 |
| Gerry Healy (left) of the WRP leading the Wigan Building Workers’ Action Committee march in central London in 1975 demanding the release of the jailed building workers after the Action Committee voted to march from Wigan to London |
This is the third and final part of a three-part series centered on a review of Aidan Beatty's book 'The Party is always right'.
[PART
ONE] [PART
TWO] [PART THREE] [PANEL] [ADDENDUM]
The
elephant in the room
No
consideration of the legacy of Gerry Healy can be taken seriously without
addressing the elephant in the room, Healy’s sexual and physical abuse of
comrades. When Healy’s expulsion from the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in
1985 first hit the news, I thought that David North was correct in arguing that
the problems of the WRP could not be reduced to the question of Healy’s sexual
abuse. One had to examine the broader political and philosophical issues behind
the degeneration of the WRP if there was to be any possibility of
reconstituting it. But that does not
mean that one should ignore Healy’s sexual abuse or outrightly deny his
physical abuse of other party members. Yet that is exactly what North has done.
His lengthy obituary of Healy, published shortly after his death in 1989, included
just one vague reference to Healy’s sexual abuse and was completely silent on
the physical violence that was a hallmark of his leadership. North wrote:
The
details of the sordid scandal in the Workers Revolutionary Party which
precipitated the crisis in the summer and autumn of 1985 have been so
thoroughly rehearsed in other publications that it is hardly necessary to dwell
on them here.[1]
How then
did North account for Healy’s conduct? The political analysis that was supposed
to explain Healy’s degeneration turned out to be a cliche-ridden anodyne
statement:
In a
statement on the expulsion of Healy adopted on October 25, 1985, the
International Committee explained his abuse of authority as “the end product of
his rejection of the Trotskyist principles upon which these past struggles were
based and his descent into the most vulgar forms of opportunism.
North
continues, quoting from the statement of the ICFI:
In place
of his past interest in the complex problems of developing the cadre of the
International Trotskyist movement, Healy’s practice became almost entirely
preoccupied with developing unprincipled relations with bourgeois nationalist
leaders and with trade union and Labour Party reformists in Britain.
His
personal life-style underwent a corresponding degeneration.
What
North calls Healy’s “life-style” was his propensity to sexually and physically
abuse comrades. This supposedly
“corresponded” to his political degeneration.
One problem with this explanation is that Healy had been engaging in
physical and sexual abuse of comrades for the better part of three decades –
yet -- according to North, his political degeneration began much more
recently. Exactly how much more recently
it is difficult to say since North is rather evasive on that subject but the
earliest examples he provides of Healy’s political degeneration are the
“premature” split with the OCI in 1971 and the transformation of the Socialist
Labour League into the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1973. If true that leaves more than a decade prior
to the early 1970’s unaccounted for during which Healy carried on his abusive
behavior. So this explanation of the degeneration of Healy’s “life-style” is
complete nonsense.
But the
document does provide a further explanation, which is that Healy violated a previously
unknown “historical law”:
Those
like Healy, who abandon the principles on which they once fought and who refuse
to subordinate themselves to the ICFI in the building of its national sections
must inevitably degenerate under the pressure of the class enemy.
There
can be no exception to this historical law.
So in
the end, the explanation for Healy’s personal and political degeneration lies
in his refusal “to subordinate himself” to the ICFI. Huh? Didn’t the leadership
of the ICFI in those years consist of Healy and his loyal followers, including,
at least until 1982, David North? So who was Healy supposed to subordinate
himself to? This bit of sophistry is what North has been parading for decades
as a great theoretical conquest resulting from his struggle against Healy!
The role
of Healy the individual in history
How then
should we understand Healy and the WRP? A comprehensive answer would be a
volume in itself, but here is a tentative outline.
Healy
was not just a severely flawed individual, but a victim of historical
circumstances that served to exacerbate his theoretical weaknesses and nurture
his psychological disorder. The years - and now generations - of isolation of
Marxists from the working class, the dearth of leadership capable of steering
the party through such conditions, etc., all combined to create conditions in
which individuals were elevated into positions that were far beyond their
capabilities.
