
Committees 13 October decision to begin expulsion proceedings against Healy
was decidedly premature. Although the CC had already agreed to set up a
control commission into Healy, it now charged him with the very crimes that the
commission was supposed to be investigating before the commission had
even begun its work! The decision was then presented to the membership as a
fait accompli, and those who refused to endorse the CCs action were
denounced as supporters of rape a thoroughly dubious characterisation of
Healys sexual abuse which the majority itself would later reject. 34 Dave Bruce
observes that many rank-and-file supporters of the minority simply didnt
believe the charges against Healy, they found it unbelievable, and I dont think
that we satisfactorily proved it to them.... So they didnt support rape, its
absurd to say that, but they didnt believe the charge, and they believed Healy
or rather Torrance that we were a right-wing group.35
This latter accusation, though almost entirely false, wasnt effectively refuted
either. The document Bruce had presented to the CC at the end of August had
outlined an essentially correct position on the united front which
Torrance/ORegan had proved unable to answer. And this exchange had been
followed up by a surprisingly good contribution from Simon Pirani, defending
Bruce and demolishing Torrances and Healys ultra-left sectarianism. Further
documents attacking Healys philosophy and politics, written by US Workers
League leader David North in 1982 and 1984, were selectively issued by the
majority shortly before the split. But little of this material had been widely
circulated in the party and none of it properly discussed by the membership.
As a result, the specifically political origins of the party crisis were barely
touched upon before the organisation split. Indeed, the majority subsequently
declared that the WRP had broken apart not on tactical and programmatic
issues, but on the most basic questions of revolutionary morality in other
words, solely over the issue of Healys sexual abuse. 36 Under these
circumstances, as Gerry Downing has pointed out, Torrances assertion that the
"sex thing" was being used to move the party rightward was obviously believed
by many members, who were required to make up their minds on whose side
they were on in the midst of very highly charged emotional appeals and very
132
little political debate. The side many took was decided by accident, where they
lived and who their friends were rather than any political assessment.37
During the week following the October 12-13 CC, area aggregates were held
throughout the country to discuss the crisis in the WRP. In London two
meetings were held at the partys Clapham headquarters, the first of which, on
14 October, was notable for a particularly disgraceful contribution from Corin
Redgrave. Rejecting point blank any disciplinary action against the WRPs
glorious leader (who was by this time in hiding from the WRP membership),
Redgrave declared: We are neither for or against corruption, we are for the
socialist revolution.38 With Healys victims and their relatives present at the
meeting, this remark can only be seen as a conscious provocation. It produced
understandable fury among majority supporters, and Redgrave only narrowly
escaped being physically assaulted. Yet such was the confusion caused by the
lack of political preparation for Healys expulsion that at this first aggregate the
Torrance-Healy faction was able to win a narrow majority. After the meeting, a
frustrated Mike Banda reportedly stamped around the yard at the Clapham
centre shouting: Everyone in the country supports me except this rubbish in
London.39
A second London aggregate was set for 18 October, however, and here the
Banda-Slaughter group succeeded in imposing its control. Theyd been bringing
in more people from outside London, minority supporter Ian Harrison recalls.
They had people who had been out of membership for a long time.... There
was no proper credentials check on the door as people went into the
aggregate, and in fact they had a lot of their very heavy people lining the
corridors as you went into the warehouse, so there was a very intimidating
atmosphere. A large brazier which was permanently blazing in the yard cast a
pall of smoke over the centre, giving an appropriately apocalyptic air to the
proceedings. Harrison recalls commenting to Corin Redgrave on the pervasive
smell of burning. Those are the fires of the Spanish Inquisition, Redgrave
replied!40
In the course of this second aggregate, Banda went completely to pieces and
it was left to Cliff Slaughter to make the main speech for the CC majority. In
relation to Healys sexual abuse, Slaughter quoted an extremely backward
comment attributed to Lenin by Clara Zetkin, which referred to a woman with
many sexual partners as a glass greased by many lips. Torrance shouted out
that this was bourgeois ideology, and was flummoxed when Slaughter
revealed the origin of the quotation.41 But she nevertheless had a point, and her
dismissal of the majority as a lot of Mary Whitehouses, wrong though it was,
gained some credibility. Slaughters speech also contained the shocking
allegation that the WRP had provided the Iraqi embassy with photographs of
anti-Baathist protestors, enabling it to identify opponents of the regime,
although even this was unproven one News Line photographer, strongly
backed by Alex Mitchell, claimed that the demonstrators faces had all been
blacked out before the photographs were handed over.42
133
Borrowing his political and theoretical points against the Torrance-Healy
minority almost entirely from David Norths documents, Slaughter attacked
Healys philosophy as a form of Hegelianism and the WRPs politics as Pabloite
revisionism. But instead of trying to calm down the atmosphere in order to
facilitate discussion of the political issues, Slaughter chose to raise the factional
heat even higher. Picking on Corin Redgraves provocative statement at the first
aggregate about being neutral on the question of Healys sexual corruption,
Slaughter declared that, by defending the rapist Healy, the minority stood for
the imposition of a near-fascist ideology in our movement.43
When Slaughter called Corin Redgrave a fascist, Bruce comments, of course
it cut the discussion off, as it was bound to ... because you cant discuss with
fascists politically, can you? Its not possible. So he shut the discussion down.
We didnt see it that way at the time, but I think Gerry Downing pointed it out
and he was absolutely right. I think that with hindsight Slaughters aim was to
cut off the discussion, to cut and run, because it was getting too difficult, and
he had to be on the side of the angels. Between them, Slaughter and Redgrave
thus succeeded in irrevocably polarising the situation and stampeding the party
into a split.44
This second aggregate swiftly descended into total hysteria. As Harrison
recalls: At the back, and in the main alleyway, there was Geoff Pilling, Matthew
Nugent, John Simmance, and about half a dozen others, and they would
constantly heckle throughout the entire meeting, "Rape! Rapists! Pol Pot!" over
and over, and all of them were red in the face, they were wild .... The only
person who was trying to calm the Banda group was Richard Goldstein. He
clearly wished to have some more serious reckoning. But it was clear that by
then they had decided there was absolutely going to be no discussion. They
were going to prevent all the people who were getting up and opposing them,
whether it was Mitchell or Corin Redgrave, they were going to prevent all of
them from speaking.45
By dismissing the minority as one reactionary mass, fit only to be denounced
and hounded out of the party, Slaughter and Banda destroyed any chance of
opening up the contradictions that existed in the Torrance-Healy camp, which
was essentially a bloc between two groupings who sought to defend the WRPs
existing programme. In fact many of Torrances supporters (as distinct from the
real gung-ho Healyites) did not in principle reject disciplinary action against
Healy. A resolution adopted by the minorityite Islington WRP branch after the
first London aggregate, while containing its fair share of political nonsense,
nonetheless insisted that we are not defenders of rape and called for a control
commission into Healy.46 Ian Harrison was mandated to put this position to the
second aggregate, but he couldnt get to speak.
Harrison concedes that if rank-and-file minority supporters had been allowed
to participate in a free discussion we would have been saying things like, this is
the immediacy of the struggle for power, you lot are turning away from the
class ... youve got to restore the News Line, the News Line is the decisive
134
paper, wed have been saying all these kinds of things.... But even if what we
had to say was wrong, and handicapped by all of our sectarian training,
ultimately if wed continued with comradely political discussion, things would
have started to flow. Harrison believes that the arguments put forward in
majority documents like Dave Bruces would have had an impact on many
minority supporters.47 As it was, hardly anyone was given the chance to
consider these arguments before the organisation split.
The next CC meeting on 19 October formally expelled Healy, on the grounds
that he hadnt appeared to answer the charges against him, and then agreed to
hold a special congress on the weekend of 26-27 October. The CC thereby
preempted any decision the congress itself might take regarding Healys
expulsion. There was a certain poetic justice in this for, as the historian John
Callaghan has pointed out, Healy himself traditionally expelled his own
opponents on the eve of party congresses.48 But it also shows how the fight
against Healy was carried out using some essentially Healyite methods.
Demonised as near-fascist defenders of rape by the majority, and howled
down when they attempted to argue their political positions, the minority
refused to attend the 19 October CC meeting because they feared violence
would be used against them. They boycotted the majoritys special congress,
organised their own alternative conference and declared themselves a separate
party. The Slaughter-Banda congress, for its part, went on to endorse Healys
expulsion. The forces mobilised by the rival factions nationally have been
estimated at 450 for the majority and 320 for the Torrance-Healy minority.49
Healys party, with its claimed membership of 9-10,000, was revealed for the
fraud that it was.
Almost immediately after the split, the Banda-Slaughter grouping itself began
to fragment. In February 1986 supporters of David North, led by Dave Hyland,
were kicked out with all the WRPs usual contempt for democratic procedure.
Adopting the name of the International Communist Party, the Northites quickly
relapsed into sectarian ultra-leftism, adopting the Bordigist position that the
trade unions are no longer workers organisations having been entirely
incorporated into the capitalist state. Mike Banda and his supporters soon
decided that the WRPs collapse was due to fundamental flaws not in Healys
politics but in Trotskys, and in Bandas case subsequently evolved towards
support for left Stalinism and third world nationalism.
As for the Slaughter-led WRP, under Dave Bruces editorship its paper
Workers Press did for a while become a forum for serious political discussion,
and the organisation briefly showed at least the potential to reassess its own
past and make some positive developments. Any such potential was destroyed,
however, as longstanding Healyite hacks like Pilling and Slaughter reasserted
their domination over the group. The WRP/Workers Press soon reverted to
proclaiming itself and its co-thinkers to be the sole legitimate continuation of
the Fourth International, publishing fatuous contributions concerning the
struggle against Pabloism, answering its critics with slanderous attacks and
135
demonstrating general contempt for Trotskyisms basic political positions
Healyism, in short, without Healy. Having arrived at this sectarian dead end, in
late 1996 the party ceased publication of Workers Press and formally wound
itself up.
Could things have turned out any differently? It is doubtful. The organisation
Healy had built possessed no tradition of internal democracy oppositional
minorities were simply anathematised and driven out. Consequently, nobody in
the WRP had the slightest experience of conducting a principled factional
struggle. And the partys actual politics were so far removed from Marxism that
informed political debate was virtually impossible. Indeed, the Healyite
movement was so rotten that there was no real prospect of the organisation as
a whole being regenerated. The most that could be hoped for was that some
elements might emerge from the wreckage and evolve in a politically healthy
direction. They proved to be painfully few.
Notes
1. Healy ... remains very much a pragmatist, it was pointed out years
earlier. He is every inch a sectarian, but he is quite willing to use any means to
build up his organisation. Were it not for Healys periodic adjustments, the SLL
would long ago have cracked up (IMG internal document, 1968).
2. Workers Press, 4 January 1986.
3. Information from Al Richardson.
4. This was revealed in Aileen Jennings letter, later published in News Line,
30 October 1985.
5. T. Wohlforth, The Prophet's Children, 1994, pp.265-6.
6. Workers Press, 6 December 1986.
8. Interview with Richard Price, 22 November 1993.
9. Workers News, April 1987.
11. Bruce interview.
12. Ibid.
13. Price interview.
136
14. Extracts from WRP Political Committee minutes, unpublished document.
A proposal for a control commission into the allegations against Healy was
voted down by 12 to 4 with one abstention.
15. News Line, 31 October 1985. Healy cynically complained that the term
youth was too vague. It should say "Under 25". As it is itll ruin my lifestyle
(News Line, 6 November 1985).
17. Ibid.
18. Gerry Downing, WRP Explosion, 1991, p.5; Price interview.
19. Workers News, April 1987; Downing, p.6.
21. Ibid; Downing, p.5.
22. News Line, 31 October, 1 November 1985.
23. Ibid., 4 November 1985.
24. Alan Thornett and John Lister in Workers Press, 22 February 1986.
25. Resolutions Adopted by the Seventh Congress, WRP internal document,
pp.64, 82.
26. Charlie Pottins in Workers Press, 25 September 1993.
28. Ibid.
29. Workers News, April 1987.
30. Harrison interview.
32. Ibid.
33. An account of the October 12-13 CC meeting can be found in Workers
News, April 1987.
34. The WRP Womens Commission later argued that Healys abuse was a
form of incest. To accuse Healy of criminal rape, one of his victims pointed out,
137
was to denigrate and patronise the large number of women cadres ... who
were persistently sexually abused by Healy. It is to say they accepted being
raped some for 20 and more years (Workers Press, 7 March 1987).
35. Dave Bruce interview.
37. Downing, p.7.
39. Marxist Review, September 1986.
44. Bruce interview. For Downings view, see WRP Explosion, pp.6-7.
46. Islington WRP branch resolution.
48. J. Callaghan, British Trotskyism, 1984, p.83.
49. Workers News, April 1987. These figures are based on the numbers
attending area aggregates around the country, with some allowance for those
unable to attend.
138
Chapter 12 (1986-1989)
THE STORY of Healys expulsion from the WRP, combining as it did
sexual scandal and the opportunity to discredit socialism, was seized
on gleefully by the capitalist press. For weeks afterwards the tabloids were
filled with scurrilous articles carrying such headlines as Red in the Bed. Faced
with this press campaign, and fearing violence from the Banda-Slaughter
majority, Healy remained in hiding for some months after the split in the WRP.
He did not attend the WRP minority conference on 25-26 October 1985, but
sent it an interim statement accusing his opponents of liquidating the WRP
into the Labour Party as rapidly as possible and virtually abandoning the class
struggle. Healy did recognise that the split marked the end of the old WRP.
Not to worry, though: A new WRP is already well underway to replace the old.
Its cadres will be schooled in the dialectical materialist method of training and it
will speedily rebuild its daily press. All this would mark a great revolutionary
leap forward into the leadership of the British and international working class.1
Until shortly before the WRP broke apart, Sheila Torrance had shown
considerable personal hostility to Healy, even going so far as to tell her own
supporters that she would never have him as a member of the organisation
again.2 Yet the minority conference passed a resolution denouncing the BandaSlaughter faction for having conspired to frame and expel the founder-leader of
our movement, Comrade Gerry Healy and declared itself proud to proclaim him
as a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party.3
To the rank and file Torrance either denied Healys sexual corruption outright
or, alternatively, claimed that his private life had nothing to do with his politics.
This latter argument certainly contrasted sharply with the authors own
experience as a WRP member in the late 1970s, when he tried to ward off
Torrances inquiries into his own private life on precisely these grounds, only to
be told firmly that no such separation of the personal and the political was
possible. Everything, Torrance had insisted, is interconnected. It now
appeared that Torrance was proposing a quite startling revision of dialectical
materialism. The new version read: Everything is interconnected except Gerry
Healy! The dialectical processes which operated throughout the material
universe apparently ground to a halt as soon as they approached the great
Master of Dialectics himself.
All this appeared to justify the WRP majoritys accusation that the entire
anti-party group of Torrance, Mitchell and the Redgraves is being centred
around Healys charisma.4 In reality, Torrance regarded the cover-up for Healy
purely pragmatically, as the price to be paid for maintaining her bloc with his
personal following, which included the two International Committee sections
in Greece and Spain who had sided with the WRP minority mainly on the
basis of support for Healy the individual. 5 She had by no means abandoned her
objective of removing Healy from the leadership. Her line, as Richard Price
summarises it, was that the Banda-Slaughter faction had attacked the entire
139
tradition of the movement Healy had built, and that it was therefore necessary
to preserve the corpse of Healy, if you like, stuff him and put him in a glass
case.6
When a new Central Committee was elected at the WRP minoritys Eighth
Congress in January 1986 Healy was nominated by little more than half the
party branches,7 Torrance having let it be known to her supporters that he
should remain in retirement. The nominations Healy did receive would, all the
same, have been sufficient to ensure his election to the CC. So pressure was
put on him behind the scenes to withdraw, and Healy, presumably aware that
he commanded insufficient forces at the congress to defy Torrance, was obliged
to acquiesce. Ray Athow then announced to the delegates on behalf of the
standing orders committee that Healy was retiring from the leadership due to
ill-health, although he would be able to attend CC and PC meetings as a
political advisor.
