Healy, Jerry

Jerry Healy was born in Ballybane, County Galway , in Western Ireland . His parents were Michael Healy, a small Catholic farmer, and Margaret Mary. After school, he left for England and worked as a ship radio operator when he was 14 years old.

In 1931, he joined the Youth Communist League, the youth organization of the Communist Party of Great Britain . A few years later he joined the ranks of the party, and earned a reputation as a trade union and party organizer, speaker and agitator . However, in 1937, Healy left the ranks of the Communist Party and joined the Trotskyist Militant Group. After a split that same year, he left the group and was among the founders of the International Workers League (RML) with Ralph Lee , Jock Huston, and Ted Grant . Healy's work inside the RML was marked by great difficulties and friction with other leaders of the organization. This led to the fact that in 1943 he was expelled from the League, and he joined the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), which was the official section of the Fourth International in Britain.

In 1944, the RSL and MRL merged into a single organization called the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In the early postwar years, Healy became one of the leaders of the RCP and worked very closely with Sam Gordon , who lived in Europe as a representative of the Socialist Workers Party (USA) at the International Secretariat of the Fourth International.

In the late 1940s , Healy advocated the idea of ​​long-term entrism ("entryism sui generis"), proposed as tactics by the leader of the International, Michel Pablo . Healy advocated for work within the British Labor Party (PL), which was approved by the International Secretariat. However, many leaders of the RCP, led by Ted Grant, opposed Entrism in the PL, considering it at that moment not timely. Grant’s position was supported by the majority of the party. Despite this, Healy, with his supporters, joined the Labor Party. In fact, this led to the collapse of the RCP, on the site of which Healy in 1950 created the band The Club. A large number of communists and left-wing intellectuals joined the group, breaking with Stalinism and the British Communist Party after the Hungarian and Polish events of 1956 and Khrushchev 's report on exposing Stalin's personality cult at the XX Congress of the CPSU .

During the split of the Fourth International of 1953, Healy supported the leadership of the American Socialist Workers Party and the French International Communist Party, Pierre Lambert . Cannon, Healy, Lambert and their supporters declared themselves the Fourth International, standing on the positions of Leon Trotsky , and established its International Committee (ICFI). Healy became one of the secretaries of the ICFI. Towards the end of the 1950s , due to a common position on a number of issues, a rapprochement began between the majority of the ICFI and the ICFI. One supporter of the reunion of the two trends was the leaders of the PSA (USA) - James P. Cannon and Joseph Hansen . In 1963, a unifying world congress was held, at which the reunification of the Fourth International was confirmed. Healy and Lambert initiated the 1963 International Conference of the Trotskyists, and continued to work within the framework of the International Committee.

In Britain, in the late 1950s, the Healy group temporarily took over leadership of the Labor youth organization. In 1959 , after Healy's supporters were expelled from the PL, and the youth organization was simply abolished, The Club was renamed the Socialist Labor League (STL). Since 1958, the new weekly newspaper The Newsletter began to appear.

In 1973, STL was transformed into the Workers' Revolutionary Party , which for many years published the weekly tabloid The News Line, which in the 1970s was one of the strongest ultra-left organizations. At the same time, the internal political regime in the RRS was getting worse and worse. There was a cult of personality of Healy, party funding from the political regimes of Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein . In 1975, on the initiative of Healy, an investigation was launched by the International Committee of the Fourth International “on the circumstances of the murder of Leon Trotsky,” dubbed “Security and the Fourth International.” Almost the entire leadership of the PSA, including Joseph Hansen, was accused of working for Soviet and American special services, as well as involvement in the assassination of Trotsky.

In 1974, a group of activists around Alan Tornett was expelled from the organization. They formed the Labor Socialist League (WSL), which then established close contacts with the Fourth International .

The accusation of the RRP leadership, led by Healy, with ties to the dictatorial regimes of Libya and Iraq caused a scandal that led to a split in the party. In 1985, the leadership of the ICFI excluded Jerry Healy from the party and the International . The RRS broke up after a series of new allegations against Jerry Healy, including sexual abuse of women in the party; physical violence against party members and defamation of David North, secretary of the United States Labor League (once affiliated with the RRS), as if he were an agent of the CIA ^[1] . Of the few supporters, including the famous English actress Vanessa Redgrave , Healy created the Marxist Party in 1987 .

In recent years, he was convinced that Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of the political revolution in the USSR . In 1987 - 1989, Jerry Healy and Vanessa Redgrave came to the Soviet Union several times. In his memoirs, “Dangerous Liaisons,” People's Artist of the USSR Sergei Yursky recalled his meetings with them in Moscow ^[2] .

• J. Healy Biography and Bibliography