How the subjectivist Thornett clique battled Trotskyism

"The Battle for Trotskyism" is a book containing documents written by Alan Thornett, a well known activist in British Trotskyist circles. In 1974, Thornett and hundreds of supporters were expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) and went on to form the Workers Socialist League (WSL). The WRP's authoritarian party head, the notorious Gerry Healy, didn't suffer opposition gladly! Most normal people went with Thornett, leaving Healy with a dwindling "party" of thugs, crackpots and corrupted petty bureaucrats (and a daily paper nobody was reading). The WRP survived only through a form of political prostitution, taking enormous amounts of money from Gaddafi's Libya, Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Khomeini's Iran. For more on Healy, see my reviews of "Marxism vs. Ultraleftism" and "Healy's Big Lie".

While the WRP and the WSL are probably mostly forgotten today, the two groups weren't unknown during the 1970's. Thornett was a high profile union activist at the Leyland plant in Cowley, the largest car plant in Britain at the time. Healy, while having little real influence, had recruited actor Vanessa Redgrave to the WRP, and remained notorious well into the 1980's, his large funds making it possible for him to finance projects for Labour politicians Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight.

This being said, I don't think "The Battle for Trotskyism" is of particular interest to the general reader. Thornett's documents are (of course) in-house Trotskyist polemics, although I don't doubt that he was closer to Trotsky's original program than the erratic Healy, whose politics were a strange blend of ra-ra-revolutionary phrase-mongering, agent-baiting of political opponents (Thornett's aide John Lister was accused of being, surprise, an FBI agent) and uncritical support to Mideast regimes willing to give the WRP hard cash. The WRP's "theory" of the economic crisis claimed that the Tory government of Edward Heath deliberately crashed the economy, that a feudal-fascist coup was imminent, and that capitalism wouldn't survive the collapse of the gold standard?! Sounds remarkably similar to Lyndon LaRouche, which raises all kinds of intriguing questions, since LaRouche was briefly a supporter of Healy's American franchise, the Workers League!

On one point, I think "The Battle for Trotskyism" has been superseded by more recent revelations. Thornett hotly denies that the British representatives of French Trotskyist Pierre Lambert were in any way involved in the WRP split in 1974. Lambert was an old factional opponent of Healy, who presumably was interested in busting Gerry's operation on the far side of the Channel. However, I remember reading somewhere that Lambert and the British Lambertists *were* involved, advising Thornett from the sidelines during secretive meetings at bridges late at night, etc. If so, Lambert didn't get his catch, since Thornett, rather than joining the Lambertist international network, struck out on his own...

But OK, perhaps my interest in these matters is somewhat original. Three stars?