Biography as demonology:
Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy
and British Trotskyism
This review is by David
North. Here is a link to the article- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/18/nizy-s18.html
Professor Aidan
Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and
British Trotskyism is a malicious piece of political hack work posturing
as a biography. The book discredits its author and meets none of the standards
that are expected of what is being advertised as a scholarly work. The book is
nothing of the sort. Beatty has produced a crude diatribe against Trotskyism
and its historic efforts to construct a revolutionary party rooted in Marxist
theory and based on the working class.
Historians who undertake
the arduous task of writing a serious biography—among the most difficult of
genres—often introduce their work with an effort to explain to their readers
why they embarked on a project that usually requires years of intensive research.
When the subject of study is a political figure, the interactions of the
individual and the epoch in which he or she lived are immensely complex. There
is a profound truth in the adage that a man resembles the age in which he lives
more than he resembles his father. A vast amount of work is required, not to
mention a command of the historical landscape and intellectual subtlety, to
understand the historically conditioned personality, psychology, motivations,
aims, ideals, decisions and actions of another human being.
Whether the writers
admire or despise their subject, they are still obligated to understand in
historical terms the person about whom they are writing. When the author
genuinely admires his subject, he or she must still retain a critical distance
that avoids a descent into hagiography. The great biographies of political
figures—Samuel Baron’s study of Plekhanov, J.P. Nettl’s two volumes on Rosa
Luxemburg, Isaac Deutscher’s Trotsky trilogy—managed to maintain an objective
attitude toward subjects for whom they clearly felt great empathy. Perhaps even
more challenging was the task confronting Ian Kershaw, who devoted years of
work to the study and explanation of the ideological, political and
psychological motivations of one of the worst mass murderers in history, Adolf
Hitler.
In the preface to The
Prophet Unarmed, the second volume of his Trotsky biography, Isaac
Deutscher recalled Carlyle’s description of the task he confronted as the
biographer of Oliver Cromwell. Like Carlyle with the leader of the English
Revolution, Deutscher had to drag the leader of the October Revolution “from
under a mountain of dead dogs, a huge load of calumny and oblivion.”[1] Beatty
has set out to do precisely the opposite. His aim is to bury Healy beneath as
much muck and slime as Beatty was able to gather. There is not a trace of
scholarly objectivity, let alone intellectual integrity, in the work produced
by Beatty. Nor was it his intention to write a legitimate biography. His
project is mired in a calculated deception. In the Acknowledgements that
precede the text, Beatty writes: “I can’t remember when I first ever heard of
Gerry Healy, but by the very start of 2020 I had begun to gather material on
him…” [p. ix] This duplicitous statement is a cover-up by Beatty of his real
reasons for writing this book. Some truth in advertising is in order.
Beatty did not stumble,
as he falsely claims, upon the name of Gerry Healy in 2020. From 2014 to 2018,
Beatty worked as an adjunct academic at Wayne State University in Detroit,
where the Socialist Equality Party and its youth organization, the International
Youth and Students for Social Equality, have been active for years—distributing
literature, holding numerous well-advertised public meetings, and recruiting
members. Their presence on the WSU campus has been bitterly opposed by the
Democratic Socialists of America, which has gone so far as to solicit the
services of campus security forces to disrupt the activity of the SEP and
IYSSE. Beatty, while teaching at Wayne State, was a member of the Metro Detroit
Democratic Socialists of America, which functions as an adjunct of the Michigan
Democratic Party. According to the KeyWiki entry on the Michigan DSA (which identifies
Beatty as a member), “Democratic socialists in southeastern Michigan possess a
level of influence within the Michigan Democratic Party of which many American
leftists dream.”
Now living in
Pittsburgh, where he teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, Beatty is an active
member of the DSA and a bitter opponent of Trotskyism, which he identifies with
an adherence to the class-grounded politics of orthodox Marxism. Beatty’s
extensive Twitter/X archive includes numerous repostings of statements by and
tributes to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and other Democratic Party
luminaries.
A factional polemic for
the DSA
It is evident that the
narrative presented by Beatty in explaining the origins of his book is based on
a lie, whose purpose is to palm off as a scholarly work a factionally motivated
political polemic.
Beatty claims that the
outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 unexpectedly provided him with “a lot
of time on my hands,” and thus enabled Beatty “to delve further and further
into the world of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP).” [p. ix] This is a
fraudulent narrative, disproven by Beatty’s own account of his career.
From 2016 until 2023, he was intensely engaged in researching, writing and
editing his book, titled Private property and the fear of social chaos,
which was published last year.
Far from having lots of
free time, Beatty stated in the Acknowledgements of the latter work: “I
completed the final revisions in a spare bedroom converted to an office and
virtual classroom in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.”[2] Authors
of scholarly works will attest to the fact that the final stages of preparing a
text for publication are nerve-racking and require intense concentration. So
how did Professor Beatty, who also calls his readers’ attention to the demands
on his time arising from parenting obligations, manage to research and write
and shepherd through the publication process an entirely different
project—about a subject he claims to have previously known nothing—while
simultaneously engaged in the writing of another book, which occupied the
central place in his academic career?
Further questions must
be raised about the financing of this project. He writes in the
Acknowledgements: “My research in Britain was funded by the Program on Jewish
Studies and the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh, who were
generous enough to see the Jewish, Israeli-Palestinian and global connections
of this project.” Professor Beatty fails to identify the nature of these
“global connections” and how he managed to convince organizations with
pronounced Zionist sympathies to finance a biography of an Irish-born
Trotskyist who indefatigably defended the struggle of the Palestinian people
against the oppression of the Israeli state. One doubts that these institutions
feared that Beatty would deliver a final product that evinced sympathy for
Healy’s politics. Beatty should answer these questions by making the text of
his applications for funding available.
The excavation and
accumulation of dreck requires not only the financial support of institutions
with deep pockets. It also takes time and effort. Beatty obviously
had substantial assistance from the DSA. Beatty also secured the support of
Pluto Press, the publishing house of a political tendency founded more than 45
years ago by factional opponents of Healy, the Workers Revolutionary Party and
the ICFI.
At the very time when
Beatty was engaged in his “research,” leading
members of the DSA were posting on Twitter memes of ice picks and
celebrating the assassination of Leon Trotsky. This obscene campaign was of
such an extensive scale that the SEP sent on May 22, 2021 an open letter to
Maria Svart, the national director of the DSA, demanding that the DSA
“unequivocally denounce and repudiate the Twitter posts, and statements in any
other media, that revive Stalinist lies and celebrate the assassination of
Trotsky.” The letter continued, “The DSA must make clear that the propagation
of Stalinist lies, thereby sanctioning not only past but also future attacks on
the Trotskyist movement, will not be tolerated and is incompatible with
membership in its organization.”
The letter to Svart,
which I wrote in my capacity as the SEP’s national chairman, stated:
The essential political
purpose of their campaign against Trotskyism is 1) to poison the political
environment within the DSA with reactionary anti-Marxist filth appropriated
from Stalinism, and 2) to attract to the DSA socially backward people who are drawn
to the anti-communist, chauvinistic and—let’s not beat around the
bush—anti-Semitic subtext of denunciations of Leon Trotsky. Judging from tweets
that have been posted in support of the DSA leaders’ attacks on Trotsky, the
campaign is drawing around your organization extremely reactionary elements who
should have no place within a genuinely progressive, let alone socialist
organization.[3]
Ms. Svart did not reply
to this letter nor repudiate the attacks. Beatty’s exercise in character
assassination began while these attacks were in progress and, clearly, is a
continuation of the same operation. Healy is only the proximate target. The
broader purpose underlying Beatty’s repulsive narrative is to denounce
Trotskyism and the efforts to construct a revolutionary socialist party of the
working class. As Beatty states, his biography
is also, more seriously,
a story about Trotskyism, the political tradition that birthed Healy as an
activist and which he also, in turn, helped (re)create. It is a cautionary tale
about the tendency that Trotskyism has always had towards schisms and personal
animosity and about the inherent flaws in “democratic centralist” parties that
often brook no dissent and can even act as incubators for predatory men like
Gerry Healy. [p. xvi-xvii]
Beatty’s smut-filled
diatribe consists almost entirely of a recycling of denunciations and outright
lies circulated by bitter enemies of Healy with personal axes to grind, most of
whom abandoned socialist politics decades ago and have evolved into virulent
anti-communists.
