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
2
Some Reflections on the Socialist Labour League - Gerry Healy
3 Preface IT’S 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 Healy’s 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 WRP’s collapse was Healy’s 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 Trotsky’s Writings you cannot but be struck by the political intelligence at work there, and by the gulf that separates Trotsky’s method from Healy’s. The best of Trotsky’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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) Trotsky’s 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 don’t think that an adequate critique of Healy’s politics is to be found by counterposing Trotskyist orthodoxy to Healy’s 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 weren’t 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s past adopt entirely conflicting political approaches in the present. They are able to do this because Healy’s 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 Healy’s political trajectory can thus be used to justify virtually any political line: from Stalinophobia to the promotion of illusions in Stalinism’s 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. Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Party’s 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 Healy’s 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 grocer’s 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 Trotsky’s writings, but made a favourable impression with his energetic activity on behalf of the organisation.8 At the Militant Group’s national conference in August 1937, on the proposal of Harber and Archer, Healy was formally accepted into membership and joined the group’s 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 Group’s 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 WIL’s 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 WIL’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s behaviour does suggest that he was temperamentally ill-equipped for the responsibilities of revolutionary leadership. Nevertheless, despite these signs of personal instability, Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 International’s ‘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 WIL’s 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 WIL’s 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 Trotsky’s 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, Healy’s 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, Healy’s 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, Healy’s 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. Healy’s 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 committee’s 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, Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s demotion was not without its adverse effect on the group – in his absence, the WIL’s industrial work was reduced to a ‘chaotic condition’31 – 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 Healy’s 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 WIL’s rejection of unification may have had at a national level – and the League’s 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 WIL’s 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 Stalin’s 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 WIL’s exclusively national existence. But the WIL leaders had made only token efforts to discuss unity with the RSL, apparently in the hope that the WIL’s 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 WIL’s 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 Cooper’s 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 WIL’s 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 International’s 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 WIL’s 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 WIL’s 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 WIL’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 critic’s neck?’37 The WIL leaders’ arguments carried more weight than Healy’s 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 – Healy’s 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 Healy’s main factional weapon from his hands. Healy’s 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 League’s leaders should admit to their error and re-educate the membership on this basis.42 The Healy group’s 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, Healy’s 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 WIL’s policies. Nevertheless, at the end of the conference, Healy’s group and the pro-IS Lawrence faction from the RSL (with whom Healy had been collaborating for some months) met with the International’s 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 International’s ‘key man’ in Britain. By boosting Healy’s 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 Healy’s ‘internationalist’ minority was to have a thoroughly destructive effect on the Fourth International’s 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 Healy’s early years in the Trotskyist movement’, Healy’s 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 Organiser’s 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 McGregor’s expulsion was reversed on appeal, Healy’s 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 30. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.101. 31. WIL industrial bulletin, May 1943. 32. WIL internal bulletin, 2 September 1943. 33. According to an account by the Political Bureau (WIL internal bulletin, 2 September 1943). This makes nonsense of Healy’s 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 International’s liaison man with the British Trotskyists. 37. WIL internal bulletin, 2 September 1943. 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 Bureau’s 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’. 44. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.103. 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 Healy’s 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 RCP’s 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 Healy’s argument was in any case weakened by his dishonesty in trying to pin responsibility for the RCP’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Trotsky’s pre-war prognoses, which had anticipated neither the long-term viability of bourgeois democracy nor capitalism’s 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 International’s 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 Britain’s 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 Healy’s 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 Secretariat’s 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 Healy’s 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 Trotsky’s 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 minority’s 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 Healy’s own organisation, however, the RCP’s intellectuals did not see their role as providing a veneer of ‘Marxist’ sophistication for Healy’s errors. On the contrary, former RSL leader Denzil Harber in particular took a distinct delight in demolishing Healy’s 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 Plekhanov’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Army’s 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 Grant’s account, Healy looked momentarily stunned – then ‘he threw out his arms, and he looked at us, and said, "Well, so we got agreement"!’20 Healy’s mindless factionalising blighted political debate within the RCP, preventing a serious examination of the party’s political problems and spreading demoralisation among the membership. It also produced widespread disgust at Healy’s dishonest methods, with the result that he failed to gain the support of more than a quarter of the RCP’s 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 RCP’s 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 minority’s request, and the next month a special conference of the RCP ratified the International’s 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 International’s 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 International’s 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 Healy’s 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 Morrison’s ‘consolidation’ speech at the 1948 party conference, which heralded the Labour government’s 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 wing’s 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 Healy’s 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 Club’s 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 Fellowship’s 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 Healy’s 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 Stalinism’s post-war expansion. Having followed the FI leaders in denying the reality of the social overturns in Eastern Europe, Healy enthusiastically implemented the International’s opportunist turn towards Tito after the SovietYugoslav split in June 1948. Although only two months earlier at the FI’s 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 YCP’s 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 brigade’s return coincided with the Yugoslav government’s 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 Kardelj’s 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 Club’s 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, Stalin’s 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 government’s pro-imperialist line on Korea.40 But having buried its real politics in order to acquire influence within the Labour left, Healy’s Club understandably found considerable difficulty in winning recruits to Trotskyism. And Healy’s 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 RCP’s 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 Healy’s, a proposal which received the opportunist backing of Grant who, though unconvinced by Haston’s arguments, was unwilling to face the break-up of the RCP’s 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 Healy’s 80 or so supporters, and would certainly have deposed him at the Club’s 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 Healy’s organisation (‘there was a terrible atmosphere’, Grant recalled, ‘of a low
25 theoretical level, of a really ignorant character’44), 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 Healy’s own efforts in politically misleading tens of thousands of genuine militants. In 1950, however, Healy’s 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. 6. RCP Political Bureau statement, 20 July 1945. 7. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.188.
