Review: The Party is always right

Alex Steiner 03.21.2025

From left to right: Aileen Jennings, Gerry Healy, Mike Banda, Cliff Slaughter

Aidan Beatty’s book, The Party is Always Right, is the first comprehensive historical investigation of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) as well as its long-time founder-leader Gerry Healy. There have been other historical accounts, mostly by former members of the WRP such as Alex Mitchell and Clare Cowen,  but those were personal memoirs rather than  comprehensive histories. Beatty did a great deal of original research pulling together material from all the available memoirs as well as numerous documents located in various archives in the UK, the US, and Ireland.  In addition, he conducted dozens of interviews with former members of the WRP and others who had personal interaction with Healy, the party, and its international affiliates.  Given that many of the events depicted were never officially recorded at the time these interviews contribute an important dimension to Beatty’s historical account, providing an oral history to complement the documentary narrative. The inclusion of this oral history has come under severe criticism from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), whose editors claim to represent the legacy of Gerry Healy. I will address this and other objections from that quarter in a follow-up article.

My overall assessment of Beatty’s work is that he has made a positive contribution in bringing a wealth of factual material before the reader that wipes away much of the mythology subscribed to by both opponents and supporters of Healy.  This is a welcome addition to the literature that has up till now been dominated by very one-sided and distorted historical narratives.  Beatty’s account is not likely to dissuade those who today claim to be the heirs to Healy’s legacy, but it should be welcomed by anyone who is capable of thinking objectively. In addition to the purely historical questions surrounding Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party, Beatty raises a number of important questions about how to go about building a socialist movement.  While I strongly disagree with his own response, they are nevertheless legitimate questions that should be discussed, and Beatty deserves credit for raising them.  

On the negative side, there are huge problems in the way Beatty deals with theoretical and political issues that characterize  Trotskyism in general and the peculiar form those questions took on in the Workers Revolutionary Party.   The first problem is that Beatty does not engage with the theoretical issues in a serious way. In the best of cases, he describes the issues in a few sentences and makes no attempt to delve into them in any but the most perfunctory manner. In the worst case, he trivializes them.

Another problem is that he conflates Trotskyism with the Workers Revolutionary Party, and since he also  – to some extent - conflates the Workers Revolutionary Party with the individual Gerry Healy, we wind up with a very distorted account. If you are looking for insights into Trotskyism, you will not find them in Beatty’s account of Healy and the WRP. 

Before delving into the more problematic areas of Beatty’s book, I will comment on his strictly historical narrative of Healy and the WRP, particularly in areas where I can provide insights from my personal experience as a leading member of the Workers League in the 1970’s.

Beatty’s nuanced account of the Workers Revolutionary Party

As a participant in the movement Beatty discusses and someone who was personally acquainted with Healy and interacted with him and many of the leaders of the WRP, I can attest that the facts Beatty presents are for the most part accurate. Before proceeding any further, I should add that my assessment is in sharp disagreement with the modern-day self-proclaimed guardians of Healy’s legacy, namely the World Socialist Web Site and its related institutions.  The latter have painted Beatty as departing from the norms of a biography and instead demonizing Healy as some kind of “monster.”  I will deal with the WSWS attacks on Beatty and his book elsewhere but suffice it to say for now that I found the WSWS allegations to not only lack merit but to be positively repulsive in that they constitute a campaign of ad hominem attacks. To be sure Beatty does not hide his repugnance toward Healy.  But at the same time, he provides a mostly fair and impartial account of Healy and the WRP in situations in which it would have been easy enough to trash them if that was his real agenda.

To take one example, Beatty devotes an entire chapter to an interrogation of the validity of the charges about the infiltration of police and intelligence agents into the WRP and how much that may have contributed to the split in 1985 rapidly followed by the demise of the WRP.  He quotes Ken Livingstone, the former Labour Party mayor of London - and one-time personal friend of Healy - who said at an event commemorating Healy,

I haven’t the slightest doubt that the upheavals that split apart the Workers Revolutionary Party, were not some accident or some clash of personalities. They were a sustained and deliberate decision by MI5 to smash that organization, because they feared it was becoming too pivotal in terms of domestic politics, linking too many international struggles with progressive elements both inside and outside the British labour movement. [1]

Healy’s followers have latched onto Livingstone’s allegations as evidence that the sexual abuse charges against Healy were spurious. But the vast majority who repudiated Healy have also dismissed  Livingstone’s suspicions.  Were Beatty just doing a hatchet job on Healy, as the WSWS has alleged, he would have dismissed Livingstone’s comments as well, arguing that the dissolution of the WRP was solely the doing of Healy.  But Beatty does not do that. Instead, he does a creditable job of going through all the  evidence either confirming or refuting Livingtone’s statement. His conclusion is a well-balanced and nuanced judgement. Livingstone’s suspicions of infiltration of the WRP by MI5 and other intelligence agencies have some basis in the evidence uncovered in recent years, but it is also a mistake to attribute the collapse of the WRP to those actions. Beatty writes:

In the most narrow sense, Livingstone’s claim was absurd; the WRP was a paranoid entity, riven by personal animosities. And the immediate catalyst for the 1985 split, Gerry Healy’s sexual abuse of female party members, was undeniably horrific. In such a situation, there is no need for a deep state deus ex machina to explain how and why the organisation fractured. Even if there is scant evidence that MI5 played a stealthy role in splitting the WRP, though Livingstone’s claims do have a certain basis in reality. [2]

But perhaps  an even more nuanced view is required? While we can agree that the infiltration of MI5 agents was not the cause of the fracturing of the WRP, the existence of agent provocateurs within the WRP undoubtedly fed the flames of the factional and personal conflicts that were unleashed with the revelations of Healy’s abuse of female comrades.  Just how much of an impact the work of the agent provocateurs had on the fate of the WRP is something we will likely never know for sure, but it would be naïve to completely dismiss their significance.

In going through all the documentation that has become available in the last few decades concerning the infiltration of left wing groups and the WRP in particular by the forces of the state, Beatty concludes, correctly in my opinion, that whereas nothing like a “smoking gun” has ever surfaced showing that the WRP split in 1985 was caused by MI5 agents within the WRP – the sexual scandal outing Healy was more than sufficient reason on its own – it was likely that MI5 agents had infiltrated the WRP at the time of the split.