Beatty’s volume recalls
Marx’s description of the Daily Telegraph: “By means of an
artificial system of concealed plumbing, all the lavatories of London empty
their physical refuse into the Thames. In the same way the capital of the world
spills out all its social refuse through a system of goose quills, and it pours
out into a great central paper cloaca—the Daily Telegraph.”[4] Mocking
the newspaper’s unscrupulous and scandal-mongering proprietor, Levy, Marx wrote
that his skill “consists in its ability to titillate with a rotten smell, to
sniff it out a hundred miles away and to attract it.”[5]
A description that
applies to Beatty and his book. He, too, is a great “sniffer,” pursuing the
ghost of Healy wherever Beatty’s nose takes him. The smellier the tale, the
more anxious he was to capture it and include it in his volume. Toward this
end, Beatty, in the course of his exercise in “odorography,” even posted a
notice on the internet, calling for Healy-haters to come forward and provide
him with material. And, of course, he found plenty of pathetic little helpers,
a motley crew of political nobodies anxious to have their individual tales of
woe committed to print and immortalized by Professor Beatty. Had he sent them a
personal welcoming card, it might well have included the phrase which, as Marx
recalled in his answer to Levy, was posted at the entrance of the public
toilets of ancient Rome: “Here … it is permitted to make bad odors!”[6]
A biography without
history
Beatty begins his text
with the following declaration: “This is a book about an authoritarian and
abusive Irishman named Gerry Healy, and about the political world he helped
create…” [p. xvi] This phrase alone is sufficient to discredit the claim that
Beatty’s work is a legitimate biography. Who would take seriously a “biography”
that began: “This is the story of a sex-obsessed abusive womanizer named John
Fitzgerald Kennedy,” or “This is the story of an alcoholic manic-depressive
named Winston Churchill.” Books like this have been written, but they do not
pretend to be scholarly efforts, and they are dismissed by knowledgeable
critics.
Even more absurd, from
the standpoint of reality and legitimate biography, is Beatty’s assertion that
his book “is about the political world he [Healy] helped create…” [p. xvi]
Entirely absent from Beatty’s account is any discussion, let alone analysis, of
the world that created Healy. This is a book without historical context.
Aside from providing a few poorly sourced details about Healy’s family
background, there is no overview of the Ireland of 1913, the year of his birth,
and the 10 years that followed. The social conditions of Ireland, the Easter
Sunday revolution and the eruption of the civil war, the years of British
terror, the formation of the Republic, the politics of Irish nationalism, the
partition of the country and the leading political personalities of the era are
ignored. The names James Connolly, Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera never
appear. All the basic questions relating to the interaction of objective
conditions and the life of an individual that would preoccupy a serious
biographer are ignored by Beatty, despite his own Irish origins.
Beatty not only leaves
out the history of Ireland; he takes little notice of that of England, where
Healy spent virtually all his adult life. Beatty writes virtually nothing about
the tumultuous history of the British labour movement. The political and social
events that shaped the labor movement in which Healy was to play such a
prominent role go unmentioned: the betrayal of the British General Strike of
1926, the entry of Labour Party leader Ramsay MacDonald into the National
Coalition government of 1931, and the infamous “cutting of the dole” by that
government do not merit a single sentence.
Trotsky wrote
extensively on British politics and intellectual life. His most important work
on British history, politics and its class struggle, Where is Britain
Going?, written on the eve of the British General Strike, is not
included in Beatty’s bibliography. Nor does Beatty reference the three-volume
collection of Trotsky’s writings on Britain, which was published by New Park,
the publishing house of the Workers Revolutionary Party, in the 1970s.
As for post-war Labour
and trade union history, that, too, is largely ignored. The massive Labour
landslide of 1945—whose consequences played a major role in the conflicts that
arose within the British Trotskyist movement—merits only a few sentences. The
major conflicts of the quarter-century that followed, and the underlying
political issues, are either totally ignored or dealt with in the most cursory
manner. The names of Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, and Harold Wilson do not
appear in Beatty’s text. The famous left Labourite, Michael Foot, with whom
Healy had extensive dealings in the 1950s, merits a single mention. The many
strikes and social struggles in which Healy played a major role are all but
ignored. The contents of the publications founded by Healy and the Socialist
Labour League—Newsletter and Workers Press—are hardly
referenced.
Beatty’s neglect of the
national context of Healy’s work is even more glaring in his treatment of the
decisive international issues, fundamental to any discussion of the Trotskyist
movement. The historical origins of the Trotskyist movement are barely referenced.
The theoretical and political struggles that developed inside the Russian
Communist Party, which gave rise to the Left Opposition led by Trotsky in 1923,
are all but ignored. The conflict between the perspective of the Opposition and
that of the Soviet bureaucracy led by Stalin is dealt with in a single
sentence: “In opposition to the Stalinist position that the USSR should develop
Socialism in One Country, Trotskyists advocated Permanent Revolution, in which
Communism would spread rapidly and globally.” [p. 3] This vulgar
simplification, written at the level of a secondary school teenager, testifies
to Beatty’s ignorance of the subject with which he pretends to deal.
The Trotskyist movement
emerged in response to monumental political events that were to determine the
course of 20th century history, which, in addition to the British General
Strike, include the 1927 defeat of the Chinese Revolution, the catastrophic victory
of Nazism in Germany, the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, and the Moscow
Trials and Stalinist terror. These world-historical events are all but ignored.
To the extent that they are mentioned in passing, it is only for the purpose of
casting aspersions, without the slightest credible documentation, on Healy’s
motives for joining the Trotskyist movement.
Leon Trotsky with
members of the Left Opposition
In dealing with Healy’s
political activities, Beatty simply ignores three central events in the
former’s political career: 1) Healy’s role, under the leadership of the pioneer
American Trotskyist, James P. Cannon, in the 1953 founding of the International
Committee in the struggle against Pabloism; 2) Healy’s remarkable intervention
in the crisis of the British Communist Party in 1956-57 following Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin’s crimes; and 3) Healy’s political
leadership in 1961-63 of the opposition within the International Committee to
the unprincipled reunification of the US Socialist Workers Party with the
Pabloite International Secretariat.
Beatty’s omissions are
not a matter of oversight. They are deliberate. Beatty cynically justifies the
biography’s failure to reference documents: “All historians, in some way or
another, are familiar with the problem of a lack of archival sources,” Beatty
writes. “Trotskyism … poses an opposite problem. Rather than there being a lack
of documentary evidence, there is too much of it.” [p. xx]
Documentary evidence
posed a problem for Beatty because the written record contradicts and is
incompatible with the factional narrative he set out to construct. Not
intending to write a biography grounded on scholarly research, Beatty decided
to solve the problem of “too much” factual material by limiting his use of
archival material to the barest minimum and relying on gossip that he palms off
as “oral history.”
Invective and political
distortion
The result of this
“method” is not a biography but a horror story, in which a real political
figure is reduced to a monstrous caricature, and the history of the British
Trotskyist movement is portrayed as a terrifying Grand Guignol, i.e., the
socialist movement as it might be imagined in the perfervid imagination of a
virulent anti-communist. As Beatty writes in the second paragraph of his
preface, his biography of Healy is “a story of violence and scandals, sexual
abuse, cults, conspiracy theories, misguided celebrities, and possibly also
international espionage and murder…” [p. xvi]
The barrage of invective
continues: “Like a familiar Dickensian archetype, Healy’s physical ugliness was
often evoked as a sign of a deeper, more profound political and moral
ugliness.” [p. xvi] Healy as Fagin, Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper. All this can
be dismissed as the spewings of an author totally consumed by personal hatred
of his subject.
To create the image of
Healy as a monster, Beatty is compelled to remove one element that is critical
to a biography: a factually accurate and objective reconstruction of the life
of the subject. The reader will learn nothing in Beatty’s book about Healy, a
figure who was a central actor in all the great struggles and debates facing
the British and international working class for nearly a half-century. Born in
Galway, Ireland, Healy rose from young migrant worker in England during the
Great Depression to the foremost figure of British Trotskyism in the post-World
War II era. For long years Healy fought indefatigably to defend the
revolutionary perspective of working class power against Stalinism, social
democratic reformism, Pabloite opportunism and related forms of petty-bourgeois
radical politics.
