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The Robertson School of Party Building the Dust Is Just Beginning to Settle After the Biggest Week the Scandal Broke

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The Robertson School of Party Building the Dust Is Just Beginning to Settle After the Biggest Week the Scandal Broke 1 ‘I Liked Gerry Healy...’ The Robertson School of Party Building The dust is just beginning to settle after the biggest week the scandal broke. Brian Behan, brother of the Irish (and dirtiest) explosion in recent memory among the author Brendan, and a former leading member of international pretenders to Trotskyism: the spectacular Healy’s outfit who left in the early 1960s, wryly asked rupture of the British Workers Revolutionary Party ‘‘What healthy Englishman would not want to join (WRP). Gerry Healy, ‘‘founder-leader’’ of the WRP, and Healy’s party, given its open attitude to promiscuity? I Michael Banda, his long-time majordomo, had a rather have been trying to contact him all week’’ (Sunday Times, nasty public falling out late last October. Banda got the 10 November 1985). bulk of the membership, the real estate and the printing The WRP split can only be a good thing for the revo- plant; Healy kept the Redgraves (movie stars Vanessa lutionary movement in Britain and everywhere else the and brother Corin) and with them what’s left of the Healyites operate. Banda’s widely-publicized admis- WRP’s main ‘‘industrial’’ fraction----in Actor’s Equity. sion of that organization’s long-standing practice of They even split the satellites; the Americans opted for physical attacks on its critics, both internal and external, the mutineers, while the Greeks and Spaniards stayed and its prostitution on behalf of Libya’s Muammar el on with the infallible leader. Qaddafi and various other reactionary Middle East The whole business began last July when Banda and bonapartists can only hasten the necessary and long- Aileen Jennings, Healy’s personal secretary and ‘‘close overdue disappearance of both wings of this foul and personal companion,’’ initiated a palace coup with alle- repulsive gang of cynics. gations that Healy’s sexual activities with 26 female party members represented a potential security risk for SL: Healyism Sui Generis the organization. (This in itself is richly ironic as Healy The deep split in the Healyites has naturally been has been for years one of the world’s foremost practitio- commented on by most of the world’s ostensible Trot- ners of a bogus ‘‘security’’ fetishism as a means for skyist tendencies. But none have paid so much attention smearing his political opponents.) Healy reportedly ac- as the American-based Spartacist League (SL) which quiesced and proffered his resignation from the group’s rushed out a special 64-page issue of their English-lan- active leadership, officially on the grounds of his long guage theoretical journal devoted to the subject. There service and failing health. are several reasons for this attention. The Spartacist He spent the first few weeks of his ‘‘retirement’’ lining grouping originated in the early 1960s as the left oppo- up a majority of the WRP’s Political Committee for a sition within the rightward-moving Socialist Workers counterattack. Banda appealed to the Central Commit- Party in the U.S., and looked to Healy’s Socialist Labour tee (where he apparently still had a secure majority) and League (SLL----forerunner of the WRP) as its interna- immediately expelled Healy. He followed this up by tional leadership. Healy early on (in 1962) gave his publishing a lurid account of Healy’s allegedly abusive American supporters a taste of his ‘‘hard’’ organizational sexual exploits, and other bureaucratic misdeeds, in tactics when he split the tendency over the majority’s Newsline , the WRP’s ex-daily. Healy’s supporters re- refusal to perjure themselves at his command. Four Newsline grouped and soon came out with their own years later, at the infamous ‘‘London Conference,’’ the which announced Banda’s expulsion from Healy’s SL and the Healyites finally parted ways when SL leader WRP. As the polemic heated up both sides accused the James Robertson refused once again to submit to Healy’s other of ‘‘revisionism’’ and traded accusations of ‘‘sub- outrageously bureaucratic notions of ‘‘discipline’’ in his jective idealism,’’ ‘‘pragmatism’’ and various other epi- international. thets from the lexicon of obscurantist pseudo-dialectics So that is part of the reason that the SL has shown such which have long been a WRP speciality. But there was intense interest in the wreck of the Healyites. But there really only one issue: who was to rule the roost at the WRP’s Clapham headquarters. is another, more compelling, reason for Robertson to Banda’s spectacular revelations of Healy’s sexual treat the split in the WRP leadership so extensively. And malfeasance received considerable play from Fleet that is to try to establish as much distance as possible Street and seems to have sparked interest in the goings- between his style of political leadership and that of his