The Party is Always Right-The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism by Aidan Beatty-Pluto Press 2024

Despite being subtitled “The Untold Story of Gerry Healy”, this book contains nothing new and is a rehash of all the old lies and slanders that have been heaped on Healy and the Trotskyist movement for decades. The historian Thomas Carlyle was fond of saying that he had to clear a large pile of dead dogs off the body of Oliver Cromwell to reach the real person underneath. The same could be said of Beatty’s book. However, once all the dead dogs have been removed from this book, all you are left with is a worthless pile of crap.

While Beatty’s book is probably his own work, Pluto Press must be held accountable for publishing this hack work. As David North writes, Beatty’s book is a political hit job, not a scholarly biography. There are many questions about the writing of this piece of hack work. There is good reason to believe that Mr. Beatty is not the sole author of this work and that he had substantial assistance in collecting this mass of odoriferous material. As it is published by Pluto Press, which is affiliated with a political tendency hostile to the International Committee, one can reasonably assume that it provided Beatty with substantial support in the “researching” and writing this volume.”

I did ask Pluto Press for a review copy and was granted one by James K, to whom I gave my address. The book never arrived. The non-arrival coincided with the publication of David North’s review on the World Socialist website.

Pluto Press, who are largely made up of renegades from Marxism, has its own axe to grind against orthodox Trotskyism. It gave free rein to the political scoundrel Paul Le Blanc to write on the back cover saying, “'Displaying scant sympathy for Gerry Healy, the substantial groups that Healy led, and the Leninist-Trotskyist traditions that Healy claimed to represent, Aidan Beatty nonetheless produces a very readable, meticulously documented take-down that will be seen as a “must-read” source on left-wing politics from the 1930s to the dawn of the twenty-first century.'

This book is so bad it is difficult to know where to start. Writing a biography is an extraordinarily complex and time-consuming event. Writing a political biography is an art form. At 148 pages long, Beatty’s piece of art barely rises above second-grade level. There are many examples of excellent biographical writing. Currently, I am reading Bernard Crick’s biography of George Orwell[1]. It took Crick ten years to write. Whether Crick agrees with Orwell’s politics or not, it is a superb read and deserves every plaudit it has got. Honestly, Beatty is not fit to tie Crick‘s shoelaces.

The Marxist writer David North writes, “ 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 they 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, they 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, and 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.”[2]

The Psuedo Left community has welcomed Beatty’s book. Jacobin’s David Broder, from the main pseudo-left journal of the pro-genocide Democratic Party, interviewed DSA member Aidan J. Beatty. Beatty was allowed free rein to spew out his slanderous allegations against Gerry Healy and the British Trotskyists that they employed violence against political opponents and party members.

Beatty writes, “There is quite a notorious incident in 1966 when Ernie Tate, a Northern Iridefenceer of the International Marxist Group, was very violently attacked by a group of Healy’s supporters outside a party meeting in London; Healy was present for this and essentially supervised the assault. The attack was bad enough that not only was Tate hospitalized, but Healy was later forced to appear at a meeting with Isaac Deutscher and apologize. This assault was unplanned, but as I say in the book, “Healy propagated an aura of total ruthlessness but could benefit from that aura, since potential followers believed he was ruthless, in a kind of feedback loop. One former member told me that he never questioned that the party had to be structured in a very top-down, authoritarian manner because that would be needed to carry out a revolution in Britain. In general, I think many people who stuck with Healy accepted the verbal and physical abuse because they believed it was necessary to maintain discipline or because the revolution was more important than their own personal well-being.”[3]

Beatty supplies no new evidence and repeats every slanderous accusation against Healy and the SLL. David North replies to this piece of garbage history, “Libelous” is the appropriate word. Healy and the Socialist Labour League went to court to demand that two publications that had printed the allegations—Socialist Leader and Peace News—retract the story and issue a public apology to Gerry Healy. “A conscientious historian, adhering to the appropriate standards of scholarship, would have carefully researched all available sources to uncover what actually occurred in 1966. But Beatty is not a principled scholar. His book is anti-Trotskyist hack work”.[4]

Beatty’s biography relies heavily on oral history. However, his interviews are all with former members of the SLL/WRP who have personal axes to grind or are renegades from Trotskyism, such as Tariq Ali, who is an outright political scoundrel with a history of betrayal as long as my arm. Beatty’s interviews were not conducted critically, and the majority, if not all, testimonies in the book are unreliable. North says, “ 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, and 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”.

