Gerry Healy and the
Failure of the Old British
Trotskyist Movement
Submitted by dalcassian on 18 March, 2009 -
8:42 Author: Sean Matgamna
DURING THE two decades of the great
labour militancy, roughly from the mid-
'50s to the late '70s, the most important
revolutionary socialist organisation in
Britain was the Socialist Labour League.
The fundamental responsibility for the
failure of the left then has to be laid on
the SLL and on its leader Gerry Healy.
The SLL dominated the world of
revolutionary politics during this period,
overshadowing even sizeable
organisations like Militant and the SWP
(then called IS) and blocking the road of
development for the tiny "Workers' Fight"
group, a forerunner of the Alliance for
Workers' Liberty.
This was the time when it was probably
possible for Marxists to make a real
breakthrough in remoulding the mass
labour movement, or, failing that, to
create a large revolutionary organisation
linked organically to the mass labour
movement.
No such breakthrough was made.
Fuelled by the mass youth radicalisation
of the late '60s, there was a wide
diffusion amongst middle class youth of
generally revolutionary ideas, but too
often ideas of a populist, quasi-anarchist
or diluted Maoist sort, hostile or
contemptuous towards the actually
existing working class. One variant of
this politics of middle-class ambivalence
and half-contempt for the real working
class took the form of patronising
lionisation of the "working-class heroes"
when they engaged in militant action,
and giving up on them when they didn't.
Another, the SWP's, combined lionisation
of individual workers with "building the
party" - as a substitute for the working
class.
Sects were built but no serious
revolutionary organisation rooted in the
working class was built; and the most
important sect during the decisive period
was the SLL. It became the "Workers'
Revolutionary Party" in 1973.
Even when, in the 1950s, it did serious
and constructive work in the labour
movement, the Healy organisation was
organisationally authoritarian and, as a
consequence, intellectually stultified. A
further consequence of this was that
there were widely disparate but
underdeveloped and incoherent political
currents within the organisation - the
Banda brothers, for example, were
always half-Maoist, held in balance with
other trends by Healy acting as the
balancing and arbitrating Bonapartist
dictator of the organisation.
Official "Trotskyism" since Trotsky has
been an unstable amalgam of Trotsky's
hostility to Stalinism and reluctant
endorsements of Mao, Castro, Ho Chi
Minh, and Tito's versions of Stalinism as
deformed expressions of "the world
socialist revolution." Everywhere this
"Trotskyism" has been inherently
unstable. Every element in this self-
contradictory "Trotskyism" existed in the
Healy organisation in a latent or open
state of conflict. The organisation
learned to live with its incoherences by
evolving an organisational dictator who
was also the ideological court of last
resort. That was Healy.
Healy's role was a pre-condition for the
survival of an organisation which had
such political contradictions.
HEALY DOMINATED the organisation in
an unchallengeable rule sustained by
both ideological and physical terror
against anybody who dared disagree
with him - or with whatever political
strand in the organisation's leading layer
he was, for the moment, backing. For
example, the organisation "went Maoist"
to support the Chinese "Cultural
Revolution" in 1967.
In the 1960s the SLL progressively cut
loose from the Labour Party - that is,
then, from the working-class movement
in politics - and, though it remained in the
trade unions, its activity there became
more like Third Period Stalinism than
serious work (see the account of this in
the Workers' Liberty pamphlet, New
Problems, New Struggles). It recruited
and exploited - and exploited is the word!
- mainly raw youth.
Healy was a highly volatile fellow who
tended to believe what he wanted to
believe, and ever more so as he got old
at the heart of an organisation where his
every whim was law. At the centre of a
machine where no-one could make him
take account of anything he wanted to
ignore, Healy slowly went mad - or, if you
like, retreated into such a childish, me-
centred solipsistic view of the world that
it came to the same thing.