This compromise identical to the one that Torrance and Mike Banda had
cooked up back in September 1985 was seen by loyal Healyites as a
disgraceful snub to their beloved leader. The day after the congress, Corin
Redgrave arrived at a Political Committee meeting accompanied by Savas
Michael of the Greek section to demand that Healy should be restored to the
party leadership. Paddy ORegan, supported by Torrance and most of the PC,
told them bluntly that this was a split issue, and sent them away emptyhanded. Michael later met with Alex Mitchell and Ben Rudder in an attempt to
gain their support for Healys reinstatement, but got nowhere with them either. 8
Even among the WRP minority, it is clear, Healy had been reduced to an
isolated and discredited figure.
As for the WRP majoritys attitude to their expelled leader, the hysterical
atmosphere in which the split had been carried out showed no signs of abating.
As Dave Bruce observes, there was enormous outrage against his sexual
corruption, and anger that these women should be treated in that way, which
was perfectly laudable. But it became expressed in some rather irrational ways.
He cites the example of minority supporter Jean Kerrigan, who appeared at the
party centre after the split to collect her severance pay and P45, leading to a
tremendous fuss that we were letting supporters of rape onto the premises.
Which was an outrageous thing to say about Jean Kerrigan. Shed never
supported rape in her fucking life, and she was no particular admirer of Healy.
She like a number of others identified with the paper. Theyd made enormous
sacrifices for that paper shed broken with her family, shed given it her life
and it wasnt something that they were going to lightly surrender.9
Such considerations had little impact on most members of the WRP majority,
whose leaders had consciously whipped up such feelings of hatred against the
minority. One product of this was the campaign of violence that members of
the WRP/Workers Press conducted against supporters of the Torrance-Healy
minority, which continued well after the split. Healy himself was not subjected
to this from the time that he returned to political life around December 1985
140
he was always well guarded. It was rank-and-file minorityites who were made
to pay for his crimes. This campaign culminated in an attack on minority
supporter Eric Rogers by Phil Penn, a member of the WRP majority Central
Committee, as a result of which Rogers was partially blinded and Penn received
a three-month prison sentence after being convicted on a GBH charge. Workers
Press then tried to cover this up by falsely accusing Penns victim, and other
innocent members of the minority, of attacking Penn. Revolutionary morality in
action!
Meanwhile, Torrance was having some success in getting the show back on
the road. Whereas the WRP/Workers Press was in a deep political crisis and
already beginning to break up, Torrances group staged a temporary recovery.
Despite losing almost all the WRPs material assets to the Banda-Slaughter
faction, the minority resumed publication of the News Line on a twice-weekly
basis in November 1985, and then raised the money to relaunch the paper as a
daily in February 1986. With the minority bloc apparently holding together, and
Healy shunted aside, it looked as though Torrance might have carried the day.
This soon proved to be an illusion. A capable organiser, Torrance had never
had an original political thought in her life, and, although there was initially
some critical discussion within the minority concerning the politics of the old
WRP, she and ORegan proved unable to develop any new perspectives or
policies. The WRP/News Line remained committed to Healys view that Britain
was in the grip of economic catastrophe and revolutionary crisis, and the partys
intervention in the long printworkers struggle at Wapping was characterised by
the familiar call for an immediate general strike combined with the usual
opportunist adaptation to the existing union leadership.
Not only was Torrance lumbered with Healys politics, she was still saddled
with Healy himself. For, in the long run, there was little chance that Healy
would meekly accept the humiliating advisory role imposed on him, and it was
only a matter of time before he tried to reimpose his political domination over
the organisation. Indeed, when the beginnings of glasnost and perestroika
became apparent in the Soviet Union, Healy demanded that the WRP/News
Line should support the Gorbachev wing of the bureaucracy, which he claimed
was launching the political revolution.10
Lacking any ideas of her own, Torrance had no objection to using Healy as a
source of political advice, and at first was quite ready to go along with this. But
the emerging pro-Stalinist line was challenged on the Political Committee by
Richard Price, who rejected the identification of bureaucratic reforms with the
political revolution, arguing that these developments were an expression of
Soviet Bonapartism in crisis. At one PC meeting Price condemned Healys line
that a section of the bureaucracy was playing a revolutionary role as Pabloism,
which reduced Healy to apoplexy!11 Accustomed to an organisation in which his
every word, however mad or mundane, was treated as the tablets from the
mountain, Healy was unable to live with this kind of thing.
141
For supporting perestroika, Vanessa Redgrave recounts indignantly, Gerry
and I were accused of capitulating to Stalinism. We realised that the split we
had made before had been incomplete.12 But to carry out a further split a
pretext had to be manufactured. From August 1986 onwards, therefore, Healy
began to provoke a series of confrontations with the WRP leadership. First of all
he demanded the expulsion of Alex Mitchell, who had departed for Australia in
May and resurfaced as a journalist with the Murdoch press. Then Healy
objected to a series of articles written by Athow and ORegan (G. Healy: Fifty
Years a Fighter for Trotskyism), which appeared in News Line in late August.
And he resumed his complaints about being excluded from the party leadership
the previous January.13
After the end of August, Healy and Vanessa Redgrave refused to attend CC
and PC meetings, and relations with the WRP leadership were from this point
carried on by letter, with Torrance-ORegan demanding that Healy and
Redgrave resume their responsibilities in the organisation, and the latter
insisting that their differences should be circulated in an internal bulletin.
Seeking a factional weapon to use against Healy, Torrance now shifted her line
on the USSR, arguing that while the political revolution was indeed under way,
Gorbachev was trying to restore capitalism. Healy supporter Mick Blakey then
produced a document outlining the Healyite position. This completely ignored
the possibility of capitalist restoration, and asserted that a left moving section
of the bureaucracy under Gorbachev was de-Stalinising the bureaucracy.14
Rather than carry out a serious discussion on this issue, Torrance responded
with an organisational manoeuvre, calling a party congress at a mere ten days
notice, which of course gave no time for the circulation of documents. When
the congress opened on 31 October Corin Redgrave, acting as spokesman for
the absent Healy, disputed the legitimacy of the proceedings on the grounds
that the party constitution required a two-month pre-congress discussion
period. He was able to win the support of nearly half the delegates for his
challenge to standing orders, leaving Torrance and ORegan stunned. They
responded by adopting a conciliatory approach towards Redgrave and Healy in
a vain attempt to keep them in the organisation.15
Richard Price recalls that he and a few other WRP members had discussed
whether they should intervene at the congress as a third force and open the
attack on both sides, because by this stage we were really beginning to think ...
that we had to get out of this mad organisation and were trying to think how to
proceed. We decided on balance that the best way was to be ... the sharpest
critics of Healy, as against the rather soft line that was put at the congress by
Torrance and ORegan. So we waded into Redgrave and Healy at that congress,
on the question of Stalinism basically. Under the impact of this attack,
Redgraves support was reduced to about a quarter of the delegates. Healy now
broke with Torrance, taking with him perhaps 40 out of a WRP/News Line
membership which was by then reduced to around 150.16 In 1987 the Healyites
began publishing a journal called the Marxist Monthly and launched a new
organisation, the Marxist Party.
142
Torrance had successfully repelled Healys challenge to her leadership, but all
that was left for her to lead was one small, politically disoriented national
grouping. (The Greek and Spanish sections inevitably sided with Healy,
although he and Savas Michael split shortly afterwards.) Most of those
WRP/News Line members whose capacity for political thought had not been
completely destroyed and, surprisingly enough, there were some joined the
opposition grouping around Richard Price which broke with Torrance in
February 1987 to form the Workers International League. A further group which
included Ben Rudder and Jean Kerrigan walked out in December the same year.
Today Torrance retains no more than a few dozen followers in the WRP/News
Line, which still devotes itself to the orthodox Healyite rituals of producing a
daily paper (with the worlds smallest circulation) and calling incessantly for a
general strike.
Healys own organisation underwent a further split after his death when the
Redgraves expelled Corinna Lotz, accusing her of acting as an agent
provocateur. Outraged by this attempt to frame an innocent person as an agent
a practice which was, of course, entirely unprecedented in the Healyite
movement Lotz, Paul Feldman and other Marxist Party members broke away
to form the Communist League. They produced a journal named Socialist
Future which upheld the memory of their dead leader by parroting the most
ludicrous of his political pronouncements.17 The Redgraves and their associates
have since moved away from anything remotely resembling revolutionary
politics in October 1993 they even supported Yeltsins crushing of the Russian
parliament and generally seem to have lapsed into a sort of humanitarian
liberalism.
As for Healy, up until his death in December 1989 his political hopes
remained pinned to Gorbachev who, he was convinced, intended to slash the
bureaucracys grip ... by returning "all power to the soviets". 18 According to
Corinna Lotzs account,19 he spent his twilight years working quietly on
philosophy in his study at the house in West Road, Clapham, which Vanessa
Redgrave bought for him, and commuted regularly between London, Athens,
Barcelona and Moscow delivering incomprehensible lectures in his unique brand
of pseudo-dialectical gibberish. Surrounded by his small band of sycophants,
Healy was probably contented enough. But it must all have seemed a bit of a
come-down for a man who had laboured for decades under the delusion that
he was destined to be the British Lenin.
Notes
1. Marxist Review, April 1986.
2. Interview with Richard Price, 22 November 1993.
143
4. News Line, 31 October 1985.
5. The Australian, German, Peruvian, Sri Lankan and US sections of the IC
sided with the WRP majority in October 1985. All of them subsequently broke
with the Slaughter group.
6. Price interview. This is confirmed by Healy supporter Corinna Lotz, who
accuses the minority leadership of wanting to use Gerry as a figurehead, and
have nothing to do with the flesh and blood human being, or indeed anyone
who was then politically close to him (C. Lotz and P. Feldman, Gerry Healy: A
Revolutionary Life, 1994, p.38).
7. Alex Mitchell topped the list with nominations from 55 branches Healy
was nominated by only 29 (Panels Committee report, WRP/News Line internal
document).
8. Workers News, May 1987; Lotz and Feldman, pp.36-7.
10. Back in 1956, Healy had initially taken a similar position in response to
Mikoyans attack on Stalin at the CPSU 20th Congress, arguing that Mikoyan
represented a revolutionary wing of the bureaucracy. See chapter 4.
11. Workers News, April 1987; interview with Richard Price, 8 June 1994.
Although the term Pabloism is largely meaningless, there were certainly
parallels between Healys views on Stalinism and those of the Pabloites of
1953.
12. Vanessa Redgrave: An Autobiography, 1991, p.262.
13. A political adviser, Healy complained bitterly, has no constitutional
rights, apart from being able to attend meetings when the adviser has no
vote not even on branch issues. He is debarred for all time from being a
delegate to Party Congresses. He is in fact a political un-person in the Party.
This and other material relating to the split in the WRP/News Line was later
published in The Marxist, June-July 1987.
15. Workers News, April 1987; The Marxist, June-July 1987.
16. Price interview, 8 June 1994; Workers News, April 1987.
17. For example, the first issue of Socialist Future, which appeared during
the 1992 general election campaign, argued in all seriousness that the election
was merely a facade behind which the ruling class was plotting to impose a
police-military dictatorship! Given that the class struggle at that time was at its
144
lowest for about a century, this could only be regarded as an act of extreme
self-indulgence on the part of the bourgeoisie.
18. Marxist Monthly, September 1988.
19. Lotz and Feldman, pp.1-192.
145
Statement on the Expulsion from WIL of G. Healy at the Central
Committee Meeting of 7 February 1943
WIL Political Bureau
THE EXPULSION of Comrade G. Healy from our organisation will no doubt
come as a shock to many of our members. The apparent suddenness of the
action has made it necessary for the PB to explain the background of his
expulsion from WIL.
At the conclusion of his Industrial Report on the second day of the National
Central Committee meeting of February 6th and 7th, which was attended by
provincial delegates, as well as the officials of the London District Committee,
G. Healy stated: that he was resigning from the organisation and joining the
ILP on the following day; his action was not motivated by political differences
but his personal inability to continue further work in our organisation in
conjunction with J. Haston, M. Lee and E. Grant.
He then left the meeting and was thereupon unanimously expelled from WIL
by the Central Committee.
The same afternoon he discussed the question of entering the ILP with two
of its leading London members, who imparted the information to Fenner
Brockway.
His action came as a complete surprise to the Central Committee since he
had not intimated his intentions in the course of the previous sitting of the CC
or in his industrial report. While many of the comrades present witnessed this
scene for the first time, the majority of London CC members had witnessed a
similar occurrence on numerous occasions since the beginning of 1939. In the
first stages of these ultimatums in the form of "resignations" from our
organisation, there was no political issue whatsoever bound up with his actions.
But in the latter stages it was usually linked up to political issues which were
the subject of controversy between the EC, the PB and G. Healy.
The first "resignation" was made to the organisation when Youth for
Socialism was, for purely technical reasons, changed from a duplicated journal
to a printed one at the beginning of 1939. Comrade Healy, who was then the
formal publisher of Youth for Socialism, took strong objection because the
decision had been taken in his absence! Later, in 1939, he again "resigned" on
a similar insignificant issue on the same basis of personal pique.
At the end of 1939, when he was in Eire as a member of a delegation of
comrades sent there by our centre, as the result of a controversy over
secondary tactical issues relating to local activity he "resigned" from the local
and stated that he intended to join the Irish Labour Party to fight our
organisation. For this action he was expelled by the Irish group. After some
discussion between the National Organiser and G. Healy, and between the
National Organiser and the Irish Group, it was conceded that he be sent back to
England without the publicity of denouncing him before the organisation as a
whole, and thus make it possible to utilise his energy in the interests of our
party in Britain.
In 1940, the first really serious breach came when his "resignation" was
linked to a political issue. At that time, Comrade Healy, who was then the
146
representative of the EC in the capacity of National Organiser, was in Scotland.
The Constitution of the organisation had been redrafted by the EC with the
object of bringing the statutes of the organisation into line with its development
from a London local into a national organisation. As a representative of the EC
he was responsible for EC policy. Having any differences with the body that
elected him, it was his elementary duty to raise such differences with that body,
and failing satisfaction then taking the question up with the membership.
Instead of conducting himself as a responsible official and discussing his
differences with the EC, he pressed forward a series of amendments to the
Constitution through a number of locals with which he had close contact in his
capacity as National Organiser. These amendments were of an opportunist
character, reducing the Constitution to a federal, instead of a centralised, basis.
When called upon by the EC to defend his policy, he failed to put up any
defence whatsoever, but instead launched into a slanderous and personal
attack upon two of the leading comrades in the centre and "resigned" from the
organisation, because of his inability to work with these comrades.
In the last instance, Comrade Healy's industrial report was to have been the
subject of criticism, and there is no doubt that his action was bound up with
that question. Although he was invited to remain in the meeting for the political
discussion on the industrial work, he refused to do this, but stated that he could
not work with the comrades mentioned.
On three other occasions a similar situation arose when the CC was
presented with "resignations" arising out of insignificant issues.
During this period the EC made every concession to him, despite these
continued disruptive acts. On each occasion, discussions were held with him in
which the error of this type of ultimatum was demonstrated. During the whole
of this period, the EC refrained from publicly branding these actions for what
they were: crass irresponsibility, thereby allowing him to maintain a measure of
authority in our ranks. This was done because it was believed that his
undoubted organisational energy and ability could be harnessed in the interests
of the party and that these concessions were to the benefit both of Comrade
Healy personally as well as of our organisation as a whole.
The final resignation, however, was the "last straw". This was particularly
true, since it took place at a National Central Committee meeting. The
immediate effect of his actions was one of revulsion and indignation among the
provincial members and DC delegates and the outcome was to partially disrupt
the work of the CC, forcing it to readjust former decisions of an organisational
character. It was in these circumstances that it was now no longer possible to
make concessions: the time had come to take decisive action.
Our organisation is no longer a small local body with no real public activity,
but a nationally growing Bolshevik organisation whose members as a whole,
and in particular its leading members, must conduct themselves as
revolutionaries.
At the worst, this latest action was a fundamental break with Bolshevism
along the road of personal opportunism and consequent political degeneration;
at the best, it was light-minded irresponsibility which could not be tolerated in
our party in particular on its leading body in the present circumstances.
The decision of the Central Committee was unanimous.
147
15 February 1943
148
Letter to the "Club"
Jock Haston
10 June 1950
Dear Comrades,
It is now 15 to 16 years since I broke with Stalinism and 14 years since I
joined a British Trotskyist organisation. The best, and I think the most fruitful
years of my political experience have been spent in the Trotskyist movement.