Suffice it to say Beatty did not ask me for an interview, which I would have refused and told him where to go. On a personal note, I joined the WRP in 1982/83. I think my probation period was nine months, a record inside the Trotskyist movement. The first few years were difficult for me, and I left just before the split occurred. I had no idea how politically sick the WRP was at the time. Perhaps the highlight was being taken to Vanessa Redgrave's house just before the split. She was supposedly downsizing and wanted to get rid of her Library. I paid her a lot and got many books, including the proof copy of One Long Night: A Tale of Truth by Maria Joffe, translated by V. Dixon. If Mr North is reading this article, I would like to donate it to your Library where it belongs.

After the split, I joined the Minority and had the best time of my life, politically speaking. As Lenin was fond of saying, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” That is exactly what happened during the split.

I only met Healy twice. He was cordial and polite. The first time was at an international Workers' school in Derbyshire before the split. There was a lot of confusion there, and I left early. It was probably the worst decision of my political career as I missed the opportunity to meet and talk to the international comrades from the ICFI. I heard Healy speak three times twice before the split and once after it. Despite the political degeneration that was taking place, Healy was still a fantastic speaker. To see him in his prime would have been a sight to behold. The third time I heard him was after the split. He was a broken man, both physically and politically. He was the leader of the Marxist Party, and they held a public meeting in London. The ICFI wanted to tape the meeting and had planned an intervention. During Healy’s speech, I cannot remember what he said a member of the French section of the ICFI  got up and accused Healy of capitulating to Pabloite opportunism. Suffice it to say you could have heard a pin drop. Unfortunately, my tape machine hidden inside my jacket ended, and a very audible click was heard. I was immediately manhandled out of the meeting by a phalanx of goons, and my machine was stripped of its tape. Before Professor Beatty rips this story out of context and uses it to justify his lie that Healy was a violent maniac, I would like to say that at no time in my albeit brief time in the WRP did I feel threatened or witness any violence towards me or others.

This brings me to Beatty’s motive for writing such a book. It must be said Beatty’s book is not the only diatribe written against the Trotskyist movement. Beatty’s soulmate in anti-Trotskyism is John Kelly, who is still an avowed Stalinist and has written two books recently.[5]

Beatty’s book is different in the respect that it is factionally motivated. North explains, “ What then is the connection between Beatty’s so-called Healy biography and his denunciation of the SEP and WSWS in the Epilogue? It is a dishonest attempt to link Healy’s abusive behaviour in the 1970s and 1980s to the Marxist class-based politics of the Socialist Equality Party.

Beatty writes: “The SEP has its roots in the Workers League that had once been led by Tim Wohlforth and closely influenced by Gerry Healy. Developing the ideas it learned from the WRP, the SEP’s privileging of class over all else has ended up not just downplaying race and gender, but outright sexism and racism.” [6]

North says, “By this point, the political motivations underlying Beatty’s book become all too clear. He is writing not as a historian but as a political flack for the Democratic Party. He denounces the SEP for its “ultra-leftist perspectives on current events and bad faith attacks on the recent crop of democratic socialist politicians, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez especially, but also Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.”  What he calls “bad faith” is the well-known Marxist critique of the middle-class political agents of imperialism.

The last words of this article should be from David North. “Whatever the truth may be, one thing is certain: with the writing of this miserable book, Mr. Beatty has dealt a blow to his professional reputation from which it will never recover. Despite the tragic character of his final years, Gerry Healy will be remembered as a significant figure in the history of the British working class and the international struggle for socialism. All that he contributed to the defence of the revolutionary perspective against the betrayals and crimes of the Stalinists and social democrats over many decades will not be forgotten. But unhappily for Beatty, the fate of books and their authors are inextricably linked. The evil men write lives after them. This is the book for which Beatty will be remembered.”.

---

[1] George Orwell: A Life Paperback – 30 July 1992

[2] 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

[3] The Damage Gerry Healy Wrought-Jacobin.com/2024/09/gerry-healy-trotskyism-wrp

[4] Jacobin and DSA member Aidan Beatty falsify the so-called “Tate Affair” www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/10/01/kifs-o01.htm

[5] See Two books by John Kelly-keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/10/two-books-by-john-kelly.html

[6] The Party is Always Right-The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism page 137- https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745348728/the-party-is-always-right/

Trotskyism without history: John Kelly's sociology of the British far left

John Kelly's book offers an encyclopaedia of the British far left while evacuating the political content of the struggle for Trotskyism. It is useful as a catalogue of membership figures and newspaper sales. As a guide to the fight for Marxism in the working class, it is worse than useless.