For example, by the late 1960s the SLL
was turning up at 100,000-strong anti-
Vietnam-war demonstrations with
leaflets asserting that the marches were
a conspiracy by the press to boost the
march organisers at the expense of great
Marxists like Healy! Yet the SLL machine
survived, as an increasingly sealed-off
youth-fuelled sect, and expanded. Not
accidentally, its main "industrial" base by
the early 1970s was among actors. (The
pioneering trail here was made, I
understand, by the playwright Jim Allen.)
They published a daily paper from
September 1969. But the SLL more and
more inhabited an onanistic world where
is own rigidly exclusive marches and
theatrical projects were more important
than anything else. For instance, their
summer camp in July 1972 happened to
coincide with the crisis around the jailing
of 5 dockworker pickets, the rank and file
industrial action it triggered and the
TUC's decision to call a one-day general
strike - in face of that threat the `Tory
government capitulated and released the
5 dockers - and what did the SLL do?
They decided to continue with their
summer-camp! One consequence of the
madness of the SLL was that by the early
1970s, the then saner IS/SWP had space
to grow substantially.
Healy was always, even in his best days,
given to paranoid self-importance and
paranoid fear of the State, and now his
derangement got completely out of
control. A terrible panic seized him
during the 1974 miners' strike that led, on
February 28th, to the dismissal of the
Tory Government by the electorate. At
one stage members of the organisation
were instructed to hide their "documents"
because a military coup was only days
away.
Then Healy "discovered" that other
Trotskyists who opposed him, such as
Trotsky's one-time secretary Joseph
Hansen, were really secret "agents" of
the US or Russian governments, or both.
A great barrage of lies and bizarre
fantasies was poured out.
A vast world-wide campaign - the
Healyites had small groups in many
countries - was launched to "explain"
much of the tortured history of
Trotskyism as a convoluted spy story. All
of the world, and much of recent history,
was reinterpreted as an affair of "agents"
and double-agents. Perhaps as part of
the eruption of his paranoia, Healy now
transmuted into a "philosopher."
LIVING THE life of a millionaire if not a
pasha, while members of the SLL/WRP
often went short so that they could
finance the organisation, and it was not
unknown for full-time workers for the
organisation to go hungry, Healy
concentrated more and more on
expounding a pseudo-Marxist, pseudo-
Hegelian gobbledegook reminiscent,
despite its verbiage about "dialectics"
and so on, of nothing so much as L Ron
Hubbard's dianetics, around which the
Church of Scientology has been
constructed. This stuff mixed oddly with
his continuing "political" concerns and
the lines were often crossed: it was not
unknown for the WRP press to denounce
someone as both a police agent and a
"philosophical idealist."
By the mid-1970s the organisation was in
serious decline, financially over-
extended, and threatened with collapse.
At this point, Healy sold the organisation
to Libya, Iraq and some of the
sheikhdoms as a propaganda outlet and
as a jobbing agency for spying on Arab
dissidents and Jews ("Zionists") in
Britain! Arab gold flowed into the
shrunken and isolated organisation.
Printing presses were bought, more
modern than those on which the
bourgeois papers were printed. To get
away from the London print unions, they
were installed in Runcorn, Cheshire
anticipating by a decade Murdoch's move
from Fleet Street to Wapping.
They churned out crude Arab-chauvinist
propaganda lauding Saddam Hussein
and Libya's ruler Colonel Gaddafi and
denouncing Israel and "Zionism."
Numerically still in serious and
progressive decline, the organisation
nevertheless built up a property empire
of bookshops and "training centres"
around Britain. To earn their wages, they,
still calling themselves Trotskyists,
publicly justified Saddam Hussein's 1980
killing of Iraqi Communist Party
members, and provided reports on
London-based Arabs and on Jewish
capitalists. The organisation, as Socialist
Organiser insisted at the time - paying-for
our insistence with a costly libel case -
could now no longer be considered part
of the labour movement. In fact it was
still widely accepted as part of the labour
movement, but that's another story.
