End of the road for a sect platform invited to make contributions were Alan Thornett, (expelled in 1973); a representative of the Lambertist group in Britain (the Socialist Labour Group); and, speaking as a Socialist Action supporter, Connie Harris (expelled in 1960). Socialist Actions were well received by those
IN LATE OCTOBER and early November the British media turned its full attention to a bizarre sect, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP).
For several weeks headlines ran like: "Red in the Bed Scandal" and
"Girls Lured to Red Gerry's Casting Couch". The cause of this was the revelation, following the expulsion by the WRP's Central Committee on a majority vote (27 to 11) of 73-year-old Gerry Healy, for several decades the cult leader of the organisation and its predecessor, the Socialist Labour League. Healy was accused, amongst other things of having abused his authority to force sexual relations between him and 26 young women party members.
PETE CLIFFORD
Whilst the bourgeois press was able the WRP to drive forward its witch hunting attacks on the left as a whole, socialists in Britain also welcomed this rupture in Healy's organisation.
the course of events since then have begun to unravel and confirm for the workers movement as a whole what a of Marxism Healy and his now led by General Secretary Michael
Banda and university lecturer Cliff
Slaughter have the support of two their organisation, probably about 500 members (and certainly nowhere near the 10,000 Healy always claimed for members).
A much smaller breakaway group, also calling itself the WRP, claims to have expelled the minority and is still supporting Healy.
It is led by Alex
Mitchell, a prominent journalist for
Healy's press, and well-known actors
Redgrave and her brother
Healy's international organised in the so-called International
Committee of the Fourth International'
(ICFI) have also divided. The majority including organisations or supporters in America,
Australia, Ireland,
Peru,
Sri Lanka and Germany have endorsed
Healy's expulsion; whilst a minority,
Greek and
Spanish including the organisations along with Healy's supporters in Britain claim to have expelled the rest and back Healy.
Clearly the roots of this divide lie the allegations of Healy's beyond abuse of power. The Banda-Slaughter
International Viewpoint 13 January 1986
Newsline now points to Healy's reduction of the class struggle to a permanent revolutionary situation -an insurrection or fascism round every corner - out of which, through the super-activism of the membership, the masses could be won direct to his outfit. From this ultra-left view came the necessity to have daily papers and an apparatus bloated out of all proportion to the size of the organisation, and its class struggle.
The Banda-Slaughter supporters now allege that Healy prettified the politics of Middle Eastern leaders from Ghadaffi to the Iraqi government in order to secure financial assistance for this. They claim this went to the depths of the WRP endorsing the murder of 21 Iraqi communists in 1979 and supplying photos to the Iraqi Embassy in Britain of Iraqi dissidents.
Along with what Slaughter calls this 'opportunist sect', came a regime which allowed Healy, the party's guru, to expel bureaucratically, physically bully members who were not subservient to him and sexually assault women members.
In reply the Healy supporters do not deny any of the charges. They simply explain that the Banda-Slaughter group cannot take the pace politically and are moving to the "extreme right"!
In order to break with Healy, the Banda-Slaughter WRP are having to open themselves outwards and grapple with their past. In late November the WRP held a London public meeting on attending. Also sold were forty copies of Healy's Big Lie - a collection of statements by revolutionists throughout the world answering Healy's slander methods.
The main platform speaker, Cliff Slaughter, explained to the meeting: "We cannot separate ourselves from Healy by just his expulsion, we have to take responsibility for what happened. ..many of those who left (the WRP) are in better shape to fight Healy than those who stayed." To be sure, both Slaughter and Banda were themselves responsible for, and central to, the "Healy clique" for over 25 years.
These statements and recent developments present an important opportunity for Marxists. Firstly because this split enables us to re-examine and explain the consequences of ultra-lett sectarianism, in particular the result of Healy's turning away from the vast majority of Marxists who re-unified the Fourth International in 1963 and instead establishing his own fake International Committee of the Fourth International. Secondly because if those who break from Healy are really to confront their past, they will have to make their reference point the traditions of our movement from Marx and Lenin to Trotsky's fight for the Fourth International. Healy's big lie tactics
There is today the possibility of a dialogue with some of these forces breaking from Healy which can affect their political evolution. Finally, the Healy clique has politically insulated the WRP from the Fourth International through the method of lies, slanders and frame-ups. They have particularly used this against the US SWP in the mid-1970s. Joe Hanson and George Novack, long time leaders of the SWP and collaborators of Trotsky, were accused by the WRP of being agents of the Soviet GPU which murdered Trotsky. Later, the present leadership of the SWP were branded as FBI agents. Today there is still a court action in the USA pending by a WRP US Workers League agent - Alan Gelfand - to this effect.
Now, with the same methods being
17
applied to his former collaborators -Healy accuses David North, leader of the US Workers League and Banda/ ICFI supporter of being a CIA agent -the opportunity exists to set the record straight on these gross allegations and focus on the political issues at stake.
