A Marxist myself, it does loathe me to mention both in the
same breath, but the contrast is important. Healy was a historically prominent
Trotskyist who, in practice, degenerated; Maupin is a contemporary promoter of
“patriotic” or national-populist socialism. Both in the end show the objective
danger posed by petty-bourgeois radicalism and political opportunism in periods
of capitalist crisis.
Gerry Healy was a central figure in mid-20th-century
Trotskyism. An organiser who, in earlier decades, defended the Fourth
International against Pabloite liquidationists. But the record of the
1970s–1980s shows a political, organisational and moral degeneration along with
an increasing turn to opportunist relations with bourgeois nationalist forces,
theoretical confusions that substituted Hegelian mystification for Marxist
historical materialism, and organisational practices that isolated and
bureaucratized the WRP. The International Committee of the Fourth International
undertook a systematic Marxist analysis of this degeneration, culminating in
Healy’s expulsion in 1985. The document explained that personal abuses and
scandals were rooted in a deeper political betrayal: the abandonment of
Trotskyist program, dialectical method, and international proletarian strategy.[1]
Whether Maupin knew about this history or even cares is open
for conjecture. His book contains no direct quotes from books or documents from
that period, and there is no bibliography or footnotes. There appears to be no
consultation of the most important biography of Healy, by David North.[2]
For North Gerry Healy’s life must be understood not as the
product of individual psychology alone, but as the interaction of his political
capacities with the shifting material conditions and class struggles of his
era. From a Marxist and dialectical perspective, North argues that Healy’s
later trajectory cannot be reduced to personal vice alone. Instead, it
reflected objective pressures and incorrect political responses. Also, a turn
toward nationalist and opportunist relations with bourgeois regimes, the subordination
of programmatic tasks to short‑term organisational growth, and a
growing separation of theory from the historical materialist method. These
tendencies were epitomised in Healy’s
ideological retreat, most notably in his distortion of dialectical materialism
in his writings and practices, which North critiqued, and in his unprincipled
alliances that compromised Trotskyist independence.
Maupin, despite pretending to defend the Fourth
International or Leon Trotsky, repeats numerous old slanders, such as the claim
that Leon Trotsky collaborated with capitalist governments against the Soviet
Union. Maupin Writes
“Trotsky held onto the notion of the USSR as a “workers'
state” that needed to have the “parasitical Stalinist bureaucracy” removed.
Trotsky was perhaps holding out for the “political revolution” he called for
that would install him in Stalin’s position. Several Soviet leaders were
convicted of allegedly conspiring with Trotsky, as well as Germany and Japan,
to make this happen. Investigating evidence of these charges—routinely
dismissed by Western historians as fabrications from Stalin—has been the focus
of Dr Grover Furr of Montclair State University. Furr maintains that Trotsky
was indeed guilty of such a conspiracy, and the response to Furr’s work has
generally been limited to finger-pointing and ridicule, rather than serious
analysis of the evidence Furr presents.”[3]
Furr’s work attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and to cast
Trotsky as an unreliable or dishonest historian. Variants of this argument
range from minimising the scale of Stalinist repression to asserting that many
well-established facts about the Moscow Trials, show trials, and mass terror
are fabrications or grossly exaggerated. Politically, this disgusting apologist
serves to blur the essential distinction that Marxists must draw between the
proletarian revolution (and its leadership in 1917–23) and the bureaucratic
counter-revolution that produced Stalinism. Furr's books are published by the TKP,
which is the sister party of the Stalinist Greek Communist Party (KKE). This
pseudo-historian reproduces all the old Stalinist lies of the 1930s.
It must be said that even after a hard study of Maupin’s
book, it is difficult to understand what exactly Maupin defends in Healy. That
is, until one gets to the end of the book. Maupin, throughout his political
career, has defended every bourgeois nationalist dictator on the planet. His
hero, like Healy at the end, is Colonel Gaddafi. Maupin defends Healy’s
treacherous collaboration with the bourgeois nationalist.
Despite Healy’s capitulation to Pabloite opportunism and his
despicable personal conduct in his treatment of female cadres, Maupin sees
Healy doing very little wrong. If he did bad things, this was not the result of
a political betrayal or adaptation to hostile class forces. Still, individual
misconduct and organisational corruption do not take place in a vacuum. They
are rooted in political orientations and class alignments. Healy’s petty-bourgeois
turn eroded links with the working class and led to the surrender of
programmatic principles in pursuit of short-term gains.
According to the analysis made in the document How the WRP
Betrayed Trotskyism:” The Party was divided into an 'Upstairs'—a coterie of
exalted individuals around Healy—and a 'Downstairs' occupied by hundreds of
rank and file members who were denied any role in the decision-making process
and took orders. This created within the Party a whole series of destructive
political relations. The leadership grew increasingly impervious to the real
relations between the Party and the workers amid class struggle.
Contact between the Centre and the WRP branches assumed a
purely administrative character, not unlike that between a local business
franchise and the head office. Healy himself became a remote figure whom most
members did not even know—and he knew very little about them. His trips to
Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Abu Dhabi and Tripoli were undoubtedly far more
frequent than his visits to Glasgow, Sheffield, Manchester and Cardiff.
Healy’s high-flying diplomacy and his sudden access to vast
material resources, based largely on his opportunist utilisation of Vanessa
Redgrave as the WRP’s calling card in the Middle East, had a corrosive effect
on the Party’s political line and its relation to the working class. Whatever
its original intention, it became part of a process through which the WRP
became the political captive of alien class forces.