The final act came in October 1985.
Healy, who had run the organisation by
personal terror, was now 72, weakened
by age and by a bad heart. He was
suddenly denounced as a rapist of 20-
something female comrades and
expelled from the organisation! Exactly
what happened is still not entirely clear,
but, with Healy dithering on the margin
between retirement and full guruship, the
WRP imploded. Faced with continued
decline and, despite the Arab gold, a new
financial crisis, the WRP apparatus
divided. Healy himself was probably
getting ready for a purge. The
organisation fell apart in a great outburst
of hysteria. The subgroups which Healy
had kept in line fell on each other, and on
Healy, who had disappointed their
political hopes.
People whom he had oppressed for
many years, using them as whipping
boys and demoralised dirty tools, allied
with the quasi-Maoist Banda brothers,
his lieutenants of 35 years, and drove
Healy out. With Vanessa Redgrave - a
splendid actress politically short of more
than a few of the pages necessary for a
full shooting script - playing Cordelia to
his Lear, Healy fled from the wrath of his
political children. He died in December
1989, by now an enthusiastic supporter
of Russia's reforming Stalinist Tzar,
Gorbachev. Asserting to the end his right
to believe what he wanted to believe, he
imagined that he saw Gorbachev
carrying out Trotsky's programme in the
USSR!. Thus the "Gerry Healy story"
would have a happy ending!
At the end, and for a long time before the
end, the "Gerry Healy story" was a series
of episodes from the theatre of the
grotesque, which is where Healy himself
really belonged politically and personally.
HE CLAIMED Irish origins, that he was a
Galway peasant. But his story, which he
spun out as from a repertoire the first
time I talked to him, that his father was
shot in Galway by the Black and Tans,
made me - a town prole from 30 miles or
so south of Galway - doubt it. The story
is repeated by his pious biographer Paul
Feldman. Altogether too pat, it
inadvertently suggested someone with
only a broad big-events acquaintance
with Ireland and Irish history, and Healy
was a notorious liar. (For what it's worth,
Irish Communist Party members whom I
knew in the late 1950s said he originated
in Liverpool: Healy was in the CP until the
mid-'30s.)
His leadership, first - in the 1940s - of the
Revolutionary Communist Party faction
which favoured entry into the Labour
Party, and then of the main British
Trotskyist group in the late '40s and
through the '5Os, was that of a "branch
manager" of the international tendency
led by the Irish-American Trotskyist
James P Cannon and by Michel Pablo
(Raptis) in Europe.
Healy took most of his broader politics
ready made; even the articles and
documents which appeared under his
name were, it seems, mostly written by
others - Sam Gordon, George Novack,
Michel Pablo.
Healy came to play the role he played in
British Trotskyism from the mid-'40s
onwards not despite but because of his
indifference to political ideas. An almost
identical political type, Pierre Lambert,
came to dominate much of French
Trotskyism in the same period. Healy,
like Lambert, came to the fore because
he was a lightweight politically, not
caring very much about the ideas of the
movement, and the problems posed for
adherents of those ideas by the events of
the Second World War - in which Stalinist
Russia, far from collapsing, as Trotsky
had expected, survived and seized a vast
empire in Eastern Europe and the
Balkans.
In the 1940s and '50s, the world posed
big problems to old-style Trotskyists, and
most of the political leaders of the
movement collapsed in demoralisation,
confusion, or perplexity. The Healys and
the Lamberts became central because
they cared about the ideas only for their
immediate organisational consequences,
and could propose what to do on the
basis of short-term calculations without
any political or intellectual qualms.
Building the organisation became for
them more or less a self-sufficient
activity, politics relegated to second
place, subordinate to organisational
exigencies.
After he asserted his political
independence from Cannon, in the early
1960s, Healy's politics were blatantly cut
to fit organisational needs, rather than
organisational questions being arranged
according to politics.