My break, therefore, was a landmark, a turning point in my personal life
decided upon only after considerable thought.
During the past period, largely as the result of the development of the world
political situation, but more so as the result of the discussions which have taken
place within the International Executive Committee and the actual evolution of
ideas and organisation of the various sections of the International and its future
perspective. I have arrived at the conviction that in its present form and on the
present road, there is no future for the organisation as at present constituted.
When the Fourth International was founded in 1938, it was based on a
rounded out programme. No section of the International, to my knowledge, in
its public agitation today has found it possible to operate that programme
without considerable modification or concretisation in a way which, not so long
ago, would have been vigorously denounced by us all as revisionism or
capitulation to reformism.
Of course, the need of the day remains to unite the working class on an
internationalist socialist programme. So also, to give this movement organised
political expression. But on the basis upon which we attempted to achieve this
task, we have failed, and any comrade who wants to give an honest accounting
of our role and examine our history cannot escape this conclusion.
From the thesis that Stalinism and Social Democracy had betrayed the
working class, we drew the conclusion that a new International was necessary.
We went further and declared that we who constituted ourselves the Fourth
International were the established leadership of the world working class. It
seems to me, however, that the critical spirit which animated our movement
during the early 30s is dead. The contemporary analysis of political events
which placed our movement in the vanguard of the working class when the Old
Man was alive has been replaced by an abysmal failure to analyse the great
changes following the Second World War. Today we tail behind events which
often leads to an outright denial of much of what we said when great historical
changes were under way. Consequently, there does not, and there cannot exist
among the members that innate conviction that the Fourth International gave,
leadership and scientific analysis of the greatest social changes since the
Russian revolution., which is essential to any tendency claiming for itself the
unchallenged ideological leadership of the world working class.
On all the major questions of the day, phrasemongering has replaced a
Marxist analysis and approach. Thus history has struck heavy blows at one
"thesis" after another. When European economy, under the impetus of
American aid, was already making a considerable upswing, the International
repeatedly declared that we faced a period of stagnation and decay. In 1947,
149
when British production was making the biggest leap forward in recent history
and the Labour Government was introducing major reforms, the International
was declaring that Britain was in a production crisis which they could not
overcome, and that there was no possibility of reforms in our epoch. The
incredible thesis of the "ceiling", above which production could not possibly be
pushed, and the whole discussion of boom or slump, or partial and temporary
stabilisation is too ridiculous to discuss in the light of the present economic and
political situation.
When I first raised on the IEC the fact that India had achieved political
freedom and the right to determine its own form of government under the
leadership of the Indian bourgeoisie, this was denounced as a denial of the
theory of the permanent revolution and a capitulation to "British imperialist
chauvinism". Yet today there is no section of the movement which would claim
that India has not freed herself from the political domination of Britain. But not
one word of explanation.
Five years after the event, we see the beginning of a grudging admission of
what has been plain to every petty bourgeois politician: that capitalism had
been overthrown in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe and that there are no longer
capitalist state in these areas. In China, the International not only failed to
recognise a revolution when it was in the process of taking place, but vilified
those who did, and contented itself with analogies and references to the 192527 struggles in China when in fact the situation was completely different.
In the past, the Fourth International was bound together, above all, on its
interpretation of the Russian question by the leadership and foresight of
Trotsky. It cannot be said that we have this cohesion today. Apart from
Shachtmans position, we have two main currents: the orthodox one that Russia
remains a degenerated workers state (to which I still adhere) and the state
capitalist thesis elaborated by Comrade J.R. Johnson and more recently by
Comrade Cliff. Cliff produced the most elaborated criticism of the fundamental
Trotskyist conceptions of the class relations in Russia. Yet, despite the fact that
his document influenced a number of members in the International in various
parts of the world, the International leadership remained completely silent
regarding this contribution, as it did to Comrade Grants reply to it. In view of
the fact that the Russian question is still the yardstick by which orthodox
Trotskyists are judged in the International, this silence was nothing short of an
abdication of leadership.
Within the majority tendency which accepts the thesis that Russia is still a
workers state, there are various fragmented ideas regarding the class character
of the buffer countries as a whole and their separate parts.
Briefly, the various positions held on this question are as follows:
1) Russia is a degenerated workers state and so also the Eastern European
countries and China: all must be defended in the event of war with world
imperialism.
2) The same position as above, with the exception of China.
3) Russia is a degenerated workers state: the Eastern European countries
and China are capitalist. Therefore we are for the defence of Russia and not the
rest.
150
4) Russia and Yugoslavia are workers states, but not the rest of Eastern
Europe. We are for the defence of the former, but not the latter.
5) Russia and Eastern Europe are all state capitalist and we adopt the same
defeatist attitude to them as to the rest of world capitalism-imperialism.
6) The bureaucratic collectivist position, held by some comrades who are still
in the International, with all that follows from the Third Camp slogans.
The divergencies between these currents are not incidental or secondary, but
fundamental. When the question was first posed at the International Executive
and the International Conference that, among others, Yugoslavia was a
workers state, the leadership declared that to concede that the Stalinists could
overthrow the capitalist system in Yugoslavia or elsewhere and establish even a
deformed workers state, would lead to a revision of our conception of the role
of Stalinism as well as that of the Fourth International. The object of this was to
frighten those who wanted an objective analysis of the historical changes that
had taken place. But we will hear no more of this.
Today the attention of the International is centred on Yugoslavia and here is
to be seen the tendency of ideological collapse in the International in its
clearest form. When Comrade David James wrote his document in which he
said that Yugoslavia was a workers state and tentatively posed the question as
to whether or not the Fourth International had been by-passed in the historical
task, he was answered only with abuse by the international leadership. Only
Comrade Grant attempted to answer him, but his reply was condemned as
inadequate. But there will be no political answer. For since James was
denounced, many of the leading elements in the International have themselves
tailed behind James and are putting forward the conception that Yugoslavia is a
far healthier workers state than James ever suggested! To propose that the
Yugoslav regime be criticised in the public organ of the British section is met
with blank refusal. (I refer here to Comrade Lees letter which was refused
publication.) If this position is adopted in the International, it completely
vindicates James viewpoint, for not only did we, as the Fourth International,
fail to recognise the event of the establishment of the workers state in
Yugoslavia when it was in the process of taking shape, we failed as an
International to recognise it for years after; and now, finally having done so, we
fail to pose the question: what follows from the fact that some force other than
the Fourth International has been capable of overthrowing the capitalist class
outside the boundaries of the Soviet Union and established a healthy workers
state.
It follows from the above that we have no right to claim political and
organisational authority as the international leadership of the world proletariat.
On the basis of our experiences over the past 10 or 15 years I consider we
must adopt a more modest title, perspective and role. Instead of continuing
with the pretence that we are a healthy and virile ideological leadership
wielding authority over 35 sections. I believe it is time to squarely face up to
the fact that the International has not provided the leadership and has no
reasonable authority to wield an organisational discipline over its few members.
Those who genuinely seek to assemble the experiences of the workers will
undoubtedly strive for international collaboration and organisation. In the long
151
run, socialism cannot be a world ideology or system without a world
organisation.
What I believe to be needed in the present circumstances is some form of
international consultative centre, whose function could only be the exchange of
Information and discussion on contemporary theoretical and political problems.
This would embrace all left wing currents, including elements of the left wing of
social democracy. This is of course a revision of what I have advocated in the
past as part of the International. But I consider that our experience calls for
such a revision. I do not lay the blame for our failure on this or that group of
comrades. On the contrary, it is the objective situation which caused the crisis
in the movement, and we ourselves with all our limitations ware the product of
the period. It is time to take stock of our real stature and role, and temper our
actions and ideas accordingly.
As regards the situation in Britain, here too I have arrived at conclusions that
are fundamentally different to those I have accepted and advocated in the past.
I reject the thesis that the Labour Party cannot under any circumstances be the
instrument of socialist emancipation and that only through the form of Soviets
can a transformation of society take place in Britain. Although I have never
excluded the possibility of the parliamentary overthrow of capitalism in the
advanced countries, particularly in this country, I now believe that it is our task
to advocate the use of parliament as the most economical vehicle for the
complete transformation of British society. If, however, in the course of the
class struggle it becomes necessary not only to advocate, but to participate in
the formation of alternative forms of government, only renegades to socialism
would fail to advocate such forms. In practice there is not a section of the
Fourth International today In the Western countries which advocates the
creation of soviets as opposed to the existing parliamentary institutions. I
believe it is our duty to state what is and speak with one voice on this question,
instead of two.
So also have I revised my view that it is historically and practically necessary
to form a tightly disciplined, secret organisation separate from the mass party
of the working class as the only possible instrument of socialist emancipation.
The perspective that it is necessary to work for a split which we have so
unsuccessfully pursued for years. I now believe to be completely false. It seems
today to be incomprehensible that I could have seriously visualised success on
this basis, namely, that a mass revolutionary current could be developed on the
basis of a tight, secret fraction. On the contrary, the very nature of the group
necessarily did in the past and will in the future confine the Trotskyist
movement to that of a sectarian clique. With this method we cannot approach
the workers squarely and honestly with a rounded out case. Only the select few
must be brought into the confidence when they are considered to be sufficiently
well seasoned. This is not a moral question. It is a political question of the
greatest importance.
The Labour Party has many bureaucratic features. Nevertheless, it is one of
the most democratic workers organisations in existence. There is a
considerable measure of freedom to advocate and give organised expression to
revolutionary socialist criticisms of policy and to present an alternative to that at
present pursued by the leadership. Indeed, there in far more lively written
152
discussion on basic question than there is inside the Trotskyist organisation.
(For example numerous pamphlets and articles on mixed economy, workers
control and socialist management). How long this will and can last will depend
primarily on the level of consciousness of the organised workers. But so long as
it does, it now appears to me to be one of the basic causes of our sectarian ills
that we have preferred to continue on the basis of a secret faction, alien to the
mass organisation, instead of acting along the lines of our public declarations,
loyally adhering to the mass party and seeking to transform it along the lines it
advocates.
The existence of this secret fraction is secret only to the Labour Party rank
and file with the exception of the handful who find their way into the
organisation and those who find their way out of it. The Labour Party leadership
is fully aware that such an organisation exists. The Stalinists know the most
intimate details of its structure and members. The police know it. If the
leadership of the Labour Party takes no action it is primarily because they more
correctly estimate the role of the group than the leadership of that faction does
itself.
It may well be that the Labour Party will not be the instrument through
which the working class of Britain will overthrow capitalism and that some other
organisation will be necessary for the achievement of that task. But of one
thing I am convinced: that it is the party through which the mass of the
workers pool their ideas and experiences and work out practical solutions to
their problems, as well as seek the solution to the conquest of the capitalist
system. Either the Labour Party will carry out the task as the result of its own
internal transformations or else the mass socialist current will emerge from its
ranks as the party of socialist emancipation.
On this promise, the task is to loyally adhere to the mass party and seek to
drive it forward on the road to the complete transformation of the system. It
follows that the maintenance of the secret disciplined fraction within the Labour
Party is not only unnecessary but undesirable, and may readily prove to be an
obstacle in the present conditions of democratic legality to the creation of a
mass alternative current and policy to that pursued by the leadership.
The existence of the secret fraction trying to find public expression leads to
two distinct and even contradictory lines which cannot assist in the
development of a healthy revolutionary wing. Publicly in the paper it is argued,
not by right or left wing Labour Party members, but by Trotskyists, that the
Labour Party is a socialist party, the mass party of the working class to which
all workers must loyally adhere; and that this party can transform society
through parliament. But privately within the confines of the groups the opposite
is advocated. Allegedly on the basis of Marxist theory, it is categorically denied
that the British workers can use the Labour Party as the instrument of its
emancipation. It is categorically denied that it is possible to transform this party
into an instrument for the overthrow of capitalism, and that parliament can be
used as the vehicle for such a transformation. The line in the paper cannot be
accepted as a mere stratagem designed to cover up a theory with a more
popular approach. It is either "a capitulation before the pressure of bourgeois
democratic public opinion" or a tacit admission that this aspect of
"fundamentals" is not applicable.
153
It is not the object of this letter to make a full critical analysis of the contents
of the paper of the British Trotskyists. However, the schizophrenic conflict
between public and private policies permeates every aspect of the life of the
fraction. Thus the editor can write an article uncritically supporting Tito from
which the only conclusions to be drawn are that Yugoslavia is a healthy
workers state. Yet when asked on the EC to publish a mildly critical letter
saying we must be careful not to create too many illusions that there exists
complete democracy in Yugoslavia, the editor thought up the crushing answer:
that he did not know what Comrades Lee and Haston were complaining of since
they believed Yugoslavia was a workers state while he, the editor, thought it
was a capitalist state! To such levels of polemic has the British Trotskyist
organisation descended.
One final outcome of this game of speaking with two voices is that the
somewhat ultra-left criticisms of the Labour leadership which appear from time
to time are combined with the most tender regard for the Stalinists and their
fellow travellers in the Labour Party. On the plea that it will drive these fellowtravellers away from the paper, if they criticise Stalinism, they refuse to tackle
Stalinism sharply in any aspect of its policy. Thus, instead of guiding the fellow
travellers in a socialist internationalist direction, they are drawn onto the trailer
of the Stalinist caravan.
I do not believe that a healthy socialist current can live in such a milieu. The
first prerequisite is to break the mental bonds, the phrasemongering and
double-talk that fetter the movement today. If this is done the Trotskyist cadres
may still play a valuable and leading role in the struggles of the working class
for socialist emancipation.
Many of my closest friends and collaborators have been highly critical of my
action in walking away from the organisation and refusing to conduct a
struggle. I wished at all costs to avoid a struggle on the old and now familiar
lines when I made the break. I hoped to maintain the best possible relations
with the members of the organisation so that a wide field of collaboration could
still exist between us. At all costs I wanted to avoid the impression that I
sought to form a group along similar lines to the existing organisation. In the
long run, I am convinced that the majority of the comrades who will play a
useful role in the British Labour movement will travel a similar role to the one I
have taken. I do not propose to defend the belated writing of this letter. My
inclination was to delay it still further until I could present a fuller exposition of
my ideas. However this brief summary will serve the purpose of informing those
comrades who have asked for a statement as to the reasons for leaving the
organisation.
My break provided the opportunity of witnessing more clearly the
degeneration of the British organisation, revealed in the reaction of the
leadership. The membership were presented with an ultimatum to break not
only political, but also personal relations with me on the pain of expulsion. It
was further stated that Haston had to be driven out of the Labour movement
and especially out of the National Council of Labour Colleges. Only the
Stalinists, to my knowledge, have carried out this practise, one which was
universally condemned by the Trotskyist movement. Unfortunately, this is a
tendency which now characterises the movement and reflects its sectarianism.
154
This campaign has, of course, a serious aspect, especially for the illegal
organisation. For example, a few days after I left the organisation I was
approached by a student of one of my NCLC classes, a Labour Party member,
who asked me why I had been expelled from the Trotskyist organisation as a
"renegade" and "enemy of the working class". He could not understand this in
the light of my lecture with which he was in complete accord. To expose the
accusations, it was necessary to give my reasons for leaving the organisation. If
a public discussion develops on this premise, the responsibility for the outcome
must rest with the maligners.
There is a certain irony in the present situation that the National Executive of
the Labour Party have twice turned down my application for membership
(although I have acted as full time propagandist for the Acton Labour Party
during the General and Municipal elections). Asked why by an influential
member of the Labour movement, the answer given was that they knew the
Trotskyists had entered as a fraction and I was kept out for this reason.
However, with the backing of the Acton Divisional Labour Party, when
accommodation can be found for me in that district, I have no doubt that
Transport House will accept my membership.
At the present time a widespread discussion is taking place within the Trade
Unions and Labour Party on the experiences of five years in power. What next
to drive the movement forward? What form of control and management should
be introduced in the enterprises which have been taken over? To what extent
will the mixed economy be disrupted and shattered by world crisis? What steps
should be taken to avoid such a disruption? How far should the policy of
nationalisation be pushed forward? All these and other problems are now the
subject of an intensive literary and verbal discussion. There is ample scope for
the expression of ideas. For my part, I hope to make some contribution without
being afraid to make mistakes or learn from others in the course of the
discussion.