Kelly, professor of industrial relations at Birkbeck, University of London, and a former member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, set out to fill what he and his reviewers agree was a genuine gap. No book-length study of British Trotskyism had appeared since John Callaghan's British Trotskyism in the mid-1980s. The book appeared in March 2018, at the height of the media and Labour right's "Trotskyist entryism" scare against Jeremy Corbyn's supporters.

The timing explains much of its reception. Kelly's central message to the ruling class was reassuring: the "Trots" are few, divided and condemned by their own doctrine to irrelevance. His message to the middle-class left was equally comforting: whatever good Trotskyists have done, they have done by setting their programme aside and building broad campaigns within the confines of capitalism.

Both conclusions rest on a method that treats the history of the Fourth International as a problem in the sociology of religion. Trotskyism is reduced to a fixed "doctrine", its parties to "sects", and its history to a ledger of splits. What disappears is the content of those splits: the political questions over which they were fought, and which class forces each tendency came to represent.

Party, sect and movement: Kelly's framework

Kelly defines the Trotskyist organisation as an "organisational hybrid" of three forms borrowed from political science and the sociology of religion: the electoral party, the doctrinal sect and the social movement. Each pulls in a different direction, and the tension between them, he argues, explains both the movement's survival and its failure.

On this scaffolding he builds a typology. Trotsky's ideas are reduced to nine "core elements" of doctrine. The movement is then divided into seven "families" according to how closely each adheres to them: Mainstream, Third Camp, Orthodox, Institutional, Radical, Workerist and Latin American. In Britain the main lineages are assigned as follows: the International Marxist Group to the Mainstream, the IS/SWP to the Third Camp, the Healy organisation (SLL/WRP) to the Orthodox, and Militant and its successors to the Institutional family.

The empirical apparatus is substantial. Kelly counts 22 Trotskyist organisations in Britain in 2017 and a combined membership of roughly 9,500. He periodises the movement into formation (1932–49), the "bleak years" (1950–65), a "golden age" (1966–85) peaking above 20,000 members, "disintegration" (1985–2004) and "stasis" since. Separate chapters treat elections, trade unions, finances, recruitment and five campaigns: the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, the Anti-Nazi League, the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, the Stop the War Coalition and the People's Assembly.

Kelly's verdict is that Trotskyism is "remarkably resilient" yet has failed in every one of its strategic goals. The cause, he insists, lies in the doctrine itself: a fixed body of 1930s formulas, defended by sectarian organisations that split whenever doctrinal purity is at stake.

A method that cannot see politics

The weakness of the framework is not a matter of detail. It is built into the method. A Marxist programme is not a catechism but a scientific perspective: an analysis of the objective development of world capitalism and of the tasks it poses to the working class. Its correctness is tested in the class struggle. To classify parties by their "distance" from a list of nine propositions, as one might classify churches by their deviations from a creed, is to abandon in advance any judgement of whether those propositions were true.

Kelly never asks the question that matters: which tendency's analysis was confirmed by events? Did Stalinism, as Trotsky insisted, prepare the restoration of capitalism in the USSR? Did the post-war boom resolve the contradictions of world capitalism, or merely postpone them? Were the bourgeois nationalist regimes of the former colonies capable of carrying through the democratic revolution? These were the issues over which the Fourth International divided. In Kelly's account they appear only as "doctrinal differences", as interchangeable as the theological disputes of rival sects.

The result is a peculiar flattening. Groups of a dozen members are given the same analytical weight as organisations of thousands, because each is a data point in the typology. The splits themselves become the explanandum, attributed to a psychological disposition toward schism that Kelly traces back to Trotsky himself. That Trotsky fought for a decade to reform the Communist International before concluding, after Hitler's victory in 1933, that a new International was necessary, sits awkwardly with this thesis.

There is also the matter of perspective in the literal sense. Kelly came to the study of Trotskyism from the Communist Party of Great Britain, a party whose political tradition rested for decades on the slanders of the Moscow Trials. He does not repeat those slanders. But the conception that Trotskyism is an ideological aberration, sealed off from reality and doomed to irrelevance, is the academic residue of the same political tradition.

The missing chapter: Pabloism and the split of 1953

The decisive omission in Contemporary Trotskyism is the struggle against Pabloite revisionism. Kelly's reviewers in the SWP's own press noted that he passes quickly over the crisis of the 1940s. From the standpoint of the International Committee, that crisis is the key to everything that followed.