Sometimes
history selects the right individual for the historical task at hand. Hegel
cites Napoleon as "the world spirit on horseback" who spread the
ideas of the French Revolution throughout Europe. Lenin and Trotsky played roles
in the Russian Revolution that were unique and irreplaceable. But more often,
the opposite occurs - leadership descends on an individual who is clearly not
the right person for the task at hand. I
discussed this problem in relation to Plekhanov’s conception of the role of the
individual in history in my very first polemic with David North:
Ultimately, he [Plekhanov] views history as a force that determines man and fails to see that man through his conscious struggle, at crucial junctures, also determines history. This is borne out by remarks Plekhanov makes in his famous essay, The Role of The Individual in History. There Plekhanov argues that the emergence of an individual suited to accomplish great historical tasks is more or less inevitable given the right set of antecedent conditions. In discussing the role of Robespierre during the French Revolution he writes, “Let us assume that he was an absolutely indispensable force in his party; at all events, he was not its only force. If the accidental fall of a brick had killed him, say, in January 1793, his place would of course have been taken somebody else, and though that person might have been inferior to him in every respect, the events would nevertheless have taken the same course as they did when Robespierre was still alive.” (CW II, 306-307) Plekhanov makes a similar argument regarding the role of Napoleon.
…As far
as Plekhanov is concerned, an individual will always be found at a crucial
juncture to carry out a historical task. Furthermore, while it may be an
accident of history whether that individual has all the talent of a great man
such as Napoleon or Robespierre, it is more or less guaranteed that the
individual in question will prove adequate to the tasks at hand. In this way,
Plekhanov accounts for an inevitable march of historical progress that
continues more or less unabated despite the vicissitudes and fortunes of
individuals.
…There
is however no basis to assume that history provides some guarantee that the
right individual will always come upon the scene, or as Plekhanov says, if not
Napoleon, then a substitute for Napoleon who may not be as brilliant as
Napoleon, but will prove good enough to get the job done. [2]
Contrast
this with a statement Trotsky made about the possible outcome of the October
Revolution had Lenin not been there in 1917:
For the
sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in
Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place – on the
condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had
been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the
leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it from occurring – of
this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I
doubt whether I could have managed to overcome the resistance of the Bolshevik
leaders. The struggle with “Trotskyism” (i.e., with the proletarian revolution)
would have commenced in May, 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have
been in question. But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin the October
Revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be
said of the Civil War… [3]
The case
of Healy is a perfect illustration that sometimes the right individual is not
available to carry out the task at hand and neither is any substitute. This
should not be taken to mean that had the right individual come along a
mass revolutionary party would have been built followed by a successful
revolution. Given the objective relationship of forces both nationally and
internationally that was never a real possibility. But one could certainly envision a different
outcome than the implosion of the WRP in 1985, one that could have been far
more favorable to the growth of a genuine Marxist political movement as an
alternative to the stifling of class consciousness emanating from the Labour
Party.
Healy
had certain qualities that propelled him into the leadership early on. Along
with being a talented organizer and speaker he also displayed a capacity for
engaging in behind the scenes tactical ploys against his rivals for leadership.
The
influence of the American Socialist Workers Party and its leader James P.
Cannon on Healy in the immediate post-war period should not be discounted in
this respect. To quote one contemporary observer:
I always
got the impression, always felt, that his [Healy’s] position was that he was
repeating what he was being fed by the American Section, Cannon and Company,
and that Healy never had any firm theoretical differences - none at all! I
never found any, and all he was actually raising were tactical points, you
know, and general dissatisfaction with the way things were going, and advancing
criticisms of the way the work was being done; anything of a theoretical nature
he never raised at all. In fact, he was the most orthodox of the orthodox, and
it seemed to me (as I am saying, I may do him a disservice, but I don’t think
so) I think that it was a bid for the leadership for personal reasons.[4]
One
important lesson Healy learned from Cannon, and to which he adhered for the
remainder of his political life, long after he broke with the American SWP
politically, was for the need to be a ‘hard’ leader. I commented on this aspect of Healy’s thinking
long ago:
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...[5]
This is
not to blame Cannon for Healy’s misdeeds.
To the contrary, Cannon never took “hardness” to the extremes that Healy
did while seeing to it that political differences were fully debated within the
Socialist Workers Party. Nevertheless,
what Healy took from Cannon was an attitude of ruthlessness against political
opponents rooted in a deep conviction that we are on the right side of history.
