Alan Thornett, in his obituary to Gerry Healy in Socialist Outlook No 21, rightly points out the serious damage done by Healy to the revolutionary Marxist tradition in Britain.
But in order, as Alan Thornett concludes, 'to ensure that there is never room left for his ilk to do such damage again', it is necessary to understand the causes of Healyism.
Although Healy came from third-period Stalinism, and later aped its methods, he was essentially a product of the split in the Fourth International that started in 1953. Although Healy did not cause the 1953 split, he was certainly one of its most obvious victims.
Two years after the 1974 expulsion of Thornett and what became the Workers' Socialist League from Healy's organisation, the International Marxist Group published the famous/infamous series of articles 'Faction and Party' written by Alan Jones, taking the form of a polemic against the comrades of the WSL.
The positions in these articles were broadly adopted by the IMG. Jones considered Healy's degeneration to have been inevitable because of his inablity [sic] to distinguish between a faction and a party. This idealistic and schematic nonsense (and these words are not used lightmindedly) has not been criticised. It has helped to hide the real causes of the 1953 split and in particular has helped to obscure any broad understanding of how the degeneration of Healy and his organisation could have been avoided.
Revolutionary Marxists have a much greater history of defeats than of successes, and it is from these defeats that lessons really have to be drawn. The programmatic and tactical issues involved in the 1953 split are particularly topical given the present developments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and are well worth studying.
But it is essential to study all the questions that were raised (especially the organisational questions raised by the comrades of the early International Committee of the Fourth International) in order to understand the causes of the split; how these causes destroyed the International's ability to correct Healy's devloping [sic] national isolationaism [sic]; and how revolutionary Marxism in Britain can recover from the tremendous setback of the 1953 split.
Roy Wall
NW London