Abuse in the Workers Revolutionary Party

It is important that Beatty documents the  truly repressive nature of Healy and his organization, especially as there have been attempts by some of the inheritors of Healy's legacy to downplay the darker side of “Healyism.” The WRP was an organization that normalized the abuse of party members. Most notorious was the sexual abuse of young female party members by Healy personally, but there was also widespread physical abuse of comrades within that organization. When I was a member, I was not aware of the sexual abuse at all and was quite shocked when I learned of it in 1985.  In a scandal that hit the tabloid press, it was revealed that Healy was a sexual predator who had abused dozens of female comrades over the years. A WRP Control Commission report listed 26 individuals who had been so abused by Healy, but the real number was likely much higher.  And this had been going for over two decades! [3]

But while sexual abuse was mostly, if not exclusively,[4] a private affair confined to Healy, physical abuse, particularly the beating of comrades, was not confined to Healy but was also carried out by other members of the WRP.  I personally never witnessed an incident of physical abuse. However I did hear stories about such practices.

One thing I did witness first-hand was the psychological and verbal abuse  of party members.  I was present at some of the Central Committee meetings presided over by Healy where longtime comrades were practically forced to confess their various sins in the face of a public browbeating by Healy.  Those “sins” generally consisted of giving into middle class idealism and the various evils that flow from it. This was a regular ritual, and it was to some extent replicated in the American group that was sympathetic with the WRP, the Workers League – although not to the extremes that I witnessed in the UK.  I never saw anything quite like what I witnessed in the Central Committee meetings of the Workers Revolutionary Party. These meetings would go on for hours and hours, and they invariably consisted of a political report by Mike Banda or another WRP leader that was then employed to reinforce the message of a deepening crisis that required all members to redouble their efforts to build a mass revolutionary party.  This somewhat perfunctory political report was then used like a hammer to browbeat the “middle class” members of the Central Committee. Healy would select someone to explain how he or she had failed to fulfill their revolutionary responsibilities.  Several hours of browbeating would follow.  Inevitably, the subject of Healy’s ire would then “confess” to his or her sins. Even so the harangues would continue. As the meeting dragged on, comrade after comrade would rise to demonstrate their indignation, each trying to outdo the denunciations of other members in this star chamber proceeding. I was a witness at several Central Committee meetings in which Cliff Slaughter, Cyril Smith, and Bill Hunter were abused and humiliated in this way.

Simon Pirani, a former leader of the WRP’s youth movement, provided a vivid account of another Central Committee meeting,

At a CC meeting, Healy shouted at C, slapped him on the face and kicked him. C was not being beaten up; he was being humiliated by a very unfit man nearly three times his age. I sat there with the other fit young members of the CC and said nothing. A few months later C was beaten up, when, having been expelled, he tried to enter a meeting to question leading WRP members openly.

Pirani goes on to explain the connection between the acceptance within the WRP of the public humiliation and physical abuse of party members to the secretive sexual predation that Healy practiced for many years,

Unlike the sexual abuse, C’s humiliation and expulsion took place in broad daylight. Many of us knew about it. In my view, our acceptance of such bullying in public created the sort of organisation within which Healy felt the confidence to practice serial sexual abuse in private. [5]

Encounters with Gerry Healy

I first met Gerry Healy a few months after I joined the Workers League and had a number of personal encounters with him in the years that followed. He was certainly a very impressive person, especially to a young neophyte. He could speak to workers in a language they understood, and he was able to convey revolutionary ideas in a way that they could grasp. This was impressive as the party intellectuals were never able to have that kind of bond with workers. He had an understanding of the history of the English working class that he was able to bring out in the historical consciousness of his audience.

He was a powerful speaker.  But one shouldn't make more of that than it was.  I would not go so far as David North who said Healy “was one  of the genuinely great working-class  orators of the 20th century.” [6]  Really, the entire 20^th century? One should not forget that Trotsky was considered one of the greatest orators of all time and he also lived in the 20^th century! One should also keep in mind that Healy’s initial political training was in the Communist Party before he became a Trotskyist and that the Communist Party was known for training its working-class cadre in the art of oratory. So while Healy was certainly adept as an orator, there is no evidence that he was a more exceptional orator than others trained in the CP.

Healy and ‘the practice of cognition’

But if Healy did exhibit some positive qualities as a political leader, he also exhibited weaknesses that eventually undermined all his positive contributions. He was never an original thinker. Even worse, his ego would not let him accept his limitations, and, given the complete lack of feedback from leading comrades who were fearful of challenging him, he became convinced of his own unique greatness. So he covered up his deficiency in the area of philosophy by essentially creating his own philosophical language. By the early 1970’s, this unique pseudo-philosophical language, what Heally called “the practice of cognition,” became a substitute for a Marxist understanding of philosophical issues.  That was something many of us grew up with as every member was required to participate in these exercises.

Diagram of Healy's 'practice of cognition' from Corinna Lotz's book, Gerry Healy: A revolutionary life

Healy created a ritualized reading of Lenin's Volume 38 (Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks ) that was foisted on all the comrades.  It was a reading of Hegel that reflected Healy’s own confused thinking rather than anything Hegel or Lenin actually said.[7] In time Healy’s “practice of cognition” replaced practically all the educational work that had previously been undertaken by the WRP.    Classes on Marx’s Capital at the College of Marxist Education in Derbyshire – taught by party intellectuals like Peter Jeffries or Cyril Smith -  were invariably cancelled by Healy and replaced with sessions on “the practice of cognition”.  

Cyril Smith

Beatty covers this area of Healy’s legacy in the chapter of his book called “Healyism.”  In it, he quotes Alisdair MacIntyre, a well-known philosopher who was briefly a member of the Socialist Labour League before running afoul of Healy. In response to Healy’s accusation of “idealism,” MacIntyre responded:

You charge me with idealism. It is time to call your intellectual bluff. Frankly from your letter, I do not think you know what idealism is. I think that you are throwing a piece of vocabulary about in the hope of impressing the membership. [8]

Alasdair MacIntyre

Beatty aptly comments about this episode,

Healy seemed to have an inferiority complex in relation to actual intellectuals within the party and certainly was not a serious intellectual himself. [9]

Achievements of the Workers Revolutionary Party

Given the distorted internal culture prevalent in the WRP, it would be wrong to completely dismiss the achievements of the WRP and its predecessor organizations under Healy’s leadership. Perhaps most notable was the intervention of the Socialist Labour League in the crisis that wracked the Communist Party following the revelations of the crimes of Stalin in Khruschev’s secret speech of 1956 as well as the Hungarian Revolution.  An important layer of Communist Party intellectuals, including Cliff Slaughter, were won over to Trotskyism as a result of that intervention. Nothing similar had ever been achieved by any Trotskyist group anywhere.