At the very point when it was most in need of a course
correction, the “success” of its work in the Middle East, which from the
beginning lacked a basic proletarian reference point, made it less and less
dependent upon the penetration of the working class in Britain and
internationally. The close and intimate connection with the British and
international working class that the WRP had developed over decades of struggle
for Trotskyist principles was steadily undermined. The isolation from the
working class grew in direct proportion to the abandonment of these principles.[4]
Caleb Maupin: A petty‑bourgeois
nationalist
Caleb Maupin, while identifying completely with WRP’s
historical love affair with bourgeois nationalism, is hostile to genuine
Trotskyist internationalism. His contemporary politics, a public promotion of
“patriotic socialism,” alliances with nationalist currents, and accommodation
to reactionary forces constitute a modern variant of the same petty-bourgeois
opportunistic tendencies as the Workers Revolutionary Party.
Maupin, like Healy, sought alliances with national-bourgeois
forces and capitulated to non-proletarian class forces. Maupin purposely fuses
socialist language with nationalist, conspiratorial, or reactionary currents
(the so-called “red‑brown” tendency), repudiating the internationalist,
working-class orientation that is the essence of Marxism.
It is therefore clear why Maupin is so enamoured with Healy
and the so-called “cult of Personality”; his Red‑brown movement adores the cult of
personality, opportunist sectarianism, and the dilution of theory into
sectarian or conspiratorial rhetoric.
Aidan Beaty-A Class Brother
Maupin spends a considerable amount of space in his short
81-page polemic attacking Aidan Beaty's hack work on Healy.[5]
Beaty is a petit‑bourgeois academic and a Pseudo-Left. His book on Healy
was not just a private dispute but a politically signalled intervention in the
larger struggle over the legacy and continuity of Trotskyism and the Fourth
International.
As David North points out, “ 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 fails to meet the standards expected of 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.”[6]
Maupin and Beaty, it must be said, share similar class
backgrounds. Red‑brown populists like Maupin and sensationalist academics
like Beatty serve to disorient workers and youth. The former does so by
offering nationalist, authoritarian or conspiratorial alternatives; the latter
by discrediting Trotskyist organisational forms and the necessity of a
revolutionary party without providing a constructive program for the working
class.
Maupin’s defence of Gerry Healy barely rises above A-level
standard biographical history. And even that is being generous. While not entirely
a hack job, it lifts no dead dogs in Healy’s political memory. However,
Maupin’s book does raise concrete political issues: how a writer or historian treats
theory and the written record. Maupin’s book contains barely 81 pages, of which
only 50 were given over to a defence of Healy.
There is not a single quote or reference to Healy’s work.
There is no examination of other work or archives mined, and no study of
internal documents. A systematic study of Books, pamphlets, press archives, and
internal documents is the material basis by which a writer transmits ideas to
the general reader, and Maupin does none
of that.
The political crisis of the WRP in the 1970s–1980s was not
an abstract intellectual dispute but the product of objective pressures: crisis
in recruitment, the lure of external funds and nationalist alliances, and the
isolation of a leadership that increasingly substituted personal discretion for
collective Marxist leadership. In these conditions, practices around written
materials — what was printed in party publications, what internal documents
were circulated, and how theory was annotated or hidden — became instruments of
political control rather than tools of education and criticism. Any half-decent
writer or historian would have to make something of this history. Did Maupin
know that Healy, like many revolutionaries, made substantial markings in books from
his prodigious library?
“Marking” books can take many forms: literal physical
annotation (underlining, marginal notes, censorship stamps), classification as
“approved” or “banned” within a party press/bookshop, editorial rewriting, or
the selective destruction/withholding of documents. Under Healy’s apparatus,
these practices were embedded in a wider method: concentrating control over
publications and the paper, using the press as an instrument of leadership
rather than as a forum for workers’ study and democratic debate.
What a writer deliberately leaves out of a book is not merely
a cultural injury; it destroys readers' ability to educate themselves, develop
independent working-class perspectives, and engage in collective theoretical
struggle.
The International Committee of the Fourth International
(ICFI) and its sections produced a sustained investigation of the degeneration
of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) under Gerry Healy. That record
documents concrete, physical, and administrative methods used by the leadership
to mark, censor, conceal, and control books, archives, and internal documents —
measures deployed to defend an increasingly opportunist, petty-bourgeois
leadership against internal dissent and international oversight.
One of the worst crimes committed by the leadership of the
WRP was the removal and sale (or attempted sale) of the movement
archives. But for the intervention of the ICFI, the WRP leadership would
have sold off much of the movement's archives and documents to the highest
bidder. It is still a mystery where most of this archive ended up.
As recently as 2025, Vanessa Redgrave, one of Healy’s
closest supporters, attempted to sell off Healy’s vast library. She was turned
down by the British Socialist Workers Party, who, in the end, got the books for
free and sold them in their shop to the highest bidder. Maupin’s silence on
these matters of historical importance is deafening.
.
[1]
www.wsws.org/en/special/library/how-the-wrp-betrayed-trotskyism/book.html
[2]
Gerry Healy and His Place in the History of the Fourth International Paperback
– 1 Dec. 1991 Mehring Books
[3]
Book Excerpt: “Why Demonize Gerry Healy in 2024?” www.cpiusa.org/news/book-excerpt-why-demonize-gerry-healy-in-2024
[4]
www.wsws.org/en/special/library/how-the-wrp-betrayed-trotskyism/book.html
[5] The Party is Always Right The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism By Aidan Beatty
[6]
Biography as demonology: Aidan Beatty’s The Party is Always Right: The Untold
Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/18/nizy-s18.html