This re-examination of 'Healyism' however, cannot focus, as Slaughter indicates, primarily on the last ten years. It has to grapple with two key features of the WRP's sectarian past -its stance towards living revolutions and its position on the British Labour
In the post-war period Fourth Internationalists were both bitterly divided and suffering from isolation imposed by the right wing political situation and the weight of Stalinism in the labour movement. The process of re-unifying the Fourth International was encouraged by a positive response by the bulk of those calling themselves Trotskyists to forces breaking form the CPs, after the Hungary events of about Stalin. This was accelerated by an enthusiastic response to the Cuban
As James P Cannon, a leader of the US SWP wrote at the time "what would our talk about revolution be worth if we couldn't recognise a revolution when we see it?" Healy could not fit his rigid notions of 'theory' to the events: the revolution began as a national democratic one, and the Castro-led July 26 movement from the Trotskyist tradition. Instead of re-examining his theory, Healy junked the revolution
Indeed it was Banda who said "there is little or no difference in the type of state set up by Castro or Battista" (Newsletter June 18, 1966).
Turning his back on the Cuban revolution and the new forces of the international class struggle, the Healy clique split from the majority of the International Fourth International which unified the International Secretariat in 1963 and thereby drew to an end the ten year period of division of Fourth Inter-
Alongside this turn away from the new revolutionary forces who internationally could contribute to the resolving of the crisis of leadership came a turn by the Healy clique away from the British Labour Party. In place of the tremendous advances the SLI (the WRP predecessor) had made as a tendency throughout the the Labour Party which linked-up with the left-wing Bevanite movement, Healy began to separate himself from this key focus for the struggle for leadership in Britain inside the Labour Party.
Instead of engaging in the struggle in the organisation that the bulk of 18
Britain's trade unions are aftiliated to, and millions of workers look to and vote for, the Healyites embarked on a binge to cut loose from the Labour Party and its left wing.
As Ernest Germain wrote in Marxism us Ultra Leftism, Healy's political strategy began to look more and more like "third period Stalinism". In 1964 Healy supporters to a large extent set their own expulsion from the Labour Party and its youth wing, the Labour Party Young Socialists, triumphthemselves as alternative to it. To this year the Healyites have ritualistically marched the Labour Party conferences appealing to participants to leave and The test of Action
As the SLL/WRP confronted each new event in the class struggle, so the tragedy turned to farce. Having failed to recognise the Cuban revolution, it is not surprising that the revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada in 1979 for the Healyites merely threw up "bourgeois nationalist leaders" (1983 WRP Congress). In Britain the Healyites to avoid massive popular movements such as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the late 1960s., In 1968 the Healyites leafletted the 100,000 strong London demonstration in support of the Vietnamese struggle for self-determination with a statement titled "Why We Are Not Marching"! Accompanying this ultra-sectarian course was Healy's transformation of Marxist theory away from its purpose as a guide to action into a dogma to justify his isolation. Healy became a self-proclaimed expert on dialectics - which party members swore religiously to uphold without having any comprehension on its application to the living world.
Such a sect inevitably has shock waves sent through it when hit by reality. Two key events in Britain in the last period have assisted this. The first was the Malvinas war, where Healy's paper failed in the first weeks to come out for the defeat of British imperialism in its war against Argentina. It has now been revealed that a sharp debate opened up around this question in the WRP. The second was the shaken up every section of the British labour movement. Forced to confront, on the one hand, the reality of the bosses offensive, and, on the other hand, the rise of the Scargill leadership leadership again outside the ranks of the WRP began to tear WRP stand at the cross roads claiming to want to fight not only Healy but "Healyism". grasped that the roots of Healy's sickness lie in the political ultra-left
Contrary to the claim made by the so-called International Committee of the Fourth International in its statement endorsing the expulsion, there ist nothing positive that Healy has contributed to the movement. In so far as he fought for anything separate or new from our traditions, it has been wildly wrong! In particular to continue the fake battle against "Pabloism" — when for 22 years Pablo has been outside the ranks of the Fourth International - will educate no-one.
If the WRP and its satellite groups are to really confront their past, that cannot be achieved through a re-writing of history within their movement to slate the personal faults of G Healy. Rather it will be achieved by a thorough going break organisationally and politically with their ultra-left sectarianism.
The alternative will be to resurrect Healyism under another name and join those from Lambert to Moreno who have proven unable to recognise the reality of living revolutions and their
Finally, one question will indicate the extent to which the WRP can break from the organisational consequences of its sectarianism - this is a simple and clear cut withdrawal of the slander and frame-up campaign against leaders of the US SWP and other prominent leaders of the Fourth International. (1) Such a step is essential for establishing a meaningful dialogue.
1. The US SWP is prohibited by reactionary legislation from being a section of the Fourth International. It does however collaborate with and work towards the same goals as the Fourth International. International Viewpoint 13 January 1986