Book Excerpt: “Why Demonize Gerry Healy in 2024?”
Synthetic Left Smears Palestine Activist 35 Years After His Death
Image credit: The Gerry Healy Archive
By Caleb Maupin
This is an abridged selection from Caleb Maupin’s upcoming short book Khruschevism: A Study in Psychological Warfare. The book should be published soon.
Gerry Healy has been dead for 35 years, but oddly, during the 2024 election cycle, an Irish-born academic in the United States decided to push out a pseudo-biography of the long-dead British Trotskyist. Aiden Beatty, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a writer for Jacobin, published his screed The Party is Always Right about the leader of the British Socialist Labour League (SLL) and Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), and Jacobin’s incestuous network of podcasts, blogs, and academic forums gave it a huge boost. The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has done a great job debunking much of the content, which does not meet the academic standards that Beatty is supposedly held to as a professor, and shows that the book served the political purpose of demonizing a long-dead activist rather than objectively examining the truth.
Funding for the project was provided by Zionists, despite Aiden Beatty insisting he is anti-Israel as his leftist milieu was marching for Palestine round the clock amid the bombing of Gaza. Beatty has made no effort to conceal the Zionist funding of his project and even acknowledged that his work served some kind of political purpose for the Zionists who paid for it in the book itself. In his book’s acknowledgments, he writes: “My research in Britain was funded by the Program on Jewish Studies and the World History Center of the University of Pittsburgh, who were generous enough to see the Jewish, Israeli-Palestinian, and global connections of this project.” The Program on Jewish Studies is notoriously pro-Israel. Beatty has never clearly answered what “global connections” they saw in his hit piece on Gerry Healy, but that should become clear in the coming pages.
Why does Gerry Healy still matter?
There have been many small leftist sects, especially in Britain and particularly in the 1960s and 70s. Tiny Trotskyist organizations were so prominent in this time and place that they became a common topic of Monty Python sketches. So, why did the Jacobin/DSA/AOC left decide to take aim at Gerry Healy in particular? Let’s dig in.
Gerry Healy was a Communist activist born in Ireland who grew up in London and joined the Communist Party, later becoming involved in the Trotskyist movement during the 1930s. In the post-war years, he participated in the various regroupments and divisions of the Fourth International. Healy was an “Orthodox Trotskyist,” one of three loosely defined camps global Trotskyism divided into during these years. To understand Gerry Healy, let’s understand these groupings and how they shaped his thought.
Grouping 1: Neo-Trotskyism or Third Camp Trotskyism
The first grouping was made up primarily of academics, liberal cultural figures, and activists. They embraced Trotsky for his denunciation of the Soviet Union and his vision of “permanent revolution,” but vehemently rejected any notion that the USSR was a “degenerated workers' state” or had “socialist economic foundations.” The Neo-Trotskyists, such as Tony Cliff, Max Shachtman, Martin Abern, James Burnham, and Irving Howe, viewed the USSR as “state capitalist” or “bureaucratic collectivist” and equally evil, if not worse, than the Western imperialists.
This is a view Trotsky vehemently argued against, in what is sometimes called “Trotsky’s Final Conflict” or “Final Fight.” His position can be found in his book In Defense of Marxism (1940), along with American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon’s companion text, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party (1940). Until his death in 1940, Trotsky held onto the notion of the USSR as a “workers' state” that simply 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. A number of 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.
Regardless, the Neo-Trotskyist academics (commonly called “The New York Intellectuals”) who broke with Trotsky and denounced the USSR—starting with the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—began receiving support from U.S. intelligence in the 1950s. The CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom program was created to subsidize cultural figures and leftist voices that would serve U.S. foreign policy goals and counter the Soviet Union and its allies. Various Neo-Trotskyists were paid to write for CIA-funded magazines like Encounter, Der Monat, and Partisan Review. Figures like Mary McCarthy and Sidney Hook, among others, had their work widely circulated with undisclosed intelligence backing as “socialists” who took the U.S. side in the Cold War. They worked to demonize figures like Albert Einstein and Lillian Hellman, who stood with the USSR. Partisan Review was, one could say, the original BreadTube.
Many Neo-Trotskyists moved on to occupy prominent places in the U.S. imperialist political apparatus. Max Shachtman, the founder of Neo-Trotskyism in America, became the top adviser to George Meany, running the AFL-CIO as a New York City labor boss during the 1960s. Irving Kristol directed the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom program and eventually became known as the intellectual father of neo-conservatism. Irving Howe, a CIA-funded Neo-Trotskyist, was featured frequently in The New York Times Book Review as an expert on Marxism and is considered the ideological father of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The largest Neo-Trotskyist organization in the United States was the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which was highly visible on college campuses from the 1980s until its dissolution in 2019, when it ultimately liquidated into the Democratic Socialists of America. The group was led by a small clique, including Ahmed Shawki and Sherri Wolfe, among others, and was funded through the nonprofit publishing house Haymarket Books, which remains active.
Grouping 2: Mainline Trotskyism, The Fourth International
A current that is rightly called “mainline Trotskyism” dominated Trotskyite politics for most of the Cold War years. These were activists who supported labor unions, were inspired by the Cuban Revolution and various Third World national liberation movements, and preached hatred for the Soviet Union while considering it to technically be a “workers' state” led by a “parasitical bureaucracy.”
The mainline Trotskyists often joined the various “labour” and “social democratic” parties around the world as factions. They embraced the Third World anti-imperialist aesthetics of leftism, chanting “Che Che Che Guevara! Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!” They always condemned the Soviet Union’s foreign interventions and were consistently enthusiastic about CIA-funded uprisings throughout the Eastern Bloc.
The primary intellectual among them was Ernest Mandel, but he was accompanied by a slew of writers and organizers such as George Novack, George Breitman, Peter Camejo, and Tariq Ali. The United States Socialist Workers Party, the Militant Tendency that infiltrated the British Labour Party and gained control of Manchester’s local government during the 1980s, and various labor union reds, feminists, and anti-war protesters fit this category of “mainline Trotskyites.” This tendency began fading in relevance after the fall of the Soviet Union, despite thunderously celebrating the 1989–1991 events that led to what has been described as “economic genocide” in the former USSR.