Another important achievement was winning over a majority of the Labour Party youth movement, the Young Socialists, to the program of Trotskyism and the capturing of the editorial board of its publication, Keep Left.  The SLL/WRP was also able to win over an important cadre of working-class members during the tumultuous decade of the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Neither should the recruitment of an important layer of cultural workers from the film and the theater industry, including celebrities such as Vanessa Redgrave, be dismissed.  Many of those who joined the SLL/WRP or its sister organizations during those years saw in them  a serious movement that, unlike the propaganda groups that were typical of Trotskyism,  could pose a genuine challenge to the rule of capitalism. Admittedly, there was an element of self-delusion in all this as the SLL/WRP never even came close to becoming a mass revolutionary party. And in the end, all of these achievements were undone with the implosion of the Workers Revolutionary Party. But it would still be an affront to the many comrades who worked tirelessly for decades in the SLL/WRP not to recognize those achievements even if they were of a transitory nature.

Vanessa Redgrave campaigning for the WRP

Let us now examine what I consider the highly problematic side of Beatty’s book.

The WRP was not only Gerry Healy

The other side of the story is that the Workers Revolutionary  Party was not only Gerry Healy. It was more than Gerry Healy.  This is often obscured in Beatty’s book.  I was first attracted to the movement because of the ideas it expressed before I heard of Gerry Healy.  It happened when I read about Trotsky’s analysis of fascism in an article in the Bulletin,  the newspaper of the Workers League.  At that time, the late 1960’s, it was fashionable among New Leftists to label everything about “Amerika” as fascist, and, having been around New Left radicalism at that point, I tended to go along with that outlook without thinking much about it.   But when I opened the copy of the Bulletin I had purchased, I read an article about the Black Panthers and how their mistaken assessment of America as being “fascist” can only lead to a politics of despair because of what it implied - that the working class has already been defeated when in fact that was not the case.  This opened my eyes to the possibility of Marxism as a method of critical and scientific analysis that has important implications for one’s political practice.

I didn't join the Workers League immediately after I read that article, but I recalled it when I came into contact with comrades from the Workers League a year later.

What further attracted me to the Workers League and the politics that came along with it was the emphasis on ideas, particularly on philosophy. I always thought that having a proper philosophical approach was absolutely necessary in order to develop a proper political perspective and a proper political practice and, having myself come from a background as a philosophy student, I was strongly attracted to the emphasis on philosophy. I did not realize at the time that this emphasis was mostly a matter of paying lip service to a goal they never actually implemented.

A superficial approach to theoretical questions

I have indicated that one of the big problems of Beatty’s book is its trivialization of some of the key theoretical issues that were being contested in the Trotskyist movement. One particularly egregious example is Beatty’s discussion of the theory of permanent revolution. In explaining the difference between Trotskyism and Stalinism, Beatty writes,

Trotskyists positioned themselves as the true heirs of the Russian Revolution, which they argued Stalin and parties like the CPGB had degraded and sullied.

and,

In opposition to the Stalinist position that the USSR should develop Socialism in One Country, Trotskyists advocated  Permanent Revolution, in which Communism would be spread rapidly and globally. [10]

Here no attempt is made to explain Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and the immense theoretical heritage behind it dating back as far as Marx’s address to the Communist League in 1850 wherein he declared:

…it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent, until all more or less possessing classes have been forced out of their position of dominance.[11]

Instead we are presented with a caricature of the issues that were debated in the Communist International in the 1920’s and 1930’s without any definition of what the issues really were other than two competing slogans and no clue as to how that debate could be adjudicated. The reader is left with the impression that whether one chooses ‘permanent revolution’ or ‘socialism in one country’ is largely a matter of taste.

Is democratic centralism inherently authoritarian?

If we go to the fundamental moral lesson  Beatty is pushing throughout his book, it is that democratic centralism necessarily leads to an authoritarian party structure. Beatty cites the Workers Revolutionary Party as perhaps the most extreme example of this authoritarian tendency.

Now it is true that the Workers Revolutionary Party was an extreme example of an authoritarian party structure.  It was a party in which it was impossible to raise differences  with the leadership and one in which factions had to work in secrecy whenever differences over program or policy arose.  The expulsion of a group of about a hundred working class cadre led by Alan Thornett in 1974 served  as a warning of the consequences to be expected if one dared participate in a faction challenging the leadership. [12] Members couldn't openly challenge the leadership and do what one would normally expect - to engage in discussions, conferences, votes on various proposals so as to formulate a political program binding on all party members.  That kind of give and take simply did not exist in the Workers Revolutionary Party, and it  didn't exist in its offshoots in the Workers League and later the Socialist Equality Party either.[13]   

Beatty’s use of the fate of the Workers Revolutionary Party as evidence that a democratic centralist party structure inevitably leads to an authoritarian internal regime is an example of what has been called a Whiggish interpretation of history. He is winding history backwards, in other words, and claiming to find seeds of the future in choices one makes in the present. The obvious fallacy here is that one cannot demonstrate the necessity of the choices one makes leading to one outcome rather than another. The fact that something happened does not mean that it had to have happened that way because something else happened previously.  There are many reasons why parties can degenerate, democratic centralist or not.  So while we can agree with Beatty’s conclusion that “The Workers Revolutionary Party remains a cautionary tale for the modern left,”[14] we strongly disagree with what this cautionary tale tells us.

Are social democratic parties more democratic?

Elsewhere, Beatty muses that perhaps a “looser” party structure, such as those that are characteristic of social democratic type parties, would be more conducive to a democratically run organization. But the history of social democratic-type parties does not bear out such a rosy evaluation. There is hardly a more typical example of the social democratic type than the British Labour Party.  Yet Beatty documents how, when it came to the growth of a revolutionary left faction within its midst, the British Labour Party quickly moved to expel the group.  Beatty writes:

Labour youth members associated with their in-house newspaper, Keep Left, defected to the SLL and became the youth wing of the latter. Keep Left had a circulation of perhaps as high as 10,500 but was proscribed by the Labour Party in May 1962 and three SLL supporters were removed from the National Committee of the Labour Party’s Young Socialists towards the end of that year. [15]

A more recent example is the witch hunt against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters by the Blairites, which is yet another example of the highly undemocratic nature of the British Labour Party.

One could also cite the  SYRIZA party in Greece. In 2015, when SYRIZA was in power at the height of the economic crisis, the government held a referendum to determine whether Greece should agree to the austerity measures demanded by the European Union. Even though 61% of their population said NO, the prime minister and head of SYRIZA, Alex Tsipras, capitulated to the EU’s demands. So much for listening to the will of the people!