In Britain, the Labour Party may be pushed back by the swing of the
pendulum in the next election. But, in the long run, it will be through the
Labour Party that the workers will express themselves when they take the next
step forward. There is ample opportunity for every comrade to play a role in
pushing the movement forward, and for all who want to remain in contact to
exchange ideas and publish material on the basis of a common orientation, to
do so within the framework of the Labour Party. With this perspective, I hope
that many of the comrades with whom I have worked so closely in the past, will
keep in touch so that we can play our part to the full in the socialist tasks that
confront us.
Yours fraternally,
Jock Haston
155
The Methods of Gerry Healy
Ken Tarbuck
This article was published in Workers News No.30, April 1991, under the
pseudonym of "John Walters" and with the title "Origins of the SWP".
IN RESPECT of Bob Pitts articles, you might be interested in hearing one of
the ways in which Healy purged his organisation in 1950. In Birmingham, where
I lived at the time, the "Club" branch was evenly divided between supporters of
the old RCP majority and Healy supporters (most of whom had arrived after
1947). Most of the old RCP were reluctant entrists, and were most certainly
incensed at the manner in which our organisation had been turned over to the
Healy faction in a most undemocratic manner. However, none of us had
supported the Open Party Faction in 1949; rather we grudgingly went along
with the leadership. There was a great fund of political loyalty to the HastonGrant leadership, and this is what really swung most of us behind the move to
entry. This loyalty, incidentally, was rapidly used up in the following year.
We found it difficult to adjust to the new regime and above all we found it
extremely hard to stomach Socialist Outlook. If one compares the pages of
Socialist Appeal with Healys paper, this problem becomes understandable.
Gone were any criticisms of Stalinism or Social Democracy in any meaningful
sense. We found ourselves selling a paper which gave front page coverage to
known Stalinist trade union leaders or fellow-travelling Labour MPs. As can be
imagined, this did not do much for our morale. On top of this we found as exmajority supporters we were treated like second class citizens by the Healy
supporters; they seemed to adopt a sneering attitude towards ex-majority
supporters. Then we began to hear rumours of expulsions or departures from
activity of people who had been members of the movement for some years.
It must have been in early 1950, just what date I cannot recall, that the exmajority supporters in Birmingham began to meet secretly as a separate group
to discuss our dilemma. Certainly we knew by then that most of the old
leadership around Haston had either deserted us, had been expelled or were
under threat of expulsion. We decided to submit a short document to the
forthcoming group conference criticising the Socialist Outlook. It was quite
short and very cautious, since we were concerned not to give Healy an excuse
for expelling us. We found it difficult to arrive at an estimation of the groups
(or Internationals) policies on the basis of documents because we were not
allowed to retain them. We were issued with documents and allowed to keep
them for one week and then had to return them to the branch secretary (who
naturally was a Healy supporter, Harry Finch). This was on the grounds of
security. When we started meeting in secret we decided to try to copy the
documents so as to retain some evidence of what was supposed to be going
on. However, in those days there were no photocopiers available and none of
us had typewriters, so we were reduced to copying them by hand.
The document which we submitted to the 1950 conference was drafted by
myself and then amended by what I suppose could be called our faction, and
then submitted in the name of Percy Downey and myself. Even then Harry
Finch was most belligerent about it being a joint document he was very
156
suspicious by then. I was elected to attend the conference, along with Harry
Finch, as one of the two Birmingham delegates.
However, I should mention that before the conference our secret faction
invited Tony Cliff to meet us, which he did, and we had a long discussion with
him about the group and the International. He had a very plausible line which
went something like this:
"If one continues to see Stalinist Russia as a workers state and admit that
the Stalinists can carry through a revolution (Eastern Europe, China) then you
end up adopting Stalinist policies (e.g., Socialist Outlook, the IS line on
Yugoslavia, etc and Stalinist organisational methods are used, e.g., Healys
group). The only way out of the dilemma was to adopt the state capitalist line."
This is, of course, a compressed summary. We were quite impressed with his
line of argument, but at that point we refused to throw in our lot with his
faction. As ordinary rank-and-file members we felt we needed more time to
consider the issues and see what happened at the conference. We were
certainly not committed to a state capitalist position, although we were
obviously swayed by Cliffs arguments.
The conference was held in an atmosphere of repressed hysteria, since by
then the Korean War had begun, and Healy used this to whip up a feeling that
at any moment we could expect the police to raid us. (Look-outs were posted
to warn of any police move.) The result was that any criticism of the leadership
was met by cat-calls, boos and hisses as though the critics were the "enemy".
Naturally, Healy had rigged the conference to give himself an overwhelming
majority. This had been done by manipulating the composition of branches.
Some branches were divided, others were amalgamated, but in each case the
net result had been that Healys supporters gained more delegates. Ted Grant
in particular was the butt of some very vicious barracking and at one point
Healy shouted out "Get back to the dung heap". I remember this very well,
since it was the first time that I had seen such conduct within the movement or
heard such language used against comrades, so it made a lasting impression on
me.
At the conference I had a discussion with Ted Grant and told him in
unmistakable terms what the Birmingham comrades thought about his spineless
attitude before the dissolution of the RCP, and pointed out that he and Jimmy
Dean had considerable responsibility for landing us in our predicament. I made
it clear that we were not prepared to support him in any leadership role in the
future, nor were we alone in this attitude amongst the opposition. So the
opposition to Healy, such as it was, was fragmented right from the start. At this
conference Healy introduced another novelty - a slate for election to the
National Committee. The EC had drawn up this slate and if any delegate
wanted to nominate someone who was not on the slate they also had to
nominate someone else to be taken off! This was, of course, designed to sow
dissension. (This did not stop me nominating.) I cannot recall now just how
many opposition delegates there were at that conference, but it was not many,
half-a-dozen, perhaps slightly more. However, this in no way reflected the true
strength of opposition, since during that year nearly 100 comrades left, some to
form the original Cliff group (about 50), some to join Ted Grant and others just
drifted away.
157
When I reported back to my comrades in Birmingham we came to the
conclusion that Cliff was correct and it was then that we decided to help found
his group. It was clear that we would have to form a group outside the "Club"
since the majority of Cliffs supporters had already been expelled. However, we
decided that we would not just walk out but ensure that we were expelled so as
to maximise the political point to be made, and put us in a position to appeal to
the International since none of us wanted to leave the Fourth International.
It was then decided that Percy Downey would submit a resolution to the
Birmingham Trades Council putting a third camp position on the Korean War.
The upshot of this was an immediate summonsed branch meeting of the "Club"
at which Healy was present. It was very acrimonious to say the least, and Healy
was at his most venomous. Healy laid a resolution for the expulsion of Percy,
and refused to allow any discussion of the political issues. He insisted that the
only issue was "did Percy, or did he not, break discipline by putting the
resolution to the Trades Council". Each time anyone tried to raise the political
issues Healy broke into a rage and shouted us down. However, when the vote
was taken there was a tie! Healy then called a halt to the meeting, declaring
the branch was suspended until further notice. Outside the pub where we had
been meeting Healy wagged his finger under Percys nose and growled "well
get a unified branch in Birmingham one way or the other Mr Downey".
Shortly after that there was another summonsed meeting and we arrived to
find that John Williams of Coventry was there. JW had been inactive for about
two years before this and had not paid any subs even before the RCP had
collapsed. But Healy had restored him to full membership and this meant that
he (Healy) would have a majority in the branch. The resolution for Percys
expulsion was again put, and again no discussion was allowed, and this time it
was passed by one vote. Percy then left the meeting. Healy then went round
the room pointing to those of us who had voted against the motion and said
something like "Do you retract your vote?" When we answered no, Healy said:
"You are suspended for one month. If after that time you havent retracted this
vote you are expelled." So nearly half the Birmingham branch was expelled for
voting against the expulsion of another member! With Percy it meant that 50
per cent of the Birmingham branch were pushed out. And similar events were
going on up and down the country.
Certainly in our case Healy had fallen into our "trap" since we then went on
to help to found the Cliff group. But we were only able to dig this "trap"
because of the bureaucratic manner in which the group was run. Had there
been anything like a democratic regime such as had existed in the RCP we
would not have wanted to leave the organisation. And of this I am sure, had
there been a credible alternative to Healy around which maintained a workers
statist position, Cliff would not have made so many recruits. Despite being
hampered by the immigration laws at that time, Cliff was very active in
contacting people, meeting them and discussing for as long as it took to recruit
them. This entailed some personal risk for Cliff, since he faced being deported
back to Palestine and a very uncertain future to say the least. Grant, on the
other hand, was completely inactive, as far as we knew, and seemed to have
retreated into his shell. In this respect one could argue that one of the people
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who was most responsible for the creation of the state capitalist group in this
country was Gerry Healy!
One other point. When it became known in later years that physical violence
had been used by Healy against his own members it did not come as a shock to
people like myself. Even in 1950 he carried around with him an atmosphere of
violence. Even if at that stage it was only verbal, he certainly created a feeling
of fear amongst those around him. I recall that in a letter I wrote to Sam
Bornstein in December 1956, before any evidence of violence was known, I
characterised Healy as a political gangster. This may not be a very precise
political characterisation but it summed up for me at the time what I considered
Healy to be. Given all that has happened since 1950, I feel that I was correct in
my assessment of Healy.
We should not ignore the responsibility of Haston and other leading
members of the WIL/RCP for the role Healy played later on. There was a
certain element of cliquishness in the treatment of Healy in the early 1940s. All
the evidence points to the fact that he should have been excluded from the WIL
because of his behaviour, but he was allowed to rejoin after resigning and stay
in. Also, Haston was prepared to offer Healy political advice at least until the
mid-1960s. Healy would often meet Haston in his home for discussions. This I
verified while renting a room in Hastons house in the mid-1960s. So the clique
persisted for many years.
159
The Struggle against Revisionism
Gerry Healy
This document, which is dated October 1953, was circulated in the Fourth
Internationals British section during the political dispute that led to a split in
the International. Although the document appeared under the name of "Burns"
(one of Healys pseudonyms), whole sections of it were lifted from US Socialist
Workers Party National Committees "Memorandum on The Rise and Decline
of Stalinism" (5 October 1953). It would seem to be the only attempt by
Healys faction in the British section to present a theoretical critique of "Pabloite
revisionism", and does not appear in any of the published documentary
collections covering the history of the FI. I am grateful to Paolo Casciola of the
Centro Studi Pietro Tresso for providing a copy.
WE ARE entering today what is probably the most serious and most important
discussion in the history of our movement. What is at stake is nothing less than
the fate of Trotskyism, that is, of the Marxism, the revolutionary socialism of
our time. Make no mistake about it nothing less is involved in the present
struggle for each single one of us than this: Whether we are to remain true to
the ideas which won us to the movement and which have guided many of us
for years and which all of us have hold and I, for my part, continue to hold
can alone provide an answer to the burning problems facing humanity in these
crucial times, which alone can ensure the victory of socialism, of the working
class.
Before going into the issues of the dispute themselves it is, I feel, necessary
to say a few words about the background, the setting for the present struggle.
Every serious comrade must have asked himself or herself even before now:
How do you account for the great heat, for the suddenness of the outbreak of
this struggle, for its swift development? Why has this fight arisen? Why at this
time?
It is the duty of a leadership to give an accounting for such a serious turn in
the affairs of a revolutionary organisation, and I believe I would be remiss in
my obligations to you if I did not first undertake to try to give you such an
accounting.
How
the
Dispute
Arose
The truth is that the rise of this dispute is sudden only in appearance. In reality,
the issues have been under the surface for quite some time, since about the
time of the Third Congress to be precise. Only we ourselves have not been fully
aware of their significance. How do you explain that? It can only be explained
by the fact that consciousness lags behind reality, that the mind grasps only
more slowly what the eye perceives.
It is necessary to understand the mechanics of this tardy catching up of the
mind with new facts, to understand it concretely, and in particular in this case.
For some time now a good many comrades not only England, but elsewhere,
have felt uneasy about some of the formulations on Stalinism that have come
forth from the IS in Paris, and also about some of the organisational procedure
in Paris. There were, for instance, formulations in some IS documents which
160
lent themselves to interpretation as though they said the Soviet bureaucracy
could not, because of the new objective situation, develop politics other than
those going in a leftward direction.
These things were disturbing to us, but we put them in the back of our
heads, so to speak.
Why? Well, to be frank, it was due to a certain amount of conservatism that
developed in us. After a number of years of international disarray in our
movement, we seemed to have established on authoritative leadership in the
IS, with prestige of a sort that we had not had before, with a certain amount of
regularisation that undoubtedly was fruitful and of benefit to us. We were
naturally reluctant to disturb that, or rather, to countenance the fact that it was
or could be disturbed.
Similarly in England, we had from time to time clashes of opinion in the
leadership, on practical matters relating to the question of Stalinism particularly,
which were alarming.
Here are a few examples:
1) We had differences on the Sheffield Peace Congress organised by the
Stalinists in 1950. Comrade Collins [John Lawrence] wanted to give it critical
support. This gave rise to a heated. discussion which led to substantial
alterations in the article that had already been intended for the paper.
2) The next criticism against the tendency of our paper under the editorship
of Comrade Collins to conciliate with Stalinism arose at our active workers
conference in May 1951. Rank and file comrades strongly opposed a review of a
book called Soviets in Central Asia. The piece which came under strongest
criticism read as follows:
"Major irrigation schemes have been constructed, there has been a great
extension of the area of land under cultivation, and an extension of cattle
breeding and dairy farming. The challenge of the desert is being met.
Afforestation to halt shifting sand has taken place and methods of irrigating the
desert are being tried. Rich mineral deposits are being exploited and new
industries are being set up.
"A serious omission in the book is that no details of wages and conditions of
labour are given though the authors assure us that none of this progress is
due to forced labour.
"What is certain is that only Socialist planning could have accomplished the
transformation of such a region.
"The claim of the Soviet scientists that the desert will bloom may soon be
made good. It is at any rate an aim far more worthy of mans labour and
ingenuity than the devising of new and more ghastly weapons of death."
3) After these episodes we adopted a resolution on Stalinism at the 1952
Conference. Unfortunately this did not end our difficulties. In November 1951
Comrade Collins again was on the brink of including a report from a fellow
traveller who had been to E. Germany. His big point was that the policemen
there were "very democratic". This was withdrawn by the Secretariat.
4) When Transport House had it all laid on to utilise the Vienna Peace
delegates last year as an excuse to get rid of the real socialists Comrade
Pablo felt we were wrong in taking action against the Peace delegates in the
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LP, and that we should have supported them against Transport House.
Everyone knows that this was precisely the trap that was set for us,
There is another startling recent example which will be dealt with in a
separate document.
We did not connect up all these matters, nor events here with our misgivings
about the IS, until it became plain that there was connection.
Since the publication of the document "Rise and Decline of Stalinism", Pablo
has done everything in the public organs of our movement to convey the
impression that this is the position of the international.
Comrade Collins went to great lengths in an effort to have us publish it
publicly, so that it would be read as our line.
And yet its proper status is that of a draft document. It is for discussion and
until carried by a World Congress is binding on no one. The indecent haste of
Pablo, Collins, Clarke and Co. to push it to the forefront is but a trick to
compromise our movement before it has had the opportunity to have a proper
discussion. It is the old "operation smuggle" of alien ideas.
As we watched this developing tension we nevertheless felt reluctant to
decide irrevocably to face up to an internal struggle. Why?
As in the case of the IS, and even more so, we had developed a certain
amount of organisational conservatism. After many years of strife and paralysis
in the British Trotskyist movement, we had succeeded in establishing a
harmonious atmosphere, a homogeneous leadership with some five to six years
of stability and fruitful work in the mass organisations.
We were particularly reluctant to disturb this peace in our midst. We were
anxious to maintain the collaboration in the leadership, the continuity of our
good work, the unity, achieved with so much effort; and of course, we had an
utter distaste for factional strife from our previous experience.
You all probably experience a similar reaction, particularly the older
comrades among you; and that is only natural. Internal struggle is something
serious revolutionists do not particularly relish there are plenty of tasks to
absorb us and take up our energies outside. But it is also something
revolutionists do not shrink from when it becomes a necessity. On the contrary.
Revolutionists face internal ideological struggle with the same resoluteness
and determination as any other task; even more so, for without clarity,
precision and correctness in our political line, all our work is like the course of a
ship without a rudder. We must know where we are going, how the chart reads
of the waters we navigate, and what is our direction.
