Gerry Healy: the Ceausescu of the British Trotskyist movement
Socialist Outlook1990sTranscribed by hand from the printed page.
Thomas Gerard Healy died on December 14th 1989 at the age of 76. For over 30 years he was 'General Secretary' of the organisation which became the Socialist Labour League (SLL) and then the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), and a leader of the so-called International Committee of the Fourth International.
By the 1980s he had done more to discredit the Trotskyist movement, and the left in general than anyone else claiming to be a part of it — despite other strong contenders for that distinction.
Healy came to Britain from Ireland in 1928, and was recruited into the already degenerated Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). This experience shaped his politics in the direction of sectarianism and bureaucracy and laid the basis for the degenerate political monster which he became.
The CPGB always had a tendency towards sectarianism and bureaucracy. In 1928, after some initial hesitations, it enthusiastically followed the Comintern into its ultra-left turn — the so-called 'third period' of denouncing social democrats as 'social fascists' — which continued from 1928 until 1934. It became one of the most slavish followers of Stalin amongst the Western CPs.
Stalin's turn to the third period was within the political framework of the Stalinised Comintern of 'socialism in one country' (the idea that socialism could be built in the Soviet Union by harnessing the international division of labour) but grafted onto it a series of wildly ultra-left policies. These caused most devastation in Germany where Hitler's rise to power was facilitated by Stalin's opposition to any united front action with the mass Social Democratic Party against the rise of fascism. The social democrats were denounced as 'worse than fascists'.
In Britain the CPGB denounced the Labour Party as fascist, and the unions as anti-working class, making a spectacular break with the tactic of working within the mass organisations, as had been advocated by Lenin, and calling instead for 'red' trade unions independent of the TUC.
Healy was expelled from the CPGB in 1937. He claimed this was for opposition to the politics of the third period; but these had been abandoned three years earlier — in favour of the cross-class line of the popular front.
Probably Healy's departure was more connected with the CP's turn to the right. He joined the newly formed Workers International League (WIL), which worked inside the Labour Party and the ILP, becoming editor of its journal. By all accounts he made a significant contribution, arguing for continued work in the Labour Party and for organising the left.
The following year three of the four Trotskyist groups fused to form the Revolutionary Socialist League, with the WIL refusing to join. The effects of the war destabilised the other groups, however, and in 1943 the WIL and what was left of the RSL fused with others to form the Revolutionary Communist Party — led by Jock Haston.
By 1947 the RCP was internally split over the issue of whether to enter into the Labour Party. A year later the minority, led by Healy, began to join the Labour Party (with a journal called Socialist Outlook: no relation!). When the RCP was eventually wound up in 1950 most went into the group Healy had established called 'The Club'.
Healy then carried out a number of Stalin-style purges designed to give him complete political control of what was now the British section of the Trotskyist Fourth International (FI). Both Tony Cliff and Ted Grant were expelled — to be heard of again! Healy established the kind of internal regime which he was to maintain for the rest of his political life.
In 1953/4 the world movement split over the line of Michel Pablo and the international leadership, which went overboard in uncritical eulogies on the 'revolutionary' nature of the Tito leadership in Yugoslavia. Healy, influenced by the emergence of a pro-Pablo current in his organisation, performed an abrupt political somersault, breaking from pro-Tito positions and siding with James P. Cannon and the American Socialist Workers Party, which adopted an 'orthodox' Trotskyist line against Pablo on Stalinism. This marked the formation of the International Committee.
Healy's group established a base inside the Labour Party and did some positive work in the unions which brought British Trotskyists out of isolation. They recruited from the Communist Party after Khrushchev's speech in 1956 denouncing the Moscow trials. Success led to the formation of the SLL in 1959. It continued to work inside the Labour Party for several more years.
By 1963 the SLL had control of the Young Socialists — the youth wing of the Labour Party. The YS was expelled from the Labour Party after a huge campaign in its defence. This was a big opportunity for Trotskyism, but soon Healy swung to a sectarian project of building a revolutionary group outside and counterposed to the structures of the mass organisations.
The SLL grew rapidly and by the mid-sixties was the mainstream of Trotskyism in Britain. Other currents — around Ted Grant who had opposed entry into the LP in the early 1960s, and Tony Cliff, who took a state capitalist line of the Soviet Union — were a fraction of its size.
The SLL made important developments in the trade unions — on the Liverpool docks, on London building sites, in the engineering industry and in the car industry, particularly in the British Leyland plant at Cowley. But like its predecessors the SLL was a sect dominated by a powerful individual — Healy.
His politics in the unions were flawed. He argued it was possible to build a party in Britain not by intervening into the mass organisations of the working class, but from the outside on a one-to-one basis by intervening into struggles and recruiting workers who were justifiably hostile to the betrayals of their leaders. No distinction was drawn between the left and the right wing of the bureaucracy in the unions, and the strategy of the united front was ignored.
In 1963 a majority of the world movement reunified to form the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International. The SLL in Britain and the OCI in France — now a large organisation with similar sectarian and bureaucratic deformations as the SLL/WRP had developed — stayed outside in the International Committee if the Fourth International. It was not a genuine international, but a fraud: its so-called sections were all subordinated either to the SLL and the OCI.