This easily gave way to an attitude of contempt toward party members who
disagreed. Prior to the time when Healy
became the leader, his political biography shows him constantly working behind
the scenes to undermine or break from the existing leadership, as the previous quote
from Bert Atkinson illustrates. After he
assumed the leadership role, he was constantly on the prowl for any possible
rivals and staging pre-emptive strikes against real or imagined enemies.
Finally,
no portrait of Healy and the decline of the WRP would be complete without an
investigation into Healy’s mental pathology. I will not attempt to do that here,
but it is a project that may interest others.
Something like an analysis of the character disorder that led Healy to
abuse comrades for three decades is needed.
While Healy’s individual pathology cannot explain the sickness of a
political movement, it can shed light on the specific form that sickness took
on. This was a point Erich Fromm made in
his masterful study of destructive character types in The Anatomy of Human
Destructiveness. His analysis of
Stalin paints a noteworthy portrait of how individual pathology, while far from
explaining a historical event, in this case the role of the bureaucracy in a
degenerated workers state, can nevertheless provide clues as to some of its
otherwise irrational actions:
One of
the outstanding historical examples of both mental and physical sadism was
Stalin. His behavior is a textbook description of nonsexual, as de Sade's
novels are of sexual, sadism. It was he who was the first to order the
torture of political prisoners since the beginning of the revolution, a measure
that up to the time of his giving this order had been shunned by the
Russian revolutionaries. Under Stalin
the methods of torture used by the NKVD surpassed in refinement and
cruelty anything that the czarist police had thought of. Sometimes he
personally gave orders about what kind of torture was to be used on a
prisoner. He mainly practiced mental sadism, of which I want to give a few
illustrations . One particular form Stalin enjoyed was to assure people
that they were safe, only to arrest them a day or two later. Of course, the
arrest hit the victim all the more severely because he had felt especially
safe; besides that, Stalin could enjoy the sadistic pleasure of knowing
the man's real fate at the same time that he was assuring him of his
favor. What greater superiority and control over another person is there? [6]
The
lesson to take from this is that it would be just as reductive to understand
the degeneration of the SLL/WRP as a manifestation of Healy’s individual
pathology as it would be to ignore that pathology and dismiss it as a mere
epiphenomenon of Healy’s political errors.
One
question that begs to be asked is how was it possible for one man to do all
this damage? After all a leader, no
matter how authoritative he is considered to be, does not work in a vacuum. To
accomplish anything, positive or negative, the leader must somehow elicit the
cooperation of many others, particularly those in key positions within the
party structure. It’s a
point made by a former early member of Healy’s group,
One must
be careful here not to indulge in a species of demonology, and attribute all
the evils to the activities of one man alone. Healy could not have acted as he
did without the support of a whole group of other people around him in the
leadership; people such as Mike and Tony Banda, Bill Hunter, Cliff Slaughter
and Bob Shaw; and the failure of people like myself to speak out. Healy merely
personified in an exaggerated way a dogmatic, sectarian streak that is common
to many small sects, both political and religious. [7]
How was
Healy able to enlist the cooperation of leading members in his destructive
actions? One answer is that Healy brought
them along on some of his more unsavory actions. Bob Pitt relates one such incident, writing
that Healy,
… made a
specific point of involving other leading SLL’ers 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.’ [8]
The myth
of Healy’s ‘consistent struggle against revisionism’
One of
the legends about Healy pushed by his apologists – including those who broke
with him politically in 1985- was that for an entire period Healy was the only
one within the world Trotskyist movement to wage a consistent struggle against all
forms of revisionism. You can find this
thought expressed by veteran British Trotskyist Barbara Slaughter who said, in a
presentation at a conference of the Socialist Equality Party of the UK,
… to
carry out that huge historic responsibility, the working class must become
conscious of its role, and that is our task, to bring a revolutionary
perspective and consciousness into the working class. That is Gerry Healy’s
great contribution to the present situation that confronts us. Because during
the 1950s and 60s, when the Trotskyist movement was decimated by the
counter-revolutionary tendency of Pabloite revisionism, Healy fought against
all the odds for the continuity of the Fourth International. When in 1963, the
US Socialist Workers Party joined the Pabloites in the United Secretariat, the
Socialist Labour League stood alone on the world stage, embodying in its
struggle all the lessons of the history of the revolutionary movement going
back to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and beyond.