If James Cannon, Healy's one-time
mentor, was fond of saying, after Trotsky,
"the programme creates the party", Healy
reinterpreted this guiding principle to
mean: arrange to have a "programme"
that will maximise party growth'; 'the
organisational needs of the party came
to determine the party’s programme.
IN APPEARANCE, Healy was
extraordinary. Small - perhaps 5 feet 2, or
3, inches - and pudgy, he had an
enormous, disproportionately large (or
so it seemed), high-coloured head, with
only thin strands of hair on it, looking like
they had been painted on with an
eyebrow pencil. His face was large and
fleshy, with small features, the little eyes
permanently red and sore, reminiscent,
as one-time associate Brian Behan wrote
somewhere, of a young pig.
What he always called to my mind was
Karl Marx's description, in "The Civil War
in France", of the politician Thiers, one of
those who suppressed the Paris
Commune: "a monstrous gnome."
He dominated his organisation by
uninhibited brute force. The 'cadre' of the
group came to be the product of
'selection' - survival - through a never-
ending serious of savage sado-
masochistic rituals, involving the
pillorying, hounding, denouncing, then
self-denouncing and self-prostrating at
one time or another of most of the hard
core. In this way Healy built a machine
that was essentially depoliticised, ready
like the Stalinist parties for any "turn." It
was a farcical caricature of Stalinism
despite its verbal "Trotskyism."
That the SLL mutated like that was a
great tragedy for working-class politics in
Britain. Much of the history of that
organisation is properly explained by the
personality of Healy; the fact that the
most important ostensibly revolutionary
organisation in Britain took this form
needs a broader and deeper explanation.
But that is a subject in itself.
Paul Feldman contributes to this book a
rehash of all the lying history the
SLL/WRP put out in its last two decades.
Corinna Lotz contributes a personal
account of Healy's last four years, when
she was his secretary/nurse.
Though she is very badly informed
politically - she thinks Lenin was
"secretary" of the Bolshevik Party, for
example - and naively believes in Healy
(dollops of whose 'philosophical'
gibberish, notes from his lectures, lace
her text) Lotz gives a touching account
of Healy in his last years as a charlatan-
guru for rich and silly theatricals -
Maharishi Guru Gerry, so to speak, and L
Ron Healy, rolled into one - globe-trotting
to interesting places with Vanessa
Redgrave's name on his calling card.
Lotz paints a fanciful picture of a gallant
old man struggling for his truth against
strong enemies, including the unbeatable
ones, old age and ill-health. She made
me forget for a while, though I have
indelible adolescent experiences to
remind me, that this man spent 25 years
bullying - politically, financially,
emotionally, sexually - and exploiting
young people who thought he
represented the legacy of Leon Trotsky,
towards which his real relationship was
that of Cain to Abel.
When Lotz described Healy moaning to
himself shortly before he lost
consciousness and died, I felt what both
humanity and convention say you should
feel about such things, though Gerry
Healy would have been the first to scorn
that sort of "weakness". Lotz: "He kept
sighing, saying 'Oh my God'..."
Then my real feelings about the old
reptile came to the surface in involuntary
speculation about the meaning of his
"last words."
Was this last-minute appeal to 'Oh my
God' a prayer? Did the old purveyor of
pidgin-religion get real religion at the
end? Or is the correct interpretation
something akin to Christ's despairing cry
on the cross: 'My God! My God! Why have
you forsaken me?' Had he thought he
had a special relationship with the
supreme Leadership in the sky?
If you exclude these possibilities, you are
left with the sense of Edward G
Robinson's dying words at the end of
Little Caesar when, playing Rico the
small-time gangster, he staggers around,
shot through the chest: "Can this", he
gasps, "be the end of Rico?" And a
miserable end Healy's was too. 30 years
too late.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
------------------
[A review of "Gerry Healy, A Revolutionary
Life", by Corinna Lotz and Paul Feldman.
From Socialist Organiser 1994]