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. 12. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.189. 13. The origin of Healy’s politics in the immediate post-war programme of the Fourth International no doubt explains why Ernest Mandel later preferred to explain Healy’s 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. 15. RCP Political Bureau statement, 20 July 1945. 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. 21. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.195. 22. Callaghan, p.36, where the quotation is wrongly attributed to the IS. The minority’s 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 Healy’s 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. 25. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.194. 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. 27. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.210. 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 Club’s members to criticise Kardelj (Slaughter, Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, vol.1, p.145). If Banda’s 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. 45. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.231. 46. This account, which is based on Grant’s ‘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 Hunter’s own account is only marginally different. (See B. Hunter, Lifelong Apprenticeship: The Life and Times of a Revolutionary, vol.1, 1997, pp.237-9.) Grant’s expulsion was so blatantly unconstitutional that it was subsequently withdrawn under instructions from the FI. He was finally expelled at the FI’s 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 International’s leaders had become deeply disoriented. In an attempt to overcome the movement’s isolation, this leadership – in particular its secretary, Michel Pablo – began to jettison some of the main planks of the Trotskyist programme. Although the Fourth International’s 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. Healy’s 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’, Healy’s 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 Pablo’s 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 Maitan’s claim that, when Pablo’s 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 FI’s 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 IS’s 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 Ouvrière trade union confederation. Faced with the PCI leadership’s stubborn resistance to his policy of ‘entrism sui generis’6 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 Pablo’s 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 Pablo’s 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 FI’s 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 regime’s 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 Healy’s unprincipled approach to entry inside the Labour Party – without any noticeable success. As Jock Haston had pointed out, Healy’s 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 Fellowship’s 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 Healy’s political opportunism.14
31 In any case, Healy soon had bigger fish to fry. The proscription of the Socialist Fellowship was followed by Aneurin Bevan’s 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 Labour’s 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 Bevanism’s 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 Bevan’s speech to the 1952 Labour Party conference was hailed by Socialist Outlook with the headline ‘Bevan Gives the Lead that Workers Want’. Bevan’s 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 Outlook’s 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 Bevan’s book In Place of Fear. Not only did Healy accept Bevan’s 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 Bevan’s 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 Britain’s capitalists or America’s 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 Healy’s attitude to Bevanism, as expressed in this article, was that of a ‘fully-fledged Pabloite’20. 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 Healy’s 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 Marxism’21 – only to have their repeated requests to this effect ignored by Healy.22 Indeed, Pablo himself would subsequently criticise Healy’s 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 party’s 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 Pablo’s 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 Pablo’s 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 SWP’s resistance to Pablo had been minimal, Gerry Healy’s 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 Peng’s 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, Healy’s 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 Stalin’s death, citing the example of Yugoslavia and the failure to anticipate Tito’s 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 FI’s ‘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 International’s leadership. In July, he agreed that ‘The Rise and Decline of Stalinism’, Pablo’s 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 Pablo’s document was discussed by the Group’s 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 Healy’s 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’. Pablo’s 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 International’s 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 Group’s National Committee meeting later in September, Healy used as a pretext for his attack on Pablo’s 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 Healy’s faction – Harry Ratner – recalls that he was ‘at first sight rather impressed by Pablo’s 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 Emmett’s 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 International’s 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 Lawrence’s proposal to launch a petition demanding that the Tory government resign.44 Although Healy rightly rejected this idea on the grounds that you couldn’t 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 Deutscher’s 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 Healy’s 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 Mao’s record as a butcher of Trotskyists.48 Healy’s 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 faction’s speedy evolution towards openly Stalinist positions. Thus Healy was able to make some correct points against Lawrence’s 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 paper’s 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 International’s 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 Healy’s problem was that his attacks on Pablo’s British supporters threatened to damage his relations with the Bevanites, who stood closer politically to John Lawrence’s group than to Healy’s. Healy evaded this difficulty with his usual political dishonesty. Thus he denounced as ‘a shameful cover for the hideous facts of class collaboration’ Lawrence’s 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 Lawrence’s 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. Bevan’s resignation from the shadow cabinet in April 1954, in protest at Attlee’s 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. Healy’s 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 Outlook’64 – 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 NEC’s 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 ‘Healy’s greatest achievement’.70 Given Healy’s 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 Healy’s attempt to use an essentially conservative craft union like NASDU as a vehicle for his aims proved disastrous. It was one of Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 paper’s sales in the docks. As a result of Healy’s 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 Pablo’s strategic line of ‘assisting the evolution’ of Bevanism into a supposedly centrist movement.