Healy fought against opportunism in all its forms. [9]
These
are eloquent words, but are they true? Let us first examine this statement,
“When in
1963, the US Socialist Workers Party joined the Pabloites in the United
Secretariat, the Socialist Labour League stood alone on the world stage…”
Did Barbara
Slaughter forget that in 1963 the Socialist Labour League did not stand alone
but was joined by the French section of the ICFI in opposing the reunification
of 1963?
As for
Healy’s record throughout this period, if you take a closer look, you will find
that it was anything but consistent. Healy’s aversion to Pabloism was mostly based
on his opposition to being part of a centralized international movement rather
than on differences of principle. Evidence
of this can be found in Healy’s numerous pivots to figures that embodied the
kind of left Stalinist or bourgeois nationalist leaders embraced by the
Pabloites. Former WRP member Bob Pitt
provides, in his book on Healy, a number of examples of Healy’s proclivity to proclaim
such leaders as implementing, however unconsciously, the program of
Trotskyism. Pitt writes,
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’. [The quotes Pitt references
are from 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.]
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! 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.[10]
Healy’s
early, if brief, flirtation with Mikoyan as embodying a revolutionary tendency
within Stalinism would be echoed far more decisively at the end of his life
when he proclaimed Gorbachev as the leader of the political revolution!
Bob Pitt
also provides convincing documentary evidence that Healy came very late to the
camp of anti-Pabloism. Throughout the
late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when Pablo was directing the Fourth International
toward an adaptation to Stalinism and bourgeois nationalism, Healy made no
criticism. It would be wrong to view
Healy as especially culpable in this regard, as his political confusion was
shared by practically the entire leadership of the Fourth International,
including James Cannon. The only exception was the leadership of the French
section, whom Pablo, with the support of Cannon and Healy, expelled from the
Fourth International.
To quote
Pitt,
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’. 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’! 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. [11]
Other examples
of Healy’s political zig-zags readily come to mind. For instance, there is the
well-known episode of Healy’s acquiescence to Mike Banda’s sympathy for Maoism
during the Maoist-inspired Cultural Revolution. This was chronicled in Pitt’s history:
In early
1967, Mike Banda’s admiration for Maoism was allowed full rein in the Newsletter,
which devoted several articles 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.[12]
One can
add to this record Healy’s oscillations between currying favors with
left-Labourites at one point and adopting ultra-sectarian positions toward
Labour at another point. [13]
While no
one could reasonably deny that Healy capitulated to bourgeois nationalist
leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the group of
Healy apologists associated with the International Committee have a vested
interest in maintaining the narrative that Healy was a consistent opponent of
Pabloism in the 1950s and 1960s.
It is
true that Healy was a consistent opponent of reunification with the International
Secretariat but the motivation for that appears more a matter of Healy’s fear
that his leadership role would be diminished within a larger international
framework rather than any adherence to principles. In addition, Bob Pitt points to some purely
factional considerations that motivated Healy,
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. [14]
Of
course, all discussions of Healy’s motivations are largely speculative, but Healy’s
adoption of highly inconsistent positions towards movements and leaders alien
to Trotskyism are part of the public record. They cannot be brushed away by
insisting on a mythical fight “against opportunism in all its forms” that was
led by Healy in the period of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
At the
same time, it would be wrong to see Healy as an arch-villain in this period. The post-war years were a period of crisis and
confusion for the entire Trotskyist movement and Healy’s errors were no worse
than those of Cannon or other leaders. Nor
are we denying that Healy made some positive contributions during this period. What
needs to be emphasized however is that the portrait of Healy as this larger
than life figure who single-handedly “ensured the continuity of Trotskyism” in
this period is not history but mythology.
The theoretical
accomplishments and failures of the Workers Revolutionary Party
While I
would not say that the theoretical work of the WRP and its predecessors was
negligible, it was also not very impressive. The best of that theoretical work
emerged from the intellectual ferment produced by a group who were won over to
Trotskyism from the Communist Party in the late 1950s. That group of
intellectuals included Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp, Brian Pearce, Peter Fryer,
and for a brief period Alasdair MacIntyre, who later was recognized as one of
the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Other notable
intellectuals who contributed to the building of what eventually became the WRP
were Cyril Smith and Geoff Pilling. Doubtless there were several others whose
names I do not know. The best of the theoretical work that was produced was in
the period from about 1956-1960 and can be found in the issues of the original
Labour Review. The second sailing of the Labour Review in the 1970's and 1980's
was a pale shadow of the original. [15]
Of the theoretical work that was done after the demise of the original Labour
Review, probably the high point was the essay Opportunism and
Empiricism, written largely by Cliff Slaughter. [16]
Slaughter only produced one other major work for the movement that delved into
philosophical issues and that was his essay Lenin on Dialectics. I
remarked on this essay years ago in my initial response to North, The
Dialectical Path of Cognition and Revolutionizing Practice.
