"I liked Gerry Healy"

Spartacist is the magazine of the Spartacist League, a small leftist group in the United States, which claims to be Trotskyist. In reality, their politics look and sound more "Stalinist", at least to those of us who can tell the difference (or give a damn).

This issue of Spartacist contain articles on the 1985 split in the British Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). The WRP founder-leader Gerry Healy had been expelled, accused of physical violence against male party members and sexual abuse of female ditto. It also became clear that Healy had taken money from both Gaddafi's Libya and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and perhaps fingered Iraqi dissidents to Saddam's secret service (!). The WRP was a relatively well-known Trotskyist organization, even publishing a daily paper, the News Line. Their most famous recruit was actress Vanessa Redgrave. Healy also had some contacts in the Labour Party, including Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight. The explosion of the WRP therefore created some stir, and the British tabloids had a field day when Healy's sexual misconduct was made public. "Reds in the bed" was a typical headline. Thus, the tiny Spartacist League in far-away New York City weren't the only ones paying attention...

Apart from articles about the actual split and its immediate aftermath, Spartacist also reprints earlier material on the WRP and their US co-thinkers, the Workers League. There's also an extensive interview with James Robertson, the Spartacist leader. Much of the material deals with factional encounters between the Spartacists and the Healyites.

Sometimes, Robertson makes rather startling claims. At one point, he even says: "Let's be clear: I *liked* Gerry Healy, I got on very well with him, we saw eye to eye on all kinds of questions, gossip, nuances, tactics, like a couple of fairly hard-bitten communists who'd been through some mills". Since Healy was, by most accounts, a cross between Stalin and L. Ron Hubbard, this is surely a remarkable admission. Later, Robertson claims that the American Healyites, lead by Tim Wohlforth, recruited lumpen youth to murder the Spartacists...

Spartacist Winter 1985-86 might be of some interest to perennial left-watchers, but personally, I don't think there's much analysis in it. When the chips are down, the Spartacist League can't do much more than regurgitate their usual shallow dogmas and invectives. The invectives may be true, as far as they go, but they don't really go that far. Even apart from the fact that defectors from the Spartacist League charge that Robertson wasn't really much better than Healy...

I loved every minute of these polemics about 20 years ago, when I read them the first time. Today, I felt tired much faster than usual.