That precisely is the question that the new IS documents raise anew. We
thought we were clear on that for a long time. But now the IS under Comrade
Pablo has undertaken to challenge some of the fundamentals of our traditional
position. Their challenge constitutes a new revisionism. I shall try now to
explain why, and from that the meaning of this struggle.
The
Issues
in
Dispute
I come to the heart of the question before us to the issues in dispute. In their
essence all these issues can be summed up into one overall question:
Shall we continue to base ourselves on the theory of Trotskyism, that is, on
Marxist theory as applied by Trotsky to the great new social phenomena of our
162
epoch? Or shall we, in the somewhat indelicate words of Comrade Clarke, "Junk
the Old Trotskyism"?
In other words: Is the theory that has guided our movement for more than a
quarter of a century now outlived, dated, obsolete? Have the new facts, the
"new realities" of the recent period basically changed such concepts as we have
held up to now of the Soviet bureaucracy, of Stalinism, of their relationship to
the big contending classes in present-day society? And, if they have, must we
not also change our own function, our role, as we have conceived it up to now
as a Fourth International, as the nucleus of an indispensable revolutionary
party still to be built to carry the proletarian revolution to its ultimate victory
over capitalism?
These two questions really hang together inseparably. You cannot discuss
the one without the other. For Marxists theory is the guide to action and not an
abstract dogma. If we revise our theory, we are obliged to change our mode of
action.
I say bluntly: The ideas put forward by Pablo, Clarke and their friends in the
Thesis on the "Rise and Decline of Stalinism" over the signature of the IS, open
the way for revisionism in our basic theory. I say just as bluntly: The only
logical, consistent conclusion that can follow from this revisionism is the
liquidation of the Fourth International as we have conceived it up to now.
Now there will probably be flung at us the charge that we are "traditionalists"
(apparently it is a new crime in some peoples eyes to remain true to the
traditions of Marxism; else why use this word?). That we are "sectarians". That
we cling to "ossified" theories and formulas, that is, to the dry bones of theories
that have lost their life and vitality. That we are like the "Old Bolsheviks" whom
Lenin condemned in 1917 for hanging on to slogans that should have been
relegated to the museum of pre-revolutionary oddities,
The older comrades in the movement, and also the younger ones who have
familiarised themselves with the literature of our historic disputes and struggles,
will recognise such charges for what they are a smokescreen for an operation
that otherwise would be given short shrift by Trotskyists. I propose here, to try
to clear the smoke a little for other comrades.
What is theory in the sense that Marxists understand it? What is our attitude,
our real attitude to theory, not the one attributed to us by others?
We have always regarded Marxist theory as a system of ideas based on an
understanding of social phenomena as they have evolved the past, are affected
by new developments, and have their impact in turn upon the present. That
indeed is the essence of living Marxism, of historical materialism, of the
dialectic.
Now it is obviously not Marxism, not even good sense, to shut your eyes to
new facts of life, because as long as there is life on earth there will be new
facts.
But Marxists never stop there. They examine the new facts very carefully and
watch their further course, to distinguish what is really fact and what is illusion
or a false impression and above all: relate what is new to the past
performance of given phenomena. That is, to past theory. Marxists dont "junk"
theory, they bring it up to date. Marxists dont look askance at innovations in
163
theory they test such innovations in the light of the body of theory inherited
from their predecessors, from the "classics", if you please.
Why is this so? Because of some kind of ancestor worship? Because of some
"scholastic" attachment to a Marxist Bible? What a shame to have all this
nonsense offered up once more as "original" criticism along with such other
allegations as "conservatism", "routinism" etc. How often we have heard this
from revisionists before!
We are attached to our body of theory because these ideas have time and
again withstood the test of experience. Because they have overcome challenge
after challenge from superficial critics. Because they have proved indispensable
as an instrument to understand the meaning of new facts. Because they
embody the memory of the working class in the struggle for emancipation.
Trotsky said in his booklet Whither Britain in 1926 that what distinguishes
the revolutionary party of the workers from the treacherous reformist parties is
that the revolutionary party serves as the memory of the class, the heart of its
experience.
This is the concept that our new opponents want to overturn. Because of
some real or alleged new facts about Stalinism, we must forget all about the
past, about the whole evolution of this social phenomenon as though what
has been involved in Stalinism is some accidental aberration of individuals who
are now in the process of self-reform!
There have been many such attempts in the Marxist movement with regard
to the nature of capitalism and the capitalist class from Bernstein down to
Strachey. In fact, the official ideology of the labour movement in this country is
that the capitalist class has more or less reformed and accepted the need of a
Welfare State just as the Labour leaders have accepted the need for a "mixed"
economy with capitalists in it. It is only a matter as to who can administer it
better, more wisely, more democratically etc. Is it necessary to go into the
"new realities" on which this reasoning is based? Not here, I hope.
Attempts to overthrow theory in the Trotskyist movement, with regard to the
nature of Stalinism, are also not altogether new. There were the capitulators of
the time of Radek, for whom the adoption of the first Five Year Plan changed
the character of the bureaucracy from a reactionary caste into a proletarian
leadership, and there were the Shachtman-Burnham revisionists for whom the
Stalin-Hitler plan sufficed to change the bureaucracy from a caste to a new
class replacing the proletariat as the challengers of capitalism for world
domination.
Historic experience has, I think, since then given its verdict over these
innovations and their innovators. We are now confronted, however, with a new
attempt to overthrow theory in the Trotskyist movement. It is far less excusable
than previous attempts, because experience has since repeatedly confirmed the
correctness of Trotskys theory of Stalinism, of the Soviet bureaucracy, of the
chief social phenomena of our epoch. But to make up for that, this new attempt
is all the more devious, all the more dangerous. It is the most serious
revisionist threat to our movement since Burnhams and we are confident it will
in the end be just as thoroughly exposed and defeated in our ranks throughout
the world.
164
I have said that the Pablo-Clarke Theses before us open the road for
revisionism. It is their opening shot. There have already been a few victims in
this campaign, but these are in their own ranks. I refer to the four members of
their international caucus who in Seattle, USA, have gone over bag and
baggage to Stalinism, who now stoutly proclaim their endorsement of the
murder of the whole Bolshevik cadre by Stalins GPU, along with every other
crime of the bureaucracy. I shall return to this not unimportant "new reality" in
our movement later on.
Meantime, let us examine some of the innovations in theory presented in this
draft document and see how they are reached, and how they shape up in the
light of actual experience as will as in the light of our theory.
What
is
New
in
Fact
and
What
in
Illusions?
Now, ever since the Third Congress, we are all agreed that some changes of
the first order have taken place in the relationship of class forces in the world
after the war.
One-third, instead of one-sixth, of the earths surface has been withdrawn
from the capitalist market, from the domination of imperialism. In this sense
the class relationship of forces has altered sharply in favour of the working
class, of socialism. The total collapse of capitalism in Eastern Europe and more
particularly the victory of the Chinese revolution mark the high points of this
change.
This expansion of the area withdrawn from imperialist domination has not
only enormously aggravated the crisis of capitalism, but it has introduced a
greater crisis than ever into Stalinism as well. Evidence of this crisis has become
clear in the break of Yugoslavia from the Kremlin, in the obvious though not
open clashes between the Chinese CP and the Moscow bureaucracy, and so
forth.
The new relationship of class forces has the tendency of developing into
international civil war or war-revolution.
Now some in our movement were slower to recognise these new facts than
others. In fact, some of the people who had previously departed from our
movement, and gone over to reformism (like Haston and Co. in England or
Geoffrey and Co. in France) saw one or the other of these developments before
any of us. That alone, however, did not suffice, as their subsequent fate has
shown, to guide them to correct conclusions. They lost their bearings in theory
and in practice, and developed all sorts of illusions, first about Stalinism and
ultimately about reformism. Their break with our tried and tested international
cadre set them adrift, and allowed all the winds of alien ideologies to carry
them to unforeseen shores.
An
Analysis
of
the
IS
Document
I said that at the Third Congress we were agreed on the main traits of the
change, in the international relationship of forces in favour of the proletarian
revolution.
No one at that time conceived of this change as some kind of irrevocable
guarantee of victory as an automatic process. On the contrary, we laid stress
on the need to build the parties of the FI to assure that victory.
Still less did anyone openly claim that the crisis in Stalinism, evidenced by
the Yugoslav and Chinese developments, had made a re-evaluation of Stalinism
165
necessary. Let alone any idea that the Stalinist bureaucracy was reforming
itself.
On the contrary, we drew the conclusion that where the Stalinist parties
were weak, it was our task to remove them from serious competition by
building our independent organisations through closer penetration of the
existing mass movements. Where they constituted the mass movement, we
were to undertake an entry into the Stalinist mass organisations for the purpose
of taking advantage of their deepening crisis with the same ultimate
objective.
Now there are some who say that the present document is merely a
continuation of the line of the Third Congress. We are prepared to restudy this
whole question. But that is not the way I at least and, I know, a good many
others, saw it then or see it now.
We have three main differences with the IS document:
a)
The
first
is
on
the
question
of
perspective.
b) The second is on the way it deals with the problem of the bureaucracy.
c) Thirdly on the role of the CPs outside the USSR.
a)
Perspective
In its approach to the background of the crisis in the USSR the document is
completely one-sided. On page 2 it says:
"The fundamental conditions under which the Soviet bureaucracy and its
tight hold over the Communist Parties developed, namely, the ebb of the
revolution, the isolation of the Soviet Union, and the backward conditions of its
economy these conditions have disappeared."
On another page the document states that "the objective foundations of the
dictatorship are in the process of rapidly disappearing".
Let us examine the post-war world and see to what degree these sweeping
assertions conform to the real state of affairs. We are here dealing with matters
of fact. Let us analyse each of the above three fundamental conditions to see to
what extent they have vanished.
i)
The
Development
of
the
World
Revolution
The international revolution has undoubtedly experienced a considerable
resurgence since 1943. The Second World War generated a revolutionary wave
of greater scope, intensity and persistence than the First World War. The Soviet
victory over Nazism, the revolutionary victories in Yugoslavia and China, the
extension of nationalised property into the buffer states by bureaucratic-military
means, the spread of the colonial revolution have all dealt hard blows to world
capitalism and enormously strengthened the anti-capitalist camp.
However, this trend in the world situation has been combined and crisscrossed with another. The immense revolutionary movement which has
produced such transformations in Eastern and Central Europe and in Asia, came
to grief in Western Europe during this very same `period. Through its alliance
with the allied imperialists, the Soviet bureaucracy was chiefly responsible for
this reversal and betrayal of the European revolution.
This has generated a series of opposite effects in the unfolding of the world
revolution. The proletarian offensive was curbed, the working class became
weaker, Western European capitalism was rescued and became relatively
stabilised for a period of years. This has enabled the imperialist counter-
166
revolution directed by the US to take hold of these countries and use them as
drill grounds and spring-boards for its war preparations and prospective attacks
upon the anti-capitalist countries and revolutionary forces.
Thus the revolutionary process since World War II has experienced an
uneven and contradictory development. While the revolution moved forward in
a number of backward countries, triumphed in Yugoslavia and China, it has
undergone set-backs in a number of the advanced countries. The victories for
the revolution represent gains for the working class and oppressed peoples. But
they must be considered in connection with the recession of the revolution in
Western Europe and its effects, in order to arrive at a more balanced and
accurate reckoning of the progress of the revolution.
To imply, as the document does, that one of the main factors in making for a
weakening of the objective foundations of the bureaucracy is the revolutions in
backward countries this suggestion is completely one-sided. Search the
document and you will not find a single word about the role of the West in this
matter.
We are supremely confident that the Russian people can and will overthrow
the bureaucracy, but the final attainment of socialism in the USSR is irrevocably
bound up with the revolution in the West.
ii)
Isolation
of
the
Soviet
Union
This first factor is directly connected with the second: the encirclement of the
Soviet Union by world imperialism. The post-war developments certainly
succeeded in loosening and unsettling the imperialist encirclement to a certain
extent and breaking through the previous tight isolation of the Soviet Union.
The linking together of the countries from the Elbe to the Pacific, however
much they may be bureaucratically governed and oppressed, is a strong
bulwark to the USSR. But here, too, it is necessary to preserve essential
proportions.
The failure of the revolution to break through to victory in Western Europe,
which would have radically altered the balance of class forces throughout
Europe and Asia, has permitted imperialism to reassert its encirclement and
intensify its pressures against the Soviet Union on all planes.
This isolation is felt in the economic, political, diplomatic and military fields in
varying degrees.
Despite all their achievements, the industrial capacities of the states in the
Soviet bloc is far below that of the capitalist states. This unfavourable balance
could be rectified only with the inclusion of the industrial complex of Western
Europe. But this is now cut off in large part by the economic blockade which is
an element in the isolation of the Soviet Union.
The moves being made by the Kremlin to curry favour with the bourgeois
governments of France and Italy, and its manoeuvres around the German
question, testify to its attempts to overcome its isolation.
Instead of attracting workers in the advanced countries, the Kremlins policy
helps to repel them and thus aggravates the social isolation of the SU from the
class forces which alone can guarantee its defence.
Finally, the United States is engaged in forging a military ring around
Kremlin-dominated territories and exerts unremitting pressures from all
directions upon it. The Soviet bureaucracy must reckon with this at all times
167
both in its domestic and foreign policies. The looming menace of A-bomb attack
determines its plan of production. This takes first place in the strategical plans
of the Soviet General Staff. The menace of imperialist encirclement and
aggression determines the policies of those Communist parties under the
Kremlins control.
How then can the resolution assert in such an unqualified way that the
isolation of the SU has disappeared? The isolation has been modified and
mitigated but not at all removed. The pressures of imperialist environment
weigh upon the entire life of the Soviet peoples. The Soviet workers, with
memories still fresh of the last war, fear the outbreak of a new one. This is still
a factor in restraining them from open conflict with the bureaucracy for fear of
aiding imperialism. Thus the very encirclement of the SU, which the policies of
the Kremlin serve to sustain and even augment, remains one of the factors in
maintaining its. grip upon power.
iii)
The
Development
of
Soviet
Economy
Marked advances have been made in Soviet economy, especially since 1947.
However these have been extremely uneven.
One of Trotskys classical definitions for the bureaucracy was that it was the
"policeman of inequality". We have only to examine the recent speech of
Khrushchev to understand the full meaning of this.
Khrushchev speaks about the absolute decline of animal husbandry in the
USSR He gives the following table:
Beef & dairy Including
Hogs
Sheep & Horses
cattle
cows
goats
1916
58.4
28.8
23.0
96.3
38.2
1928
66.8
33.2
27.7
114.6
36.1
1941
54.5
27.8
27.5
91.6
21.0
1953
56.6
24.3
28:5
109.9
15.3
(million head as of the beginning of the year, on comparable territory)
He says: "We must say, however, with all frankness that we poorly utilise the
tremendous reserves inherent in large-scale socialist agriculture. We have not a
few collective farms and whole districts that are backward and are even in a
state of neglect. In many collective farms and districts crop yields have
remained low. The productivity of agriculture, especially in animal husbandry,
the growing of feed and fodder crops, potatoes and vegetables increases very
slowly. A definite disproportion has set in between the rate of growth of our
large-scale socialist industry, the urban population and the material well-being
of the working masses, on the one hand, and the present level of agricultural
production on the other."
And again: "The lag in a number of important branches of agriculture retards
the further development of the light and food industries and prevents the
incomes of the collective farms and the collective farmers from rising."
Thus we see that agriculture lags far behind the needs of the Soviet people.
Soviet advances have led to an improvement in the living conditions of its
citizens, especially in urban centres. They have still greater hopes and
expectations of betterment in their material conditions, which the post-Stalin
168
regime has had to take into account. The new rulers have made certain
concessions in the sphere of consumption and promised still more.
But the question at issue is this: has there been so drastic a change in the
Soviet economy as to eliminate the objective material basis for the
bureaucracy? That would entail the production of consumers goods and food in
sufficient abundance to guarantee necessities to everyone, satisfy the demands
of the people, and thus eliminate any need for bureaucratic arbiters to decide
the distribution of the available products.
Has Soviet economy, with all its indubitable successes, reached that point, or
even approached it? The citing of general production figures and their global
comparison with those of other countries will not help here. The decisive point
is not how much more is being produced than before, but is enough being
produced now to take care of the basic demands of the people?