This current of Trotskyism is kept alive by groups like Socialist Alternative in the United States and the International Marxist Tendency. These Trotskyites generally had no influence or alliance with anti-imperialist governments, with the exception of Cuba and Algeria, which at one point had strong relationships with Fourth International-aligned groups.
It is clear that during the 1960s, U.S. intelligence backed “mainline Trotskyism” to some degree. Leslie Evans’ autobiography Outsider’s Reverie admits that he was provided free housing by individuals from the CIA’s Rand Corporation who wanted to enable him to function as a full-time activist for the Socialist Workers Party. His book describes other examples of mysterious assistance and financial support trickling into the SWP from untraceable sources throughout the ’60s and ’70s.
Mainline Trotskyites were useful in creating distance between the Soviet Union and what U.S. foreign policy strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski called “satellite countries,” i.e., countries with popular anti-imperialist governments backed by the USSR. The SWP and Ernst Mandel romanticized Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro while repeating State Department talking points against the Soviet Union. They fundraised for the CIA-backed Roman Catholic “Solidarność” labor union in Poland. They romanticized Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen of Afghanistan as they fought the Soviet Union, building up support for these CIA-backed Afghan insurgents among those who sympathized with the Vietnamese and Latin American anti-imperialists, sowing confusion by equating the struggles.
Mainline Trotskyists were able to channel the energy of the “New Left” away from sympathy for Washington’s primary geopolitical rival. They were also able to confuse and muddy the waters in many international conflicts and, like all Trotskyists, create the illusion that one could be revolutionary while distancing oneself from the bulk of existing Marxist-Leninist states and supporting Western demonization and operations against them.
In the late Cold War, Brzezinski’s strategy of “keeping the barbarians killing each other” by manipulating various anti-colonial movements was the primary way the U.S. set the stage for the fall of the USSR. Iranian Islamic revolutionaries and Iraqi Ba'ath socialists killed each other for almost a decade, with Washington covertly funding both sides at various times. Pol Pot received Chinese and U.S. backing to fight against Soviet-aligned Vietnam. Members of Nelson Mandela’s Soviet-backed African National Congress and the Black Nationalist Pan African Congress, with Maoist roots, routinely murdered each other in South Africa. The CIA’s “Operation Gladio” involved fomenting the infamous “Years of Lead” in Italy, where Maoist Red Brigades murdered communist labor leaders, fascist groups conducted bombings, and Communist Party-aligned academics received funding to interpret and promote the works of Antonio Gramsci—all creating enough confusion to keep the country from leaving NATO.
“Mainline Trotskyism” was helpful in sowing this kind of confusion, isolating Moscow from the widespread global sympathy for national liberation movements, and fracturing and distorting the widespread anti-imperialist sentiments of the era. In the early ’80s, mainline Trotskyism began to decline significantly, no longer serving its purpose. The U.S. Socialist Workers Party experienced an internal fight against “the internationalists” who embraced Third World guerrilla movements, before pushing a “turn to industry,” with most of the organization being expelled by the mid-’80s.
Grouping 3: Orthodox Trotskyism
Post-war Trotskyism also produced another current of individuals who called themselves “Orthodox Trotskyists,” a label that US Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon had once applied to himself. The Orthodox Trotskyists are/were doctrinaire and nearly religious in their application of the ideology. To their credit, “Orthodox Trotskyists” are far more consistently anti-imperialist due to their rigid adherence to Leninism. They will generally denounce pro-imperialist color revolutions and call for “military defense” of forces the US government is targeting.
Their publications tend to excessively focus on similar, smaller organizations, highlighting the Freudian concept of “the narcissism of small differences.” The groups police each other, to some degree, going over each other’s manifestos line by line, looking for ideological deviations with which they can proceed to “expose” the rival organization for years to come. The groups are known to have a harsh internal culture defined by intense debate, much like “line struggle” and “criticism, self-criticism” within Maoist groups, where small disagreements about politics are hammered out in intense sessions with lots of yelling.
Orthodox Trotskyism has divided into many competing sects, often labelled “cults” by detractors. Prior to the rise of social media, groups like the Spartacist League, the League for the Revolutionary Party, Trotskyist Platform, the International Bolshevik Tendency, the Socialist Equality Party, and other organizations seemed to have formed their own alternative subculture, fighting with each other over who is the most purely Trotskyist. While Orthodox Trotskyism, like most esoteric leftist politics, has faded in recent years, with most of those intensely interested in the topic just becoming internet debaters and wiki editors rather than activists, some of these organizations live on. The groups will sometimes take absurd positions, such as claiming the Second World War has not yet ended, calling for legalizing pedophilia, or rallying to the defense of Roman Polanski and Mormon Polygamists, among other absurdities. In these circles, having a position that no other organization is willing to take, for a very hypercomplex and seemingly clever reason, is very much valued. One particular grouping led by Juan Posadas of Argentina became obsessed with UFOs, arguing that spaceships proved the existence of socialism on other planets, for example.
The esoteric world of Orthodox Trotskyism does not seem to have gotten US intelligence support to any significant degree that can be proven, unlike the other incarnations of Trotskyite organizing. Some have speculated about the role of the Spartacist League during the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and its habit of disrupting and sabotaging anti-imperialist mobilizations in the United States during the 1970s and 80s, but nothing can really be substantiated to show state backing. The followers of Juan Posadas seem to have had a relationship with various anti-imperialist forces in Latin America at different moments, though these relationships were not consistent.
Regardless of how diverse and strange Orthodox Trotskyism is as a current, Gerry Healy was by far its most successful adherent. One could say Healy was really the only Orthodox Trotskyist to have become “relevant” in world events. His organization played an important role in global politics, especially in relation to the Middle East, despite its small size and esoteric beliefs.