In 1951 Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, then leading the Fourth International's secretariat, advanced the thesis that the Stalinist bureaucracies, social-democratic parties and bourgeois nationalist movements could be pushed by objective pressures into playing a revolutionary role. The perspective of building independent Trotskyist parties was replaced by "deep entry" into these organisations. In November 1953 James P. Cannon, on behalf of the American Socialist Workers Party, issued the Open Letter that founded the International Committee of the Fourth International in opposition to this liquidationist line. The British section under Gerry Healy joined the IC.

This split was not a schism over doctrine. It was a conflict over class orientation: whether the working class must build its own revolutionary leadership, or whether the Trotskyist movement should dissolve itself into the existing bureaucratic and petty-bourgeois apparatuses. Every subsequent division in British Trotskyism, from the Mandelite IMG's orientation to student radicalism, to Militant's decades inside the Labour Party, to the SWP's adaptation to the trade union bureaucracy, can be traced to positions on this question.

Kelly's "families" obscure this. The IMG appears as "Mainstream" Trotskyism, when it represented the Pabloite tendency that the IC had fought. Militant's long-term entry into Labour appears as an "Institutional" variant, rather than as an adaptation to reformism of precisely the type the 1953 split opposed. Strip the political content from these differences and the history of the Fourth International becomes what Kelly says it is: a series of inexplicable quarrels.

"Influence" as adaptation: social movements, Labour and Corbyn

The chapter most praised by Kelly's reviewers on the left is the one on social movements. Here, it is said, the Trotskyists did real good: the Anti-Nazi League against the National Front, the Anti-Poll Tax Federation against Thatcher, the Stop the War Coalition against the invasion of Iraq.

Kelly's own findings tell a different story. He shows that success in these campaigns rarely translated into growth for the organisations that led them; the SWP and Militant both lost members at the height of the ANL and the poll tax campaign respectively. His explanation is that movement success required downplaying the revolutionary programme. He means this as a criticism of the programme. It is, in fact, an exact description of opportunism.

Stop the War is the clearest case. In February 2003 up to two million marched in London. The coalition's leadership channelled that opposition into appeals to Labour MPs and the United Nations, while sharing platforms with Labour lefts and Liberal Democrats. The war went ahead. No independent political movement of the working class emerged, because none was fought for. Kelly's own conditions for movement success (limited goals, a muted programme, a broad coalition of social forces) describe this course exactly. From a Marxist standpoint it was a demonstration of the political bankruptcy of the pseudo-left.

The same applies to Corbyn. Kelly's book was promoted against the background of the "Trotskyist entryism" scare, and its numbers deflated that scare effectively. But the real role of the pseudo-left groups was not to infiltrate Labour but to promote illusions in Corbyn as a vehicle for socialism. The result is now history: Corbyn's capitulation to the Labour right on NATO, Trident, antisemitism smears and Brexit, the 2019 defeat, and the installation of Keir Starmer. A study that measures "influence" by proximity to official politics cannot register that this influence was exercised against the working class.

1985: the collapse of the WRP and its meaning

Kelly dates the end of the "golden age" to 1985, when the Workers Revolutionary Party exploded amid revelations of Gerry Healy's sexual abuse of members. In his account this is the moment of "disintegration", the sect consuming itself.

What the sociological lens cannot register is that the WRP's collapse was the end product of a political degeneration. From the early 1970s the WRP leadership abandoned the struggle against Pabloism it had once led. It substituted activism and spectacular claims of membership for the theoretical education of cadre. It reduced dialectical materialism to an idealist mysticism, and it cultivated unprincipled relations with bourgeois nationalist regimes in the Middle East. The International Committee documented this record in How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism, 1973–1985 (1986).

The outcome was not merely a split but a clarification. The ICFI suspended the WRP in December 1985 and severed relations in February 1986. Its British supporters formed the International Communist Party, which became the Socialist Equality Party in 1996. The IC majority reaffirmed the principles of 1953 and turned to the analysis of globalised production, which it concluded had undermined every nationally based programme, from Stalinism to Labourism.

None of this features in Kelly's ledger as anything other than another fracture. Yet it was the only development in post-war British Trotskyism that produced a principled reckoning with the movement's own history, set out in David North's The Heritage We Defend (1988). It also produced the ICFI's 1988 perspectives resolution, The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, which analysed how global production was transforming the trade unions and reformist parties into instruments of corporate and state policy.