39 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Pablo’s opponents. In July 1954 the LSSP delegates to the FI’s ‘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 SWP’s 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 Trotsky’s Fourth International. It lacked even a functioning international centre which could pose as an alternative to Pablo and Mandel’s 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 Congrès de la Quatrième Internationale , 1989, vol.4, p.9. 4. International Secretariat Documents, 1951-1954, 1974, pp.25-30. 5. Information from John Archer. 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 Congrès de la Quatrième 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 tendency’s 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 Trotsky’s theories of entry’ (SLL internal document). 16. Socialist Outlook, 3 October 1952. 17. Ibid, 28 November 1952. 18. Healy took the phrase from Trotsky’s 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 Bevan’s 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 FI’s 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 Pablo’s ‘isolation’ was due to his having expelled, with Healy’s 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. Healy’s letters of 9, 12 and 13 November 1953, have never been published. For the SWP’s 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, Let’s 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 Hunter’s 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 – Pablo’s 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 Healy’s pseudonyms), it consisted largely of passages lifted from the SWP’s polemics against Pabloism. The one innovation in Healy’s 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). 58. Socialist Outlook, 9 April 1954. 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 Grant’s pamphlet Socialism and German Unity, which took a distinctly more principled line than Healy had on this issue. 62. Socialist Outlook, 30 April 1954. 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 Hunter’s 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. O’Mahony 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 Healy’s zigzags over the parity commission, and the subsequent evolution of the IC, see Peng Shuzi’s account in How Healy and Pablo Blocked Reunification, pp.77-8
45 Chapter 4 (1955-1958) AT THE END of 1955, Gerry Healy’s 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 wing’s ban on Socialist Outlook had left him without a public organ, while the Group’s 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 Labour’s 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. Healy’s 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 Khruschev’s ‘secret speech’ denouncing Stalin’s 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 Healy’s 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, Healy’s initial response to the 20th Congress was the purest ‘Pabloism’. Basing himself on Mikoyan’s 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 Group’s impact on the CPGB crisis was the product not of any political clarity on Stalinism, but of Healy’s 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 Group’s 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 don’t think there can be any doubt about this’, Hillman states. ‘It was Healy’s 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 leadership’s 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 CPGB’s history, was held in Hammersmith. Healy organised a major intervention. Fryer’s 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 Fryer’s 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 Pearce’s 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 Fryer’s 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 Trotsky’s 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 Bevan’s 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 Healy’s 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 Hillman’s experiences on joining Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 CPSU’s 20th Congress.25 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 organisation’28 – 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 Grant’s 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 Mandel’s draft resolution for the forthcoming FI Fifth World Congress.30 A month earlier, Bill Hunter had written a polemic against Mandel’s document, entitled ‘Under a Stolen Flag’. This – the first critique of the International Secretariat’s politics produced by the Group since the beginning of Healy’s 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 Mandel’s arguments. Healy’s denunciations of the pro-Stalinist politics of the IS did not prevent him from turning a blind eye to his protégé Mike Banda’s 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 Banda’s thoroughly ‘Pabloite’ position on China. This showed quite clearly, as Hillman points out, that Healy’s 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 Healy’s real commitment to a discussion of the issues underlying the 1953 split is illustrated by the case of Harry Ratner, the Group’s industrial organiser, who resigned in 1957, unable to swallow Healy’s Stalinist-style demand that
50 members should unquestioningly accept the leadership’s 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 Group’s 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 I’ve 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 you’d better be clear.” All the committee – Healy, the Banda brothers, Bill Hunter – kept on repeating this ultimatum.... Eventually, Healy said, "You’d better make up your mind or you’re out!"’ Faced with this ultimatum, Ratner was forced to state that he no longer had any reservations.35 Healy’s 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 Bevan’s renegacy at the 1957 annual conference. By contrast, there was an upsurge of activity in the trade unions. Healy therefore empirically shifted the Group’s 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 McAlpine’s Shell-Mex site on London’s 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. ‘We’ve 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 Group’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Party’s 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. Healy’s low profile was probably due to the witch-hunt launched by the capitalist press in the run-up to the conference. A front-page exposé appeared in the News Chronicle, which sent a reporter to Healy’s home in Streatham to interview the evil genius behind the ‘Red Club’. (Healy refused to co-operate. ‘Print what you like. It’s a free press, isn’t it?’ 50) The campaign no doubt boosted Healy’s sense of his own importance, but it was based on a somewhat exaggerated view of the Group’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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. 9. Information from John Archer. 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. 15. Fryer interview. 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. 20. Fryer interview. 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 Healy’s 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. 36. How Healy and Pablo Blocked Reunification, p.34. 37. ‘Deep Entryism’ and Pablo’s Anti-Unity Offensive, 1978, p.7. 38. Ibid., p.10. 39. Harry Ratner, interviewed by Sam Bornstein, 4 February 1987. Transcript courtesy of Socialist Platform. 40. Quoted by J. Callaghan, British Trotskyism, 1984, p.223. 41. How Healy and Pablo Blocked Reunification, p.33. 42. See Bob Pennington’s 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. 47. The Times, 17 November 1958. 48. Cf. anon., ‘The disunity of theory and practice’. This makes the point that the organisation’s 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 clique’s 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. 51. The Times, 17 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 Group’s 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 Group’s 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 Healy’s 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 wasn’t 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 Grant’s ‘open’ RSL was formed, Healy had furiously denounced this as a Pabloite plot designed to sabotage the Group’s 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 Group’s 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 Group’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 section’s 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 secretary’s 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 League’s 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 Healy’s 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 Hadj’s 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 Shaw’s 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, Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Labour’s 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 SLL’s National Assembly of Labour in November 1959, where Healy went out of his way to deny the League’s 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 unusual’31 – 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 Healy’s own record of authoritarianism against him to win the conference’s 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 Cadogan’s expulsion.32 ‘The League’s 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 organisation’s long-standing policy of