An Anti-Imperialist, Pro-Palestine Organization
As a lifelong activist, Healy built a large organization of young anti-imperialist activists in Britain during the 1960s and 70s. While many of his recruits had first been involved in protesting the Vietnam War, Healy oriented them to mobilize for economic demands, as allies of labor unions and in favor of a socialist revolution in Britain. He recruited famed actress Vanessa Redgrave, and she was far more than simply a celebrity endorser. Vanessa Redgrave ran for office as a Workers Revolutionary Party candidate on several occasions and lived a cadre life as a full party member, so much so that her daughter felt neglected.
Healy befriended the Arab Nationalist governments of the Middle East, becoming a personal friend of Libyan leader Colonel Moammar Gaddafi, while actively supporting the Iraqi and Syrian Baathist states. These socialist countries aligned with the Soviet Union were very key players in the global anti-imperialist movement. Libya, in particular, gave support to the Irish freedom struggle, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and the Black Panther Party of the United States.
Until 2011, Libya had the highest life expectancy on the African continent. Gaddafi built a network of popular councils to carry out the revolutionary government’s goals on a local level. He constructed the world’s largest irrigation system, the Great Man-Made River. He provided universal healthcare and education. Prior to the destruction of Libya by NATO bombs in 2011 and Gaddafi’s subsequent murder, he was in the process of creating an independent African bank that would issue its own independent currency. Millions of Africans had come to Libya from across the continent, where they were provided with guaranteed employment amid the prosperous economy created by oil wealth and centralized planning.
In alliance with Arab Nationalist and Anti-Imperialist governments in the Middle East, and in coordination with a famed cinema actress, Healy was able to make dramatic strides for one political cause in particular: Palestine. The impact of Healy’s small organization on the Palestinian struggle and raising awareness about it globally was massive.
While the cause of the Palestinians and opposition to Israel has grown trendy in the last several decades, during the 1970s and 80s it was very much a taboo, forbidden topic. The very significant over-representation of people of Jewish descent among the Communist circles in America and Britain made sympathy for Israel, or at least limitation of criticism of Israel, very commonplace (understandably so, as it has been heavily propagandized as a means to avoid another Holocaust). The Communist Party USA did not speak against Israel until the 1967 war, and even then, its statements affirmed Israel’s “right to exist” in very strong language.
Organizations like the Socialist Workers Party that mouthed support for the Palestinians engaged in a huge effort to block talk of Palestine from anti-war protests or other gatherings, as it was labeled “divisive.” It wasn’t until 1981 that a major anti-war protest in Washington DC featured a Palestinian speaker.
The feeling that Israel was somehow a progressive, social democratic country of enlightened people despite its flaws, and that criticism of it was veiled fascism or anti-Semitism, was pretty standard among leftists. Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, both of whom had been outspoken supporters of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, loudly defended Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, as did many communist-adjacent activists at the time. Many Communists who genuinely opposed Israel or its actions were convinced to insist on avoiding the topic in coalitions, as being labeled “anti-Semitic” was a political death sentence and often came with direct physical violence from the Jewish Defense League. Various Communist groups that dared defend the Palestinians had their offices raided at gunpoint, their members shot at, and their events attacked with baseball bats and weapons by followers of Meir Kahane, who operated in New York City and other parts of the United States.
A Huge Contribution to Palestine Solidarity
Gerry Healy and his followers did not adhere to this unspoken rule of extreme caution or self-censorship, and loudly criticized Israel, supporting the Palestinian cause. From the moment Israel was created, Healy opposed it, condemning it as a colonial project of imperialism. In 1956, while organizing inside the Labour Party before the SLL was formed, he published a pamphlet Stop This War! Hands Off The Arab People! The pamphlet condemned British military moves against the Arab Socialist government of Abdul Nasser in defense of Israel. His pamphlet did not pull any punches, containing the sub-headline: “Imperialism Traps the Jews” and stating: “Jewish working people everywhere must denounce Israel’s stab in the back of the Arab people. The future of Jewry lies through a socialist solution, not through capitalist Israel. A socialist solution demands real solidarity with the Arab people.” The SLL and WRP marched with Palestinian flags regularly in the streets of Britain, fighting off Zionists who mobilized against them and facing accusations of “supporting terrorism.” The press falsely accused them of stockpiling weapons and being terrorists, and their offices were raided by police.
As a member of the Workers Revolutionary Party, Vanessa Redgrave produced the ground-breaking English-language film The Palestinian (1977). The film told the story of the conflict from the perspective of those living in Gaza and the West Bank and was screened all over the world. Libya provided some funding, but Redgrave ultimately mortgaged one of her houses to cover the costs of the film, which made huge waves across the planet, rallying support for Palestinian resistance to Israel.
When Vanessa Redgrave won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1978, she did so despite the opposition and threats of the Jewish Defense League, which had promised to retaliate against the academy with bombings if she won. Her Academy Award speech, met with boos from an audience full of Zionists, will go down in history. Before the entire world, broadcast on international TV at the Academy Award Ceremony, Vanessa Redgrave, a loyal follower of Gerry Healy, proclaimed: “My dear colleagues, I thank you very, very much for this tribute to my work. I think that Jane Fonda and I have done the best work of our lives, and I think this was in part due to our director, Fred Zinnemann. And I also think it's in part because we believed and we believe in what we were expressing. Two, out of millions, who gave their lives and were prepared to sacrifice everything in the fight against fascist and racist Nazi Germany. And I salute you, and I pay tribute to you, and I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks you’ve stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression. And I salute that record, and I salute all of you for having stood firm and dealt a final blow against that period when Nixon and McCarthy launched a worldwide witch hunt against those who tried to express in their lives and their work the truth that they believed in. I salute you, and I thank you, and I pledge to you that I will continue to fight against anti-Semitism and fascism. Thank you.”
Despite their Trotskyite roots, the Workers Revolutionary Party of Britain did what a Marxist-Leninist Party in an imperialist country is supposed to do. They built mass demonstrations demanding the right to jobs as unemployment swelled in Britain during the late 1970s. They protested cuts in public services, supported the Miners' Strike of 1984, and promoted the achievements of socialism in Libya, Iraq, and Syria.