Conclusion: the twilight that wasn't

Kelly followed this book with The Twilight of World Trotskyism (Routledge, 2023), which drops the British typology and states the thesis plainly: Trotskyism is a historical relic whose doctrine guarantees its extinction. There he singles out the ICFI's January 2020 perspective, "The decade of socialist revolution begins", as the epitome of "Orthodox" doctrinairism.

In his report to the Ninth Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US) in August 2026, David North answered that every premise of Kelly's alternative has since been refuted: the durability of bourgeois democracy, the impossibility of world war, and the prospect of "social reform" within the parameters of capitalism. The six years since 2020 have brought a pandemic that killed millions, the Gaza genocide, the NATO–Russia war in Ukraine, the US–Israeli war on Iran, the rearmament of Europe and the turn to dictatorship in Washington.

Contemporary Trotskyism should be judged in this light. Its tables of membership and paper sales are a useful record of the organisations that called themselves Trotskyist in Britain. But its method treats as a weakness the one thing that distinguishes Marxism from the academic study of social movements: the insistence that politics must be grounded in an objective analysis of the epoch and tested against the historical record.

The question is not how many groups claim Trotsky's name, but which has defended his programme against every form of opportunism. That history is to be found not in Kelly's typology, but in the documents of the struggle against Pabloism and in the record of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Bibliography

The book under review

• Kelly, John. Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain. Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. xiv + 295 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-94379-7 (hbk); 978-1-138-94381-0 (pbk); 978-1-315-67104-8 (ebk).

Other works by Kelly

• Kelly, John. Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. London: Verso, 1988.
• Kelly, John. "The discursive reconstruction of poor electoral performance: the British Trotskyist left and the 2010 General Election." Journal of Political Ideologies 21, no. 1 (2016): 78–98.
• Kelly, John. "Should Labour worry about Trotskyists in the Party?" LSE British Politics and Policy blog, 2018.
• Kelly, John. "The consolation of familiar ideas: a reply to Christian Høgsbjerg." International Socialism 161 (2019).
• Kelly, John. The Twilight of World Trotskyism. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023.

Reviews and responses

• Birchall, Ian. "Was it all futile?" Public Seminar, 14 July 2018 (first published in Review 31).
• Blackledge, Paul. "The Prophet's Children: Parties, Sects, and Revolution." Labour/Le Travail 94 (Fall 2024): 297–330.
• Choonara, Joseph. "Trotskyism under the Spotlight." Socialist Review 436 (June 2018).
• Høgsbjerg, Christian. "Trotskyology." International Socialism 160 (October 2018).
• Ledwith, Sean. "In the British Footsteps of the Prophet." Historical Materialism book reviews, 23 November 2019.
• North, David. "An assessment of the decade of socialist revolution and the tasks of the Socialist Equality Party." World Socialist Web Site, 11 August 2026.
• Snowdon, Alex. "Contemporary Trotskyism – book review." Counterfire, 10 January 2019.

The history of the Fourth International

• Bornstein, Sam, and Al Richardson. Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1924–38. London: Socialist Platform, 1986.
• Bornstein, Sam, and Al Richardson. War and the International: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1937–49. London: Socialist Platform, 1986.
• Callaghan, John. British Trotskyism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.
• Callinicos, Alex. Trotskyism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990.
• Cannon, James P. "A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World" (the Open Letter, November 1953). In Trotskyism versus Revisionism, vol. 1. London: New Park, 1974.
• International Committee of the Fourth International. How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism, 1973–1985. Detroit: Labor Publications, 1986.
• International Committee of the Fourth International. The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988.
• North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988.
• Smith, Evan, and Matthew Worley, eds. Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.
• Trotsky, Leon. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Program). 1938.

 

  

A professor writes an obituary for the Fourth International

John Kelly's slim volume declares the Trotskyist movement dead. It is, in reality, a document of the political demoralisation of a layer of former Stalinist and reformist academics, written at the very moment the crisis of world capitalism is vindicating the analysis they reject.

John Kelly's The Twilight of World Trotskyism is less a work of history than a death notice. Its author, an emeritus professor of industrial relations at Birkbeck, University of London, opens the preface by announcing that the Trotskyist movement has an "unparalleled record of political failure." [1][3] The six chapters that follow—on the origins of Trotskyism, its "four main centres" in Argentina, Britain, France and the United States, its present condition, its "dynamics," the reasons for its marginality, and finally its supposed twilight—are arranged to prove that verdict. [1]

The late 2022 publication date is not without irony. The book appeared as the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine threatened to spiral into a nuclear confrontation, as inflation drove the largest wave of strikes in Britain in decades, and as the ruling classes everywhere responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by placing profits before human life. Since then, the imperialist powers have armed and defended the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the second Trump administration has moved openly toward dictatorship. Under these conditions, an academic study proclaiming that revolution is a delusion and that the only realistic politics is accumulating reforms within capitalism performs a definite social function.