Instead of carefully
researched and substantiated facts, Beatty spins out a web of conjecture.
Throughout the book, he speculates about what Healy “probably knew,” “probably
preferred,” “may have” done, “apparently wanted,” or, most astoundingly, had
been “possibly channeling.” [pages 49, 75, 76, 100, 138]
Beatty’s references to
actual events in Healy’s life generally involve a distortion of his underlying
political motivations. One glaring example is Beatty’s comment on Healy’s
attempt to enlist in the military during World War II. He writes: “[H]ow this squared
with his Trotskyist opposition to the war was unclear, though his political
entanglements meant he was turned down for military service and thus never had
to address this obvious double standard.” [p. 10]
There was no double
standard whatsoever involved in Healy’s effort to enlist, which was entirely
consistent with the war-time program of the Fourth International and the
Workers Internationalist League (WIL) of which Healy was a member.
Trotsky and the
Socialist Workers Party were intransigent opponents of pacifism, and rejected
as a matter of principle avoidance of the draft and military service by party
members. They insisted that party members of military age, under conditions of
universal wartime military conscription, participate in the experience of the
mass of working class recruits. Based on the Transitional Program, the founding
document of the Fourth International, and discussions between Trotsky and James
P. Cannon, the SWP adopted what became known as the Proletarian Military
Policy. The SWP, under Trotsky’s guidance, worked out a comprehensive program
of demands for which members would campaign among their class brothers serving
in the military.
James P. Cannon
In The History
of British Trotskyism to 1949, Martin Upham reviewed in detail the
Proletarian Military Policy and its implementation in Britain. He explains that
“Trotsky had been involved in a lengthy discussion with SWP members on
attitudes towards war preparation. He advised against draft avoidance and
argued for using military training to acquire skills of arms.” Upham wrote:
The need for a positive
programme in wartime made a deep impression on the WIL and from the late summer
of 1940 it tried to counter embryonic Vichyism with its Military Policy:
elected officers, government-financed trade union-controlled training schools,
public ownership of the armaments industry and a class appeal to German
soldiers.
Upham’s study is
accessible online and is even listed in Beatty’s bibliography.[7] But
in a manner typical of Beatty’s method and consistent with his efforts to smear
Healy, he ignores the facts presented in Upham’s study and speculates that
Healy’s efforts to enlist were “perhaps” motivated by a desire for “a more
stable income as a married man…” [p. 10]
Beatty spares no effort
to slander Healy and manufacture an image of the man and the party that he led,
which bears no resemblance to reality. Attempting to discredit the Trotskyist
movement among the largely student and middle-class milieu of the DSA, Beatty
writes, “There was also a general homophobia within the party, or, at best, an
apathy to gay issues.” [p. 86] He alleges, without any supporting evidence,
“When two women asked to join the party and revealed to Healy that they were
lesbians, he not only rejected them but then also mocked them to other party
members.” This story is most certainly a malicious lie.
It is contradicted by an
article, referenced by Beatty, on the subject of homosexuality that was
published in The Newsletter, the organ of the British Trotskyists,
in its edition of September 14, 1957. It was a lengthy commentary on the
recently issued Wolfenden Report, which called for the repeal of the draconian
laws criminalizing gay sex. The Newsletter prominently
reported on and endorsed the findings and recommendations of the Report,
comparing homosexuality to “other basic human activities, such as eating and
sleeping.” The Newsletter clearly stated that “Homosexuality
is common not merely throughout the human race and human history, but is
frequently observed among higher animals.”[8] It
insisted that there existed no defensible reason for persecuting people for
what is normal human behavior. While citing this article, Beatty misrepresents
its content, quoting part of a sentence out of context to give the impression
that the British Trotskyists considered homosexuality an “unfortunate part of
the individual.” [p. 86]
Despite the British
Trotskyists’ longstanding and public opposition to the persecution and
stigmatizing of homosexuality, Beatty promotes the false claim made by one of
his interviewees, that “Gay people were not even allowed to join because of an
assumption that they could be blackmailed by the state.” No documents are, or
could be, presented to support this slander.
Healy was a socialist,
not the backward brute portrayed in Beatty’s narrative. As far back as the late
19th century, in response to the case of Oscar Wilde, socialists had denounced
the persecution of gay people. The Bolshevik regime had repealed laws that
criminalized homosexuality. Healy’s own attitude toward homosexuality combined
his Marxist outlook with a broad and sympathetic attitude toward the
complexities of human behavior.
Neither the SLL nor the
WRP opposed the admission of gays into the party and its leadership. Such a
reactionary stance would have been incompatible with the Trotskyist movement’s
defense of democratic rights and its opposition to all forms of repressive persecution.
Moreover, it was well-known to Trotskyists of Healy’s generation that Rudolf
Klement, the martyred secretary of the Fourth International, murdered by the
Stalinists in 1938, was a homosexual. At meetings of the WRP held annually to
pay tribute to the memory of Trotsky and other martyrs of the Fourth
International, Klement’s portrait was always among those prominently displayed.
A biography of Gerry
Healy ... without Healy’s words or voice
Almost entirely missing
from Beatty’s book are the words and voice of Healy. Virtually nothing of what
Gerry Healy wrote or said during a career in revolutionary socialist politics
spanning more than a half-century appears in Beatty’s biography. The final
citation to anything that Healy wrote appears on page 41 of the book’s 148
pages of text. Beatty mentions in passing that Healy “was capable of high
quality writing” [p. 16], but he provides no examples.
At one point, Beatty
writes that there was “an oddly sycophantic tone to many of Healy’s letters to
the SWP” [p. 17] during the period of his close collaboration with Cannon
during the 1940s and early 1950s. Beatty does not provide examples that support
this claim. He also fails to cite correspondence between Cannon and Healy,
especially during the struggle against the Pabloites, which reflected the
latter’s maturity as a political leader and was a significant factor in Healy’s
growing prestige and authority in the Fourth International.
Beatty does not allow
the voice of Healy to be heard because it reveals an immensely intelligent and
thoughtful man with vast experience and a subtle understanding of the problems
that arise in the development of the cadre of a revolutionary party and the
building of a collective leadership. A letter from Healy to Cannon, written on
July 21, 1953 in the midst of the fight against Pablo’s efforts to liquidate
the Fourth International, testifies to Healy’s exceptional qualities as a
political leader:
From experience, we have
learned that the strength of a national section lies in the maturity of its
cadre. Maturity flows from the collective way in which a cadre works. This, as
you know, does not arise from the brilliance of this or that individual in a
particular field. It arises from the historical selection of devoted people who
supplement each other’s talents by learning to work as a team. Like the
development of the class struggle itself the development of those who comprise
the cadre is an uneven one. You find people who have many weaknesses in some
directions, playing a powerful positive role inside the cadre. This is, in
fact, not only the great strength of the cadre, but also its weakness. A
responsible, mature leader has these things fixed in his mind at all times.
Another factor which
plays a role, is the receptiveness of the cadre toward changes in the political
situation. Some people have quite a flair for this, and make useful
contributions in assisting the cadre forward. Yet, it is possible to find on
occasions, in comrades who make turns easily, a certain feverishness which can
flow from a basic instability rooted in class questions. An experienced cadre
checks from time to time these manifestations, and enables the comrade or
comrades concerned, to go forward toward a new, more advanced, stage of
development. On the other hand, a cadre will always contain
such people because they are an essential reflection of the development of the
class itself.
Experience has taught us
that the construction of a cadre takes time and many experiences. In spite of
the inflammable international situation you cannot short-cut cadre building. In
fact, the two things are dialectically related. The more explosive the situation,
the more experienced a cadre must be in order to deal with it. The long time
taken in developing a cadre then begins to pay off big dividends. What appears
previously to be a long difficult process now changes into its opposite.
Those of us who have
gone through this process in national sections are familiar with its
intricacies. Because of its enormous collective power, a cadre is also an
intricate instrument. The wise leader must attune himself to the need for sharp
changes, and what is all important, the way to prepare the cadre for such
changes. He must know his people, and how sometimes to help the “lame ones”
over the stile. Leadership is not a question of theoretical ability only, one
must know the cadre.