They put forward a program of aligning the working people of Britain with those in the colonized nations of the world fighting for independence. As the Communist Party of China made clear in its document Long Live Leninism!, this is exactly what a communist organization based in an imperialist homeland should be doing: “imperialism is monopolistic, parasitic or decaying, moribund capitalism… it is the final stage in the development of capitalism and therefore is the eve of the proletarian revolution. The emancipation of the proletariat can be arrived at only by way of revolution, and certainly not by way of reformism. The liberation movements of the proletariat in the capitalist countries should ally themselves with the national liberation movements in the colonies and dependent countries; this alliance can smash the alliance of the imperialists with the feudal and comprador reactionary forces in the colonies all dependent countries, and will therefore inevitably put a final end to the imperialist system throughout the world.”
The Communist Party of China explained this even more concisely in their Proposal Concerning the General Line in 1963: “U.S. imperialism is pressing its policies of aggression and war all over the world, but the outcome is bound to be the opposite of that intended--it will only be to hasten the awakening of the people in all countries and to hasten their revolutions. The U.S. imperialists have thus placed themselves in opposition to the people of the whole world and have become encircled by them. The international proletariat must and can unite all the forces that can be united, make use of the internal contradictions in the enemy camp, and establish the broadest united front against the U.S. imperialists and their lackeys. The realistic and correct course is to entrust the fate of the people and of mankind to the unity and struggle of the world proletariat and to the unity and struggle of the people in all countries.”
Beatty’s Screed, Out of Touch with British Politics
In Jacobin writer and DSA member Aiden Beatty’s 2024 screed opposing Healy, he seems to completely misunderstand the context of the SLL’s expansion during the 1960s. He says that Healy’s Socialist Labour League was the only option for those who thought the Communist Party was too “rigid and doctrinaire” and for those who did not like the reformism of the Labour Party. This reveals an absurd ignorance of Communist politics at the time.
The Communist Party, taking direction from Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, blindly supported the Labour Party and worked to tone down leftist agitation while building pacifist “peace councils” that campaigned for the Labour Party in elections. The Communist Party was secretive, rarely ran its own candidates, and functioned almost as a pro-Soviet wing of the Labour Party. Within the wider anti-Vietnam War movement, there were a whole slew of Maoist and Trotskyite groups who wanted to break with the Labour Party.
Beatty’s claim that the pro-Soviet Communist Party was “rigid and doctrinaire” as opposed to the “reformist” Labour Party, with the SLL being the “only” alternative, reveals a pro-imperialist bias in addition to ignorance of the political matters. Beatty, as a fan of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Party’s “socialists” such as Bernie Sanders, finds any support for existing anti-imperialist governments to be scandalous. In his mind, the British Communist Party of the Khrushchev era is “rigid and doctrinaire” and scandalous in its existence because it aligned with the Soviet Union. The actual nature of its practice, as a de-radicalizing, Labour Party-adjacent network affiliated with the USSR, is something he is completely unaware of.
This is much like the various liberals and Trotskyites in America who referred to Gus Hall’s Communist Party USA, which did almost nothing but campaign for Democrats, as “Stalinists” up into the 80s and 90s. The fixation on ties to an anti-imperialist government, an unforgivable crime in the eyes of liberals, overrides any actual knowledge or understanding of how the organization functions, which is anything but doctrinaire or “hard-line.”
In September of 1975, the British press reported rumors that the Derbyshire education center of the Workers Revolutionary Party was being used to stockpile weapons. This was a completely false claim, but police raided the College of Marxist Education and strip-searched a number of young activists studying there. The police planned their raid to coincide with an international gathering where many supporters of WRP from different countries were in attendance. For six hours, 70 officers scoured the facility but were only able to find 20 bullets, and not a single other suspicious or incriminating item. The WRP maintained the bullets were planted by police, and the criminal charges initially related to the raids were dropped within a week. The WRP was able to sue a newspaper that had reported the false claims about weapons for libel.
Beatty’s coverage of this significant act of political repression, an outrage if committed against any political group, is very telling. Beatty spends far more time playing up quotes from angry ex-members who say the College “gave me the creeps,” and had a “paranoid atmosphere,” than detailing the brutality and trauma scores of young anti-imperialists must have been subjected to when police stormed into their communal educational space, stripped them naked, and ravaged through their personal belongings.
Just as the FBI raids and absurd indictment of Jesse Nevel, Penny Hess, and Omali Yeshitela after a horrendous FBI raid in 2022 were ignored by the mainstream left amid whispers that the Uhuru movement was “a cult,” Aiden Beatty is equally unconcerned about targeted repression in generations past. Lifelong conservatives Tucker Carlson and Scott Ritter stood with the Uhuru 3 amid their trial in Federal Court, while the scores of liberals touting Black Panther Party T-shirts were too scandalized by talk of alleged ties to “fascist” Putin to offer any substantial support to Black revolutionaries against the FBI.
Beatty admits that listening devices had indeed been planted in WRP spaces by police before but describes the security procedures at the college as “paranoid.” Beatty scolds the WRP for overlooking the raids on Black and Irish organizations in its publications speaking about the raid on their facility. The fact that many WRP members who attended the classes were married and had children doesn’t stop Beatty from mentioning that the large estate contained a “children’s playroom” as somehow scandalous, hinting that perhaps Healy or the WRP leaders were pedophiles, an allegation that has never been made even by Beatty’s collection of angry, hyperbolic ex-members. This is the manner in which liberal (read: propaganda in favor of the US state) “anti-cult” hit pieces are written. Activities and conditions are reinterpreted, assigned motive, and reframed in the most sinister way possible, with the intention of triggering the traumatic memories of readers, causing them to link unrelated events about people they’ve never met with their own painful experiences.