61 nationalisation with no compensation, advocating reduced compensation instead, while the demand for workers’ control was quietly forgotten. The SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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 King’s horses and all the King’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s hands – that Behan’s 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 League’s elected bodies. Behan also opposed as grossly undemocratic Healy’s control of the organisation’s assets, the SLL’s 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 League’s 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 Healy’s 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 minority’s case, in marched Healy with a group of majority supporters. Ken Weller, a member of Behan’s 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 Healy’s 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 SLL’s political positions, ranging from its uncritical line towards the SWP and the LSSP, to Healy’s refusal to oppose Mike Banda’s ‘completely Pabloite attitude to the Chinese Revolution’. Grainger described how the leadership’s ‘obsessional fear of mildly unorthodox views – or of simple questions for which readily
63 prepared answers are not available’ had reduced intellectual life in Healy’s 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 Healy’s methods, Pennington and Grainger renounced Trotskyism and founded the ‘libertarian’ Solidarity group. ‘The crisis will deepen’, was Grainger’s 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). Healy’s 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. 9. Interview with Ellis Hillman, 4 January 1991. 10. ‘Deep Entryism’ and Pablo’s 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. 24. Harry Ratner, interviewed by Sam Bornstein, 4 February 1987. Transcript courtesy of Socialist Platform. 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. 30. Newsletter, 21 November 1959. 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. 39. Interview with Ellis Hillman, 4 January 1991. 40. SLL Internal Bulletin No.5, June 1960. 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 Healy’s methods and perspectives.1 In the course of these developments, any vestige of democracy in the SLL had been destroyed and Healy’s 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 Behan’s 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 Behan’s 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 League’s 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 organisation’s 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 leader’s purpose was ‘clear and unmistakeable’: having ‘decided to emulate [Ramsay] MacDonald’s betrayal’, Gaitskell was ‘systematically preparing to split the Labour Party’.10 In Healy’s 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 Healy’s mistake was in supposing that they ever did have any such intention. At the League’s 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 Union’s 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 Khrushchev’s 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 Cliff’s 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 Healy’s 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 Castro’s 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. Healy’s 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 SWP’s 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 SLL’s 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 SLL’s 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, Healy’s 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, Healy’s 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 SLL’s 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 SLL’s 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 SWP’s 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 Healy’s 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 month’s 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 leadership’s 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 SWP’s 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 Healy’s 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 SLL’s political line, Healy’s defence of ‘orthodoxy’ was welcomed as an alternative to the SWP’s 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 latter’s uncritical attitude towards the Cuban regime, Wohlforth having acted as the sole opponent of the party’s 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 SWP’s 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 SWP’s ‘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 RT’s 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 Healy’s 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, Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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 Pablo’s 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 Hansen’s refusal to defend him during a confrontation with Isaac Deutscher at Natalia Trotsky’s 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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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 couldn’t 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 IS’s one objection to fusion. In March, however, Nahuel Moreno of the IC’s 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 IC’s 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 Moreno’s 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 Moreno’s 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 SWP’s unprincipled split but themselves favoured unification, broke with the IC shortly afterwards and joined the USec. The end result of Healy’s 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 didn’t), it would probably have made sense to participate in the reunification and fight out the differences inside the USec. As it was, Healy’s decision to go it alone placed the Socialist Labour League in a position of national isolation. The situation undoubtedly accelerated Healy’s 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 Healy’s mind, identical with – the struggle to rebuild the Fourth International. This reasoning was expressed quite openly by Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 League’s 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 USec’s 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 Healy’s superior political methods. The SLL’s 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 SLL’s rivals – Tony Cliff’s statecapitalist tendency, Ted Grant’s supporters and the forerunners of the International Marxist Group – were unable to equal the gains made by Healy’s faction. Furthermore, Young Guard’s 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 Healy’s 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 League’s 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 ‘Healy’s shock troops’ – the phrase is Tim Wohlforth’s58 – against the Labour bureaucracy. Here again, as in 1956-7, Healy’s talent for spotting a political opening and directing his organisation’s 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 Wilson’s 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 SLL’s 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 year’s 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 Healy’s political style. And to the extent that his more exaggerated pronouncements reflected a euphoria generated by his organisation’s 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 Healy’s 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 SLL’s 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 leadership’s 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. Healy’s bureaucratic stranglehold over the organisation was thereby considerably tightened. That the youth’s energies were directed into such activities as paper selling and organising for the SLL’s 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 League’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s one foray into the international arena during this period was in response to the Lanka Sama Samaja Party’s entry into a bourgeois coalition government in Ceylon. This betrayal by the USec’s 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, Healy’s 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 party’s 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 – Healy’s 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 SLL’s summer camp in July-August 1964,69 was subsequently justified on the grounds that attacks by the Labour bureaucracy on the SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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. 3. SLL Internal Bulletin No.5, June 1960. 4. SLL Internal Bulletin No.3, June 1960. 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. Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Fryer’s 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. 22. SLL Internal Bulletin No.5, June 1960. 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 Pablo’s 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 Prophet’s 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 project’s 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 Moxham’s 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. 56. Wohlforth, Memoirs. 57. Keep Left, May 1964. 58. Wohlforth, Memoirs. 59. Newsletter, 3 October 1964. 60. Ibid., 22 February 1964; 28 September 1963. 61. Wohlforth, Memoirs. 62. M. Hoskisson and D. Stocking, ‘The rise and fall of the SLL’, Workers Power, February 1986. 63. J. Cleary and N. Cobbett, ‘Labour’s 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). 64. Newsletter, 22 June 1963.
