This article was written by Bob Pitt and appeared on the What Next? website.

INDEX

Chapter 1 (1913-1944)

Chapter 2 (1944-1950)

Chapter 3 (1950-1955)

Chapter 4 (1955-1958)

Chapter 5 (1958-1960)

Chapter 6 (1960-1964)

Chapter 7 (1965-1968)

Chapter 8 (1968-1971)

Chapter 9 (1971-1975)

Chapter 10 (1975-1985)

Chapter 11 (1985)

Chapter 12 (1986-1989)

Preface

IT’S NOT very often an author begins a book by urging readers to disregard virtually everything that is written in it, but this is one of those rare occasions. Let me explain.

The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy was first published as a series of articles in the paper Workers News, beginning shortly after Healy’s death in 1989. Having spent a couple of years in the Workers Revolutionary Party in the late 1970s, and having been influenced by its politics over a much longer period, I was concerned to find an explanation for the implosion of that organisation in 1985. The conclusion I drew was that the underlying cause of the WRP’s collapse was Healy’s contempt for the basic political principles of Trotskyism.

This, I would argue, was not an entirely stupid conclusion. Reading through the multi-volume Pathfinder collection of Trotsky’s Writings you cannot but be struck by the political intelligence at work there, and by the gulf that separates Trotsky’s method from Healy’s. The best of Trotsky’s writings (his articles on the rise of Nazism in Germany are a case in point) represent a serious attempt to grapple with the complexities of the political situation, in order to reach an objective analysis and outline a practical strategy – a method which contrasts sharply with the subjective fantasy and ultra-left bombast which usually characterised Healy’s approach.

Towards the end of his life, it is true, Trotsky did tend to lose his political grip. The perspectives that inform the Transitional Programme – imminent economic collapse, the redundancy of bourgeois democracy, the threat of fascism as the only alternative to socialism, the expectation that revolutionary conflict was about to break out, and so on – certainly provided the basis for the catastrophism that was a feature of Healy’s political outlook throughout his career. However, as I have argued elsewhere ("The Transitional Programme and the Tasks of Marxists Today", What Next?, No.11, 1998) Trotsky’s false analysis is understandable as a response to the developments he confronted in the 1930s. He was guilty only of mistaking a particularly unstable phase in the development of capitalism for the terminal crisis of the system, and would undoubtedly have reassessed his perspectives had he lived to do so. Healy, on the other hand, continued to parrot these predictions in circumstances where economic expansion, the stability of parliamentary democracy and the distant prospect of revolutionary struggle were self-evident facts.

Having said that, I don’t think that an adequate critique of Healy’s politics is to be found by counterposing Trotskyist orthodoxy to Healy’s combination of infantile leftism and opportunist manoeuvring, as this biographical study does. These days, I would reject much of the Leninist-Trotskyist tradition, which I think serves as an encouragement to sectarianism. As far as political activity in Britain at the present time is concerned, I believe the method of Marx and Engels, with their emphasis on the need for Marxists to participate in existing working class organisations, has far more relevance than the party-building fetishism that distinguishes the various Trotskyist groupings, rendering them irrelevant, disruptive or both. From that standpoint, I would now look more favourably on the experience of the Healy Group in the 1950s, when it did at least try to work in the the broad labour movement. My criticisms of the Healyites’ political practice in that period would now be from the right. Whereas in The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy I condemn them for liquidationism, my present view would be that they weren’t liquidationist enough!

The version of The Rise and Fall of Gerry Healy that appears here is an expansion of the original articles from Workers News. The additional material was, however, incorporated many years ago, and if I were to update the biography now I would almost entirely rewrite it. But I have resisted any temptation to do so. Life, to put it bluntly, is too short.

June 2002

Introduction

In truth, Healy had never been anything more than a very minor political figure, whatever illusions he himself may have had on that score. It was only in Britain that he ever built an organisation of any size or political weight, and even there his achievements were, on the scales of history, extremely modest. At the peak of its strength in the early 1970s the Socialist Labour League, as it then was, had a membership of perhaps two thousand; it produced a daily paper, albeit with a small circulation; it had established a base of support in the trade unions; and it had drawn towards it a radicalised layer in the intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia (not to mention Vanessa Redgrave). But in none of these departments – membership, circulation of its press, industrial base, influence on cultural and intellectual life – did Healy’s organisation even rival the Communist Party of Great Britain, which by general agreement was always one of the weakest components of the official world Communist movement.

Nevertheless, a study of the career of this politically marginal figure is not irrelevant. Over the years, tens of thousands of workers, youth and intellectuals were recruited to Healy’s organisation in Britain. Furthermore, a multitude of organisations worldwide, comprising thousands of militants, still identify with the traditions of the International Committee, the tendency Healy helped to found after the split in the Fourth International in 1953. As for the United Secretariat, the largest of the international Trotskyist tendencies, its British section produces a publication named Socialist Outlook after the paper around which Healy organised his entry work in the Labour Party from 1948 to 1954, and has at times published glowing references to the activity of Healy’s group in the British labour movement of the 1950s. In fact a bewildering variety of groups, many of whom would react with indignation to accusations of ‘Healyism’, lay claim to this or that aspect of Healy’s political legacy. The memory of Thomas Gerard Healy, it might be said, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

What is striking is that those groups which base themselves on, or seek to emulate, episodes from Healy’s past adopt entirely conflicting political approaches in the present. They are able to do this because Healy’s career comprised a series of unprincipled zigzags, in the course of which he furiously denounced political positions which he had earlier enthusiastically supported, and eagerly embraced policies which he had once bitterly opposed – invariably carrying out these abrupt reversals without the slightest trace of self-criticism. Retrospective identification with particular points on Healy’s political trajectory can thus be used to justify virtually any political line: from Stalinophobia to the promotion of illusions in Stalinism’s revolutionary potential; from sectarian abstention on struggles within social democracy to liquidation into left reformism; from a formal defence of the permanent revolution to sycophantic adulation of bourgeois nationalists.

These sudden shifts in political line are not, of course, a feature of the Healyite tradition alone. In the early 1990s the Militant Tendency, whose badge of honour for decades had been its commitment to patient work inside the Labour Party, launched itself into a self-destructive turn towards an independent party. And the Socialist Workers Party, which had for years (quite correctly) opposed calling for a general strike in circumstances where this was demand was unrealisable, raised precisely that slogan in 1992 during the campaign against pit closures – at a time when industrial conflict in Britain was at a historically low level. Healy’s various ‘about turns’ were thus only particularly extreme examples of a method employed by the leaderships of virtually every far left group currently in existence.

For all these reasons, a detailed analysis of Gerry Healy’s political evolution is not merely of historical interest but has direct relevance to the struggle to build a socialist movement today.