The 1984 Miners’ Strike: Global Class War in Britain
The 1984 miners’ strike was one of the biggest episodes of social unrest British society has faced since the Second World War. Miners, led by Arthur Scargill, resisted layoffs by shutting down the mines. The British electrical grid was largely dependent on coal power, and the miners' unions had leveraged this to win huge concessions. Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, famous for saying “There is no such thing as society, only individuals,” was determined to take away this power from miners' unions. Amid the strike, the miners' union mobilized “flying pickets” that traveled across the country shutting down pits where scab laborers were working. When the strike ended on March 3rd, 1985, three people had been killed and thousands had been injured. Scuffles between police and strikers were almost daily occurrences.
Amid the strike, mainstream British media focused on ties of the National Union of Miners to the Soviet Union and Libya. The Soviet Union’s miners' union donated £1.5 million to support the strike, and Arthur Scargill was condemned for accepting this donation. The press pointed to Scargill’s statements defending Stalin and demonized the miners' union as a group of violent communist extremists.
In November of 1984, leaders of the miners' union visited Libya, where Gaddafi welcomed them as heroes for fighting for the working families of England, Wales, and Scotland. The media went into overdrive, claiming the strike was a foreign conspiracy to sow unrest in the United Kingdom. Gaddafi’s government was openly funding the Palestinian resistance and was falsely blamed for a number of terrorist attacks in Western countries. The US government had designated Libya as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” In 1986, the US bombed Libya, killing a number of civilians, including the Libyan leader’s infant daughter Hana Gaddafi.
The Workers Revolutionary Party was also very close to the Libyan government, with Gerry Healy riding in Gaddafi’s private jet and describing himself as the Libyan leader’s personal friend. The British press played up the allegation that the WRP were agents of Libya, publishing the claim that Col. Gaddafi greeted Vanessa Redgrave at a public event, saying “How is my party?” in reference to the WRP. The number of stories in the British tabloids alleging Libyan funding of the WRP is massive. It is worth noting that Vanessa Redgrave received donations to create a follow-up film after releasing The Palestinian (1977) from a number of autocratic, Western-aligned Arab governments, including the US-backed monarchy of Kuwait. These donations from governments that tortured, practiced stoning and beheading, and were ruled by absolute monarchs were never considered scandalous in the mainstream press.
The Workers Revolutionary Party was one of many socialist organizations in Britain that supported the National Union of Miners, working around the clock to staff the flying pickets, raise money for the families of striking miners, and build public support for the miners with protests and daily outreach. Healy’s writings focused on the danger of the British military overthrowing the civilian government to crush the strike, as often took place in developing countries. It is now confirmed that conversations were indeed happening among the British military discussing such moves.
The British military had discussed removing Prime Minister Harold Wilson during his leadership decades prior and continued to discuss scenarios where the civilian government would be overturned to crush unrest. The fact that Healy was aware of the possible coup plots among the British military brass is impressive and reveals how tuned in and connected Healy was as he built his effective anti-imperialist organization. Beatty is unconcerned about how effectively the WRP raised the alarm about the real threat of military dictatorship in Britain, the revelation of which should be considered highly scandalous. He fits Healy’s efforts to describe what is now known to have been taking place at the time as another example of Healy and the WRP being “paranoid.” This should be compared to how Beatty and his DSA associates would speak of the January 6th, 2021 Capitol Riot in Washington DC, in which no real threat or discussion of overturning civilian rule existed.
“A Messianic Atmosphere”
Just months after the end of the miners' strike, in October of 1985, the Workers Revolutionary Party collapsed due to an explosion of demonization in mainstream media. Various women who Gerry Healy had sex with came forward, claiming they felt victimized. The primary voice was Aileen Jennings, Healy’s personal secretary. She had been unaware that Healy had been having sex with other women in the organization while maintaining an on-and-off sexual affair with her for years. The press used the words “rape” to describe Healy’s sexual promiscuity, but no criminal charges were ever filed. The statements of the victims amounted to saying that they had sex with him under false pretenses, thinking he was an important revolutionary leader rather than an evil demagogue. Jennings did not accuse Healy of rape or anything non-consensual, but wrote that Healy had used his position in a "completely opportunist way for sexual liaisons.” She later stated that he liked "to degrade women and girl comrades and destroy their self-respect.” This did not stop the press from reporting this vague accusation as “rape.” The Daily Mail tried to explain that admittedly consensual sex acts were actually “rape,” reporting: “He gave them the impression that they could not have a political relationship unless they also went to bed with him.” Notice that Daily Mail does not even say Healy “said” that a political relationship was impossible without sex, but that he “gave the impression” in an unstated way. This allegation is very far from the definition of rape by any legal standard.
Beatty’s quotation of Aileen Jenning’s letter accusing Healy omits the opening paragraph. The first sentence of her letter, republished unabridged by World Socialist Web Site was: “During the course of action on the Manchester Area certain practices have come to light as to the running of Youth Training by a homosexual.” Before Jennings said anything about Healy’s sexual liaisons, she first made clear that she disapproved of a gay person being allowed to train youth and considered this the primary scandal to raise with the Workers Revolutionary Party’s Political Committee. The fact that the accusations against Healy opened with a blatant appeal to homophobia and the stereotype of LGBT people as pedophiles is not something that will strengthen Beatty’s credibility with his woke readers. This omission demonstrates just how selectively Beatty works to frame both Healy and the accusations against him in the eyes of his 2024 audience.
Beatty’s screed openly admits that there was internal conspiracy within the organization, saying “they had been planning their move against Healy for about a year.” The text of Aileen Jennings’ “hand grenade” letter that led to the 1985 collapse of the WRP, contained no accusation of rape or non-consensual sex acts of any kind in it. The brief letter, opening with a complaint about an unnamed LGBT person training youth, goes on only to refer to “opportunist” “liaisons” alleging that this was not a sex crime, but simply an improper use of party-owned properties that could be used by police to blackmail the party. The fact that the allegation went from simply inappropriately using an apartment to one of the most serious crimes short of murder doesn’t seem at all suspicious to Beatty.