Kelly is not a neutral observer. As a sympathetic reviewer in Ebb magazine notes, he wrote his first major critique of Trotsky's views on the trade unions in the 1980s as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, then moving toward Eurocommunism. [2] His hostility to Trotsky's analysis of the trade union bureaucracy has remained constant since. In January 2024, he co-authored a column in Times Higher Education blaming the "Trotskyist" politics of the UCU Left for repeated university strikes, which he and his co-author characterised as futile. [6] Twilight is the theoretical companion piece to that intervention on behalf of university management and the union apparatus.

Counting letterheads instead of analysing history

Kelly's method is that of the sociologist of sects. He tabulates organisations, membership estimates and election results, and finds that in 2022 some 32 rival bodies were claiming to be the Fourth International, with 21 competing groups in Britain alone. [4][5] From this inventory he concludes that Trotskyism has never led a revolution, won a national election or built a lasting mass party, and never will.

The explanation he offers is a single, timeless "Trotskyist doctrine." Kelly lists nine elements: the theory of permanent revolution, the united front, transitional demands, the democratic-centralist vanguard party, the Fourth International as a new revolutionary leadership, the rank-and-file struggle against the trade union bureaucracy, the critique of the Stalinist states, revolution as the seizure of power, and the characterisation of the imperialist epoch as one of wars and revolutions. [4] The failures of the movement, he insists, are "chronic, persistent and pervasive" because they flow from this doctrine rather than from circumstances, mistakes or poor leadership. [4]

Even sympathetic readers have noted how thin the empirical basis for this sweeping verdict is. The Ebb reviewer points out that, unlike Kelly's 2018 study of British Trotskyism, the new book contains no fresh interviews, relies heavily on secondary literature, and largely abandons the typology of Trotskyist "families" that gave the earlier work what nuance it had. [2]

But the deeper problem is not a shortage of data. It is the method itself. To measure a revolutionary tendency by the number of its members and votes in periods of reaction is to apply the standards of bourgeois electoral politics to a movement whose programme was formulated against those standards. By that measure, Marx in the 1850s and Lenin in 1914 were also failures. The validity of a Marxist programme depends on whether it correctly anticipates the course of history and arms the working class to intervene in it. By that criterion, Trotsky's warnings of the catastrophe Stalinist policy would produce in Germany, and his prognosis in The Revolution Betrayed that the bureaucracy would ultimately restore capitalism in the Soviet Union, were confirmed in 1933 and again in 1991.

The struggle against Pabloism disappears.

Kelly defines as Trotskyist every organisation that claims the label, irrespective of whether rival groups dispute the claim. [4] This seemingly neutral definition is, in fact, the central falsification of the book. It dissolves into a single "doctrine" the decisive conflict in the history of the Fourth International after the Second World War: the struggle between Marxism and revisionism.

In the early 1950s, Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, adapting to the postwar restabilisation of capitalism and the apparent strength of the Stalinist bureaucracy, advanced the perspective that the Stalinist parties, social democracy and bourgeois nationalist movements could be pressured to the left and would carry through the socialist revolution in place of the Fourth International. The practical conclusion was to liquidate independent Trotskyist parties into these organisations. In November 1953, James P. Cannon's Open Letter rallied the orthodox Trotskyists against this programme and led to the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).

Kelly's catalogue of 32 rival Internationals is, to a very large extent, a catalogue of the products of Pabloite revisionism: organisations that retained the name of Trotskyism while discarding its programme and orienting to whatever force—Castroism, Maoism, guerrillaism, Labour lefts, trade union bureaucrats or "broad left" parties such as Syriza and Podemos—appeared to offer a shortcut. Their fragmentation does not prove the sterility of Trotsky's programme; it reflects its abandonment.