I personally had a similar experience, though on a much smaller scale, with the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), which is the closest thing that exists in the US to a social democratic-type party. It occurred at a meeting of the DSA branch in Brooklyn years ago when the DSA was trying to decide whether to endorse the candidacy of the well-known actress Cynthia Nixon, who was running for governor of New York. Nixon was running as a “progressive” Democrat of the Bernie Sanders variety, and a number of people at the meeting opposed endorsing her on the grounds that she refused to call herself a socialist. A vote was taken and two-thirds of the people at the meeting said, no, we should not support her.  Other branches in the New York area said the same thing.  Nevertheless, the leadership of the DSA endorsed Nixon regardless.  What one can take from such episodes is that, when it comes to social democratic-type parties, there is a disconnect between what is discussed and voted on by the rank and file and the policy adopted by a tiny elite that actually run the party behind the scenes.

If you go back to the original discussion of democratic centralism in What is to be done?, all Lenin was saying was that a serious political party needs to be “democratic centralist”  in the sense that it must maintain a democratic environment in which members can debate and discuss issues and vote on policies, but that once those policies are agreed upon, then everyone is obligated to adhere to them and fight for them in public.  That's what defines a party as opposed to a loose bunch of individuals.  This, of course, is a general definition that leaves open many details as to implementation. Certainly the kind centralism required of a party operating in secrecy under conditions of illegality, as were Lenin’s Bolsheviks, is not the same as what can be expected from a party functioning openly whose members do not have to fear immediate imprisonment.

Trotsky’s statement ‘The party is always right.’

As part of Beatty’s indictment of democratic centralism, he gives great weight at the beginning of his book to a statement Trotsky once made:

The party in the last analysis is always right because the party is the self- historical instrument given to the proletariat for the solution of its basic Problems. [16]

Beatty makes no attempt to provide any historical context for that quote. Yet the statement as it stands is untenable. One cannot say a party is always right if there are differences within that party, as there were when Trotsky made that statement. After all, what determines which faction in the party is correct? After a free vote, the majority position becomes the one publicly defended by the party.  But that doesn’t necessarily make it “right.”  Is what is “right” determined by the fact that the party makes a decision, or does the party necessarily make a decision because something is in and of itself “right”? When posed in this way, the self-contradictory nature of a statement to the effect that “The party is always right” becomes evident.

If we examine the historical context behind the quote cited by Beatty, we gain a different understanding of its significance.  Beatty cites John Medhurst’s book,  No Less than Mystic: A History of the Russian Revolution,[17] as the source for this quote.  Medhurst in turn cites Robert V. Daniels’s The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia as the source of the quote. Daniels in turn cites the stenographic transcript of the Thirteenth Party Congress, published in Moscow in 1924.  Daniels, unlike Beatty, or for that matter Medhurst, provides some historical context for the quote.  He writes:

The only course open to the Opposition was to recant and to acknowledge the unqualified supremacy of the party. Trotsky undertook to do this, though possibly with sarcastic intent… [18]

Daniels statement points to the precarious position that the nascent Left Opposition found itself in during the Thirteenth Party Congress.  It was conducted during Lenin’s last illness just days before his death, and it followed the so-called “Lenin Levy,” a maneuver by the emerging bureaucracy that brought in hundreds of thousands of new party members whose only loyalty was to the party machinery, immediately changing the character of the party from one of dedicated revolutionaries to one dominated by careerists and yes-men.  Given this unfavorable alignment of forces at the Thirteenth Party Congress, Trotsky made a tactical decision not to openly challenge the majority led by Stalin, a decision that has been debated ever since.  But while it is perfectly reasonable to debate whether Trotsky made the right decision at that time, it is clearly a distortion of Trotsky’s overall position to cite this quote in isolation from the context in which it was made. It’s a good example of cherry-picking quotations to build a case, something that, ironically, is one of the legacies of Healy that Beatty correctly identifies elsewhere.  

Rather than selecting the “The party is always right” as the exemplification of Trotsky’s attitude about the role of the party,  a far more accurate portrait of Trotsky’s mature thinking on this matter can be found in his book on Stalin.  There he wrote,

The Sisyphean labours of those who try to reduce all subsequent developments to a few allegedly fundamental original sins of the Bolshevik Party are both sterile and absurd, as if a political party were a homogeneous entity and an omnipotent factor of history. A political party is only a temporary historical instrument, one of very many instruments and schools of history [my emphasis]. [19]

Developing this thought further Trotsky explained how it was possible for the Bolshevik Party of Lenin to become the bureaucratic dictatorship of Stalin:

The limitation of the party as a historical instrument is expressed in the fact that at a certain point, at a given moment, it begins to disintegrate. Under the tension of external and internal pressures, cracks appear, fissures develop and organs begin to atrophy. This process of decomposition set in, slowly at first, in 1923, and rapidly increased in tempo. The old Bolshevik Party and its old heroic cadres went the way of all flesh; shaken by fevers and spasms and excruciatingly painful attacks, it finally died. In order to establish the regime that is justly called Stalinist, what was necessary was not a Bolshevik Party, but the extermination of the Bolshevik Party.  [20]

Elaborating on this argument Beatty writes:

The heritage that Trotskyists sought to defend was the victorious if also authoritarian party after the Russian Civil War and after Lenin’s death in 1924, rather than the earlier, relatively more democratic party from before 1917 in which factions were allowed form and some criticism of the party leadership was tolerated.[21]

It is not clear who are the  “Trotskyists” Beatty has in mind, but if we examine what Trotsky himself defended, it was not “the victorious and also authoritarian party after the Russian Civil War and after Lenin's death in 1924.”  Rather it was the earlier, far more democratic party prior to 1924, in which factions were allowed to form and  criticism of the party leadership was not only tolerated but even encouraged. The party after Lenin’s death  began to degenerate under the leadership of the incoming Stalinist bureaucracy, when for the first time all manner of careerists were introduced into the party.