Beatty’s selective quoting of the later allegations against Healy does not very effectively conceal the personally vengeful and sometimes absurd nature of some of them. He references Aileen Jennings saying Healy “verbally attacked her at a party meeting” after their sexual relationship had come to an end. Who could ever imagine two lovers who have just broken up exchanging heated words? Is this evidence of one being a psychopathic predator? Beatty hilariously states it merely as fact that the sexist white male non-feminist Healy “tended to dislike women that he saw as too free-thinking or who were not afraid of him.” Beatty’s narrative acknowledges that there is a “fuzzy grey area” between consensual interactions and ones where power dynamics play an inappropriate role. However, even in his selective quotations designed to portray Healy as a vicious predator and monster, there is no clear or fully substantiated accusation of non-consensual interactions, sexual assault, or rape. This doesn’t stop Beatty from presenting Healy as a mastermind “grooming” women and keeping them separate from each other, quoting others describing his behavior as “cunning.”
Beatty cites hearsay alleging a woman claimed “Healy had attempted to force himself on her but backed off when he realized she was under the legal age.” Someone should remind Beatty that there is is no “legal age” for rape or sexual assault. Predators who commit serious violent crimes generally do not stop in the process to explore the specific legal implications of the victim. This allegation is credited to two of Healy’s enemies who say they heard it from an unnamed accuser. It is probably an exaggeration of Healy flirting with or making romantic moves on a young woman and stopping when he realized how young she was, if it is not just entirely a fabrication. Even if Healy was still living, how could he be expected to defend himself from an allegation that he started to commit a crime against an unnamed person on an unknown date in an unknown location and then stopped, according to two people who say they heard about it from someone else? It is certainly true that in the age of #MeToo vague hearsay accusations like this about attempted crimes can destroy careers if properly inflated by social media. Is this any more just or logical today than in 1985?
As the WRP imploded, the mainstream media’s attacks came directly from the Khrushchevist script, writing of Healy: “He would charm you one minute and grab you by the throat the next… He was a man who brooked no argument and created a messianic atmosphere into which young idealists would be drawn. However, many would leave within months, unable and unwilling to put up with the highly autocratic regime which seeks to become an all-pervading force in its members’ lives.” (The Times, November 1st, 1985) Healy, despite being a Trotskyist, had apparently created a Stalinist “cult of personality.” The world apparently needed to see what an evil tyrant he was so we could all learn to never follow such a leader or join such a movement in the future.
Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London and Labour Party MP, has consistently defended Gerry Healy and never retracted his defense, saying: “I have never changed my belief that the split in the WRP during 1985 was the work of MI5 agents.”
The biography of Healy entitled Gerry Healy: A Revolutionary Life, written by Corina Lotz and Paul Feldman, published in 1994, describes how the splitters openly advertised that personal security was no longer being provided to Healy, in the hopes of emboldening anyone who wanted to assault or kill him. The book describes how those who remained loyal to Healy, including Vanessa Redgrave, rushed him out of the country for his own safety. Amid the turmoil surrounding the split, Healy told his followers: “The only privilege a communist has is to be where things are most difficult - this is the whole essence of training. We have to endure the persecution of the state and learn and learn to endure contradiction.” After the collapse of the WRP in 1985, Healy continued his organizing with an organization called the Marxist Party. The 1994 biography writes: “Gerry knew the political limitations of his collaborators. He also understood that the movement could only be built of real, contradictory human beings… he often remarked, ‘The only thing that amazes me is how we held it together for so long.’”
Did Gerry Healy engage in misconduct? To some degree, certainly. Political organizations are not a place to look for sex partners. Romantic drama and sexual affairs need to be kept out of spaces where the stakes are high and serious organizing is happening. It’s likely that to some degree, Healy’s behavior had become compulsive or addictive, something that is not uncommon in a culture where clear personal and relational boundaries are often eroded and blurry. In the past, traditional family and marriage provided a built-in framework for these boundaries, but as societal norms have shifted, many individuals now navigate this on their own, mostly without guidance.
Did Healy lose his temper and display inappropriate anger at various times? This is likely. For someone like him, who took the political struggle so seriously and had invested his very existence in the movement, the stakes are very high. The functioning of a political organization was not a passive hobby, and differences over political line were not mere intellectual abstractions.
But is Gerry Healy the Satanic figure that Aiden Beatty portrays? Of course not. No one could successfully build a massive, anti-imperialist organization in the context of Cold War Britain, under the extreme pressure of political repression and hostility, and be the cruel, narcissistic, and megalomaniacal figure Beatty and Healy’s jealous detractors portray. Building an organization requires patience, compromise, willingness to find other people's skills, the ability to experience setbacks and keep going, and the ability to be let down by others but give them another chance; to accomplish what Healy accomplished requires all kinds of abilities that define effective leadership—a level of organizational ability that a shallow narcissist is incapable of.
Healy was able to keep organizing and building from the 1930s, all the way up until his death in 1989. The amount of empathy, patience, endurance, and dedication required to achieve what Healy achieved is not small. A purely selfish person, or someone only motivated by sexual desires or self-gain, would have walked away after a decade at most. If Healy was merely a selfish narcissist, he would have become a mainstream politician, a business owner, or perhaps a criminal. Instead, he chose to give his life to the struggle against imperialism and Zionism, at a time and in a political climate where few, if any, rewards were offered for choosing this path. The jealousy-ridden accusations of his detractors reveal more about themselves and their own motivations than about Healy. Whatever flaws Healy had, he was a far more genuine and dedicated person than any of them.
During the final years of the Soviet Union, when Gorbachev’s administration “rehabilitated” Trotsky, Healy became a guest lecturer at Soviet universities, teaching classes on Trotskyism, economics, and dialectical materialism. The fact that Healy was given this position indicates he most likely had a relationship with the Soviet government that went even further back. This would fit with his relationship with Libya, Iraq, and Syria, which were Soviet-aligned. It would also explain why, in the context of the 1984 miners’ strike, an intelligence operation to destroy his reputation and weaken his influence would be seen as almost a necessity by British imperialism. Vitaly Startsev, professor of history at the Herzen Institute of Leningrad, wrote: “Gerry Healy appeared intimate with material dialectics. For him, it was not simply a phrase, not just a vow associated with a particular order, but an actual window on the world, a prism, through which he saw the surrounding world and reconstituted it in the light of the class spectrum.”