… A national leadership
must learn to know its country and itself, an international leadership must
know the world, and embody the collective experience of the national sections.[9]
Beatty’s refusal to cite
from Healy’s documents, letters and speeches, means that the real individual
personality does not appear in his book. There is virtually no discussion of,
or even reference to, the struggles Healy led and the policies he fought for.
Beatty offers no realistic description of Healy’s political persona.
Beatty does reference
the recruitment of well-known writers and artists into the party. He is
particularly fixated on actress Vanessa Redgrave’s membership. But Beatty does
not attempt to explain what it was about the Socialist Labour League in the
late 1960s and Healy himself that led a substantial section of intellectuals
and artists to join the party.
Trevor Griffiths, Healy
and The Party
Beatty briefly refers
to The Party by the late socialist playwright Trevor
Griffiths. It was premiered in London in 1973. It is based on a series of
Friday night meetings, attended by Healy, known as John Tagg in the play, with
intellectuals and artists against the backdrop of the revolutionary events of
May-June 1968 in France. The Healy-Tagg character was performed by Sir Laurence
Olivier, which is itself not only an indication of the seriousness of
Griffiths’ play, but also of the complexity of Healy’s personality. An actor of
Olivier’s caliber would not have been required to portray the two-dimensional
fiend conjured up by Beatty.
Griffiths’ play focused
on the response of middle-class intellectuals and artists to the immense social
upheavals of the 1960s. Healy-Tagg has been invited to attend a gathering of
members of this milieu. True to form, the only line from the play quoted by
Beatty is the derogatory comment of one cynical character, a middle-class
feminist, who describes Tagg—before his arrival at the meeting—as “irrelevant”
and “a brutal shite.”
The dramatic high point
of the play, as Griffiths recalled in 2008 in an interview conducted by World
Socialist Web Site arts editor David Walsh,[10] is
Tagg’s reply to one of the attendees, who has presented a demoralized analysis
of the political situation based on the New Left ideology of that period.
Throughout the intellectual’s long discourse, dismissive of the working class
and replete with references to Marcuse and other heroes of petty-bourgeois
radicalism, Tagg listens quietly. Finally, at the conclusion of the discourse,
Tagg rises from his seat and answers the middle-class critique of the
perspective of working class revolution. As recalled by Griffiths in the 2008
interview, Healy-Tagg “takes over the meeting. Is the meeting in
a sense and delivers a speech which lasts for 22 minutes, uninterrupted. Which
is certainly, since [George Bernard] Shaw, the longest political speech ever
delivered on the British stage.”[11]
It is appropriate to
quote extensively from this speech. Griffiths attended many of the informal
gatherings, and the Tagg speech is largely a transcription of Healy’s remarks.
The speech is a record not only of Healy’s remarkable intellectual depth and eloquence,
even when speaking extemporaneously, but also of his perceptive appraisal of
the crisis of the middle-class intelligentsia:
If our analysis is
correct, we’re entering a new phase in the revolutionary struggle against the
forces and the structures of capitalism. The disaffection is widespread: in
London, in Paris, in Berlin, in the American cities; wherever you care to look,
bourgeois institutions are under sustained and often violent attack. New forces
are rising up to throw themselves into the fray. The question is: How may they
be brought to help the revolution? Or are they simply doomed forever to be
merely “protests” that the “repressive tolerance” of “late capitalist”
societies will absorb and render impotent? (Pause.) We shall need some
theory, to answer questions like those. But I suspect the theory will not be
entirely in accord with that which we have heard expounded by our comrade here
tonight. (Pause.)
There’s something
profoundly saddening about that analysis. And, if I might be permitted a small
digression, it seems to reflect a basic sadness and pessimism in you
yourselves. You’re intellectuals. You’re frustrated by the ineffectual
character of your opposition to the things you loathe. Your main weapon is the
word. Your protest is verbal—it has to be: it wears itself out by repetition
and leads you nowhere. Somehow you sense—and properly so—that for a protest to
be effective, it must be rooted in the realities of social life, in the
productive processes of a nation or a society. In 1919 London dockers went on
strike and refused to load munitions for the White armies fighting against the
Russian revolution. In 1944 dockers in Amsterdam refused to help the Nazis
transport Jews to concentration camps.
What can you do?
You can’t strike and refuse to handle American cargoes until they get out of
Vietnam. You’re outside the productive process. You have only the word. And you
cannot make it become the deed. And because the people who have the power seem
uneager to use it, you develop this … cynicism ... this contempt. You say: The
working class has been assimilated, corrupted, demoralized. You point to his
car and his house and his pension scheme and his respectability, and you write
him off.
You build a whole theory
around it and you fill it with grandiloquent phrases like “epicentres” and
“neocolonialism.” But basically what you do is you find some scapegoat for your
own frustration and misery and then you start backing the field: blacks, students,
homosexuals, terrorist groupings, Mao, Che Guevara, anybody, just so long as
they represent some repressed minority still capable of anger and the need for
self-assertion. (Pause.)
Well. Which workers have
you spoken with recently? And for how long? How do you know they’re not as
frustrated as you are? Especially the young ones, who take the cars and the
crumbs from the table for granted? If they don’t satisfy you, why
should they satisfy the people who actually create the wealth in the first
place? You start from the presumption that only you are intelligent and
sensitive enough to see how bad capitalist society is. Do you really think the
young man who spends his whole life in monotonous and dehumanizing work doesn’t
see it too? And in a way more deeply, more woundingly? (Pause.)
Suddenly you lose
contact—not with ideas, not with abstractions, concepts, because they’re after
all your stock-in-trade. You lose contact with the moral tap-roots of
socialism. In an objective sense, you actually stop believing in a
revolutionary perspective, in the possibility of a socialist society and the
creation of socialist man. You see the difficulties, you see the complexities
and contradictions, and you settle for those as a sort of game you can play
with each other. Finally, you learn to enjoy your pain; to need it, so that you
have nothing to offer your bourgeois peers but a sort of moral exhaustion.
You can’t build
socialism on fatigue, comrades. Shelley dreamed of man “sceptreless, free,
uncircumscribed, equal, classless, tribeless and nationless, exempt from all
worship and awe.” Trotsky foresaw the ordinary socialist man on a par with an
Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx, with still new peaks rising above those heights.
Have you any image at all to offer? The question embarrasses you. You’ve
contracted the disease you’re trying to cure. (Pause.) I called this a
digression, but in a way it describes very accurately the difficulty I
experience when I try to deal with our comrade’s … analysis.[12]
Healy-Tagg proceeds to
review the revolutionary struggles of the working class during the previous
half-century and the catastrophic impact of the treachery of Stalinism and
social democracy. He insists upon the essential role of revolutionary
leadership, emphasizing that “those leaderships will develop from new
revolutionary parties which in turn will base themselves in
and on the class they seek to lead. There is only one slogan worth mouthing at
this particular historical conjunction. It is: ‘Build the Revolutionary Party.’
There is no other slogan that can possibly take precedence.”
He concludes with words
that addressed the political and moral dilemma of petty-bourgeois left
intellectuals:
The party means
discipline. It means self-scrutiny, criticism, responsibility, it means a great
many things that run counter to the traditions and values of Western bourgeois
intellectuals. It means being bound in and by a common purpose. But above all, it
means deliberately severing yourself from the prior claims on your time and
moral commitment of personal relationships, career, advancement, reputation and
prestige. And from my limited acquaintance with the intellectual stratum in
Britain, I’d say that was the greatest hurdle of all to cross. Imagine a life
without the approval of your peers. Imagine a life without success.
The intellectual’s problem is not vision, it’s commitment. You enjoy biting the
hand that feeds you, but you’ll never bite it off. So those brave and foolish
youths in Paris now will hold their heads out for the baton and shout their
crazy slogans for the night. But it won’t stop them from graduating and taking
up their positions in the centres of ruling class power and privilege later on.[13]
Healy-Tagg’s critique of
the self-centered individualism of petty-bourgeois radicals, who briefly dabble
in socialist politics before moving on to make their careers, is even more
relevant today than it was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. How timely a
restaging of this play would be, with, perhaps, the brilliant actor Brian Cox
taking on the role of Tagg.