In fact, Trotsky addressed this very question in his book, The Revolution Betrayed, in which he explicitly delineated the contrast between the Bolshevik Party before and after its degeneration.  In depicting the democratic soul of Bolshevism prior to its degeneration, he wrote:

The inner regime of the Bolshevik party was characterized by the method of democratic centralism. The combination of these two concepts, democracy and centralism, is not in the least contradictory. The party took watchful care not only that its boundaries should always be strictly defined, but also that all those who entered these boundaries should enjoy the actual right to define the direction of the party policy. Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an irrevocable content of the party democracy. The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of [the] epoch [of] decline. In reality the history of Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations? [My emphasis -- A.S.] The farsightedness of the Bolshevik leadership often made it possible to soften conflicts and shorten the duration of factional struggle, but no more than that. The Central Committee relied upon this seething democratic support. From this it derived the audacity to make decisions and give orders. The obvious correctness of the leadership at all critical stages gave it that high authority which is the priceless moral capital of centralism. [22]

By way of contrast to this portrait of lively debate, Trotsky points to the authoritarian structure of the party that gradually took shape under the whip of Stalinism:

The regime of the Bolshevik party, especially before it came to power, stood thus in complete contradiction to the regime of the present sections of the Communist International, with their “leaders” appointed from above, making complete changes of policy at a word of command, with their uncontrolled  apparatus, haughty in its attitude to the rank and file, servile in its attitude to the Kremlin.[23]

To sum up, Beatty’s book falls down in many ways with respect to democratic centralism, Trotskyism, or Trotsky himself. Beatty does ask some relevant  questions as to what kind of movement can be built today that avoids the pitfalls that have dogged movements of the past several generations.  His response to those questions, however, does not flow out of a serious consideration of the topic.  He berates the rigidity and lack of openness and curiosity in parties like the late WRP and the current SEP. But the lesson is not that there is something inherently wrong with democratic centralism or with Trotskyism, but that groups that began under the banner of Trotskyism can degenerate even if they initially held a “correct” position. How such degeneration occurs is a complex topic that is only hinted at in Beatty’s book. Certainly having an abusive leader with sexual pathologies whose leadership goes unchallenged for decades is a formula for eventual chaos, but that  can only provide part of the answer. There is also a web of philosophical, political and historical issues involved.  I have diagnosed some of them in my previous writings. [24]

Nevertheless,  Beatty does a positive service in bringing together a great deal of historical material to provide an account of the authoritarian and abusive nature of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the pathological state to which it was reduced by Healy.  This is not to deny that the WRP, and Healy, also had their moments. But whatever positive achievements the WRP can be credited with, and there were some genuine achievements, these were more than undone by the abuse of the many party members who dedicated their life to the communist future of mankind and were so terribly mistreated.

Healy leading a march of the WRP to free the Shrewsbury Two

---

[1]  Aidan Beatty, The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism, Pluto Press, London, 2024, p. 109.

[2] Ibid. p. 111

[3]  Beatty covers the story of Healy’s sexual abuse in Chapter 7 of his book. First-hand accounts are available in Norman Harding’s and Clare Cowen’s memoirs.

[4]  Beatty, op. cit., p. xi. Allegations of sexual abuse were lodged against other members of the WRP but were never confirmed. There have been sexual abuse scandals in other Trotskyist groups such as the British Socialist Workers Party. However none of those scandals came close to matching the extent of sexual abuse practiced by Healy.  I would also agree with Beatty that the WRP nurtured a culture that made sexual abuse possible and in that sense the problem went beyond the pathology of the individual Healy. I just don’t agree with Beatty that it was the democratic centralist structure of the WRP that created the conditions for sexual abuse.

[5]  Simon Pirani, The break-up of the WRP – from the horse’s mouth,

  https://piraniarchive.wordpress.com/investigations-campaigns-and-other-stuff/the-break-up-of-the-wrp-from-the-horses-mouth/

[6]  From a transcript of North’s remarks at a Webinar on Beatty’s book on Dec. 2, 2024.

[7]  For a critique of what Healy called “the practice of cognition” see the essay by David Bruce, A Charlatan Exposed.  David North’s critique of Healy’s “practice of cognition” goes astray when he characterizes it as “crude Hegelianism which is thinly disguised with occasional references to the material world”.  See North’s essay, A Contribution to a Critique of G. Healy’s “Studies in Dialectical Materialism”. There is nothing “Hegelian” about it, crude or otherwise.  See my remarks in the foreword to David Bruce’s article.

[8]  Beatty, op. cit., p. 24.

[9]  Ibid. p. 24.

[10]  Ibid. p. 4-5.

[11]  MECW, Volume 10, Address of the Central Authority to the League, p. 281.

[12]  Beatty, op. cit., p. 62.

[13]  For a recent example of how the Socialist Equality follows in the footsteps of the authoritarian structure of the WRP, see Anatomy of a sect: ICFI expels a leading member of French section

[14] Beatty, op. cit., 135.

[15] Ibid. p. 39.

[16] Beatty, op. cit.,  p. xi

[17] John Medhurst, No Less than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left, Repeater Books, London, 2017, p. 526.

[18] Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960, p. 240.

[19] Leon Trotsky, Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence, Well Red Publications, 2016, p. 680.

[20]  Ibid. p. 681.

[21]  Beatty, op. cit., xix

[22] Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch05.htm#ch05-1

[23] Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch05.htm#ch05-1

[24]  One of several critiques of the WRP can be found in Chapter 8 of my book long polemic, The Downward Spiral of the International Committee of the Fourth International, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch08.pdf.  I wrote at the time (2008),

 

The abusive atmosphere within the internal life of the WRP, including, as we were to learn in 1985, the sexual abuse of female comrades, while owing much to the warped nature of Healy’s personality, was not just a problem of Healy the individual. It affected the way comrades were trained in the movement and colored their view of what it meant to be a revolutionary leader. After the split with the WRP in 1985 and the expulsion of Healy, that kind of abusive treatment of the members ended. However, what persisted, and what persists in the IC under North’s leadership to this day, was Healy’s notion that the way to build a revolutionary movement is to encourage “hardness” and loyalty toward the leadership, and conversely a fear of discussing differences...

 

For North, the methods for achieving the goal of the “ideal Bolshevik” may have changed, but the goal is indeed the same. Rather than physical abuse, North employs the methods of ostracism, character assassination, and for some the use of financial pressure. Thereby North has succeeded in forging a party of aging hand-raisers who go along with his every turn even when they know better, surrounded by a newer layer of younger, mostly middle-class students, who have been trained to believe that every article they write for the WSWS brings the party closer to the working class when just the opposite is the case. What is clearly missing in the ranks of the WSWS is any semblance of the working class or any spirit of independent thought.

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The Rebel Who Came In From the Cold: The Tainted Career of Bayard Rustin

[Note: James Creegan died in 2023. His obituary can be found here: James Creegan: A Marxist maverick.  This article originally appeared in the online journal Portside on March 17, 2016, https://portside.org/2016-03-17/rebel-who-came-cold-tainted-career-bayard-rustin. Creegan’s exploration of Rustin, the man and the myth, is even more timely today then when it was first written in light of the Netflix biopic 'Rustin' from 2023 starring Colman Domingo and produced by the Obamas. Jim would have appreciated the irony of our republication of the article exactly 9 years after its initial publication on St. Patrick’s Day.]