Understanding Beatty’s Liberal Politics
When being interviewed by Jacobin for his widely promoted 2024 screed against Healy, Beatty claimed that Healy’s lack of adherence to liberal identity politics was to blame for his alleged sexual misconduct. Beatty proclaimed: “The WRP was not just critical of liberal feminism; it was openly contemptuous of all forms of feminism, even socialist feminism. I have always seen that as politically inseparable from Healy’s abusiveness. There was a very pronounced masculinist culture that predominated within the WRP — very severe and austere, totally dour and humorless, arrogantly convinced you are right on every issue. It very much endorsed the idea that members should be able to withstand pain and privation. The party was abusive by design.”
Beatty’s interview goes on to laughably explain that parties like the WRP are unsuccessful in comparison to liberal causes promoted by mainstream media and major corporations, simply because people dislike their “authoritarian” vibe: “Even just based on anecdotal evidence, it is clear that the leftist groups or movements that have had any kind of recent successes, even if only partial or limited ones, are not vanguardist in structure: Democratic Socialists of America, Momentum, Black Lives Matter. The Trotskyist parties that remain stuck on the fringes are the ones that refuse to accept that vanguardism or very top-down, authoritarian party structures are off-putting to the vast majority of people today.” The fact that CNN and MSNBC advertised and endlessly promoted Black Lives Matter, and that the Democratic Socialists of America functions as a wing of one of the United States' two major political parties, with a major Presidential candidate promoting them, does not occur to Beatty. The “success” of liberal activists who support US imperialism in comparison to anti-imperialist groups is simply a matter of the general public disliking “authoritarianism.”
What is sad is that it is obvious that Aiden Beatty has very little interest in Gerry Healy or the history of Trotskyism. In the introduction he writes that he cannot even remember when he first heard of Gerry Healy. His ignorance of the political context, his lack of interest in the genuine political repression WRP faced or the causes it championed and his stretching to create negative innuendo out of nearly everything Healy did indicates he was probably assigned to write a hit piece. This brings us back to what he admits about his Zionist funders and their interest in the project in his acknowledgments.
The World Socialist Web Site, led by a former protege of Healy named David North, went to work debunking Beatty’s book. David North disagreed with Healy and felt he was too sympathetic to Arab nationalists and did not stand with Healy at the time his organization was imploded amid a media campaign. North, however, felt his differences with Healy were political and saw the campaign against Healy in the press as coming from a negative place. In 2024, North and his associates saw the Beatty book as a slanderous attack, not just on Healy’s memory but on themselves.
In the opening of the book, Beatty claims that Gerry Healy told people that he had seen his father shot and killed by the British military’s infamous “Black and Tans” division as a child. This obviously did not happen, and the fact that Healy made this claim is supposed to be proof of what a deceptive self-promoting narcissist he was. North and WSWS have shown that there is no evidence that Healy ever made this claim. The only people who reference it are people who left the organization after the 1985 crisis. Healy’s daughter never heard this claim, and it cannot be found in publications from the SLL or WRP promoting Healy, yet Beatty emphasizes it excessively, and makes it central in presenting Healy in a negative light. The fact that Beatty’s central argument against Healy is hearsay about a lie that is likely to have never been told should discredit his book entirely.
Boxer The Horse
The title of Beatty’s book “The Party is Always Right” is drawn from a quote from Leon Trotsky referring to Democratic Centralism. Beatty argues in the book that Leninist parties are inherently authoritarian, and uses Healy as a negative case study for “authoritarian” movements. The phrase “the party is always right,” however, strongly rings a bell for anyone who has ever read the anti-communist allegorical novel Animal Farm written by George Orwell. This book, which is required reading in most American schools, presents a group of barnyard animals overthrowing the farmer and trying to establish an egalitarian society. The book is a lampoon and smear on the Soviet Union, with the swine of the farm representing the Communist Party. A more sincere revolutionary pig named “Snowball” represents Trotsky, with the evil dictator character being a pig named “Napoleon” who represents Stalin.
A character called “Boxer the Horse” represents the Russian working class. Orwell’s vulgar elitism, utter dishonesty, and western chauvinism come across when depicting this caricature of an ignorant workhorse who blindly obeys to represent the people of the Soviet Union. It is obvious that Orwell has utter contempt for the millions of people who mobilized to build their country up during the Five-Year Plans that inspired the world and electrified and industrialized a huge swath of the planet. The millions of people who gave their lives in the fight against fascism and defended their homes and communities could not be depicted with more contempt and lack of respect for the sacrifices they made.
When the horse becomes too old to work, Orwell’s narration has the pigs, representing the Communist Party, sending the horse to the glue factory to be killed for money. This is the exact opposite of what the Soviet Union did for the elderly, providing very generous pensions and a comfortable retirement that was superior to what many western workers enjoyed, even during the post-war welfare state expansion. This subtle lie, that the Soviet government worked its population for the gain of bureaucrats and then disposed of them for profit, has nothing to do with the reality of Russian history, yet it is presented to millions of schoolchildren across America in an elitist, fairy tale written by a professional British intelligence propagandist who was employed to write propaganda during the Second World War.
As a sign of his ignorance and foolish loyalty to the allegorical Stalin, the Boxer the Horse character in Orwell’s allegory coins the slogan “Napoleon is always right.” Beatty is obviously alluding to this with the title of his book. He wants to get his readers to snap back into the liberal narratives and Khrushchevite training they have been given in American society from the time of childhood. He is reminding them of the juvenile anti-communist book they were spoon-fed in school. He wants them to think joining a serious mass movement or revolutionary organization, as opposed to a trendy hashtag like “Black Lives Matter” approved on CNN and MSNBC, is dangerous. He wants his readers to “think for themselves” by only consuming US mainstream media, and reflexively dismissing anything that might sound like “Foreign Propaganda” or “Conspiracy Theories,” even if it points to true things or makes logical arguments. The irony of these contradictions made by someone calling Orwell to mind should not be lost on the reader when one considers the concept of “Newspeak” in Orwell’s 1984.