Kelly's contempt for "Orthodox Trotskyism" in particular is barely concealed. Closing his penultimate chapter, he quips that its forces are being "carried into oblivion by the laws of biology." [2] Elsewhere, as Paul Blackledge notes, his example of Trotskyist "doctrine" in action is Gerry Healy's Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). [4] But Kelly's schema has no place for the fact that it was the International Committee itself that, in 1985–86, broke with Healy, Michael Banda and Cliff Slaughter and exposed in detail how the WRP leadership had, over the preceding decade, abandoned the theory of permanent revolution and the struggle against Pabloism in favour of unprincipled relations with bourgeois nationalist regimes and the Labour and trade union bureaucracies. That struggle was waged based on precisely the principles Kelly dismisses as dogma. It laid the foundation for transforming the ICFI's sections into Socialist Equality Parties and launching the World Socialist Web Site in 1998.

Sri Lanka, Bolivia and the price of opportunism

The two cases in which Trotskyists won mass influence—Sri Lanka and Bolivia—are treated by Kelly as near-exceptions, explained away because in both countries a Trotskyist party existed before a Stalinist one could take root. [3] What he does not draw out is how both ended.

In Sri Lanka, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), once the leading party of the island's working class, entered Sirimavo Bandaranaike's bourgeois coalition government in June 1964. This "Great Betrayal" was prepared by years of adaptation to parliamentarism and Sinhala populism, sanctioned in practice by the Pabloite leadership in Paris. Its consequences—the subordination of the working class to Sinhala chauvinism, the abandonment of the Tamil-speaking workers and the slide toward three decades of communal civil war—remain a central lesson of the 20th century. In Bolivia, the Revolutionary Workers Party (POR) of Guillermo Lora, leading an armed working class in 1952, extended political support to the bourgeois nationalist MNR government instead of fighting for workers' power, and the revolution was strangled.

These were not the failures of Trotskyism, but of its repudiation. Kelly's thesis, that Trotskyists failed because they held too rigidly to principle, turns reality on its head. Where parties bearing the name won a mass following, they were destroyed not by "doctrinairism" but by opportunism.

The same evasion characterises Kelly's treatment of the objective obstacles confronting the Fourth International. As Shamus Cooke observes in Cosmonaut, Kelly acknowledges that Trotskyists were jailed or murdered in China, Vietnam, Greece and Cuba, only to ask a few pages later why they played so small a role in those revolutions. [3] Stalinism did not merely compete with Trotskyism. It conducted a political genocide against it: the extermination of the Left Opposition and of the generation of Marxists who made the October Revolution in the Great Terror, the murders of Leon Sedov, Rudolf Klement and Ignace Reiss, and the assassination of Trotsky himself in 1940. Add to this the postwar boom, which provided the material basis for the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies for three decades, and the isolation of the Trotskyist movement requires no recourse to a mythical sectarian essence.

Applause from the Stalinists, complaints from the pseudo-left

It is entirely fitting that the Morning Star, the daily of the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain, gave Kelly's book the warmest welcome. Its reviewer, John Green, recommended the book as an insightful look at a movement driven by dogmatism and a personality cult, and singled out Kelly's insistence that history cannot be reduced to "a crude contraposition of a heroic Bolshevism and a Stalinist tyranny." [5]

There is the political heart of the matter. Kelly's amalgam of Bolshevism, Trotskyism and Stalinism is the old thesis of the Cold War historians and the Stalinist falsifiers alike: that the October Revolution led inevitably to the bureaucratic dictatorship, and that Trotsky was merely a defeated rival in the same camp. It erases the irreconcilable class antagonism between the Left Opposition, which defended the programme of world socialist revolution, and the nationalist bureaucracy that destroyed it in the name of "socialism in one country." The Stalinists understandably welcome any work that obliterates that distinction.

The pseudo-left's responses are no less revealing. In Cosmonaut, Shamus Cooke defends Trotskyism by citing the Militant Tendency's role in the anti-poll tax campaign, Kshama Sawant's seats on Seattle City Council, the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union and the mass protests against the Iraq war. [3] Writing in Labour/Le Travail, Paul Blackledge of the state capitalist tradition argues that Kelly fails to distinguish the relatively influential Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party from the sects, and holds up Tony Cliff's revision of Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union as the road out of the ghetto. [4]

In each case, Trotskyism is defended precisely to the extent that it has ceased to be Trotskyism—by its adaptation to municipal electoralism, to the trade union apparatus and to middle-class protest politics. Kelly's critics share his criterion of success: numbers, influence and respectability within the existing institutions. Blackledge goes further, joining Kelly in identifying the defence of the Transitional Programme by Cannon and the orthodox Trotskyists after 1945 as the source of sectarian dogma. [4] On the essential question—whether the working class requires a revolutionary party, independent of and opposed to the bureaucracies, based on the historical continuity of the Fourth International—Kelly and his left critics stand on the same side of the barricade.