The Rebel Who Came In From the Cold: The Tainted Career of Bayard Rustin

By James Creegan

Rustin (left) pictured with Rev Bernard Lee and Dr. Martin Luther King in 1964

In 2013, Bayard Rustin, who died in 1987, was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, along with Bill Clinton and others. On that occasion progressive radio and television journalist Amy Goodman devoted part of her syndicated broadcast, Democracy Now!, to Rustin's life and legacy. She introduced Rustin as "a minority within a minority, who tirelessly agitated for change, spending nights, days and weeks in jail opposing US policy at home and abroad-a gay man fighting against homophobia, and a pacifist fighting against endless war." 

A guest on the program was John D'Emilio, who writes in the introduction to his 2003 biography, Lost Prophet that Rustin:

wished more than anything else to remake the world around him. He wanted to shift the balance between white supremacy and racial justice, between violence and cooperation in the conduct of nations, between the wealth and power of the few and poverty and powerlessness of the many. [1]

A widely acclaimed documentary chronicling Rustin's career, Brother Outsider, by Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer (2003), also celebrates Rustin as a forgotten hero and visionary of the civil rights and peace movements. This high praise is certainly warranted in relation to the earlier parts of Rustin's life. But, as we shall see, such encomiums either leave out or tend to downplay the far less laudatory later chapters of his biography.  

Young, Black and Angry

Although never a campaigner for homosexual rights, Rustin was unapologetically gay in private life, several times hitting back against the attempts of politicians - from Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond to black Democratic congressman Adam Clayton Powell -- to slime him for his sexual orientation. He was also a determined anti-racist fighter from an early age. He first protested against racial segregation as a high school student in his native Westchester, Pennsylvania, where he refused to sit in the balcony reserved exclusively for blacks in a movie theater. He went on briefly to join the Young Communist League in his adopted home of New York City. He was active in the CP-led campaign to free the nine Scottsboro Boys, falsely accused of rape and sentenced to die in Alabama's electric chair. Rustin became disillusioned with the CP when it downplayed civil rights agitation after Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941, on the rationale that fighting for black rights would hinder the American war effort.  

Rustin then fell under the influence of the radical clergyman A. J. Muste, who headed the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and of the American Socialist Party of Norman Thomas. His chief mentor soon became the black Socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin at this time became a principled pacifist, dedicated to a Ghandian philosophy of non-violent agitation for social change. He spent nearly two years in federal prison during World War II for refusing, as a conscientious objector, to serve in the army.

Rustin was also a founder of the civil rights movement. He headed an early version of the Freedom Rides to protest southern Jim Crow laws in 1947, and refused to take his appointed seat on a segregated bus in North Carolina eight years before Rosa Parks did the same in Alabama. For this offense, he did twenty-one days on a chain gang. Rustin helped Martin Luther King to organize northern support for the  Birmingham bus boycott in 1956. In an era of near-universal homophobia, King became nervous about being publicly associated with Rustin due to the latter's earlier arrest on a "morals" charge in California (he was discovered performing oral sex in the back seat of a car), and for a time took his distance, relegating Rustin to a much less visible background role in the movement. But Rustin and King came together once again for the 1963 civil rights march on Washington. Rustin was the leading organizer of that quarter-million-strong outpouring for racial and economic justice. The march is widely regarded as the crowning achievement in the career of a black leader of exemplary dedication and self-sacrifice, of formidable intellectual and oratorical gifts, and organizing skills unmatched by anyone in the civil rights struggle.

It is the years up to and including 1963 that the devotees of Rustin's memory prefer to emphasize. We would, however, be unfaithful to the historical record if we were to ignore a less uplifting sequel. From the time that the administration of Lyndon Johnson embraced major parts of the civil rights agenda, Rustin pursued an increasingly rightward trajectory. The principled pacifist ended up supporting (with occasional qualms) the Vietnam War and promoted the intensification of the nuclear arms race; the champion of black rights apologized for the intervention of the South African apartheid régime in the Angolan civil war in the 1970s. It can be said without exaggeration that Rustin ended his life as a neo-conservative.

In Transition

To understand this  transformation, it is necessary to introduce a figure absent from Amy Goodman's tribute and  Brother Outsider, and mentioned in only a few lines of D'Emilio's biography. His name was Max Shachtman.

A writer, speaker and politician of great energy and outstanding gifts, Shachtman first came to prominence on the American left as a follower of Leon Trotsky. He broke with Trotsky, however, in 1940 over the question of whether the Socialist Workers Party (the American Trotskyist group) should continue to defend the Soviet Union in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler pact. Trotsky argued that the USSR was worthy of defense despite the pact and horrors of Stalinism. Shachtman, on the other hand, maintained what he called a third-camp position, equidistant from Stalinist totalitarianism and western imperialism. 

Yet Shachtman did not remain for very long in the third camp. Throughout the 40s and 50s, he moved steadily to the right, ultimately coming to see Stalinism as the greater evil, and adopting an increasingly friendly attitude toward the US and its cold war allies. On the home front, Shachtman concluded, after unsuccessful attempts to organize socialist groups independent of the two major parties, that  the Democratic Party was the main arena in which socialists should work. Within the party itself, he looked to labor officialdom -- at first in the person of the head of the United Auto Workers,  Walter Reuther -- as the principal vehicle of the leftward Democratic realignment that he proclaimed as his objective. But opposing groupings within the Democratic Party and AFL-CIO fell out over the Vietnam War in the 1960s, resulting in the temporary departure of Reuther and the UAW from the labor federation to protest the leadership's support for the war. Shachtman, on the other hand, cast his lot with organized labor's pro-war right wing, headed by George Meany, and with the Democratic Party mainstream of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. 

Rustin was Shachtman's main liaison with the civil rights movement, and, along with his aging mentor, A. Philip Randolph, followed a political path that coincided in all major respects with that of Shachtman. Rustin's admirers can hardly ignore his pro-establishment drift, but tend to portray it as a pragmatic decision to remain silent on Vietnam in order not to jeopardize his civil rights and social welfare agenda. But Rustin did not merely fail to speak out against the war. He was also extremely vociferous when it came to condemning the Black Power movement, anti-war mobilizations and the New Left.  