To Beatty, if you give your life to the Palestinian cause like Healy did, or if you stand in solidarity with anti-imperialist leaders like Gaddafi and refuse to cheer for the NATO destruction of African countries, you are “brainwashed” and “in a cult.” Any leader who would organize such a movement is a potential Hitler. Any such movement cannot be sincerely socialist, and thus can only be “fascist,” with “rich” necessarily being code for “Jew” and, likewise, “imperialist finance capital” necessarily being code for “Jewish bankers.”
Beatty, who claims not to be a Zionist, goes as far as to suggest that Healy’s calling out of media bias against the Palestinians and his own organization is the equivalent of the anti-Semitic claim that “Jews control the media.” Yet, in his own text, the historical record forces him to admit that libel cases were filed in response to the British press falsely claiming they were stockpiling weapons to set the stage for a brutal police raid. Why would Beatty seem so desperate to accuse one of the most prominent pro-Palestine activists in British history of being an anti-Semite? Why would anyone?
The only type of leftism that is acceptable to the likes of Beatty is one laced in emasculated identity politics, supporting “human rights” protests against anti-imperialist states, while mobilizing not against imperialism, but rather “the right wing” which might want to make peace in Ukraine or limit social media censorship. This type of pessimistic, anti-working class politics has completely consumed “socialism” in the United States.
The Center for Political Innovation stands alone in heroically rejecting this political degeneration—this infantile sickness—of leftism and refusing to compromise with it. At this point, even the word “communist” has been claimed by people with no concern for a global movement against imperialism, content as woke mobs the bulk of the American people hate and consistently vote against. Just as Lenin found it inappropriate and politically detrimental to call the Bolsheviks “social democrats,” we find it utterly necessary to differentiate ourselves from what people know as “communist” by holding up a new banner: Innovationism. To what should be no one’s shock, the political circles where Beatty originates have targeted us relentlessly, spreading lies and sex gossip, inciting violence against us by falsely linking us to Nazis, picketing our events, and doing everything possible to weaken our organization. As Beatty psyches up his audience of young “socialists” to support war with Russia and massive government crackdowns on those who might object, he is repeating an identical narrative about a long-dead pro-Palestine leftist.
Beatty Fears the Coming Triumph of Illiberalism
It is obvious why Zionist foundations paid for Beatty’s work. Beatty has a certain narrative that is deeply embedded in American academia. It is the narrative of Leo Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing. It is the narrative of Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem and her work on “totalitarianism.” It is what Susan Sontag was alluding to when she claimed, “Communism is nothing but the most effective form of fascism.” It is a narrative that equates Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as examples of excessive democracy and populism. It is a narrative that views those who would mobilize mass movements of any kind as potential genocidal murderers threatening the freedom of the “philosopher kings” who should rightly rule over them.
Let us not forget that Jeremy Corbyn was declared an anti-Semite, and a relentless campaign in the British press argued that all kinds of standard leftist anti-imperialist and economic statements were coded hatred of Jews. Let’s also remember how the social media operation known as “BreadTube” launched a witch-hunt in U.S. and British leftist circles against those who stood by such principles. We now know that Abigail Thorne was on the payroll of British intelligence foundations, and we have seen Natalie “Contrapoints” Wynn be embraced and boosted by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton. The Center for Political Innovation revealed as early as 2021 that intelligence-linked “cult deprogrammer” (read: serial kidnapper) Dr. Steve Hassan was advising them.
Aiden Beatty thinks Gerry Healy is Hitler. This is laughable, on the surface. Healy was a Trotskyist who led an organization that fought Nazis in the streets on numerous occasions and had many Jewish members. Vanessa Redgrave, his close follower, starred in a film and won an Oscar for portraying the heroic anti-fascism of communist resistance fighters in the film Julia (1978). But in Beatty’s view, populism and the masses that populist movements would mobilize are the real enemy. Movements that seek to mobilize the masses and organize the economy for their benefit are the greatest danger.
Khrushchevism is part of a much bigger worldview, an anti-human one. It fits in with Neoconservative foreign policy and elitism, Malthusian economics, and the overall ultra-liberalism of the dying western financial order. Its adherents believe any and all collectivism must be opposed—individualism above all else. As Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society, only individuals.”
“We the people” are the enemy, unless we carry out our liberal duty to remain atomized and obedient, “thinking for ourselves” by letting the algorithms and our supposed “natural superiors” nudge us through life. We are a horde that must stop reproducing. We are gluttons that must stop consuming. We shouldn’t be asking questions, and our lack of trust in mainstream media and academia is very concerning; they’re the ones who have been vetted to think for us! We must rally behind their wars against Gaddafi, Putin, Xi, and whoever else would reject their financial domination. We must own nothing and be happy about it. We must learn to live in pods, eat bugs, and subject all who disagree to cancel culture mob justice. We must never allow genuine leadership to rise or draw spiritual strength from those with it. We must never join real organizations where we can have comrades and learn to struggle together for a better life, asserting our own will onto history.
Aiden Beatty’s perspective is just the same old perspective of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Frankfurt School, Ayn Rand, George Orwell, and every other post-war pessimistic thinker trotted out by the establishment—every incarnation of the Philosophical Irrationalism condemned by Lukács. This worldview thinks the greatest villains are the Gerry Healy-like figures. What Gerry Healy did on a very small scale in Britain, Gaddafi did in a small North African nation, and Stalin did on one fifth of the planet. Breaking free from imperialism, bringing people together to build and construct, and feed off each other’s strength and creativity, in Beatty’s view, is what must be prevented at all costs to preserve the dying liberal order and rule of the imperialist monopolies. The liberal order is terrified of the coming pro-human, pro-growth movement that will rip humanity from the artificial restraints they have imposed on it, and Beatty’s work indicates that academia and U.S. intelligence circles are very well aware that movements and organizations like those Gerry Healy devoted his life to building are likely to emerge within the coming crisis.