While
Slaughter deserves credit for turning the attention of Marxists to the
publication of Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks, he also tries to defend
the completely untenable thesis of a continuity between Lenin's earlier
work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and his later Philosophical
Notebooks.
I had
some correspondence with Slaughter during the height of the pandemic in 2020,
just a year before he died, in which he acknowledged that he got this wrong in
his essay Lenin on Dialectics.
Alex,
Many
thanks indeed for sending your 2004 destruction of North (I sincerely
hope it means you have shed the Corona symptoms). Your critique of my Lenin
on Dialectics I accept completely, of course.
My
present position, as you will have realised, is that we (I) have to recognise
that we had not accepted what was new in Marx's materialism, and that unless we
change we cannot do anything about a fresh start. [17]
He
clarified the correct relationship between Lenin’s Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism and his notes on Hegel in an article published in the
journal Critique where he wrote:
Here an important example is Lenin’s understanding of
materialism. His Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism was written in December 1908. It contains thirty-nine
references to Feuerbach, in every case doing
no more than confirming that, like Marx, Feuerbach was a consistent
materialist. Nowhere is it indicated that Marx had to make a decisive break
with Feuerbach. It is impossible not to conclude that in 1908 Lenin had not
grasped that fundamental break. Only in 1914 did he study Hegel, his purpose
being to understand what Marx meant by seeing Hegel as the source of his
dialectical method. In his notes on the Science
of Logic, Lenin interprets one of Hegel’s paragraphs as meaning: ‘Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective
world, but creates it.’ (My emphasis, CS). [18]
But
whereas it is true that there were some important theoretical contributions in
the late 1950s and the early 1960s, both the quality and quantity of those
contributions noticeably deteriorated by the mid 1960s. The reason for that was
the internal regime that Healy was building, which, while it made a talisman of
its commitment to philosophy, was in fact discouraging any genuine theoretical
work. Serious intellectuals could not long co-exist in the kind of regime that
Healy built as sooner or later they would be forced to either keep any
independent thought to themselves or be forced out, as was the case with Peter
Fryer and a number of others. The results were clear if you look at what passed
for theoretical material by the 1970s. Aside from a few academic articles by
Tom Kemp and Geoff Pilling on economics, there was virtually nothing worth
reading. Slaughter's subsequent literary contributions to the movement
consisted of high flown manifestos and polemics that had no intellectual
content and could have been ordered online from a computer program that
produces polemics on demand. I have to
say that much of the material in the 7 volume series Trotskyism versus
Revisionism has this character, especially the later volumes. To cite
one example, the polemic against the OCI that was written by Slaughter. It's an
embarrassment to read today. Even worse is the polemic against Thornett written
by Banda. I fully acknowledge my own contributions to this genre, having
contributed to two long polemics against Wohlforth that you can find in Volume
7 of that series. Although those polemics made some valid political points,
their basic premise was false, namely, that the crisis precipitated by
Wohlforth was his personal crisis and not a symptom of the
degeneration of the leadership of the International Committee. The
"theoretical" sections of those polemics were also confused, to say
the least. They reflected the influence of Healy's mangling of dialectics.
Personal
Encounters with Healy
I was elevated
into a leadership role in the Workers League within a year or two after I
joined the movement. This was the result of a series of fortuitous
events that I never expected. Having
left my university studies in philosophy at the New School for Social Research
I was wondering if there was some way to salvage the years I had put into my
studies for the benefit of the movement I had recently joined. Toward this end I
held a number of conversations with Tim Wohlforth, the National Secretary of
the Workers League at the time. Wohlforth finally suggested that I write a
comprehensive critique of the work of George Novack, who was the main
spokesperson on philosophical issues in the Socialist Workers Party. I gladly jumped at the chance to use what I
learned in academia to clarify important theoretical questions confronting the
revolutionary movement.