Whose twilight?

The book's most revealing passage is Kelly's attempt to refute the Trotskyist claim that the epoch of capitalist reformism is over. Against it, he lists the European Union's worker rights directives, minimum wage and anti-discrimination laws, the legalisation of same-sex marriage and abortion, the spread of multiparty elections in Latin America and Africa, and the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. [2] Even the Ebb reviewer, no friend of Trotskyism, found this rosy picture of global progress astonishing. [2]

Read today, the list indicts its author. The "collapse" Kelly celebrates was the restoration of capitalism by the bureaucracy, which plunged hundreds of millions into poverty and led directly to the wars now raging in Eastern Europe. The "Social Europe" of directives is spending hundreds of billions on rearmament while imposing austerity. In the United States, the right to abortion was overturned by the Supreme Court in the very year Kelly's book appeared, and the Trump administration is assembling the apparatus of a police state. The imperialist powers that Kelly credits with expanding democratic rights have backed the destruction of Gaza. Far from a renewal of reformism, the past four years have seen every reformist party and trade union apparatus decompose into an open instrument of the state.

Kelly's book is itself evidence of this process. A layer of former Stalinists and reformists, which once looked to the Soviet bureaucracy and the Labour Party for the gradual improvement of capitalism, has lost faith in everything except capitalism's stability. Unable to imagine the working class as a revolutionary force, they project their own pessimism onto history.

Trotsky founded the Fourth International in 1938 on the understanding that "the historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership." That assessment has never been more relevant. The objective conditions—global war, the deepest crisis of the capitalist system since the 1930s, the growth of social inequality to staggering levels, and the turn of the ruling classes toward fascism—are driving the working class into struggle internationally. What is required is not abandoning the programme of the Fourth International, but having a new generation of workers and youth assimilate it.

It is not Trotskyism that is entering its twilight, but the reformist illusions on which Professor Kelly has built his career.

Notes

1. Routledge, publisher's page for The Twilight of World Trotskyism: table of contents and author biography.
2. Daniel Frost, "The Twilight of World Trotskyism", Ebb magazine (review). Source for Kelly's CPGB background, the book's reliance on secondary literature, his list of reforms (pp. 77–79) and the "laws of biology" remark (p. 99).
3. Shamus Cooke, "R.I.P. or Long Live Trotskyism?", Cosmonaut, 24 January 2023. Source for the preface's opening sentence and Kelly's treatment of Sri Lanka and Bolivia.
4. Paul Blackledge, "The Prophet's Children: Parties, Sects, and Revolution", Labour/Le Travail 94 (Fall 2024): 297–330. Source for Kelly's nine-point "doctrine" (p. 2), the count of Internationals and British groups (pp. 41, 107) and the "chronic, persistent and pervasive" passage (p. 105).
5. John Green, "The political cul-de-sac of Trotskyism", Morning Star (review).
6. John Kelly and Adam Ozanne, "UCU Left's Trotskyist politics are driving UK HE's perennial strikes", Times Higher Education, January 2024.

Page references to Kelly's book are as given in the reviews cited.

Bibliography

The book under review and Kelly's related work

• Kelly, John. The Twilight of World Trotskyism. London: Routledge, 2022 (copyright 2023). Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics.
• Kelly, John. Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain. London: Routledge, 2018.
• Kelly, John. Trade Unions and Socialist Politics. London: Verso, 1988.

Reviews and responses

• Blackledge, Paul. "The Prophet's Children: Parties, Sects, and Revolution." Labour/Le Travail 94 (2024): 297–330.
• Cooke, Shamus. "R.I.P. or Long Live Trotskyism?" Cosmonaut, 24 January 2023.
• Frost, Daniel. "The Twilight of World Trotskyism." Ebb magazine.
• Green, John. "The political cul-de-sac of Trotskyism." Morning Star.

Trotsky and the history of the Fourth International

• Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. 1936.
• Trotsky, Leon. The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (The Transitional Programme). 1938.
• Cannon, James P. "A Letter to Trotskyists Throughout the World" (the Open Letter). The Militant, 16 November 1953.
• International Committee of the Fourth International. How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism, 1973–1985. 1986.
• North, David. The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International. Detroit: Labour Publications, 1988.
• Socialist Equality Party (US). The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party. Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2008.
• Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka). The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party (Sri Lanka). 2011.