[D66] Healyites

[A.O.]

John Lister, expelled from the WRP in 1974, concluded:

     Healy was a crook and a political charlatan, who preserved his 
position as General Secretary of the WRP by resorting to the most 
bureaucratic and anti-democratic measures, who stubbornly opposed any 
campaigning for women's liberation or gay rights, who habitually 
subjected women "comrades" to sexual abuse, who sold out the WRP's 
formal principles and programme for Middle East oil money and who has 
done more than anyone to degrade the reputation of Marxism and 
Trotskyism in Britain.[23]

[...]

Vanessa Redgrave said at a press conference that "these allegations are 
all lies and the women who are supposed to have made them are all liars. 
I don't care whether it's 26, 36 or 236. They are all liars".[19] She 
denounced her former colleague: "This is part of a political frame-up by 
Mr Banda who wants to dissolve the WRP because he has moved to the 
right".[19]

[...]

The Communist Forum was a short-lived political group formed in 1986 by 
Mike Banda, following his expulsion from the Workers Revolutionary Party 
(Workers Press). Banda continued to reassess his politics, and in 1986 
published "What is Trotskyism? Or Will the Real Trotsky Please Stand 
Up?", a document arguing that Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement were 
mistaken.[5] This position differed from the majority of the Workers' 
Press group, and so Banda left that year to form the Communist Forum. 
The group moved away from orthodox Trotskyism.[11] This was soon renamed 
the "Marxist Philosophy Forum", but dissolved in 1987.[12][13]

[...]

North:

Entitled "What is Trotskyism? Or Will the Real Trotsky Please Stand 
Up?," Banda's new document is a frantic denunciation of Trotskyism, a 
belated tribute to Joseph Stalin and a declaration of political 
allegiance to the Kremlin bureaucracy. It is an open attack on the 
entire struggle waged by Trotsky from the 1920s on against the 
degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, the usurpation of political power 
by the Stalinist bureaucracy and the betrayal of the Russian and world 
socialist revolution. In this new attack, Banda quotes the texts of 
everyone from the ultrarightist James Burnham, to the state capitalist 
Max Shachtman, to the theoretical godfather of Pabloite revisionism, 
Isaac Deutscher. After having spent 40 years in the Fourth 
International, Banda has discovered that Leon Trotsky was wrong in 
refusing to capitulate to Stalin in 1928! Trotskyism, he writes, "has 
now become synonymous with scholastic pettifogging and centrist rhetoric 
combined with the most grotesque political prostration before the Social 
Democratic bureaucracy and the imperialist state. Together with the 
Euro-Communists it stands as one of the most discredited of 
anti-communist, anti-Soviet and anti-working class groups outside the 
Social Democracy."

That is not all. Banda now asserts that he was mistaken in his previous 
belief that Trotsky's politics could not be held responsible for the 
crisis inside the International Committee:

     In my "27 Reasons" I incorrectly stated that Trotsky had "sown 
dragon's teeth and reaped fleas." This only shows how widespread and 
deep were Trotsky's mystifications and mis-education of generations of 
would-be Marxist revolutionaries who spurned the Popular Frontism of the 
Comintern and turned to Trotskyism on the mistaken assumption that this 
was authentic Leninism. Belatedly — and somewhat reluctantly — I have 
become convinced, through a careful consideration of my own experience 
in what was ostensibly the strongest Trotskyist group in Britain that 
there is a direct causative connection between the impasse and 
disintegration of Trotskyism and the method and policies advocated by 
Trotsky. Conversely, I would say that if Trotsky's policies and 
perspectives were right and did correspond to the real development of 
historical law then the movement he founded would today be counting its 
members in millions with sections all over the world — principally in 
the USSR, Eastern Europe and China.

Banda writes that Trotsky's

     claim to Marxist-Leninist authenticity must be doubted. Not only 
has his policy failed to materialize in any party anywhere....

     History has been a satire on Trotsky's beliefs and principles. 
After 60 years only an ignorant fetishist or an idolatrous worshiper of 
a personality cult would maintain that Trotsky's analysis of the USSR 
and his methods of party building, as well as his concept of a world 
party, are correct and consistent with the tradition and method of Lenin 
and Marx. Only an empiricist simpleton or charlatan would maintain that 
the collapse of the Fourth International and the disintegration of its 
vaunted successor — the ICFI — was an unfortunate episode not connected 
with an objective process and determined by the operation of the 
dialectical laws of history and the movement of social forces.





--
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_International_(post-reunification)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Healy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Banda
http://www.aworldtowin.net/resources/MikeBanda.html
http://kurdishquestion.com/oldarticle.php?aid=michael-van-der-poorten-mike-banda-remembered-1930-2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Redgrave
https://www.wsws.org/en/IML/heritage/heritage_full.html#anchor33