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) HEALY’S 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 Wilson’s 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 Grant’s 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 Lenin’s call in What Is To Be Done? for an all-Russian political newspaper – ignoring the fact that Lenin wasn’t
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 Healy’s 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 Labour’s 1965 budget was described as ‘an epitaph for reformism in Britain’.6 Healy’s 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 didn’t 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 Healy’s 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 party’s Wilsonite candidate.11 The by-election in fact produced a substantial swing to Labour, making nonsense of Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 IC’s 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 Ouvrière 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s bogus theory of continuity did not stop the congress accepting another amendment, from Pierre Lambert’s 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 Healy’s 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 section’s leader Loukas Karliaftis, that the IC should elect a Secretariat in order to provide a collective leadership. Healy’s 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 Varga’s Hungarian group and Karliaftis’s 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 Ouvrière, 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 Healy’s angry announcement, halfway through
85 the proceedings, that he had no idea that Voix Ouvrière held a state capitalist position on China, and that if he had known he wouldn’t have invited them.22 The incoherence of the IC’s own position on the workers’ state question was brought out in a contribution by James Robertson, who criticised the SLL’s 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 latter’s 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 Robertson’s independence, compromise him politically and give Healy a hold over him. After refusing to comply with Healy’s demand, Robertson recalls, he was ‘called into Healy’s 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 – you’ll 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 seamen’s strike of May-June 1966, denouncing it as communistinspired, and then proceeded to impose a legally binding wage freeze. The SLL’s attacks on Wilson, which by the Newsletter’s own admission had earlier found little resonance in the class, now won the Healyites a hearing among militant workers. Another reason for the SLL’s recovery was Healy’s 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 seamen’s 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, Healy’s 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 wasn’t 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 Wilson’s resignation,32 given that the parliamentary party was overwhelmingly dominated by Wilson loyalists. Healy’s 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 government’s betrayals by resigning, or lapsing into political inactivity, which only strengthened Wilson’s 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 SLL’s late-1960s expansion, of course, was Healy’s own energy, hard work and organising ability. Tim Wohlforth, Healy’s 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 leader’s 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 SLL’s numerical gains were not greater, however, was due largely to Healy’s sectarian attitude towards the protest movement that developed against the Wilson government’s support for US imperialism’s 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 Wilson’s 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 Healy’s mind, was the established revolutionary leadership to whom all others had to defer. The SLL was involved in the VSC’s 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 Russell’s 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 SLL’s intervention as anything other than a provocation. The motive for Healy’s 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 Healy’s performance at a demonstration against US aggression in Vietnam at Liege in October 1966, which was organised by Ernest Mandel’s 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 Healy’s purpose. One thing is certain, Healy’s actions were not the product of any principled opposition to Stalinism as such. In early 1967, Mike Banda’s 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 Banda’s byline and was not an editorial at all.42 But Healy failed to distance himself or his organisation from Banda’s 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 Healy’s 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. Healy’s 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 Cliff’s 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 1. Newsletter, 30 January 1965.
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. 20. Slaughter, p.31. 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. 45. Newsletter, 2 November 1968.
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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 wouldn’t back down, he wouldn’t 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 SLL’s 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 government’s anti-union policies, together with a more general disillusionment with Labour’s 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 SLL’s 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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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 Wilson’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Wohlforth’s 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 Healy’s ultra-leftist lurch was his attempt to mount an electoral challenge to Labour. This policy was first agreed at the SLL’s 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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 section’s dual defeatist line on the 1967 Middle East war was diametrically opposed to the Healyites’ support for the ‘Arab revolution’, while Banda’s backing for Mao and Ho Chi Minh was anathema to the bitterly anti-Stalinist Lambertists. And the latter’s 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 Healy’s 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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Frank’s 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 USec’s European sections, which had experienced a substantial growth since 1968. Healy’s 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 Lora’s 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 IC’s ‘slanderous attacks’ on them ruled out any prospect of discussions,31 while internally they justified their decision on the grounds that ‘Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s opportunist adaptation to ‘Pabloism’ and reasserting the principles of IC orthodoxy. Healy’s 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, didn’t even bother to reply.35 As had been the case during his break with the SWP in the early 1960s, Healy’s 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 government’s Industrial Relations Bill, produced an upsurge of anger in the working class. This was reflected in a significant expansion in the SLL’s 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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s instigation, an article holding the Lora leadership of the POR responsible for the Bolivian workers’ defeat. In October the OCI, the POR, Michel Varga’s 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 IC’s sections actually were! The SLL’s 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 SLL’s 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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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. 5. Workers Press, 7 February 1986. 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 don’t 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. 9. Newsletter, 11 January 1969. 10. Black, p.1077. 11. Newsletter, 18 June 1968. 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 Prophet’s Children, 1994, p.226. 19. Wohlforth, Memoirs, unpublished draft (later published in a revised form as The Prophet’s 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 Vérité, 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. 36. Workers Press, 15 February 1971. 37. Bulletin of Trotskyist Discussion, February 1986. 38. Material relating to the SLL-OCI split can be found in Slaughter, vol.6. 39. Bulletin of Trotskyist Discussion, February 1986. 40. Fourth International, Winter 1970-71. 41. Slaughter, p.108. 42. Documents of the Workers Vanguard, 1979, p.68.
102 43. Bulletin of Trotskyist Discussion, February 1986. 44. Wohlforth, Memoirs.