The watershed moment in Rustin's career occurred at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The convention took place during the Freedom Summer,  when the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was mounting an intensive voter registration drive in the South, in the course of which three civil rights workers -- Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney -- met their deaths at the hands of Mississippi racist vigilantes, acting in collaboration with local police. The newly formed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) elected a  group of delegates to Atlantic City to challenge the credentials of the regular all-white delegation, which had been selected by a process barred to blacks. As the devastating testimony before the credentials committee of Fannie Lou Hamer, a middle-aged black sharecropper, concerning the reign of terror against black people in her state, was broadcast on national television, Lyndon Johnson scrambled to make the MFDP challenge disappear. Johnson continually invoked the bogey of a victory of his far-right opponent, Barry Goldwater, in the November elections to bring MFDP sympathizers into line. His two principal lieutenants in this fight were future vice-president Hubert Humphrey, and UAW chief Walter Reuther. (In taped phone conversations that have recently become public, we can hear Johnson handing out marching orders in his almost daily phone calls to Reuther,  and the auto workers' president responding  with fulsome flattery.)

Finally, the challengers were offered a compromise under which the state's full Jim Crow delegation would be seated at the convention, and the MFDP would be apportioned two at-large delegates, not self-selected but handpicked by the Democratic leadership-a move designed to keep Hamer from speaking on the convention floor. The Johnson team pulled out all stops to force upon the MFDP an offer that most members of the delegation deemed a betrayal of their purpose. Reuther made  a point of telling the MFDP legal counsel, Joseph Raugh, that his firm's principal client, the UAW, would take its business elsewhere if he did not join in urging the compromise upon the MFDP. Raugh capitulated, but failed to persuade the delegation, which ultimately rejected Johnson's offer. During protracted and stormy debates among the delegates, it soon became apparent that the president's men had another important ally, Bayard Rustin, who strenuously urged  acceptance. In exasperation, one SNCC member shouted, "You're a traitor, Bayard!"[2]

In an article, "From Protest to Politics", in Commentary the following February, Rustin laid out the main lines of a political approach that was to separate him from the radicalism that emerged from the civil rights movement in response to the freedom summer and disillusionment with the Democrats. Rustin argued that the main barriers to black progress in the future would consist less of legal discrimination than economic disadvantage. The remedies-jobs programs, housing construction and aid to education-could not be obtained by the confrontational tactics - like lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides - employed to fight de jure segregation. They rather required large-scale intervention on the part of the federal government. The main force favoring such things was organized labor, and the principal tactic was pressure within the Democratic Party to expand Johnson's War on Poverty and break with the Dixiecrats. It never seems to have entered Rustin's mind that the fight for economic equality might, like the  struggle against segregation, be driven forward  by non-electoral means, such as King hoped to employ in the Poor People's Campaign he was planning at the time of his assassination. There was also no mention at all of the firestorm that was consuming  government funds initially earmarked for the War on Poverty, and driving the country's youth, black and white, in ever-growing numbers away from the Democratic Party: the war in Vietnam. Along with the civil rights bills that Johnson pushed through Congress, he also introduced the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, authorizing what was soon to become a massive aerial assault on North Vietnam. 

The Test of Vietnam

Rustin was aware that he could only remain on the fair-weather side of the political coalition to which he had hitched his wagon by dissociating himself from anyone in the emerging anti-war movement whose differences with the Johnson administration transgressed its fundamental cold-war framework. Thus, when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) issued a call for an anti-war demonstration in Washington in the spring of 1965, and welcomed all who opposed the war, Rustin and his co-thinkers instantly understood that such a non-exclusionary policy would allow the participation of groups that were calling for the total and immediate withdrawal of US troops, not to mention those who openly supported the victory of the Viet Cong.  Rustin thus added his voice to the anti-SDS red baiting chorus that preceded what turned out to be a march whose attendance of 25,000 greatly exceeded the expectations of organizers, and inaugurated the era of mass anti-war demonstrations. Rustin's signature appeared along with those of Socialist Party head Norman Thomas and A.J. Muste  on a statement warning people away from the march. According to Kirkpatrick Sale in his history of SDS, "...this group managed to get the New York Post to run a prominent editorial on the very eve of the march featuring this statement and going on to issue warnings about `attempts to convert the event into a pro-Communist production' and `a frenzied, one-sided anti-American show.' "[3] Rustin's position on the march led to a rift with two other anti-war pacifists with whom he co-edited Liberation magazine, Dave Dellinger and Staughton Lynd. In an article in the magazine, Lynd accused Rustin of advocating a "coalition with the marines." Rustin resigned from the editorial board shortly thereafter. 

It was not a betrayal of Rustin's integrationist and pacifist principles to oppose those sections of the radicalizing black movements of the 60s that rejected non-violence and embraced one or another variety of black separatism. Rustin famously debated Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. But Rustin also proved to be a determined foe of the efforts of even those who espoused nonviolence and racially integrated struggle-such as that advocated by Martin Luther King and his close adviser, James Bevel-against the Vietnam War.  When in 1967, King made the momentous decision to speak out against the war at Riverside Church in New York City and join an anti-war march at the United Nations, Rustin was prominent among those who urged King against taking this step. Apparently, the famous photograph that weighed so heavily in King's decision -  of a young girl running from a US-torched Vietnamese village, her face contorted with pain and her naked body seared with napalm-did not have a similar effect on Rustin.    

Facing Right

As the Vietnam war loosened the grip of anti-Communist ideology, and the student and minority movements of the 60s became increasingly radicalized, several "democratic socialists" who had previously operated within the cold-war framework - such as Michael Harrington and Norman Thomas - expressed some misgivings about their political past. Bayard Rustin was not among them. In the final decades of his life, he moved even further to the right. As early as 1966, he had joined  Norman Thomas in the  Committee on Free Elections in the Dominican Republic, a CIA front group aimed at legitimizing rigged elections in 1966 to prevent the return to office of Juan Bosch, a reformist president effectively ousted by the invasion of 42,000 US troops in the previous year.

By this time, Rustin had become co-director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, funded mainly by George Meany and the AFL-CIO leadership, and an election monitor for Freedom House. In 1972 he became a co-chairman of the virulently anti-Communist Social Democrats, USA, previously headed by Max Shachtman. In 1976, he joined with Paul Nitze to found the Committee on the Present Danger, which advocated a nuclear arms buildup against the USSR.  He was a fervent supporter of Israel  and a regular contributor to Commentary magazine, edited by one of the founders of neo-conservatism, Norman Podhoretz.