Beatty’s misuse of “oral
history”
Rejecting from the
outset serious archive-based research or other standard elements of scholarly
work, Beatty justifies his biography as a legitimate product of oral
history. Of course, biographers should, if possible, conduct
interviews with individuals acquainted with the subject. But the historian must
conduct such interviews critically. Not all testimony is reliable. The relation
of the interviewee to the subject must be carefully appraised. The historian
must be able to distinguish between flattery and slander, between facts and
gossip, between truth and lies. The historian must determine whether the claims
of one or another interviewee are reliable, whether they are supported by
evidence of a more objective character, i.e., documents.
In a trial, not all
testimony is admissible. There are rules of evidence whose purpose is to
prevent unreliable and unsubstantiated testimony and even outright lies from
misleading a jury.
The rules observed by
Beatty have the exact opposite purpose: the only testimony that Beatty allows
to be entered into evidence and presented to readers is that of haters of
Healy. Beatty’s procedure can be summed up as follows: “If you have nothing
good to say about Healy, I’m all ears.” In a social media post soliciting
informants, Beatty promised “all interviews will be handled with the utmost
care, no interviews will be made publicly available and can be recorded
anonymously.” This is the sort of pledge that the FBI offers to Mafia
informants. The use of anonymous witnesses in what purports to be a biography
precludes the verification of their statements and allegations by scholars and
readers.
Beatty got what he was
looking for. The testimony upon which Beatty’s oral history is based consists
exclusively of allegations made by Healy’s political enemies, and whose
subjective hatred of Healy is embedded in their repudiation of revolutionary
politics decades ago. Though I was among those contacted by Beatty for an
interview, he abruptly broke off contact—“I’m muting this conversation” was his
final text message on May 5, 2022—after Beatty realized that I would not
provide him with the smut he was looking for.[14]
An example of Beatty’s
unscrupulous misuse of “oral history” as a means of filling his narrative with
allegations against Healy that are entirely unsubstantiated is his description
of the relationship between Healy and his wife Betty. He writes: “They [Healy
and his wife] had been mostly estranged since the early 1970s; Betty had
supposedly once told Mike Banda that Gerry Healy was ‘a madman’ and felt some
sense of guilt that, by supporting him financially, she had enabled him.” [131]
“Supposedly once told”
means that there is no reliable evidence that Betty Healy ever made such a
statement. The footnote that accompanies this statement references the memoir
of ex-WRP member Clare Cowen, My Search for Revolution, in which
she writes that she “remembered something Aileen [Jennings] had told me. Betty
had warned Mike and Tony years before: ‘You’re tied to a madman.’”[15] So
reconstructing the basis upon which Beatty introduces the “madman” allegation
against Healy, it turns out that he is relying on Clare Cowen’s recollection of
what she had been told by Aileen Jennings. It is not clear from where Jennings
had learned of Betty Healy’s alleged warning. Did it come from Betty Healy
herself? From Michael or Tony Banda? Or perhaps from someone, unidentified, to
whom one of the Banda brothers might have relayed this story? We are in the
realm of double, triple or even quadruple hearsay, and have no way of knowing
whether this incriminating statement was ever made.
After introducing the
totally unsubstantiated “madman” allegation, Beatty continues: “According to
Dave Bruce, Betty Russell [Healy] ‘roundly despised’ Gerry, ‘but not as much as
she roundly despised his supporters’ and she tried in a coded way to warn people
about him. Bruce says he has fond memories of Russell.” [131]
Beatty introduces no
verifiable evidence that would substantiate Bruce’s incredible statement. Did
Betty Russell Healy tell Bruce directly that she “roundly despised” her
husband? Why would she impart such intensely personal information to a member
of the WRP staff who was approximately 35 years younger than her? Did Betty
Healy know David Bruce so well that she would take him into her confidence,
entrusting him with private feelings that she otherwise only communicated “in a
coded way.”? The story is totally unbelievable, and its use by Beatty testifies
to his lack of intellectual integrity and the degraded character of his book.
Relying on the slanders
by Tim Wohlforth
In addition to the
interviews that he conducted with Healy haters, Beatty relies heavily on an
anti-communist tract titled The Prophet’s Children: Travels on the
American Left, by the late Tim Wohlforth, a former leader of the Workers
League (WL) who, after seriously compromising its political security, deserted
the WL, turned sharply to the right, denounced the Trotskyist movement as a
“cult,” and eventually evolved into an open supporter of American imperialism,
authoring in 1996 an essay agitating for the US bombing of Serbia, titled “Give
War a Chance.”
The prominence given to
Wohlforth’s denunciation of Healy is a glaring example of Beatty’s deliberate
falsification of the historical record. As part of a lengthy chapter entirely
devoted to portraying Healy as a violent and paranoid dictator, Beatty presents
the following account of the events surrounding Wohlforth’s removal from the
post of national secretary of the Workers League (predecessor of the SEP) in
August 1974:
The WRP’s American
sister party, the Worker’s [sic] League, expelled its own leader, Tim
Wohlforth, in 1974 when it was discovered that his partner, Nancy Fields, had
an estranged uncle who worked for the CIA. Wohforth’s account of this is
genuinely disturbing (and is confirmed by Workers League member Alex Steiner,
who was also present). Healy’s accusations were produced during a stage managed
move against Wohlforth at an international party meeting in Montreal. Allowing
tensions to build over several days, Healy finally dropped his bombshell during
a marathon all-night meeting, when attendees were bleary-eyed and exhausted and
more liable to go along with Healy’s actions. The CIA connection, though, was a
ruse. Wohlforth had observed at an international meeting a few months earlier,
in April 1974, that Healy’s purging of Thornett had cut off devoted and skilled
party members and thus hurt the WRP at a critical point of early development.
Healy did not tolerate such criticism. His willingness to use violence against
his erstwhile comrades, already a well-established trait, came more to the
surface within the WRP. [p. 62-63]
There is not a single
truthful or factually accurate statement in the paragraph quoted above.
Beatty’s presentation is a grotesque falsification of the well-documented
circumstances of Wohlforth’s removal from the post of Workers League national
secretary. As Wohlforth’s book is the published work most frequently cited by
Beatty, the extensive use of the perjured narrative demolishes his own
credibility.
First, a minor point,
the summer school was not held in Montreal, but in Sainte-Agathe, which is
about 60 miles north of the city. Far more important, neither Wohlforth nor
Nancy Fields were expelled from the Workers League. One month after his removal
from the post of national secretary, Wohlforth sent a letter to the Political
Committee of the Workers League, dated September 29, 1974, announcing his
resignation from the Workers League. This letter is published in Volume Seven
of Trotskyism Versus Revisionism. The same volume includes the
reply sent by then ICFI Secretary Cliff Slaughter to Wohlforth, dated October
6, 1974, calling on Wohlforth to withdraw his resignation. Wohlforth never
replied to this letter. Instead, Wohlforth rejoined the Socialist Workers
Party, thereby repudiating his previous 14 years of political struggle against
the SWP’s betrayal of Trotskyism, and from which he had been expelled in 1964.
Fields, who had broken off all communication with the WL, also joined the SWP.
Trotskyism Versus
Revisionism, Volume Seven, is included in
Beatty’s bibliography. His decision to ignore the documents contained in this
volume makes his narrative all the more deceitful.
The account provided by
Beatty of the meeting at which the national committee of the Workers League
voted unanimously to remove Wohlforth from the post of national secretary and
suspend Nancy Fields from membership is entirely false. But before proceeding
to the refutation of Beatty’s narrative, it is necessary to review the events,
based on published documents, that led to the decisions taken by the WL
national committee on August 31, 1974.
During the 12 months
that preceded the WL summer school (not “international party meeting”) of
August 1974, the party experienced a devastating organizational crisis that was
precipitated by the sudden elevation of Nancy Fields in the summer of 1973 into
the leadership of the Workers League. The change in her political status was
based entirely on the beginning of an intimate relationship in July 1973
between Fields and Wohlforth.
The Fourth International
and the Renegade Wohlforth, published by the Workers League in
1975, provided a detailed account of the organizational havoc unleashed by
Fields with the support of Wohlforth, who had abdicated his own political
responsibilities as he focused on his personal relationship:
Wherever she went,
Fields left behind a trail of political destruction. She became Wohlforth’s
inseparable traveling companion and hatchet woman. They jetted around the
country to the tune of thousands of dollars in a wrecking operation the likes
of which had never been seen in the Workers League. They closed down branches,
threatened members with expulsions, and employed the crudest factional
intrigues to drive comrades out of the Workers League.