After
spending several months researching Novack’s voluminous writings I wrote a
series of articles on Novack that were initially published in the newspaper of
the Workers League, the Bulletin, and later turned into a pamphlet with
the title, The Liberal Philosophy of George Novack. [19]
In hindsight there are many passages in
that pamphlet that I would not have written today. There was certainly an overly personal hostility
expressed toward Novack, who, whatever his political and philosophical problems
were, deserved a great deal of respect for the decades that he devoted toward building
the Socialist Workers Party and educating generations of socialists. His
pivotal role in making the Dewey Commission happen was an enormous contribution
to the exposure of the fraudulent Moscow Trials. That being said I stand by my
main philosophical critique of Novack, if not perhaps every word of it. The
main thrust of that critique was that Novack’s conception of Marxist philosophy
was of a wooden, mechanical materialist variety, one that he inherited from a
dogmatic tradition going back to Plekhanov. Here is one of the key points of my critique
of Novack’s approach to the history of philosophy,
A
Marxist historian of philosophy should unearth this contradictory development
of man's thinking wherein historically revolutionary leaps in man's
understanding emerge inextricably connected with the old forms of thought. This
process must be followed in its transition from non-knowledge to
knowledge disguised within the prevailing ideological forms. Novack substitutes
for this a method of procedure wherein the history of philosophy is seen as the
progressive approximation of one of its sides, materialism, to certain basic
ahistorical principles that have finally been established. This is a sterile
scholastic method which uses the results of a process to distort the
spontaneous motion the process undergoes. [20]
In any
case, what I wrote must have gotten under Novack’s skin because, after ignoring
anything coming out of Healy’s organization for many years, he actually wrote a
brief response to it. This was seen by
Healy as an important turning point in his political war against the leadership
of the Socialist Workers Party. Healy, even prior to the “indictment” of Hansen
and Novack as “GPU agents”, had a deep personal animosity towards Hansen, one
that went back to Hansen’s polemics against Healy and the SLL during the debate
over the reunification of the International Committee (IC) with the
International Secretariat (IS) in the period 1962 - 1963. Healy considered Novack being forced to respond
to a challenge on philosophical issues a vindication of his efforts to force a
discussion on philosophical issues with the leaders of the SWP. Therefore, the next time I attended the annual
WRP summer camp in the UK in 1972, I was
summoned by Healy for a series of personal “discussions”. It
didn’t take me long to figure out that Healy’s idea of holding a discussion
consisted of Healy initially asking a question or telling an anecdote and then
following a brief response, I would have to listen to Healy remonstrating about
his views on a philosophical question or his reminiscences about his early
political battles. My role basically
consisted in listening to Healy carry on. These sessions were at once
intimidating and sometimes even entertaining, but they were never an exchange
of ideas. When attending the summer camp
I would be summoned to Gerry’s tent, often in the middle of the night, for
these sessions. When in London, I would be sent to join him in his flat across
the street from the headquarters on Clapham High Street. Sometimes, if Healy
was in a good mood, he would have his assistant order Chinese food for us while
we watched something on the ‘telly’. I
suppose I was fortunate in not being a female.
It was shortly after the
publication of the pamphlet on Novack that Healy recommended that I be placed
on the Central Committee of the Workers League.
The
practical accomplishments of the WRP
Any fair
assessment of Healy’s legacy should include an account of his talent as an
organizer and speaker and the practical work that was accomplished in the
postwar years up to the time of the WRP’s implosion. An account of Healy’s talent as an organizer
can be found in Bob Pitt’s memoir. Pitt, a former member of the WRP, and no
friend of Healy, writes about the indispensable role of Healy in winning over to
Trotskyism a significant section of the Communist Party following the crisis
induced by Khruschev’s speech in 1956,
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’, Hillsman states.
‘It was Healy’s attack that broke the morale of the CP after the 1956 Congress.’ [21]
The
Worker Revolutionary Party and its predecessor organizations did have a unique
record of intervention in the struggles of the working class that impacted the
thinking of many beyond its ranks. Clare
Cowen, in her memoir, chronicles many highlights of these struggles in the
period from the 1960’s to the 1980’s. These included organizing defense
committees on behalf of victimized workers that failed to get a mention in the
bourgeois press, publicizing the struggles of peoples in the colonial world
against imperialism, holding right to work marches led by unemployed youth that
crisscrossed the UK as well as other European countries, the production of a daily newspaper that
included a sports section alongside a Marxist political analysis of current
events, the production of spectacular theatrical events focusing on working
class history that attracted audiences in the thousands. Nothing like this had ever been achieved by any
Trotskyist organization and it looked to some as if the Trotskyist movement was
on the cusp of breaking out of its decades-long isolation from the working
class.