Anyone who doubts just how far to the right Rustin had moved would do well to have a look at an article that appeared in the Commentary of October, 1978, which he co-authored with future Reagan appointee, Carl Gershman. Entitled "Africa, Soviet Imperialism and the Retreat of American Power", the article blasts the Carter administration for taking a complacent attitude toward the Soviet and Cuban aid to the People's Front for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which had led the independence struggle against Portugal. They argued that Carter, paralyzed by the Vietnam syndrome and fearful of undermining détente, was allowing the Soviet Union to gain a foothold in Africa, and urged greater aid to the anti-Soviet UNITA. Headed by Jonas Savimbi, UNITA guerillas had posed as independence fighters while secretly colluding with the Portuguese. Rustin and Gershman had this to say about the fact that UNITA was also aided by a South African intervention force:

 

And if a South African force did intervene at the urging of black leaders. to counter a non-African army of Cubans ten times its size, by what standard of political judgment is this immoral?

The authors also worry lest the administration become overly fixated on the rights of the black African majority:

...the suppression of blacks by whites is not the only human rights issue in Africa. Virtually all governments in Africa are undemocratic to one degree or another, but nowhere does democracy have less chance of evolving than in the kind of totalitarian party dictatorships which the Soviet Union is in the process of trying to implant in Africa. Not to resist this development, but to concentrate solely on the black-white problem, undermines the moral credibility of the administration. 

We see in this passage an early formulation of the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian régimes, popularized by Reagan's UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, as a rationale for supporting the Nicaraguan contras and the death-squad government of El Salvador (which Kirkpatrick said was only authoritarian, as opposed to Communist-totalitarian). This article is unmentioned in D'Emilio's biography.

Principles of Convenience

It is easy to determine if one is acting on principle when doing so entails defying the established order and enduring the kind of sacrifice and marginalization that Rustin experienced in his younger years. However, when one's principles happen to coincide with those of the powerful, and their espousal confers status and material rewards, disentangling the threads of opportunism from those of genuine belief becomes a lot harder. Admirers point out that, even in his  later years, Rustin maintained a strong commitment to racial justice and social equality. And his political thinking did display a certain internal logic: if "Communist totalitarianism" was worse than western racism or imperialism, one could conclude that the latter should be supported as the lesser evil. Rustin's final neo-conservatism indeed represented the end-point in the evolution of a definite strand of social-democratic thought and practice, represented above all by Max Shachtman and his Social Democrats, USA.  

Yet it is also not unfair to say that this political tendency epitomized the devil's bargain offered up by the more liberal and enlightened custodians of the American empire in its heyday: a certain commitment to social reform at home in exchange for support of the global régime of private property, and its defense against all those forces that seriously threatened it, be they Stalinist governments, left-nationalist reformers, or national liberation movements-all conveniently amalgamated under the rubric of the "Communist menace." It was this devil's deal that Shachtman and Rustin embraced with both arms. For them, the coups that toppled nationalist reformers like Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, or Bosch in the Dominican Republic because they threatened to nationalize US corporate property; the massacre of an estimated million Indonesians who supported the Sukarno government  and the Communist Party, or the hecatombs of Vietnam, were not too heavy a price to pay for the passage of a civil rights bill or the funding of a government anti-poverty program. Their politics were, in the end, virtually indistinguishable from those of the so-called Scoop Jackson Democrats, named after the Democratic senator from Washington State (aka the "senator from Boeing"), who favored both the welfare state at home and militarism abroad.  Moreover, they stood by the bargain they had made even as it was becoming increasingly apparent that the US government was having difficulty delivering guns and butter at the same time, and would opt for the former when it came time to choose. 

It would also be much easier to ascribe the politics of Rustin's twilight-years to belief alone if there had been no perks or material rewards-no rides in Hubert Humphrey's limousine, no White House visits, no honorary degrees from  Yale and Harvard, and, above all, no reliance on regular paychecks from George Meany and the AFL-CIO to fund the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which Rustin directed. Perhaps he was able to preserve some shred of self-respect from his radical past with the knowledge that-unlike Norman Thomas and others who were paid directly by the CIA-he supported the Cold War out of continuing loyalty to the labor movement (read: the right wing of the trade-union bureaucracy). But regardless of where the money came from, the politics it underwrote were the same.

Even John D'Emilio, Rustin's sympathetic biographer, strongly suggests the existence of an implicit quid pro quo:

...George Meany, always a cold warrior, made support for the president an undebatable proposition within the AFL-CIO. Had Rustin become too strongly identified with anti-war forces, there was a risk he might have lost funding for the Randolph Institute.[4]

And further on:

George Houser, who had worked closely with Rustin. thought he "just made a practical decision that, `if I'm going to survive in this world, then I have got to play a different game, because there's no place for me in just maintaining contact with a small radical group. How do I manage myself?' I think he made a conscious decision about that." [5]

And finally:

Shizu Ashai Proctor, a former FOR [Fellowship of Reconciliation] secretary whom Rustin had thoroughly captivated in the 1940s, ran into him on a subway platform in Manhattan. She hadn't seen him in many years but had followed his career. Talking about old times and commenting on his current circumstances, Rustin made a comment that, almost three decades later, remained engraved in her memory. "You get tired after a while," he told her, "and you have to come home to something you can count on." Well into his fifties at the time of this encounter, Rustin had experienced a lifetime on the margins. The Randolph Institute provided a secure political home, allowed a considerable measure of autonomy, and gave him the opportunity to express his prodigious energies. As America began to spin out of control because of the passions unleashed by the war, Rustin chose to set himself firmly on a particular ground, and he never reconsidered.[6]

If one were to limit the definition of "selling out" to the drawing up of an explicit contract stipulating the exchange of political utterances and actions "x" in exchange for perks and sums of money "y", one would be hard put to find any examples of selling out in the entire history of the left. Political shifts are almost invariably accompanied by professed changes of belief. The fact, however, that some views will lead to federal prison and the chain gang, while others to the portals of power and a steady meal ticket is a distinction that should not be overlooked in attempting to dissect the motives of historical figures. As a man who fought black oppression and suffered as a gay, Rustin appears to many contemporary progressives as an attractive figure. And while his later choices should not prevent us from appreciating his genuine contributions, neither should these choices be allowed to slip down a memory hole in any rush to celebrate unsung heroes. One can easily understand why Barack Obama views Bayard Rustin as an exemplary civil rights leader. We on the left, however, should examine the past with a far more critical eye.

[Jim Creegan was chairman of the Penn State chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s, lectured in philosophy in the 70s, he was a union shop steward during the late 80s and 90s. He lives in New York City, now unaffiliated but unresigned. His writings often appear in the Weekly Worker (UK).] 

 

---

[1]  John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet (Chicago, 2003), p.2

[2]  Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire (New York, 1998), p.473

[3]  Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York, 1974), p. 179

[4]  John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet, (Chicago, 2003), p. 447

[5]  Ibid., p.447

[6]  Ibid., Pp. 447-448

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