The so-called “national
tours” of Wohlforth and Fields had more the character of a honeymoon than a
political intervention.[16]
In a letter to Gerry
Healy dated July 19, 1974, Wohlforth provided a detailed account of the
organizational devastation of the Workers League—without, however, providing
any information about the central role played by Nancy Fields in this extreme
crisis.
In answer to the
question about your coming to our camp and conference let me just give you some
information on the League. It has been going through a very remarkable period.
I have figured that since “X” [the reference is to the editor of the Bulletin, Lucy
St. John] left about a year and a half ago, some 100 people have left the
League. The figure refers only to people in the party for some time and playing
important roles, not those who drift in and out, the usual sorting out of
membership. The bulk of these people left in the period of the
preparation for and since the summer camp last year which was the decisive
turning point in the history of the League.
Even this figure does
not show the full impact of the process. Almost half of those who left were
from New York City. Almost half the National Committee and Political Committee
were involved. Virtually the entire youth leadership were also involved. …
We are, of course very
much of a skeletal movement these days … We are virtually wiped out as far as
intellectuals are concerned—one big bastardly desertion. What is done on this
front I have to do along with Nancy. We have nothing anymore in the universities—and
I mean nothing. The party is extremely weak on education and theoretical
matters. …
As far as the trade
unions are concerned our old, basically centrist work in the trade unions,
especially SSEU, has collapsed precisely because of our struggle to change its
character and turn to the youth.[17]
The arrival of this
letter set off alarm bells in London. Healy requested that Wohlforth come to
London to discuss the situation in the Workers League. During discussions held
with Wohlforth in mid-August 1974, Healy inquired about the role of Nancy Fields
in the party leadership, whom Wohlforth had chosen to accompany him as a
delegate to a conference of the International Committee that had been held in
April 1974. Her attendance had surprised the British leadership, as Fields had
no significant political history in the Workers League and was entirely unknown
to the ICFI leadership.
With all his vast
experience in revolutionary politics, spanning more than four decades, Healy
noted the coincidence of Fields’ sudden elevation into a position of immense
authority and the extreme crisis within the Workers League. Wohlforth was asked
directly on August 18, 1974 if he had any reason to believe that Fields may
have connections to the state. Wohlforth replied that there was no reason to
believe that any such connection existed. In fact, Wohlforth lied to Healy and
other members of the WRP leadership who were present at that discussion.
Wohlforth knew, but had chosen not to reveal, that Fields had the closest
family connections with a high-level member of the US Central Intelligence
Agency. During the week that followed, the British leadership obtained
information about Fields’ family background that had been concealed by
Wohlforth.
The 1974 Workers League
school
The Workers League
summer school was held during the last week of August 1974. Due to the massive
loss of membership, there were insufficient cadre to provide direction for the
large numbers of working class youth who were in attendance. Wohlforth himself
had prepared neither a political report nor lectures. A chaotic situation
developed, as the remaining cadre of the party struggled to maintain some
semblance of organizational discipline at the camp.
Contrary to Beatty’s
claim that Healy had allowed “tensions to build over several days” Healy
arrived at the school on August 30, 1974. That evening a meeting of the
National Committee was held. The meeting opened with Healy asking NC members
for an evaluation of the political situation within the Workers League. This
question produced an explosive response from the NC members, who provided a
detailed account of the chaos that existed in the organization.
The National Committee
met again on the evening of August 31, 1974. It was scheduled for 9 p.m., an
earlier starting time not being possible because all the cadre were totally
preoccupied with maintaining some semblance of order at the camp. When the meeting
opened, Healy brought to the attention of the NC the information that the WRP
leadership had received about Nancy Fields. Wohlforth then falsely stated that
the facts related to Fields’ background were well known within the Workers
League. This lie was flatly contradicted by all the NC members in attendance.
At no point in the meeting was Nancy Fields accused of being a CIA agent. The
charge brought against Wohlforth and Fields was that they had deliberately
withheld information about her family connections from the party leadership,
and that these connections had been treated by Wohlforth as a purely personal
matter. Moreover, Wohlforth had brought Nancy Fields to a conference of the
ICFI, where those in attendance included delegates from Spain and Greece
working under conditions of illegality, without informing the international
leadership of her background.
For these reasons, the
National Committee voted unanimously to remove Wohlforth from his position as
national secretary and to suspend the membership of Nancy Fields, pending an
investigation by the ICFI into the precise nature of her family relations and
the serious breach of security. Both Wohlforth and Fields voted in support of
this resolution.
The ICFI investigation
into Nancy Fields
Beatty’s assertion that
the issue of the CIA “was a ruse” is a lie that is clearly contradicted by the
documentary record. The International Committee proceeded with its
investigation despite the refusal of Wohlforth and Fields to participate. The
Commission of Inquiry issued its findings on November 9, 1974. It stated:
We found that TW did
withhold information vital to the security of the IC and its 1974 conference.
When asked directly, in the presence of three witnesses, on August 18, 1974, in
London about the possibilities of any CIA connections of NF, he deliberately
withheld the facts, thus placing his own individual judgment before the
requirements of the movement. He later stated he did know of these connections,
but did not consider it important to say so.
The inquiry established
that from age 12 until the completion of her university education, NF was
brought up, educated and financially supported by her aunt and uncle, Albert
and Gigs Morris. Albert Morris is the head of the CIA’s IBM computer operation in
Washington as well as being a large stockholder in IBM. He was a member of the
OSS, forerunner of the CIA, and worked in Poland as an agent of imperialism.
During the 1960s a frequent house guest at their home in Maine was Richard
Helms, ex-director of the CIA and now US Ambassador in Iran. …
We found that the record
of NF in the party was that of a highly unstable person who never broke from
the opportunist method of middle-class radicalism. She adopted administrative
and completely subjective methods of dealing with political problems. These
methods were extremely destructive, especially in the most decisive field of
the building of leadership. TW was fully aware of this instability, and bears
the responsibility for bringing NF into leadership. He found himself left in an
isolated position in which he eventually concealed NF’s previous CIA
connections from the IC. He bears clear political responsibility for this.[18]
The Commission found,
based on the limited information to which it had access at that time: After
interviewing and investigating all the available material, there is no evidence
to suggest that NF or TW is in any way connected with the work of the CIA or
any other government agency. The inquiry took into account TW’s many years of
struggle for the party and the IC, often under very difficult conditions, and
urged him to correct his individualist and pragmatic mistakes and return to the
party.
We recommend that TW,
once he withdraws his resignation from the Workers League, returns to the
leading committees and to his work on the Bulletin, and has the
right to be nominated to any position, including that of National Secretary, at
the forthcoming National Conference in early 1975. We recommend the immediate
lifting of the suspension of NF, with the condition that she is not permitted
to hold any office in the Workers League for two years.[19]
The Commission’s report
concluded: The inquiry urgently draws the attention of all sections to the
necessity of constant vigilance on matters of security. Our movement has great
opportunities for growth in every country because of the unprecedented class
struggles which must erupt from the world capitalist crisis. The situation also
means that the counterrevolutionary activities of the CIA and all imperialist
agencies against us will be intensified. It is a basic revolutionary
duty to pay constant and detailed attention to these security matters as part
of the turn to the masses for the building of revolutionary parties.[20]
These published
documents, of which Beatty is aware but has chosen to ignore, demolish his
false but politically preferred narrative, from the standpoint of the interests
of the DSA, of Wohlforth’s “expulsion.”
Moreover, Beatty’s claim
that “Wohlforth had observed at an international meeting a few months earlier,
in April 1974, that Healy’s purging of Thornett had cut off devoted and skilled
party members” is demonstrably false. In fact, in April-May 1974, the WRP led a
powerful campaign to defend Alan Thornett against his victimization by the
management of the British-Leyland plant in Cowley, where Thornett held the
position of senior convenor. Confronted with strike action by Cowley workers
and broad-based rank-and-file support throughout Britain, organized by the WRP
in a campaign personally directed by Healy, British-Leyland backed down and
reinstated Thornett.
The political conflict
with Thornett first developed not in April, but in the autumn of 1974. It was
precipitated by Thornett’s unprincipled formation of a faction in secret
collaboration with an opponent organization. While the International Committee,
in its subsequent analysis of this conflict, sharply criticized Healy’s
ill-advised and precipitous resort to organizational measures without the
necessary political clarification, the Thornett affair was not related to and
did not in any way detract from the seriousness of Wohlforth’s reckless
violation of the security of the Workers League and International Committee.