Cowen
quotes the reminiscence of one former WRP member many years after the implosion
of the WRP in 1985:
‘During
the miners’ strike I found that dozens of local leaders had been recruited to
the Young Socialists when they were 15 and 16,’ said miner Dave Temple. ‘I
meet them every year at the Durham Miners’ Gala and they tell me that whatever
was wrong with the Party it gave them a basic education which changed the
course of their lives.’
‘Thousands
of young people learned about socialism because of us.’ [22]
Yet a
critical examination of these efforts cannot but conclude that they came at too
heavy a price. The production of the
daily newspaper caused massive burnout on the part of the rank file members who
were tasked with selling the paper as well as massive financial problems that propelled
the opportunist relations with bourgeois nationalist leaders in the Middle
East. The theatrical spectacles and marches, while impressive, became over time
a substitute for building a party and educating its members. And the price paid
for tolerating an authoritarian internal regime and overlooking Healy’s chronic
abuse of comrades by those in a position to do something about it was
catastrophic. Nevertheless, those former
party members who still see a positive value in the work they did are not entirely
wrong to do so. Although in the end the
walls of Jericho came tumbling down on the Workers Revolutionary Party it left
behind thousands who were introduced to the ideas of socialism. At the same
time we can empathize with those former members whose personal experience of
abuse was so horrendous that they never got over it. Yet any objective analysis cannot be swayed
by such emotions or feelings of nostalgia for a bygone youth by former members,
but must recognize the ultimate failure of the WRP and draw the appropriate
political and theoretical lessons.
The
inheritors of Healy’s legacy
One
group that never drew the appropriate conclusions from the implosion of Healy
and the WRP was the Socialist Equality Party led for decades by David North. The
last chapter of Beatty’s book deals with these modern inheritors of Healy’s
legacy. Beatty is correct to view this entity as the current embodiment of
Healyism. I made that point myself many
years ago when I noted that although North broke with Healy politically in 1985,
he never learned the lessons of that break. Rather, he carried on a version of
Healyism that tried to avoid the worst extremes of that legacy without breaking
from its basic premises.
For
North, the methods [used by Healy] 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. [23]
Employing
the methods of what might be called ‘Healyism-lite’, i.e. a version of Healyism
with some of its rough edges smoothed out, what North has built in the 40 years
since the split with Healy is a highly authoritarian party structure that
prohibits differences from ever being raised, a leadership that is
unaccountable to the membership, that keeps a lid on any information about its
finances or business relationships from the membership, and that politically
has evolved into a cartoonish caricature of Marxism.
We have
previously called attention to the kind of internal regime North maintains in
documenting the expulsions of Shuvu Batta and Peter Ross [24]
and that of Sam Tissot [25]
for the “crime” of attempting to have a discussion. We have also, through private correspondence
over the years, been made aware of many other such incidents in which members
of the Socialist Equality Party who developed differences with the leadership
were expelled or strongly encouraged to leave.
Beatty,
in the last chapter of his biography of Healy, critiques the Socialist Equality
Party through the prism of a form of identity politics which I do not share. [26] However, the Socialist Equality Party
provides him with easy targets. He is not wrong when he sees indications of a
hostility to the working class in their sectarian contempt for unions. [27]
He is not wrong when he sees more than a touch of misogyny in their zealous
defense of virtually everyone accused of sexual abuse. [28]
He is not wrong when he identifies a refusal to face up to the reality of racism
when he criticizes their reductionist understanding of classes. [29]
He is wrong however in diagnosing the sickness of the SEP as in any way the
fault of Marxism or Trotskyism.
A parting
thought
Healy
was a contradictory personality. An
objective biography cannot simply dismiss him as a “monster”. But it is also true that he did some monstrous
things. While he can be credited with a few positive achievements working under
difficult conditions, his more numerous misdeeds cannot be air-brushed away as
they left a massive wreckage in their wake. Nevertheless the attempt to build a
mass revolutionary party in an advanced capitalist country in the latter half of
the 20th century posed questions that went beyond Healy. While
ultimately a failure, those of us who were drawn into the orbit of the SLL and
the WRP saw that Trotskyism does not have to be confined to the verbal
fisticuffs of sterile sects isolated from the working class. We had a glimpse,
despite the horrors inflicted on numerous comrades – and however fleeting -- of
the potential of the working class to topple the existing social structure and inaugurate
a new dawn.