The facts are that the rise in the economy has sufficed to provide a minimum
for most workers, to eliminate famine conditions, and ease some economic
tensions. But side by side with the general improvement, there have been
considerable increases in consumption for more favoured layers. From the
aristocrats of labour up to the tops of the bureaucracy, there is an inclination to
grasp for more. Malenkov is compelled to give a bit more bread and other
articles to the masses. But at the same time the Kremlin makes sure to provide
more new cars, refrigerators, television sets etc. which are exclusively within
the reach of the upper layers of Soviet society.
All this accentuates the contradiction between the rulers and the ruled,
heightens social inequalities, and makes the situation more intolerable to the
workers. There is a sharpening conflict between the working class growing in
numbers and the bureaucratic guardians of privilege.
The economic and cultural backwardness is in the process of being
overcome. But to assert that this has already taken place is to falsify the real
state of Soviet economy today.
This does not at all mean that the bureaucracy can or will perpetuate itself in
power indefinitely. That depends upon further developments of the world
revolution which can definitely remove the hostile pressures of world
imperialism, and not simply temporarily ease them, and overcome the scarcity
of consumers goods by placing the industrial resources of more advanced
countries at the disposal of Soviet economy. It depends even more upon the
development of the deepening conflict between the bureaucracy and the
masses. The Soviet people need not wait for the elimination of the economic
roots of the totalitarian bureaucracy in order to embark upon a mortal struggle
against it. As Trotsky pointed out, the social conflict can explode into political
revolution as a result of the intensification of antagonism, to the boiling point.
"Economic contradictions produce social antagonisms, which in turn develop
their own logic, not awaiting the further growth of the productive forces."
(Revolution Betrayed, p.48.)
Thus a sober analysis of the world situation and its development during the
past decade discloses that three major objective factors responsible for the rise
of the Soviet bureaucracy have not been changed in a fundamental sense but
only to a certain extent. The Kremlin bureaucracy has to operate today under
new but not decisively different circumstances. Its further life-span will depend
169
upon the struggle of the living forces in the world arena and in the Soviet Union
over the next period in which the ideas and forces of Trotskyism will play their
part.
b)
The
Bureaucracy
Today
We now come to the most controversial section of the document. I refer to
Section 15. The false, one-sided description of the processes at work inside and
outside the USSR is designed to provide a background to this section, which in
turn tends to convey the impression that these social forces at work internally
and externally are changing the role of the bureaucracy.
"Traditionally", the section states, "the historically transitional and passing
character of the Bonapartist dictatorship in the Soviet Union was analysed
correctly in the sense that this dictatorship could lead either to a reinforcement
of the restorationist tendencies within the peasantry and the bureaucracy, that,
with the aid of imperialism, would restore capitalism in the Soviet Union by
means of a civil war; or, thanks to the extension of the world revolution and the
aid brought by the world proletariat to the Soviet proletariat and thanks to the
"Reiss tendency" of the bureaucracy (a tendency which will rally to the side of
the proletariat for the defence of the social bases of the USSR) would lead to
the overthrow of the Bonapartist dictatorship and the re-establishment of Soviet
democracy. But it is evident that the two variants of this alternative imply a
special dynamism of the class struggle on the world scale. The first appears as
the result of the retreat of the world revolution, the second as the product of
the international victories of the revolution."
What does this mean? Let the document speak. The restorationist danger
"will be nothing more than a by-product of the evolution and not its dominant
characteristic". The dominant feature will be the growth of the "Reiss
tendency". This tendency, which Trotsky mentioned in the Transitional
Programme as one which would passively reflect the pressure of the masses, is
now given prominence by the authors of the document.
Why? We are left to draw any conclusion we like, and this is in fact what is
happening. It is precisely from these vague formulations that Clarke and Pablo
extract their "sharing of power by the bureaucracy" theory. This is the vehicle
to revisionism.
But let us proceed. The section concludes: "The coming decisive battle within
the Soviet Union will not be waged between the restorationist forces aiming to
restore private property and the forces defending the conquests of October. It
will be, on the contrary, waged between the forces defending the privileges and
administration of the bureaucracy and the revolutionary working class forces
fighting to restore Soviet democracy upon higher level."
Good but one question please? What social forces will the bureaucracy rest
upon in this fight with the revolutionary working class? The document relegates
the "restorationist" elements to a role of minor importance but it absolutely
refuses to answer this vital question. Why? Because the authors are fiddling
around with the idea that under the pressure of this struggle the majority of the
bureaucracy can transform into a "Reiss tendency". The document, which
elsewhere claims that the Stalinist parties outside Russia can project a
revolutionary orientation under certain conditions, in effect does not exclude
this possibility for the CPSU that is why the authors play down the role of the
170
restorationist elements, and leave unanswered the social implications of the
evolution of the bureaucracy in struggle with the working class. The vagueness
of this section is not accidental. It is in fact nothing more than a smokescreen
for revisionist conclusions.
What will the bureaucracy do in a crisis? Take the present crisis in
agriculture. Khrushchev admits that this is affecting certain branches of
industry. There is obviously serious discontent with the shortages amongst
industrial workers.
And how do the bureaucracy propose to overcome this crisis? In every case
by strengthening the restorationist elements amongst the peasantry. In every
case it is to make concessions to encourage interest in private plots of land. Not
only this, but on the tractor stations they have created a new type of
proprietor.
All personnel are to have private plots of ground and state loans of 10,000
roubles. To solve the crisis the bureaucracy leans towards the restorationist
tendencies.
What is the most important task before the FI in relation to events now
unfolding inside the USSR? We agree that the militancy of the proletariat is on
the increase that the situation is favourable for us.
Our most important task is to re-form the ranks of the Bolshevik Leninists.
Trotsky supplied us with the programme. Our task is to supply the perspective,
and prepare our Soviet comrades for struggle. How can this be done if we do
not prepare them for struggle against the bureaucracy? How can we do this if
we place a question mark over the role of the bureaucracy? How can we
prepare for struggle against the bureaucracy if we neglect to analyse the social
base upon which it will rest in this struggle?
If for example we adopt the "sharing of power" theory what is to be the role
of our comrades in the USSR?
It is not possible to build a revolutionary party in the USSR on the basis of
Section 15. This can only be done if they are prepared for a fight to a finish
with the bureaucracy, for the political revolution, for its overthrow if necessary
by civil war.
Nobody excludes the development of the Reiss tendency, but an essential
pre-requisite for utilising its possibilities is a powerful Soviet section of the FI.
Many excuses have been brought forward by supporters of the document to
explain the reason why the last two sentences are missing from the quotation
taken from the Transitional Programme, on our programme for the Bolshevik
Leninists in the USSR These are the sentences.
"Only the victorious revolutionary uprising of the oppressed masses can
revive the Soviet regime and guarantee its further development toward
socialism. There is but one party capable of leading the Soviet masses to
insurrection the part of the Fourth International."
It has been said that the document states these by implication. The same
could be claimed for the Transitional Programme, but it was no accident that
Comrade Trotsky included these sentences. For Trotsky a programme for work
in the USSR was meaningless unless connected with the perspective of building
a party that is why we have trouble with these sentences today.
171
The authors of the draft document have excluded these sentences because it
falls in line with their revisionist conclusions in Section 15. They are perfectly
familiar with the sentences. They utilised the same quotation in the Thesis for
the Second Congress and included these sentences. If they were valid in 1948,
why are they excluded now?
c)
The
Kremlin
and
the
Communist
Parties
The resolution states that the Kremlins rigid grip on the mass Communist
parties is weakening. It gives three reasons for this deduction: the growing
power of the mass movement exerted on these parties, the loosening of their
relations with Moscow, and uncertainty about the Kremlins authority and policy
in recent months. No specific evidence is cited to substantiate this speculation,
although the development cannot be ruled out in advance in specific cases.
Such has certainly been the case with the Yugoslav and Chinese CPs. But there
are no open signs of a similar occurrence elsewhere yet,
To buttress this point the resolution cites the Kremlins inability to reestablish any International since 1943. Actually Moscow finds any International
more of a liability than an asset. It wishes to keep the CPs separated and to
control them by other means.
This alleged relaxation of Kremlin control is associated with "the penetration
of ideas opposed to the interests of the Kremlin bureaucracy within these
organisations: and a process of modification in the hierarchical, bureaucratic
relations previously established". That is how the disintegration of Stalinism is
beginning. Vague as these observations of tendencies are, they point to the
growth of new ideological currents and organisational relations within the shell
of the CPs which will apparently continue inside them until the reformed and
rebellious parties become strong and independent enough to throw off the
Kremlins stranglehold. Does this not project the perspective of such reformed
Stalinist parties escaping the Kremlins clutches and proceeding on the road to
revolution?
This conclusion receives reinforcement from the assertion that the mass
Communist parties are forced to radicalise their policies more and more. This is
the fundamental and inescapable course of their policies.
The resolution grudgingly admits "the possibility of the mass Communist
parties to carry through temporary turns to the right within given conditions, so
long as the mass pressure has not reached its culminating point". The direction
of Stalinist policy in such parties is thus made to depend in the last analysis on
the degree of mass pressure exerted upon them.
Up to now there has been no such direct correlation. The history of the
French CP is instructive. From 1929-1933 when the workers were not yet
energetic it pursued, an ultra-left line. In 1936 when the mass movement
reached its height the CP took a Peoples Front line. In 1944-47, at the crest of
the revolutionary wave generated by the war, the Stalinist leaders disarmed the
workers and helped de Gaulle restore the capitalist regime. In 1952, when the
workers had relapsed into passivity, thanks in large measure to the previous
gyrations of Stalinist policy, it summoned the Paris workers into the adventure
of the anti-Ridgway demonstrations. Finally, in August 1953, during the General
Strike, the CP remained passive and maintained its "National Front" mixture of
opportunism and sectarianism without radicalising its policy an iota.
172
This record shows that, far from co-ordinating their line with the rise in mass
pressure, this mass CP ran counter to it. The diplomatic needs of the Kremlin
got the upper hand over the demands of the masses. This does not mean that
the CP can get away with anything at any time. It too must adjust itself, like
other mass parties, to the radicalisation of the masses, more in words than in
deeds. But in and of itself the pressure of the masses does not suffice to push
the CP closer to the revolutionary road.
The conception that a mass CP will take the road to power if only sufficient
mass pressure is brought to bear is false. It shifts the responsibility for
revolutionary setbacks from the leadership to the masses, according to the
following reasoning: if only there had been more pressure, the CP could have
been forced to drive for power. The interaction between the insurgent masses
and the leadership is thus reduced to the simple equation: maximum mass
pressure equals revolutionary performance, however inadequate, from the CP
leadership.
Actually, the pressure of the workers in the 19533 French General Strike was
formidable enough to start the offensive for power. But it was precisely the
momentum of this mass power and its implications that caused the CP
leadership to leap away in fright from it and prevent its organisation. In this not
unimportant case, instead of radicalising Stalinist policy, the mass pressure had
a different effect. Obviously, there is not a direct but a dialectical relationship
between the two factors,
Yugoslavia and China show that under certain exceptional conditions the
leadership of a Stalinist party, caught between extermination by the counterrevolution and an powerful revolutionary offensive of the masses can push
forward to power. This can be repeated elsewhere under comparable
conditions, especially in the event of a new world war.
But it would be unwarranted to generalise too broadly and hastily on this
point. It should be remembered that while the Yugoslavs marched to power,
the CPs in other countries remained subordinate to the Kremlin and facilitated
the work of the counter-revolution. Two Communist parties, the Yugoslav and
the Chinese, met the test in one way: the others in a directly opposite manner.
The specific conditions which forced the Yugoslav and Chinese CPs onto the
revolutionary road analysed and understood. Both parties had been in conflict
with the existing regimes and operated illegally for long years. Both fought
prolonged civil wars during which the leadership and cadres were selected,
tested and hardened and their forces organised. The Chinese CP had armed
forces of its own for years before launching the struggle for power. The
domestic capitalist regimes were exceptionally weak and imperialism was
unable to intervene with any effect.
In any case, as the Manifesto issued by the Third World Congress declared.
"The transformation which the Stalinist parties might undergo in the course of
the most acute revolutionary crises may oblige the Leninist vanguard to
readjust its tactics toward these parties. But this in no way relieves the
proletariat from the task of building a new revolutionary leadership. What is on
the agenda today is not so much the question of a projection of a struggle for
power under exceptional conditions in this or that isolated country, but the
overthrow of imperialism in all countries as rapidly as possible. Stalinism
173
remains obstacle number one, within the international labour movement, to the
successful conclusion of that task."
Conclusions
1) No matter what excuses the supporters of the document make for the
revisionist formulations, there is no getting away from the conclusions which
people are beginning to draw.
In Seattle four members of the Clarke-Cochrane faction deserted for
Stalinism. The answer of our opponents to this one is that Cannon drove them
there, and after all was there not the case of Grace Carlson!
It wont work. Nobody ever left this movement for Stalinism because people
drove them there. They left for political reasons and nothing else. The
desertions in Seattle are the logical outcome of the Clarke, Cochrane, Pablo
line.
The case of Grace Carlson was one of those unpredictable things that
happen from time to time in our movement, under the best possible conditions.
Her desertion to the RC church was not followed either in America or anywhere
else with a general walk-out to join "the faithful". Nobody in the IS majority
adopts the method of Clarke to explain why she left. If someone were, for
example, to blame Cochrane, it would be really absurd, just as it is absurd to
blame Cannon for Seattle.
2) Seattle paved the way for Ceylon. Mouthing quotations from Pablo, a
minority a few days ago deserted from our section to the Stalinists. Now who is
to blame for this? Cannon again? Or our Ceylon people? It is obvious that there
is an important connection between Ceylon and Seattle. The same false
international line lies very much at the roots of both.
You would think that these are events to sound the alarm about in the
International, if our IS took its responsibilities seriously. But no. We dont hear
even a word of information from Paris on any of these real desertions, these
real dangers to our movement of capitulation to Stalinism.
Instead, the shabbiest intrigues, gossip and puerile cominternist
organisational measures are undertaken against the loyal Trotskyist cadres
upon whom the movement has rested for decades and who admittedly served
as the basis of authority for the IS up to the Third Congress.
We have had a visiting "fireman" here to put out the revolt against the
revisionism of the Pablo-Clarke IS and its documents. We understand that to
some comrades the visitor offered, in the name of his faction, to make all kinds
of amends and amendments. It is said he is ready to restore the shamefully
dropped sections from the quotation from the Transitional Programme; that he
is willing to repudiate or withdraw his own trial balloon formula about the
Stalinist bureaucracy sharing power with the masses. If this is seriously meant,
and not sheer deception, it can be proved.
Let me conclude, therefore, by asking a few questions of Comrade Collins,
and through him, of Pablo and Clarke. 1) Are you prepared here and in the IS
to issue a written statement dissociating your group from the alarming
statements by Clarke and Pablo in the FI on the possibility of self-reform of the
bureaucracy, its sharing of power with the masses and to reaffirm our
traditional Trotskyist position on the need for a political revolution against the
bureaucracy? 2) Will you condemn the capitulators to Stalinism in Seattle, in
174
France, in Ceylon unequivocally and join in a struggle against conciliation to
Stalinism, as we are unreservedly prepared to join with you in condemning any
manifestation of yielding to the pressure of imperialism or reformism?
On your replies to these questions the movement here will be able to judge
you and the road you intend to take. Whether, no matter how extreme your
position, you are prepared to discuss within the framework of the ideas of
Trotskyism. Whether, no matter how serious your struggle, you intend to carry
it on within the framework of a united Trotskyist movement.
175
A Comment on the National Committee Decision to Form a Socialist
League
Ellis Hillman
This document, opposing the decision to launch the Socialist Labour League,
was published in the February 1959 issue of Forum, the internal discussion
bulletin of the Healy group.
THE DECISION of the NC to form a revolutionary Socialist League is a serious
political blunder.
For some time now it has been apparent that a whole chain of circumstances
has been driving the group towards the proclamation of a new Open Party, a
new "Revolutionary Communist Party".
The fact that this process has not been understood by the leadership of the
group reflects the empiricism which has characterized its functioning over many
years. A combination of an empirical adaption to events, and an impressionist
outlook on national questions has now brought about the most serious
situation in the history of British Trotskyism.
After eleven years of hard work in the Labour Party the basis upon which
the group was able to turn to the CP after the 20th Congress the group is
now being placed in the position of overturning its declared Conference policy.