Alex Steiner: A
dishonest witness
As for Beatty’s claim
that Wohlforth’s account of the meeting at which he was removed from the post
of national secretary “is confirmed by Workers League member Alex Steiner, who
also was present,” this is another example of Beatty incorporating into his
text the false testimony of dishonest individuals. The supposed confirmation of
Wohlforth’s account by Steiner, who was interviewed by Beatty twice, on May 17,
2022 and July 4, 2023, is false. In fact, Steiner was not, and could not have
been, present at the National Committee meetings of August 30 -31.
The facts are these:
Alex Steiner was among those who left the Workers League in late 1973 as a
consequence of Fields’ wrecking operation. However, during his meeting with
Wohlforth in August 1974, Healy suggested that an effort be made to win back to
membership comrades who had recently left the organization, and that they be
invited to meet with the remaining members of the National Committee at the
upcoming summer school to discuss their membership status. When Wohlforth
returned to the United States and reported this proposal to the remaining
members of the Political Committee, I strongly endorsed this proposal. I
personally telephoned Steiner (the telephone was then the fastest means of
communication), and urged him to make the trip to Canada.
Steiner arrived at the
camp with a substantial number of former Workers League members on the
afternoon of August 30, 1974. A meeting of the National Committee was then
held, at which Healy asked that the committee entertain a motion for the
readmission of all these former members. The motion was adopted unanimously,
and the reinstated comrades were warmly welcomed. They then left the camp, and
were not in attendance at the subsequent meetings of the National Committee.
It should be added that
Steiner enthusiastically supported the decisions taken by the National
Committee. He and I worked closely together to revive the party’s theoretical
and educational work, which had been disrupted by Wohlforth and Fields. In May
1975 Steiner attended a conference of the International Committee, at which he
spoke forcefully on the experience through which the Workers League had passed.
He also voted in support of the proposal to initiate an investigation into the
assassination of Leon Trotsky. Steiner and I co-authored The Fourth
International and the Renegade Wohlforth. For a period of several
years, Steiner remained politically active within the Workers League. But the
growing difficulties in the political situation, and the trauma of the brutal
assassination in October 1977 of a leading member of the Workers League, Tom
Henehan, deeply discouraged Steiner, who was always prone to extreme pessimism.
After a final conversation, in which Steiner stated that “Life is grim,” he
left the movement in the autumn of 1978. He reestablished cordial relations
with the Workers League in the aftermath of the split with the Workers
Revolutionary Party, but Steiner never rejoined the movement. In the aftermath
of the events of 9/11, reacting to the wave of political reaction that
accompanied the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Steiner swung violently to
the right.
As is often the case
with political renegades who abandon and betray the ideals of their youth,
Steiner developed a pathological hatred of his former comrades who retained
their commitment to the fight for socialism. For the last 15 years he has
focused his limited political energies on the production of a blogsite, to
which he contributes three or four articles a year, devoted almost exclusively
to vicious denunciations of the ICFI, SEP and me personally.
One further point must
be made about Beatty’s portrayal of the Wohlforth incident as an example of the
WRP as “a paranoid entity.” This slander is contradicted by information
included in Beatty’s volume, which clearly establishes that Healy’s concerns about
the security of the WRP were an entirely justified response to the efforts of
British state intelligence agencies and police to disrupt and even destroy the
WRP.
Beatty acknowledges that
the WRP and other left-wing organizations were subjected to continuous
surveillance, infiltration and harassment by the state intelligence agencies.
He quotes the speech given at Healy’s funeral by Ken Livingstone, former London
mayor and Labour Party MP, in which he declared that there had been a
“sustained and deliberate decision” by the intelligence agencies of the British
state “to smash” the WRP. [p. 109] Beatty writes that “there is a
well-documented history of political interference by British intelligence
agencies and the police, mainly targeting the left…” [p. 111] He concedes that
“The observations of the historian David Chard about accusations of FBI
interference in the American New Left and Black Power movement are apposite for
the WRP…” [p. 111] Beatty also notes: “Already, in January 1954, Healy was the
subject of MI5 monitoring because of an ongoing surveillance of Charles Van
Gelderen, a South African Trotskyist of Dutch Jewish ancestry.” [p. 111] Beatty
admits that “it is empirically true that the Workers Revolutionary Party were
under police monitoring and that there were police informants within the party
providing information on multiple aspects of the WRP’s activities. He also
concedes that “The WRP was enough of a police interest to have its Derbyshire
school raided by the police in 1975,” but then proceeds to dismiss the attacks
as merely “a catalyst for a bout of paranoia in the party.” [p. 112]
The political crisis of
1985-86
Beatty’s “biography” is
not an account of a political life, but, rather, a catalog of the sins
attributed to Healy by his enemies. The Healy presented by Beatty is
one-dimensional and unchanging. The crisis that erupted within the WRP in 1985
is portrayed as the inevitable outcome of the accumulated sins of Healy’s life,
rooted in the “moral ugliness” invoked by Beatty in the book’s preface. In his
recounting of the events of 1985, Beatty is focused on the allegations of
sexual misconduct on the part of Healy. This is the sole element of the crisis
that is of real interest to Beatty. There is not to be found in Beatty’s
narrative any substantial reference to, or discussion of, the critical issues
of theory, program and perspective that underlay the eruption of the crisis in
the summer of 1985.
Beatty barely mentions
the extensive criticism made by the Workers League, between 1982 and 1985, of
Healy’s distortion of Marxist theory and the WRP’s political opportunism.
Beatty writes only: “Between October and December 1982, David North, leader of the
Workers League, the WRP’s sister-party in the United States, had begun to
tentatively criticize Healy’s pseudo-philosophical posturing, always a taboo
move within the ICFI.” [p. 90] If this move was “taboo,” why did I take this
step? Moreover, this “tentative” criticism consisted of dozens of pages, which
subjected Healy’s writings on philosophy to a detailed analysis.
Beatty does not quote a
single sentence from this extensive critique. Nor does he mention, let alone
cite, the even more detailed criticisms of the entire political line of the
Workers Revolutionary Party that I presented at a meeting of the International
Committee in February 1984. He also fails to reference any of the hundreds of
pages of documents, produced by the International Committee majority between
October 1985 and February 1986, despite the fact that all these documents are
publicly available in print and online.
In June 1986, in the
aftermath of its split with the WRP, the International Committee published a
detailed analysis of the protracted political degeneration of the Workers
Revolutionary Party. Covering the entire history of the WRP, How the
Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism 1973-1985, which I
co-authored with the Sri Lankan Trotskyist leader Keerthi Balasuriya, proved
that the fundamental cause of the crisis was the WRP’s increasingly nationalist
and opportunist political orientation. Based on a meticulous review and
analysis of documents, the ICFI traced the retreat of the WRP from the
principles and program that the British Trotskyists had defended for so many
years. It subjected to a meticulous examination the policies pursued by the WRP
in Britain and internationally. The International Committee proved that the
source of the crisis within the WRP, and of Healy’s personal degeneration, was
rooted in its opportunist abandonment of the historic perspective of the Fourth
International, based theoretically on the theory of permanent revolution.
How the Workers
Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism
This critical document
is ignored by Beatty. It is not even listed in his book’s bibliography.
Instead, Beatty is fixated on the sex scandal. His heroes in the crisis are a
group of political scoundrels, operating surreptitiously and without any
declared program, who worked on the staff of the WRP. Their idea of a political
struggle consisted of planting electronic listening devices in Healy’s office
in order to gather salacious material that would be used to compromise him.
None of the individuals engaged in this operation were interested in initiating
a political struggle to stop the opportunist degeneration and re-establish the
authority of Trotskyism in the WRP. Rather, the purpose of focusing on the sex
scandal was to preempt the necessary discussion, demanded by the ICFI, of the
political source of the crisis in the WRP.