103 Chapter 9 (1971-1975) IF A DETAILED account of Gerry Healy’s 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 Cliff’s International Socialists were by then engaged in building rank-and-file movements in the trade unions, while Ted Grant’s 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 women’s movements and Irish solidarity campaigns. Healy’s ‘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 IS’s 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 Militant’s 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, Healy’s response to the Irish liberation struggle was to denounce ‘the reactionary, indiscriminate violence of the Provisionals’1 (while engaging in a short flirtation with the leadership of Official Sinn Féin) 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 SLL’s position on the women’s 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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s intervention in this milieu was preserved for posterity in Trevor Griffiths’s 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 Healy’s 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, Healy’s turn to the radical middle classes was motivated by the straightforward pursuit of cash. According to one perhaps apocryphal story, Healy’s response to the recruitment of C. Redgrave was ‘It’s the big one I’m interested in, the one with the money’ – namely Corin’s wealthy sister.5 Another probable motive on Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Heath’s 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, Healy’s successes in this period were very impressive, at least so far as the SLL’s 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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s
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 Healy’s talents as a political showman than a reflection of the SLL’s 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 Lenin’s 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. Healy’s line was that trade unionists should be left to get on with the practical details of industrial struggles, while the SLL’s 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 dollar’s link with gold in August 1971, Healy asserted that this had provoked an economic crisis which was ‘the worst in the history of capitalism’14 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 government’s 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 movement’18 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 WRP’s 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 Healy’s 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 government’s 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 WRP’s 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 party’s numbers continued to decline. All the conditions for a major crisis in Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s ultimatist calls for the immediate nationalisation of major industries and the banks. Healy’s reaction was to ban WRP members from reading the Bulletin, and to change the party’s 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 WRP’s factory branch at British Leyland Cowley, voted against Healy’s 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 party’s special conference in July 1974 another Cowley WRPer, Tony Richardson, made the mistake of asking a question of clarification. He was hauled off to Healy’s 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 Healy’s sectarian ultra-leftism, and faced with a party regime which prevented any serious reassessment of the WRP’s policies, Thornett and his supporters opened up discussions with the Bulletin Group, and began with the latter’s 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 WRP’s politics were utterly divorced from Trotskyism.26 Healy responded to this challenge with his usual anti-Bolshevik methods. Thornett’s 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 party’s 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 Healy’s wrong perspectives, sectarian politics and bureaucratic centralism were not restricted to Britain, but were felt throughout the WRP’s 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 SLL’s YS work, trying to attract young African Americans and Puerto Ricans to politics by means of dances, socials, etc.27 On Healy’s instructions, Wohlforth waged a bitter struggle against the ‘conservative’ forces in the League who resisted this new turn. The results were devastating. By Wohlforth’s 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 WL’s ‘turn to the working class’, and recommended the League’s 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 Wohlforth’s 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 WL’s 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 leader’s life would not be under threat! The purging of Wohlforth, who was essentially set up as a scapegoat for the results of Healy’s 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 Field’s ‘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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s paranoid
110 accusations. By this time, however, both Wohlforth and Fields had left the WL in disgust. Another victim of Healy’s arbitrary methods was L. Sklavos (Dimitri Toubanis), the secretary of the IC’s 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 League’s 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 Slaughter’s 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 League’s 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 Healy’s career has demonstrated anything, it is that the organisation he led was never more than a degenerate fragment of Trotsky’s 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 Healy’s organisation, which occurred a decade later, was that it did not happen long before. Notes 1. Workers Press, 24 February 1972. 2. Interestingly, this group also held discussions with Tony Cliff, but were more impressed with Healy’s ‘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 SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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. 11. Workers Press, 7 February 1986. 12. Trotsky never accepted that Lenin’s 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 Healy’s 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. (Healy’s 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 League’s 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 WRP’s 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 Wohlforth’s Memoirs, on the published version, The Prophet’s 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 wasn’t 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 WRP’s 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 CLP’s 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 Healy’s 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 WRP’s failure to correct its self-destructive course was partly due to Healy’s own withdrawal from active organisational work. Though the Healyite tendency’s 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 didn’t 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 Healy’s 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 WRP’s politics had by this stage become completely crazed. Having announced that a revolutionary situation had been ushered in by the Labour government’s 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 firemen’s strike.’1 In the face of this political idiocy the WRP’s 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 party’s 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 Healy’s whipping boy on the Central Committee. In an internal document, which was suppressed by the WRP leadership, Gale demolished Healy’s rantings about a revolutionary situation and an immediate struggle for power, and he savaged Healy’s 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 party’s 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 WRP’s 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 WRP’s 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 party’s witnesses (undoubtedly on Healy’s instructions) disgraced themselves by equivocating over revolutionary principles in a vain attempt to persuade the jury of the WRP’s 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 Ba’athist regime in Iraq. Healy’s new turn had its roots in the SLL’s 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 Healy’s 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 organisation’s 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 Party’s 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 WRP’s stupid ultra-leftism prevented it from addressing this problem. Indeed, the perspectives document for the party’s 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 WRP’s candidates ranged from Roy Battersby’s 95 votes in Dundee to Simon Pirani’s 820 in Ormskirk – all of them, needless to say, lost their deposits. Healy dismissed this humiliation with the argument that the WRP wasn’t 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, Healy’s 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 Khomeini’s Islamic regime, to the extent of endorsing its suppression of the Iranian USec group. In Zimbabwe the Popular Front, and in particular Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU, were given uncritical backing. News Line notoriously justified the execution of Iraqi Communist Party members by the Ba’athist 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 country’s 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 WRP’s 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 Healy’s 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 WRP’s commercial printing, argues that ‘of the thousands of pounds that came from the Libyans to the WRP’s 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 Gaddafi’s 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 WRP’s 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 Ba’athists were too astute to swallow Healy’s 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 Ba’athists 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 Healy’s 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 Ba’athists' execution of Iraqi CP members, but got no support. It was not until 1984 that David North of the US Workers League challenged the WRP’s general line