This policy was the product of the experience of a movement painfully acquired
through struggles whose lessons have a very direct bearing on the present
discussion. The policy of working within social-democracy to prepare the way
for a mass revolutionary party is now being pushed aside for a policy that has
already been tried out in the history of the Trotskyist movement and been
found impractical.
The circle has been completed from ENTRY to EXIT. With this difference.
Whilst the old RCP hammered the issues out in a serious and responsible if
prolonged discussion of the merits or otherwise of entering the mass Party of
the working class, the abandonment of the work that resulted from the old
discussion appears to require but a few desultory and confused contributions
and points of view from the NC.
The NC reporters have demonstrated the confusion of ideas that lie behind
the decision to form a League. This confused thinking is now being carried into
the movement at large, and is already evident in some of the Newsletter
articles on the Workers Charter.
Whilst the older comrades are busily engaged in convincing themselves (?)
that the announcement of the League will not cut across the basic line of work
within the Labour Party, the spokesman for the new turn does not agree to
their artificial limitations.
For him, and in this he is consistent, the League is the "framework of the
new revolutionary party" (to quote his own words). He has declared that all
members of the old movement will have to join the League, irrespective of
considerations of the work within the Labour Party, irrespective of
considerations of proscription of the League by the Right Wing.
176
Again, he has stated that the main cadres of the old group will have to be
placed in the open League.
This position can be respected. It is consistent, logical, and requires the most
serious discussion. It is an attempt to solve some of the problems arising from
the groups expansion (e.g. the non-functioning of key t.u. factions), the poor
Labour Party work, the failure to recruit industrial workers on a permanent
basis, the lack of proletarian composition of the London leadership, the
theoretical primitivism and clich-mongering that is becoming a substitute for
serious Marxist analysis) by the "short cut" to the powerful mass Party that is
our common objective.
The League, however, may well not be the short cut to the mass Marxist
party but the short cut to a second-class Communist Party. In the event of
setbacks, the League could open the road back to the CP.
This is not to say that the comrades who are pressurising the group into
acceptance of the League perspective are being pulled back by Stalinism. It is
not inaccurate, however, to state that what is pulling them is the proletarian
base of the CP. Many CP industrial workers will work together with us, but will
not accept our LP orientation as an alternative to the CP. In fact, it could be
said that the majority of the best militants still remain attached to the CP
industrial machine. Will the League open the road to these workers? Surely, this
itself is a debatable proposition requiring two or three Aggregates to clarify the
group.
The new exit turn of the NC is even more serious than a change of strategy
which will be absolutely fatal to the continuation of serious work within the
Labour Party by what one presumes will be the Leagues entrist fraction. The
new turn opens the door to the dangers of a complete liquidation of what we
have termed the orthodox Trotskyist movement, and its replacement by an
unconvincing parody of the present CP.
In this matter, the major responsibility rests with the Old Guard of the
Trotskyist movement who have bowed to the pressure of "CPism" that is
becoming increasingly evident in the leadership of the group. Instead of guiding
the industrial strength of the group into the Labour Party, and establishing in
the London Labour movement the basis of a militant Left Wing which could
directly challenge the Right Wing on their policies the leadership has allowed
the leading comrades around the Newsletter to develop their work outside the
real Labour Party. Instead of the older comrades convincing the leading
comrades of the necessity of creating the beginnings of an alternative
leadership within the Labour Party, of bringing the class struggle directly into
the GMCs, the wards, the Labour Party Conferences the Newsletter people
have apparently convinced (?) the older comrades of the pressing importance
of "independent" activity around a League or a Newsletter Association as a
substitute for a serious overhaul of Labour Party work.
The NC comrades have been repeatedly warned individually and collectively
over a whole period as to the consequences of their empiricism. The political
results of the new turn will be far-reaching. The membership have the right to
the fullest discussion of a policy that is at loggerheads with Conference
decision. A National Conference of the group is now an urgent necessity.
11 January 1959
177
An Open Letter to Members of the Socialist Labour League and
Other Marxists
Peter Fryer
Dear Comrades,
The explanation given in The Newsletter for my resignation as editor was
true as far as it went. But it did not say what had made me ill. Nor did it tell the
members about the quite improper pressure that was put on me, through
persons close to me, to try to compel me to return to a post that it had become
impossible for me to fill. The methods used by the general secretary both
before and after I left The Newsletter have nothing in common with Marxism,
with socialist principles, or with the relationships that should prevail among
comrades inside a revolutionary working-class organization. If persisted in,
these methods can only hold back the growth of the Socialist Labour League
and make it impossible to carry into effect the programme and policy adopted
by the Leagues inaugural conference ... a programme and policy which I
support in all essentials.
We who came into the Trotskyist movement from the Communist Party, hard
on the heels of the experience of Hungary and our struggle with the Stalinist
bureaucracy in Britain, were assured that in the Trotskyist movement we would
find a genuine communist movement, where democracy flourished, where
dissenters were encouraged to express their dissent, and where relationships
between comrades were in all respects better, more brother and more human
than in the party we had come from. Instead we have found at the top of the
Trotskyist movement, despite the sacrifices and hard work of the rank and file,
a repetition of Communist Party methods of work, methods of leadership, and
methods of dealing with persons who are not prepared to kotow to the superior
wisdom of the "strong man".
I personally joined the Trotskyist movement with many reservations, which
were made quite clear verbally at the time of joining. The defects which I and
others could see at the top of the movement we attributed to the exceptionally
unfavourable conditions under which it had had to operate since it arose: above
all, the persecution which we as Communist Party members bore some share of
the responsibility for, even if we had not personally participated in it. We fully
recognized that we, as ex-Stalinists, had much to learn from our new comrades.
But we also felt and we said so openly that we had something to teach
them as well. We were willing to learn. They, it appears, were not. They were
not willing to slough off the ingrained sectarian suspicion of other peoples
motives, the cynicism towards other comrades and other socialists, which has
been and remains the biggest single obstacle to the healthy growth and
development of the Trotskyist movement in Britain. They were not willing to
allow working-class democracy to flourish inside the organization, but insisted
on retaining, even during the brief period of rapid growth, a regime whereby
effective authority lay in the hands of one man, to whom his colleagues and coworkers were not comrades to be consulted and discussed with but instruments
to be used quite ruthlessly.
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The outstanding feature of the present regime in the Socialist Labour League
is that it is the rule of a clique the general secretarys personal clique which
will not allow the members to practise the democratic rights accorded to them
on paper, and which pursues sectarian aims with scant regard to the real
possibilities of the real world.
The ordinary members of the Socialist Labour League, who have joined
because they want to build a revolutionary leadership as an alternative to
Stalinist and social-democratic betrayals, should know how this clique operates,
and how the general secretary maintains his control of it. His domination is
secured by a series of unprincipled blocs with various leading members against
various other leading members who happen to disagree with him on any given
point at any given time. There is scarcely a single leading member of the
League whom the general secretary has not attacked in private conversation
with me at some time or other, in terms such as these: "I have enough on P to
get him sent down for seven years." "I dont know what game P is playing. He
could be a police agent." "C is a bad little man who would put a knife into
anyone." "There will have to be a showdown, with B. Hes trying to take over. I
come back to find he is appointing his own full-timers." "B is a primitive Irish
peasant." "I dont trust P. He is not a Marxist. He doesnt accept dialectical
materialism." "S wont stay in the movement long." "G is a lunatic." "A is quite
mad. He beats his wife." "S is completely useless. He has built nothing and
never will build anything." "F is a stupid kid." "H is only out for personal
prestige." There is no principle whatever in the general secretarys attitude to
his comrades.(Thus when he discovered that the wife of one leading member
was having an affair with another leading member he criticised the latter very
strongly, was going to have him removed from his position, etc. A few months
later, when he needed this comrades services very badly for a particular job,
he was prepared to turn a blind eye to the resumption of the affair.)
That the ruling clique is an instrument of the general secretary is shown by
the way it was elected. How many comrades know that the panel presented by
the panel commission to the inaugural conference was first presented in toto by
the general secretary to a meeting of the executive committee, as if that was
the most natural thing in the world, then presented by the executive committee
to the outgoing national committee, then presented by the national committee
to the panel commission. MBs job on the panel commission and at the
conference was to make sure that the general secretarys list was accepted.
This accounts for the general secretarys anger when B muffed the job and
when it was suggested that to comply with the constitution the conference has
only just passed a ballot vote should be taken. In the Communist Party we
criticized the way the new executive was appointed by the old executive. In the
Socialist Labour League the national committee and the executive committee
alike are appointed by the general secretary.
After long reflection I have come to the conclusion that the way the Socialist
Labour League was formed (I do not say its formation, which I supported and
still support) was no less fundamentally undemocratic. That a turn of this
magnitude should have been carried through without a national conference and
without the production and discussion of documents was alien to all the
Bolshevik traditions that the Marxist movement claims to uphold. It was
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unscientific as well as undemocratic. A number of quite different ideas has been
canvassed at successive national committee meetings. The final form the new
organization took was a panic reaction to the Birmingham expulsions and the
hue and cry in the South London newspapers against the general secretary.
Over two years close work with the general secretary has convinced me
beyond any doubt that he will permit no real criticism and no real differences of
opinion within the organization. All the fine talk we heard two and a half years
ago about the rights of minorities turns out to be so much eyewash when
anyone who ventures to open his mouth is told he succumbing to "class
pressures" what a travesty of Marxism! when critics are summoned to the
executive and browbeaten into withdrawing their criticism, when critics are
threatened, intimidated and expelled, when lies are told about them, when the
details of their personal lives are ultilized, for blackmail and character
assassination. Month after month I was assured by the general secretary and
BB that the Nottingham branch was a "centre of degeneracy", that it consisted
very largely of "drug addicts" and that one of its members had "indoctrinated
young girls into drug taking". To my shame, I accepted the slanders without
any enquiry. I now find that they are quite baseless. I was told that KC was
being expelled for "inactivity". I now find that during his period of "inactivity"
this comrade was studying for a degree, and that his work included the writing
of a dissertation on the Marxist theory of alienation which has earned him a
first-class honours degree. This original contribution to the subject, of which
our whole movement ought to be proud, is likely to be published. I was told as
a fact, over and over again, that John Daniels was going to see Pablo in Cannes
while on the Continent. I now find that JD never had any intention of seeing
Pablo and that in fact Pablo was not in France during the relevant period. The
general secretary now states that this was a rumour retailed to him by a child.
Wherever there is a comrade with a critical attitude lie after lie is told to
discredit that comrade. I was lied to too much in the Communist Party to take a
favourable view of being lied to in the Socialist Labour League, in which there
should be no place whatsoever for those methods.
The lack of democracy in the organization, with the general secretary going
to any lengths to prevent a real confrontation of ideas, provides the soil in
which panic methods of political leadership can take root and flourish. The
members are educated not through the clash of ideas but through alarms,
emergencies and crises. The past year has seen a succession of attempts to
pull ourselves up by our own bootlaces. BB will rush into the office in the
morning seized with some burning idea for a poster parade, a leaflet, a
"special" or a last-minute change in The Newsletter, and all the slender
resources of the organization have TO BE GEARED TO THE FULFILMENT OF
HIS IDEAS. Now it is excellent to have "ideas men"; but surely the task of the
general secretary is to canilize their energies into fruitful team work instead of
letting then fly off at a tangent. We have been operating without continuity,
without proper planning, without thought, without Marxist analysis of the actual
state of affairs, and without honest examination of how far predictions and
"perspectives" have in fact been borne out by events.
A few weeks ago the general secretary told no that JD now "doubts the
whole of our economic analysis". I find this is a gross exaggeration. JDs point,
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and I agree with him, is that the slump has not developed in the way that we
expected: ought we not therefore to bring our analysis up to date? To this I
would add that the turn to open organization was predicated on the continuing
growth of unemployment. But unemployment, for the time being at any rate,
has ceased to grow. So ought we not, as Marxists and materialists, to be willing
to look facts in the face to find out how far we were wrong and why? Failure to
make a sober and frank assessment of our earlier forecasts is all of a piece with
the general secretarys constant braggadocio, his continual exaggeration of the
movements achievements, and his consistent opposition to any scientific
examination of those achievements and of its defects and shortcomings.
Panic methods of leadership are soon at their worst in the print-shop, whose
administration is nothing short of a scandal. A large part of the London
membership was transformed during the summer into a reservoir of voluntary
labour for print-shop work. Some of these comrades wore working round the
clock, some twice round the clock. The compositor, TB, works from 9 a.m. to
11 p.m. or later and often till 1 a.m., six or seven days a week. The general
secretary now holds in his own hands the posts of general secretary,
international secretary, editor of The Newsletter and ... print-shop manager.
This extraordinary concentration of responsibility makes it impossible for any of
those jobs, least of all the last one, to be done satisfactorily. The general
secretary bitterly resists any delegation of authority in the print-shop. There is
no proper planning or progressing of work there. Extravagant promises are
made to customers. Intolerable pressure is put on comrades working full-time
at the print-shop in an effort to fulfil these promises. Slave labour is always
uneconomical in conjunction with machinery. MB had had three hours sleep a
night for a week and was dog tired when, alone in the machine-room, he failed
to check that a forme had been tightened and a weeks work crashed to the
floor and was scattered and irretrievably lost.
In order to consolidate his domination, the general secretary refrains from
taking a position of principle on various controversial questions, preferring to
ride two horses as long as he can. This was seen on the question of the
character of The Newsletter, where the issue was whether it was to be purely
an industrial bulletin eschewing cinema and theatre reviews and other articles
of cultural interest, as BB demanded in a speech which included the words "I
am a Philistine", or a workers newspaper which, while giving all the news of
industrial battles, strove to broaden its readers horizons, as was Gramscis
vision of a workers paper. The general secretary made a speech at the national
committee which gave a sop to B and a sop to me on this question and avoided
the issue of principle. He has done the same thing on many occasions, coming
down simultaneously on both sides of the fence wherever it was inexpedient to
challenge the Philistinism and the simplist and primitivist conceptions of
Marxism that are rife inside the organization. This conflicts glaringly with the
general secretarys professed regard for "theory", "principle", and "the books".
The denial of democracy to members of the organization is summed up by
the general secretary himself in two phrases he has employed recently: "I am
the party" and in answer to the question "How do you see socialism?" "I
dont care what happens after we take power. All I am interested in is the
movement". Politically this is revisionism, all too clearly reminiscent of
181
Bernsteins "the movement is everything the goal nothing". Philosophically it is
solipsism: if the movement is everything and "I am the movement", then "the
world is my world" and "I" inhabit a fantasy world less and less connected
with the real world. It is just such a fantasy world that the general secretary
inhabits, in which "we" can "watch ports" (to stop me leaving the country!) and
be "absolutely ruthless" to the point of carrying out "killings" (as the general
secretary declared to PMcG) when "we" have in cold fact fewer than 400
members.
It will be asked why I did not speak out about those things earlier and conduct
a fight about them on the leading committees. A person with a different
temperament might have done, though I doubt whether he would have got
very far. But I have never seen myself as a politician or as a leader, and I
certainly lack the ability to contend against the "strongmen" who have moulded
the Socialist Labour League into what they want it to be. Moreover I did not
care to admit to myself that the organization I had joined in the belief that it
was very different from the Communist Party in fact shared many of the latters
worst features. Ever since the end of 1957 I have fought a long battle within
myself, trying to blind myself to what I saw going on around me, trying to
excuse it, above all trying not to see the pattern running through a whole series
of events and incidents. Considerable pressure was put on me to attend
meetings of the executive committee. When I did so I found it merely a
sounding board for the general secretary, packed with his own nominees who
not merely never raised their voices against him but in some cases never raised
their voices at all.
I tried to do The Newsletter and Labour Review jobs as well as I could; and I
wrote The Battle for Socialism in the hope that the remarks there about
leadership would become true as the League expanded; but it became less and
less possible to do my work adequately without waging war on the sectarianism
and lack of democracy, inefficiency and mismanagement, squabbling and
capriciousness. I heard HO told that she was sacked and then bullied by the
general secretary until she wept. I heard the general secretary and BP come
near to blows as each uttered throats of violence and vengeance. I saw the
general secretary take off his coat and fling it to the ground in fits of rage that
invariably hindered any constructive solution of a particular problem and so did
harm to the movement. I used to ask myself what I was doing to be caught up
in such a situation. Several times I offered my resignation, even begging to be
released from the job, but it was made abundantly clear that my resignation
would never be accepted. Last February, after one especially irrational tantrum
of the general secretarys, I walked out. I went back because I wanted to serve
the working class in struggle. But precisely the same attitude to human beings
that in the end produced the Hungarian revolution was rampant at the top of
the Socialist Labour League. I dreaded the thought that comrades would say I
had let the movement down if I left, and this dread expressed itself in bad
dreams and a lasting mood of depression.