The International
Committee was by no means indifferent to the conduct of Healy. In fact, it
opposed all those within the WRP leadership, including Cliff Slaughter and Mike
Banda, who sought to prevent a thorough investigation of Healy’s conduct, which
was demanded by David Hyland, a member of the WRP central committee. The ICFI
supported Hyland’s principled demand and defined Healy’s conduct in political
terms as an abuse of the cadre of the Fourth International. On October 25,
1985, the International Committee adopted unanimously a resolution expelling
Healy and endorsing his expulsion from the WRP. But in contrast to the leaders
of the WRP, with the exception of David Hyland, who wished only to focus on the
scandal and what they hypocritically called “revolutionary morality,” the ICFI
insisted on issues of program and principle. The ICFI resolution declared:
In expelling Healy the
ICFI has no intention of denying the political contributions which he made in
the past, particularly in the struggle against Pabloite revisionism in the
1950s and 1960s.
In fact, this expulsion
is 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.
The political and
personal degeneration of Healy can be clearly traced to his ever more explicit
separation of the political and organizational gains of the movement in Britain
from the historically and internationally grounded struggles against Stalinism
and revisionism from which these achievements arose.
The increasing
subordination of questions of principle to immediate practical needs centered
on securing the growth of the party apparatus, degenerating into political
opportunism which steadily eroded his own political and moral defenses against
the pressures of imperialism in the oldest capitalist country in the world.
Under these conditions
his serious subjective weaknesses played an increasingly dangerous political
role. Acting ever more arbitrarily within both the WRP and the ICFI, Healy
increasingly attributed the advances of the World Party not to the Marxist
principles of the Fourth International and not to the collective struggle of
its cadre, but rather to his own personal abilities.
His self-glorification
of his intuitive judgments led inevitably to a gross vulgarization of
materialist dialectics, and Healy’s transformation into a thorough-going
subjective idealist and pragmatist.
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.
Those like Healy, who
abandon the principles on which they once fought and 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 historic law.The ICFI affirms that no leader stands above the historic
interests of the working class.[21]
These twelve paragraphs
provide a depth of insight into the crisis of the WRP and, one must add, an
understanding of the life, legacy, and tragedy of Gerry Healy, that is entirely
absent in Beatty’s 213 pages of scandal-mongering hack work.
Conclusion
Beatty has written not a
biography, let alone an “untold story.” It is, rather, a diatribe, consisting
of old thrice-told slanders—directed not only against Healy, but also the
Trotskyist movement. He invokes the memory of Tim Wohlforth as the sage to whom
all those on the left should turn for direction. “As Tim Wohlforth saw,” Beatty
writes, “a radical non-Leninist socialism might be a little messy and chaotic
but it also has a far better chance of actually building something long-lasting
within the interstices of Western capitalism.” [p. 134]
Beatty chose the wrong
person as the subject for his biography. Gerry Healy was a revolutionary, not a
reformist. He devoted virtually all his political life to constructing a party
that would overthrow capitalism, not live within its “interstices” like fungus
between the toes. “I am,” Healy would occasionally remark, “in the business to
end business.” And everyone who encountered Healy during his best years on the
political battlefield knew that he meant it.
Healy was, as Trotsky
once said of Lenin, “warlike from head to foot.” Healy’s political demise began
in the 1970s when he began to retreat from a revolutionary perspective and seek
opportunist shortcuts. But during the many years in which he fought for Trotskyism—against
the powerful Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies and their Pabloite
accomplices— Healy was an inspiring figure. During the decades that followed
World War II, when the labor movements were dominated by reformist
bureaucracies and large sections of the Fourth International abandoned
Trotskyism, Healy continued the fight for the World Party of Socialist
Revolution.
After Gerry Healy’s
death on December 14, 1989, I wrote a lengthy obituary. During the previous
seven years, I had been compelled to conduct a political struggle against the
opportunist trajectory of Healy and the WRP. The documents of that conflict,
written between 1982 and 1986, comprise many hundreds of pages of text (of
which not a single sentence is quoted by Beatty). The conflict assumed an
extremely sharp form and culminated in 1985 in the resolution, of which I was a
co-author, authorizing Healy’s expulsion. Such conflicts are not conducted in a
spirit of warm-hearted magnanimity. The extent of Healy’s political
degeneration, and the degraded forms that it took, could not but arouse anger
and a sense of betrayal among his former comrades. But in writing Healy’s
biography, I was obligated to provide an objective appraisal of the man, his
work and his legacy. I concluded the obituary as follows:
For a long and difficult
period, Gerry Healy was a crucial human link in the historical continuity of
the Fourth International. For decades he fought against Stalinism and
opportunism. In the end, he broke beneath the pressure of this tremendous
struggle. But the best of what he achieved in his long career lives on in the
International Committee of the Fourth International; and the resurgent
international revolutionary workers movement, learning both from his
achievements and failures, will not fail to pay proper tribute to his memory.[22]
Thirty-five years after
Healy’s death, I see no reason to change this appraisal.
Beatty’s Epilogue
Aidan Beatty concludes
his book with a chapter titled “Epilogue: Twenty-first-century Healyism.” It is
devoted to an attack on the present-day International Committee, the Socialist
Equality Party in the United States, and me personally. Toward the latter end,
Beatty has made extensive use of Ancestry.com to inform his readers of my
family background (“European Jewish refugees”), including information related
to the musical career of my grandfather Ignatz Waghalter, from whom I inherited
my middle name (but, alas, not his talent), the name of my father, who died
when I was three years old, the identity of my stepfather and his career as a
businessman, and my mother’s activities in the arts and business. Beatty
reports that I “was blessed with cultural capital, as well as raw economic
capital.” [p. 138] His main informant for this inquiry into my family is Alex
Steiner, whose political hostility is seasoned by personal animosity and
subjective jealousy. The FBI will appreciate Steiner’s services as an informer.
In the writing of the
Epilogue, Beatty has traveled a substantial distance from Gerry Healy, the
subject of his so-called biography. But there is a definite continuity, in as
much as his purpose is not only to expose my Jewish family background, for those
who might be interested in or troubled by it, but also to continue his
denunciation of the SEP’s unflagging commitment to Trotskyism and revolutionary
socialist politics. Beatty writes that “the SEP’s privileging of class over all
else has ended up not just downplaying race and gender, but outright sexism and
racism.” He denounces the World Socialist Web Site’s “bad faith
attacks on the recent crop of democratic socialist politicians, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez especially, but also Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.”
Clearly, this Epilogue
has been tacked on to the book by Beatty, not only as retribution for my
unwillingness to contribute anti-Healy filth to his biography, but above all to
counter the growing influence of the SEP and WSWS among members of the DSA and
its periphery of student youth who are increasingly alienated by its role as a
political accomplice and agency of the imperialist war-mongering and
pro-genocide Democratic Party.
In any event, the
purpose of this review has been to answer and expose Beatty’s fraudulent
biography of Gerry Healy. An extensive reply to the Epilogue, which is directed
against the WSWS, the SEP and me, will be provided at another time.
Endnotes
[1] Isaac Deutscher, The
Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky 1921-1929 Volume II (New York: Vintage Books, 1965),
p. v
[2] Aidan Beatty,
Private property and the fear of social chaos, (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2023) p. ix
[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/22/dsal-m22.html
[4] Karl Marx, Herr
Vogt, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 17 (New York: International
Publishers, 1981), p. 243
[5] Ibid, p. 246
[6] Ibid, p. 243
[7] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/upham/09upham.html
[8] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/newsletter/newsletter-v-1-no-19-14-september57.pdf
[9] Trotskyism Versus
Revisionism: A Documentary History, Volume One, “The Fight Against Pablo in the
Fourth International”, (London: New Park Publications, 1974), pp. 143-44
[10] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/12/man1-d11.html
[11]Ibid
[12] Trevor Griffiths:
Plays, (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 149-52
[13] Ibid, p. 155
[14] The complete record
of the exchange of messages between Beatty and me can be accessed at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/08/13/dxgf-a13.html
[15] Clare Cowen, My
Search for Revolution (Leicestershire: Matador, 2019), p. 334
[16] Trotskyism Versus
Revisionism, Volume 7 [Detroit: Labor Publications, 1984] p. 169
[17] Ibid, pp. 172-73
[18] Ibid, pp. 270-71
[19] Ibid, pp. 271-72
[20] Ibid, p. 272
[21] Fourth
International, Volume 13, No. 2, Autumn 1986, p. 52
[22] David North, Gerry
Healy and his place in the history of the Fourth International (Detroit: Labor
Publications, 1991), p. 117