Though not large, the SLL was by now bureaucratised, with an iron fisted leadership separated from the membership. Healy now had two objectives — a sectarian line on party building in Britain and the destruction of the 'revisionists' of the USFI. To achieve them he turned again to Stalinism and its principal methods; lies, slander, intimidation and violence.
In December 1966 Healy directed a gang of SLL thugs to beat up a USFI supporter, Earnest Tate, who was selling a pamphlet Healy 'Reconstructs' the Fouth International outside an SLL meeting at Conway Hall. It was open terrorism within the Trotskyist movement, advertised in advance in the SLL's Newletter: 'We shall not hesitate to deal appropriately with the handful of United Secretariat agents who hawk it around the fake-left in England'. When several left wing journals defended Tate, Healy threatened them with legal action — a replica of the methods used by the Stalinists against the Trotskyists in an earlier period.
Those who took this up were branded as slanderers of the SLL, whose membership were told that the SLL was beseiged by enemies prepared to go to any lengths to discredit it. But the SLL, still doing consistent work in the unions, continued to grow. A rank and file grouping was established called the All Trades Unions Alliance. This had real possibilities but suffered from the sectarianism of the SLL.
Healy launched a campaign for a daily SLL newspaper, raising huge sums of money from the membership. The daily Workers Press which emerged in 1969 ended any objective politics. The organisation disapeared into frantic activism with the highest turnover of membership ever recorded for a 'Trostkyist' organisation, compounded in 1973 with the winding up of the SLL and the launching of the Workers Revolutionary Party which had to be seen to be bigger.
With a paper membership of four thousand, it set out to emulate a mass organisation. The gains made in the trade unions produced an ATUA rally in Manchester of 4,000 and another at the Empire Pool the following year of 10,000. But as the numbers went up, the politics went down. Frantic recruitment campaigns were instituted in which branches were given daily targets for recruitment. Members were told to talk to the person they sat next to on the bus and ask them to join.
In 1971 Healy had split with his international co-thinkers in the French OCI. There was little politics in the split, it was a case of two bureaucratic aparatuses which could no longer live together. At an SLL central committee meeting Healy demanded that Lambert give a yes or no answer to the question 'is dialectical materialism the theory of knowledge of Marxism?'. When Lambert refused, the OCI delegation was forced to leave.
As the SLL became more isolated and more vulnerable to its critics the Stalinist methods were extended. In 1972 Bala Tampo, a Sri Lankan trade union leader and a supporter of the USFI was accused by Healy of being an agent of the CIA. Later Joseph Hansen, one of the leaders of the US SWP, was accused of being an agent of the FBI. This despicable method was then used extensively in Britain. In the Cowley car plants we were encouraged to think that members of the rival International Marxist Group were working for the police.
By 1973 the politics of the WRP had reached crazy proportions. Healy was predicting imminent collapse of the capitalist system: so when the Heath Government imposed a three day week to conserve fuel during the oil crisis Healy announced we were on the verge of a military coup: Workers Press headlined 'Countdown to Dictatorship'. Two months later we had a Labour government.
From Cowley we began a political challenge to this, and increasingly, the whole political framework of the WRP. Within weeks we were hounded and slandered as police agents. One comrade was beaten up by Healy personally. In 1974 we were expelled with 200 others.
These expulsions were a terminal blow to the WRP although it staggered on for another 10 years. Workers Press collapsed and the Newsline was established with any last vestage of political principle was abandoned. Healy had turned to reactionary Mid-East oil states, promising them uncritical coverage for money. By the late 1970s he was supporting not only Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, but also the execution of Iraqi CP members by the Iraqi regime. Later he took money for identifying Iraqi oppositionists.
In 1985 the WRP was blown apart by a letter from Healy's personal assistant alleging that Healy had been involved in the systematic sexual abuse of women members of the organisation. Healy was expelled and the group disintegrated as details emerged of gross sexual abuse of a large number of women plus appalling financial corruption.
Despite Healy's crimes and the discredit they brought to Trotskyism and to the left in general, a few WRP zealots, most notably Vanessa and Corin Redgrave, stayed with him and published a magazine called the Marxist, which quickly became distinguished as an uncritical supporter of Gorbachev.
Other fragments formed small groups, one publishing the News Line, and another calling itself the International Communist Party (ICP). Both of these continued Healy's politcs without Healy. The group which expelled Healy and now publishes Workers Press made a partial critique of his politics, but failed to carry this through to a conclusion or elaborate an alternative political line for the class struggle in Britain.
Healy's funeral was jointly conducted by the Marxist and the News Line groups. Fittingly, there was even a sectarian battle at the funeral, in which the organisers physically excluded the ICP. Healy would have fully approved.
Unlike Stalin or Ceausescu, Healy never held state power. He learned about tyranny from the Stalinist movement and exercised it inside the small groups of the Trotskyist movement. The result has done serious damage to the development of the revolutionary Marxist tradition in Britain. The best conclusion from his death is to ensure that there is never room left for his ilk to do such damage again.
Alan Thornett