on bourgeois nationalism, and he found himself completely isolated. It was the same with the bogus dialectics. When North criticised Healy’s 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 WRP’s 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 Healy’s 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 WRP’s 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 paper’s soft attitude towards terrorism in the Middle East. One YS member, Rufus Boulting, had the courage to condemn the WRP’s double standards on this issue, only to find himself stitched up by Healy hatchet-man Simon Pirani.14 Healy’s galloping opportunism wasn’t 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 Healy’s ‘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 WRP’s 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 WRP’s call for ‘Community Councils’, which could be portrayed as embryonic organs of workers power while at the same time providing a useful platform for Healy’s 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. Healy’s ‘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 WRP’s 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 WRP’s 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 government’s 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 don’t take the power we will have fascism’, Healy declared in February 1985, on the eve of the strike’s collapse. ‘Make no mistake, if we don’t 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 WRP’s 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 government’s 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 Livingstone’s 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 WRP’s perspectives in shreds and its members demoralised and disoriented, assistant general secretary Sheila Torrance had the idea of diverting attention from the party’s 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 wasn’t 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. Author’s 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. 19. News Line, 9 March 1985. 20. Fourth International, Summer 1986. 21. News Line, 11 March 1985. 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 WRP’s 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 WRP’s perspectives with the defeat of the miners’ strike. Of course, this was not exactly the first time that Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 WRP’s needs, but he had also acquired a bloated apparatus of some 90 full-timers – in a ‘party’ whose active membership didn’t even reach four figures. The situation was aggravated by a severe reduction in the WRP’s income resulting from the slump in News Line sales which followed the miners’ defeat. Healy’s own refusal to consider any evidence that contradicted claims about the party’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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. There’s a very close parallel’.7 The initial form the WRP’s 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 Healy’s 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 WRP’s history, either to scare people into greater activism – "if you don’t 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 WRP’s 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: ‘You’re twisted, this time you’re going to come unstuck, I’ll take it to conference and then you’ll 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t 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 Healy’s 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 didn’t do something we’d be expelled’, Bruce points out, ‘because that had happened to everybody else. We’d studied the Thornett experience, and the mistakes that Thornett made, and how he got outmanoeuvred, so we weren’t 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. ‘That’s 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 he’d 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 Banda’s 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 can’t 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 Healy’s sexual abuse. Banda apparently tried to pressurise the parents of Healy’s victims into withdrawing this demand, while Torrance used the WRP’s 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 Healy’s 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 I’m 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 didn’t want Pandora’s box opened.... She wanted a kind of tamed Healy.’20 Meanwhile, a sharp discussion had developed over the WRP’s political line. Torrance herself was critical of Healy’s 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 party’s cover-up for Ken Livingstone. 21 However, while she could criticise the party’s 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 WRP’s 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 Bruce’s 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 Torrance’s name but was probably written by her partner Paddy O’Regan, was an exercise in pure Healyite gibberish. According to Torrance, Britain was in a ‘revolutionary situation ... which is deepening continually’. Healy’s 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, Torrance’s 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 Healy’s 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. Torrance’s 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 WRP’s Seventh Congress perspectives, which called for the overthrow of ‘Thatcher’s 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, Healy’s erstwhile lieutenant Mike Banda, whose politics were oscillating wildly, had turned into Healy’s most vitriolic opponent. And Cliff Slaughter, who at the August CC meeting had staunchly defended the WRP’s 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 idol’26 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 Torrance’s 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 don’t say he’d arrived at it, but he was heading that way. I remember he said, and my jaw dropped, that he’d learned far more from Mao Zedong – on philosophy, I think – than he’d 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. ‘That’s undoubtedly true’, Price points out. ‘Some did become Stalinists.’27 The obvious solution to the WRP’s 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 didn’t 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 Banda’s 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 party’s political perspectives and Healy’s sexual corruption could be resolved without a split. On 2 October, however, Healy entered the party’s 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 WRP’s 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 who’d been absolute toadies in the past. Some of these were quite wondrous to behold.’ Members of Healy’s ‘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 night’s 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, "You’re withholding Gerry Healy’s mail. We want all his mail".’ Ignoring Harrison’s assurances that Healy’s 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 WRP’s various companies along with obvious business circulars. ‘And he pointed his finger at me ... saying "I’ll break your legs if you take Gerry’s 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, I’ll break your legs’!30 A further irony of these new factional alignments, Richard Price points out, was that while many of Healy’s toadies had flip-flopped, most of the TorranceHealy faction on the Central Committee (with the obvious exception of the Redgraves and Mitchell) ‘weren’t really Healy’s 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 can’t 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 wasn’t 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. Banda’s speech also featured an account of Healy’s 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 Healy’s expulsion were unquestionably on the wrong side. But this doesn’t 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 Committee’s 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 CC’s action were denounced as supporters of rape – a thoroughly dubious characterisation of Healy’s sexual abuse which the majority itself would later reject. 34 Dave Bruce observes that many rank-and-file supporters of the minority simply ‘didn’t believe the charges against Healy, they found it unbelievable, and I don’t think that we satisfactorily proved it to them.... So they didn’t support rape, it’s absurd to say that, but they didn’t 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, wasn’t 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/O’Regan had proved unable to answer. And this exchange had been followed up by a surprisingly good contribution from Simon Pirani, defending Bruce and demolishing Torrance’s and Healy’s ultra-left sectarianism. Further documents attacking Healy’s 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 Healy’s sexual abuse. 36 Under these circumstances, as Gerry Downing has pointed out, ‘Torrance’s 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 party’s 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 WRP’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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. ‘They’d 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 Healy’s 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. Slaughter’s speech also contained the shocking allegation that the WRP had provided the Iraqi embassy with photographs of anti-Ba’athist 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 North’s documents, Slaughter attacked Healy’s philosophy as a form of Hegelianism and the WRP’s 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 Redgrave’s provocative statement at the first aggregate about being neutral on the question of Healy’s 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 can’t discuss with fascists politically, can you? It’s not possible. So he shut the discussion down. We didn’t 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 Slaughter’s 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 WRP’s existing programme. In fact many of Torrance’s 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 couldn’t 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 ... you’ve got to restore the News Line, the News Line is the decisive