A different type of person night have reacted differently. But I had the Rajk
trial, the massacre of Magyarovar and the whole Hungarian tragedy behind me.
Since Hungary I had devoted my energies to a struggle against Stalinism. I
182
lacked the inner resources for a new, long and probably bitter fight to put
things right in the movement to which I had given my energies without stint.
Finally I wrote a letter to the general secretary telling him in the plainest
possible terms that I could carry on no longer. He met me the same evening
and refused to accept my resignation. I told him I felt I was in the middle of a
nervous breakdown. But he refused to contemplate the possibility of my leaving
the job. Next day I saw the paper through the press. The day after that I
walked the streets sick with worry and anguish. I decided that the only way to
convince the general secretary that it was impossible for me to continue to
work with him, that his methods, his approach and his attitude to people
sickened me, disgusted me, and filled me with dread for the success of our
movement, was to go where he could not reach me, have a long period of rest
and reflection, and devote myself to some other kind of work altogether. So I
went away.
If leading comrades efforts were devoted to finding me, Im sorry they were
made to waste their time. It is strange that the day after the general secretary
wrote to me at my mothers house in Yorkshire saying no one was pursuing me
there would be no calls, no visits, no molestations CS arrived at 11 p.m.
looking for me. According to CSs later account to JD, the general secretary
himself was with him in the car!
The general secretary threatened JF on the telephone he would have her
expelled; he would seek me out and "destroy" me wherever I was; she had
"destroyed" me; etc. etc. when she refused to disclose my whereabouts.
Then MG visited her and told her a whole string of lies, including the allegation
that I had written letters derogatory to her (no such letters exist); that PMcG
(with whom I am living) had given BP details of our physical relationship, when
they met on a poster parade the previous Sunday; and PMcG was an OGPU
agent who had shanghaied me out of the country. He told her that if they did
not hear from me within seven days The Newsletter would carry a banner
headline: "Where is Peter Fryer? Has the OGPU got him?" I do not think that
this kind of thing has anything to do with socialism. What right has the general
secretary or MG to utilize their knowledge of peoples private lives in this
shameful way? In order to protect myself against these methods I caused
solicitors letters to be sent to MG and the general secretary warning them not
to interfere with me or JF any more, nor to spread false statements about me. I
have no apologies to make to anyone for seeking this measure of protection
against blackmail and political gangsterism.
It is up to the members of the Socialist Labour League who believe in the
principles they profess and I think these are the majority to put things right.
The removal of the general secretary and the establishment of a collective
leadership which trusts the members and is trusted by them, the establishment
of mutual confidence among members and a spirit of socialist brotherhood in
place of suspicion, lies, bullying and blackmail: these are what is needed, in my
opinion, if the League is to do the job it was founded to do.
September 19, 1959
POSTCRIPT. After writing the above I decided not to circulate it for the time
183
being because I did not want to bring a personal complaint forward if it could
be avoided. I thought then and I still think that comrades attention should
be concentrated on abuses such as the Nottingham case and the attempt
forcibly to enter the Knights house at 12.30 a.m. in the morning. Two
circumstances have made me change my mind: (a) Many comrades are puzzled
by my silence and want to hear my case and some think I have treated the
members with contempt; (b) Peter Cadogan has been expelled on a formal
point. To me the expulsion of Cadogan means that I could no longer remain a
member of the Socialist Labour League. I am therefore putting out this personal
statement, together with a few points in reply to the executive committee
statement in The Newsletter of November 14.
This statement is wrong when it says that I "was charged with the main
drafting of the present constitution". In fact Brian Behan did it. The statement
also suggests that I am in agreement with Peter Cadogan, where it says my
"sympathies extend to" him. This is not the case. I have many disagreements
with Peter Cadogan. But I regard his expulsion as a blow at the right of every
member to discuss freely and to have full access to the information necessary
for free discussion and intelligent decision-making. This right is not only a
requirement of democracy in a working-class organization; it is also a
requirement of any scientific consideration of events. The expulsion of Peter
Cadogan is a nodal point in the development of the Socialist Labour League.
From now on all honest comrades who went through the experience of the
Communist Party crisis must repudiate this organization. It has gone wrong.
The lessons of the recent past are too fresh in our memory to allow us to blind
ourselves to the truth or to fail to take the necessary action. To those comrades
who still feel as I did in the last paragraph I wrote on September 19 I say
"Good luck". But events since that time have made it clear to me that the
reformation of the Socialist Labour League from within is no longer possible.
The offer in the last paragraph of the executive committee statement is
disingenuous. With Healy as general secretary, the cards are stacked against
anyone who wants to take "every opportunity to present their opinions to the
membership in person and in writing". Healy told Cadogan in September: "I am
determined to have you out now." This is the answer to those latest
protestations and promises.
Those who are treating the membership with contempt are those who
behind the scenes do exactly what they like to critics and dissenters, and in
public make pious pronouncements about "the fullest possible discussion".
November 14, 1959
PPS. Three other things occur to me. Comrades should know:
(a) As far as the libel action pending against me is concerned, Healys
suggestion that my refusal to meet him is prejudicial to the conduct of the case
is wholly false. I have every intention of fighting the case; all the parties are
represented by the same lawyer; and if Healy has any problems about it all he
has to do is go and see the solicitor in question.
(b) I myself took the initiative in having legal ownership of The Newsletter
properly handed over to the nominee of the Socialist Labour League.
184
(c) On Friday, I received a letter from Ray Nash of the News Chronicle
offering me "the usual rates" for an 800-word feature article on my differences
with the Socialist Labour League. Needless to say, I tore the letter up.
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Some Reflections on the Socialist Labour League
Gerry Healy
From the March 1960 issue of the Socialist Labour Leagues internal bulletin
Forum.
IT IS now almost 12 months since we called for the formation of the Socialist
Labour League. During that time the League has been assailed by all kinds of
critics ranging from the ultra-left sectarians to the right-wing opportunists. This
is as it should be. The Marxist movement can only be constructed by a
relentless struggle against these tendencies. It would, indeed, be food for
thought if they had praised us.
The Socialist Labour League was founded in order to extend the work inside
the Labour Party at a time when a more leftward development inside the trade
unions and industry is gradually getting under way. The independent side of the
Socialist Labour Leagues activity is entirely subordinate to this perspective.
Trotskyist activity inside the Labour Party recommenced in 1947 in an
organised form. From the beginning of the war until that time our movement
had existed as an open organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Party. We
entered the Labour Party to participate in the formation of a broad left wing
under conditions where our movement would have the opportunity of
influencing this left wing politically in a Marxist direction. It was and is our basic
perspective that the mass movement of the British working class from the trade
unions and the Labour Party will be centred in the first broad stage of
development around a left wing in the Labour Party. The cold war and the
continuation of the arms boom acted as an important brake upon this
development of the struggle inside the trade unions. This served to isolate the
left-wing movement in the Labour Party within the confines of the party itself.
Such a one-sided process could not resolve the problem of reformism for the
Marxists. It was necessary to wait until issues began to develop inside the trade
unions as a result of the conflict of the class forces and to combine the left
movement in the unions with the left movement inside the Labour Party.
In spite of the delay in the leftward development in the unions, our
organisation participated to the best of its ability in the work inside the party.
The formation of the Socialist Outlook in December 1948, the launching of the
Socialist Fellowship in April 1949 found our people extremely active and on the
look out for all possibilities of strengthening the Marxist movement.
The Korean war in mid-summer 1950 demanded a principled and public
opposition to the right wing and the centrists who supported Wall Street
imperialism. Such a stand temporarily isolated the Marxists and resulted in the
Socialist Fellowship being proscribed in 1951. Almost simultaneously Bevans
break from the Cabinet stirred a new wave of left-wing opposition into action
186
inside the Labour Party. This came to a head at the Morecambe conference in
1952 when the Marxists were in the forefront organizing what was perhaps the
largest left-wing faction at any Labour Party conference since the end of the
war (it totalled about 80 delegates). Its influence at the conference was very
important as a glance at that years report will show.
Almost immediately the conference was over the right wing through Gaitskell
and Morrison launched an attack against the Trotskyists. During this time our
comrades paid considerable attention to work on the docks and by the
beginning of 1953 a prominent movement against denationalization of road
haulage was organized with our people playing a leading role. The personal
intervention of Aneurin Bevan served to disorientate this movement and the
denationalization was successfully carried out by the Conservative government.
Considerable attention was paid to the political side of our work with the
result that when the Pabloite revisionist disruption got under way during August
and September 1953, the organization quickly retaliated and expelled from
membership those who had broken the discipline of the organization.
The gradual decline of the Bevanites and their retreat after Morecambe
1952, again served to isolate the Marxists. The struggle against Pablo had to be
fought out more or less in the open and as soon as the right wing realised that
the revisionist group of Lawrence was defeated, they took steps to ban the
Socialist Outlook. This ban was endorsed by the Labour Party Conference in
October 1954 and from then until 1958 the Marxists had no public focal point of
organization inside the Labour Party. Bevan gradually shifted towards the right,
confusion grew within his circle of former supporters, the trade union struggle
still remained slow and sporadic, in other words our movement had to work
under conditions of further isolation.
The 20th Congress crisis in the Communist Party provided an important
opportunity for Marxists to strengthen their cadre forces from the ranks of
people who are now openly in opposition to Stalinism. It also provided the
movement with an important outlet of activity during this period of enforced
isolation in the Labour Party. Here again, the Marxists demonstrated the flexible
nature of their work by training important recruits from the CP during the
period of 1956-57.
Most important, however, was the beginning of a movement in industry
which broadly speaking started from the BMC and Standard strikes during the
summer of 1956. This struggle, which has become more pronounced all the
time, centres on the need for British capitalism to step up its trade in the export
markets. What was important for Marxists was that this tendency produced a
friction between classes that was not there before. This conflict still continues
to evolve.
Here is the situation which faced our movement during the summer of 1958.
A struggle was developing in industry, the political situation inside the Labour
187
Party was stagnating (a factor which was further aggravated by the closeness
of the general election). Meanwhile the Marxist movement, which now included
important new cadre forces had the opportunity of serious work in the trade
unions with a view to drawing this work together with the left movement inside
the Labour Party.
The preparation of the National Industrial Rank and File conference enabled
us to take steps towards a consolidation of our work in the unions. The
conference rejected the sectarian conception of an independent party and
pledged itself to work towards a continuation of the industrial struggle within
the Labour Party itself.
It will be recalled that before and during this conference a witch-hunt of
considerable proportion got under way and this was no accident. The
employing class are very sensitive to the weaknesses of the Labour Party. They
try, at all costs, to separate developments in the Labour Party from
developments in the trade unions. When they realized that the Marxist
movement inside the Labour Party proposed to utilize the industrial struggles to
strengthen the work in the Labour Party they immediately brought pressure on
the Right-wing to take action against the Marxists. It must be said that the right
wing was reluctant to do so because of the closeness of the general election,
nevertheless we were placed in a position where important people were being
expelled from the Party under conditions where it was impossible for us to
remain silent. Furthermore the prolonged isolation of our movement inside the
Labour Party served to expose our lending people in a manner that could not
be avoided by organizational manoeuvre. After all, our movement had spent
almost 12 years inside a party fighting as Marxists against the right wing. It was
impossible to avoid isolation under conditions where the trade union struggle
lagged behind events in the Labour Party.
Our movement was therefore faced with the position of either standing and
idly watching its people being expelled piecemeal from the Party or adjusting its
tactics under conditions where the expulsions would serve to strengthen our
work in the unions and provide new forces for the work inside the Labour Party.
Our decision to form the Socialist Labour League had important political and
practical implications for two reasons.
Firstly, previous experience of left movements in the unions particularly after
the First World War emphasized the trend of militants to by-pass reformism and
move in the direction of communism. The left movement lead by the shop
stewards in World War I provided nearly of the basic cadres of the Communist
Party when it was launched in 1920. At the same time it would be a mistake to
argue that this limited movement of militant trade unionists had a direct
response within the class. It only indirectly reflected the feelings of an
advanced element of the class who still continued to support the Labour Party
even after its betrayal in the First World War. For this reason it was necessary
for Lenin to write "Left-wing" Communism in an effort to reorientate the young
188
communist movement in Britain on the basis of the struggle in the Labour Party
and against the right wing of reformism.
From this historical experience and the success of the National Industrial
Rank and File Conference our organization concluded that if we were to win
militants from the experience of this new wave of industrial struggle a more
open organization would be necessary in order to educate and train them for
the forthcoming struggle inside the Labour Party. Therefore at the beginning of
1959 when we faced a wave of expulsions which could not be avoided as well
as the need to compete more openly with the Communist Party inside the trade
unions, we proposed to launch the Socialist Labour League.
Secondly, instead of allowing our people to disappear into the wilderness as
a result of expulsions, we now saw the opportunity to reorganize them more
openly as the core of the Socialist Labour League itself. In other words the
formation of the Socialist Labour League was a strategic modification of our
total entry policy to a new situation which could not have been foreseen when
out movement entered the Labour Party in 1947.
The work of the Socialist Labour League in the next period must continue in
this direction. The conflict on nationalization revealed at Blackpool is a measure
of the merging of the problems of the trade unions with the problems of the
Labour Party. It is in fact the first time that a major domestic issue has tended
to produce a crisis in both sectors simultaneously. Whilst it cannot be excluded
that a temporary upswing in the economy may slow down the evolution of this
crisis, nevertheless since the fortunes of British imperialism are tied to an
export market, which is now becoming the battlefield for the most cut-throat
price reduction there is every indication that the conflict between the employers
and the working class will continue.
The struggle on nationalization enables us to bring about a regroupment
between the left forces of the trade unions with the left forces in the Labour
Party. That is why the National Assembly of Labour was even more successful
than the National Industrial Rank and File Conference which marked a new
stage which coincided with the development of the Socialist Labour League in
drawing together the left wing from the unions and the Labour Party. In
addition the Assembly was able to establish a relationship with professional
people and students greatly disturbed by the possibility of nuclear war. The
National Assembly of Labour was the forerunner of a new type of left wing
which will approximate to the type of left wing we envisaged when we first
entered the Labour Party in 1947.
It is impossible now for our group to organize inside the Labour Party as an
illegal grouping. This problem is not only confined to the Marxists. The
emergence of the New Left reveals some of the problems which centrists face
also. Just as Marxists find it necessary to establish an open relationship with
trade unionists who are not members of the Labour Party and recruit them into
the Socialist Labour League, so the Victory for Socialism, ex-Bevanite group
189
have to reach out to professional elements in the New Left some of whom have
been refused admission to the Labour Party because of their past association
with the Communist Party. The Marxists and the centrists orientate towards
different social strata, but they both have to combine work outside the Labour
Party with work inside the Labour Party. This, in fact, is another example of the
deep-going crisis in the Labour Party.
Whilst the Marxists turn towards the working class, we will not neglect our
work in the New Left and amongst the students and the better elements of the
pacifist groupings.
We are facing a period of fruitful political activity where the strength of a
working class in action against the employers can demonstrate to intellectuals
entering politics for the first time how the working class is the real force in
society. This is the most important opportunity our movement has ever had in
Britain.
The formation of the Socialist Labour League has therefore been fully
justified. It was neither an adventure nor was it opportunist. It was a step that
had to be taken during a specific period of our work in circumstances which our
organization fully appreciated. In the same way, as we tenaciously held on
during the period of our illegal entry in the Labour Party, so we must continue
to strengthen the Socialist Labour League as the core of the new left wing now
coming to the forefront.
The open work of the Socialist Labour League at this stage must therefore be
subordinated and organized in such a way as to facilitate the growth of the
Marxist movement inside the Labour Party and the trade unions.
1 January 1960

Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy

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Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy

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The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy

Some Reflections on the Socialist Labour League - Gerry Healy

THE LACK of seriousness in Healys resignation from the WIL is

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