[1] David North, Gerry Healy and his place in the history of the Fourth International, The Final Years
[2] Alex Steiner, The Dialectical Path of Cognition, 2004, https://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/dialectical_path.pdf p. 19
[3] Leon Trotsky, Trotsky's Diary in Exile 1935, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1976, p. 46.
[4] Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, The War and the International: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937 – 1949, Socialist Platform Ltd., London, 1986. p. 197. Interview with Bert Atkinson.
[5] Alex Steiner, The Downward Spiral of the International Committee of the Fourth International, Chapter 8, p. 213, A new stage in the degeneration of the International Committee
[6] Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1973, p. 285.
[7] Harry Ratner, Reluctant Revolutionary: Memoirs of a Trotskyist 1936-1960, Socialist Platform, London, 1994, p. 228.
[8] Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy, Chapter Six – Bob's Stuff
[9] Barbara Slaughter, “Gerry Healy fought
against all odds for the continuity of the Fourth International”,
[10] Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy, Chapter Four – Bob's Stuff
[11] Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy, Chapter Three – Bob's Stuff
[12] Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy, Chapter Seven – Bob's Stuff
[13] These are well-documented in multiple sources but probably the most detailed account can be found in Bob Pitt’s book previously cited.
[14] Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy, Chapter Four – Bob's Stuff
[15] You can find an index of the Labour Review on
the Marxist Internet Archives, http://marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/lr/index.html
[16] Republished with a critical introduction: Opportunism and Empiricism, https://permanent-revolution.org/archives/opportunism_empiricism.pdf
[17] Cliff Slaughter, email to Alex Steiner, April 27, 2020.
[18] Cliff Slaughter, ‘More than a theory, “a guide to action!” Theses on Marx (on reading Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope)’, Critique 90, 48:4 (December 2020), pp. 549–562.
[19] The issues of the Bulletin in which the
series was published are available on the Marxist Internet Archives:
Part I - Volume
8 Number 26 Issue 235, March 6, 1972, v08n26-w235-mar-06-1972-Bulletin.pdf
,
Part II - Volume
8 Number 28 Issue 237, March 20, 1972, v08n28-w237-mar-20-1972-Bulletin.pdf,
Part III – Volume 8 Number 29 Issue 238, March 27, 1972, v08n29-w238-mar-27-1972-Bulletin.pdf
[20] Alex Steiner, The Liberal Philosophy of
George Novack, Labor Publications, 1972, p. 36-37.
Part II - Volume 8 Number 28 Issue 237, March 20, 1972, v08n28-w237-mar-20-1972-Bulletin.pdf
[21] Bob Pitt, The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy, Chapter Four – Bob's Stuff
[22] Clare Cowen, My search for revolution and how we brought down an abusive leader, Troubador Publishing Ltd., 2019
[23] Alex Steiner, The Downward Spiral of the International Committee of the Fourth International, Chapter 8, p. 213, A new stage in the degeneration of the International Committee
[24] Shuvu Batta and Peter Ross, Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Joseph Kishore spreads lies about an Amazon worker and former party member: The worker responds ~ Permanent Revolution
[25] Sam Tissot, Anatomy of a sect: ICFI expels a leading member of French section ~ Permanent Revolution
[26] Aidan Beatty, The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism, Pluto Press, London, 2024, Chapter 10, Epilogue: Twenty-first-century Healyism.
[27] Frank Brenner and Alex Steiner, An anti-working class organization: reply to comments ~ Permanent Revolution
[28] Frank Brenner, Willful blindness on sexual abuse ~ Permanent Revolution. Also see our discussion of the misogyny of the SEP in Part II of this series.
[29]
Joseph Kishore, The
killing of Trayvon Martin and racial politics in America - World Socialist Web
Site. Kishore, while making the
formally correct point that class is a more fundamental category than race
practically dismisses the importance of race. For instance, he takes issue with
a statement of Jesse Jackson that, “Racial profiling is all too common in the
US, and has led to the killing of a young man.” The utter insensitivity to the
issue of racism in the SEP resulted in an extremely rare outbreak of internal
dissent in that organization in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin killing.