134 paper, we’d 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 we’d continued with comradely political discussion, things would have started to flow’. Harrison believes that the arguments put forward in majority documents like Dave Bruce’s 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 hadn’t 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 Healy’s 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 majority’s special congress, organised their own alternative conference and declared themselves a separate party. The Slaughter-Banda congress, for its part, went on to endorse Healy’s 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 Healy’s ‘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 WRP’s 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 WRP’s collapse was due to fundamental flaws not in Healy’s politics but in Trotsky’s, and in Banda’s case subsequently evolved towards support for left Stalinism and ‘third world’ nationalism. As for the Slaughter-led WRP, under Dave Bruce’s 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 Trotskyism’s 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 party’s 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 Healy’s 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. 7. Interview with Dave Bruce, 6 October 1993. 8. Interview with Richard Price, 22 November 1993. 9. Workers News, April 1987. 10. News Line, 8 November 1985. 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 it’ll ruin my lifestyle’ (News Line, 6 November 1985). 16. Price interview. 17. Ibid. 18. Gerry Downing, WRP Explosion, 1991, p.5; Price interview. 19. Workers News, April 1987; Downing, p.6. 20. Price interview. 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. 27. Price interview. 28. Ibid. 29. Workers News, April 1987. 30. Harrison interview. 31. Price interview. 32. Ibid. 33. An account of the October 12-13 CC meeting can be found in Workers News, April 1987. 34. The WRP Women’s Commission later argued that Healy’s 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. 36. News Line, 2 November 1985. 37. Downing, p.7. 38. News Line, 16 November 1985. 39. Marxist Review, September 1986. 40. Harrison interview. 41. News Line, 16 November 1985. 42. Harrison interview. 43. News Line, 16 November 1985. 44. Bruce interview. For Downing’s view, see WRP Explosion, pp.6-7. 45. Harrison interview. 46. Islington WRP branch resolution. 47. Harrison interview. 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 author’s own experience as a WRP member in the late 1970s, when he tried to ward off Torrance’s 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 majority’s accusation that ‘the entire anti-party group of Torrance, Mitchell and the Redgraves is being centred around Healy’s 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 minority’s ‘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 O’Regan, 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 Healy’s 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 majority’s 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. She’d 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. They’d made enormous sacrifices for that paper – she’d broken with her family, she’d given it her life – and it wasn’t 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 Penn’s 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, Torrance’s group staged a temporary recovery. Despite losing almost all the WRP’s 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 O’Regan proved unable to develop any new perspectives or policies. The WRP/News Line remained committed to Healy’s view that Britain was in the grip of economic catastrophe and revolutionary crisis, and the party’s 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 Healy’s 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 Healy’s 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 O’Regan (‘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-O’Regan 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 O’Regan 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 O’Regan. So we waded into Redgrave and Healy at that congress, on the question of Stalinism basically’. Under the impact of this attack, Redgrave’s 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 Healy’s 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 world’s smallest circulation) and calling incessantly for a general strike. Healy’s 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 Yeltsin’s 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 bureaucracy’s grip ... by returning "all power to the soviets"’. 18 According to Corinna Lotz’s 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. 3. Marxist Review, April 1986.
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. 9. Interview with Dave Bruce, 6 October 1993. 10. Back in 1956, Healy had initially taken a similar position in response to Mikoyan’s 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 Healy’s 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. 14. Marxist Review, April 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 Shachtman’s 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 Grant’s 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 Lee’s 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 Pitt’s 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 Healy’s 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 group’s (or International’s) 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., Healy’s 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 Cliff’s 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 Healy’s 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 Cliff’s 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 Percy’s nose and growled "we’ll 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 Percy’s 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 haven’t 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
158 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 Haston’s 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 International’s 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 Healy’s pseudonyms), whole sections of it were lifted from US Socialist Workers Party National Committee’s "Memorandum on The Rise and Decline of Stalinism" (5 October 1953). It would seem to be the only attempt by Healy’s 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 man’s 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
161 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 people’s 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 don’t "junk" theory, they bring it up to date. Marxists don’t 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 Trotsky’s 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 Burnham’s 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 Stalin’s 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 earth’s 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 Kremlin’s 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 Kremlin’s 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 Trotsky’s 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 Kremlin’s 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 Kremlin’s 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 Kremlin’s 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 Kremlin’s stranglehold. Does this not project the perspective of such reformed Stalinist parties escaping the Kremlin’s 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 People’s 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 won’t 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 don’t 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 group’s 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 cliché-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 League’s 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 League’s 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 people’s 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.
178 The outstanding feature of the present regime in the Socialist Labour League is that it is the rule of a clique – the general secretary’s 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 don’t 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. He’s trying to take over. I come back to find he is appointing his own full-timers." "B is a primitive Irish peasant." "I don’t trust P. He is not a Marxist. He doesn’t accept dialectical materialism." "S won’t 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 secretary’s 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 comrade’s 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. MB’s job on the panel commission and at the conference was to make sure that the general secretary’s list was accepted. This accounts for the general secretary’s 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
179 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. JD’s point,
180 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 secretary’s constant braggadocio, his continual exaggeration of the movement’s 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 week’s 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 Gramsci’s 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 secretary’s 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 don’t 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 Bernstein’s "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 latter’s 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 secretary’s, 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, I’m sorry they were made to waste their time. It is strange that the day after the general secretary wrote to me at my mother’s 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 CS’s 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 people’s private lives in this shameful way? In order to protect myself against these methods I caused solicitor’s 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, Healy’s 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.
185 Some Reflections on the Socialist Labour League Gerry Healy
From the March 1960 issue of the Socialist Labour League’s 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 League’s 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 Bevan’s 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 year’s 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