on in the WRP among many who don’t normally pay one-time mentor. A wide spectrum of former cadres of much attention to such things. Sales of Newsline are Robertson’s group have remarked that the template of reported to have tripled during the height of the mud- the abominable organizational practices attributed to slinging. More surprisingly, a WRP candidate for presi- the WRP in the pages of Spartacist fits the SL itself rather dent of the powerful Amalgamated Union of Engineer- closely. ing Workers polled a whopping 15,000 votes during the The Healy organization has long been infamous for 2 its maintenance of ‘‘discipline’’ internally by means of peculiar phenomenon. According to Seymour, the arid beating up critics and opponents. This is something factional life inside the SL ‘‘is conditioned by the absence which the SL is not guilty of to our knowledge. We do of objective circumstances which required major note however that inside that organization intimations changes or breakthroughs in political line or unantici- of such appetites are increasingly common. In a letter pated organizational turns...’’ It is now almost eight written after his resignation a former member of Robert- years since this was written and still nothing in the real son’s British satellite noted the tendency to view oppo- world has had enough impact to produce any internal nents as class enemies: dissent in the SL. Just as Healy attempted to break ‘‘According to your National Treasurer [two former mem- Robertson in London in 1966, anyone who is thought bers] have ‘gone over to the bourgeoisie.’ Is this the capable of developing into a factional opponent in the position of the organisation? It would seem so. I believe SL is broken and/or otherwise disposed of long before your latest paranoid delusion consists of a ‘quitters clique’ they come up with any differences. hell-bent on the destruction of the SL/B [Spartacist League/Britain]. The idea that people disillusioned with Unlike the Spartacist League, Healy’s group has had the SL/B treadmill are active enemies of the organisation a continuing series of political oppositions, some of and therefore, by sleight-of-hand sectarian logic, agents which have at least been allowed to go through the of the bourgeoisie is both ludicrous and dangerous. Per- motions of submitting documents and offering counter- haps you could explain why Len told [a former member] posed reports at party conferences. In 1971 the Blick- to remember what the Provos do to ‘people like him.’ Or Jenkins grouping exited into the Labour Party when why Ed felt moved to tell [another member] that ‘if we their international co-thinkers----Healy’s erstwhile part- were in [another country] we would beat you up.’ Off-the- ners in the Organisation Communiste Internationale---- cuff remarks in the heat of the moment? Maybe. But then broke relations with the SLL. (In the 6 December 1985 all measures are in principle permissible against the class enemy, are they not? And what is meant concretely by issue of the New Statesman Robin Blick recounted how ‘going over to the bourgeoisie’?’’ he ‘‘was punched and had his head banged against a wall’’ on that occasion.) In 1974 Allan Thornett led more If the members, ex-members or leftist opponents of than a hundred people out of the WRP to found the the SL are in fact ‘‘racists,’’ ‘‘fascists,’’ ‘‘Nazi-lovers,’’ centrist Workers Socialist League. Five years later a ‘‘scabs’’ and/or ‘‘COINTELPRO [FBI]-type’’ provo- small factional opposition, led by Royston Bull, a former cateurs (slanders which the SL has been hurling with staff writer for Newsline, left the WRP. Bull, by his own increasing frequency against its perceived enemies, in- account, had managed to survive for some four years as cluding ourselves, in recent years) then the question of an occasional oppositionist before finally deciding to what measures are permissible in doing battle with them jump ship. is indeed only a ‘‘tactical question.’’ Bull’s description of the internal regime of the WRP The SL came into existence as a separate and distinct bears a striking resemblance to the SL today: grouping from the Healyites largely in opposition to the ‘‘a marked failing of the WRP is its inability to build up a corrupt tactics of the SLL leadership. It has subsequently stable and growing cadre of workers or youth to lead any undergone a long evolution back to many of the very section of the mass movement. techniques which it once abjured. Today the SL stands ‘‘The endless categorical instructionalism from the lead- as a qualitatively identical formation to the SLL of the ership creates inflexible doctrinaires who are unable to late 1960s. It is worth noting that the iSt’s ‘‘discovery’’ sense or react to changes in the mass movement. Since the that its ranks were riddled with racists, fascists and mainspring of a WRP cadre’s existence is his reliance on individuals with sinister connections to the police has the centre for instructions, the very impulse that gives a been made only fairly recently.
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