Politically bankrupt, stagnant, Healy has seen his International Committee' split, with first the return of the American Socialist Workers Party to a sympathetic relationship with the Fourth International headed by the United Secretariat. and the rupture with the Lambert group in France. This has left him almost completely isolated in his Clapham lair. with only a few stooges here and there, propped up by financial aid from the London centre.
Meanwhile, the Fourth International has continued to grow and now has sections or sympathising organisations in more than 42 countries, Its international leadership meets regularly, is elected by International Conferences (not appointed from 'above') and are known, unlike the anonymous members of the 'International Committee'. In Britain, Healy lost his working class base with the expulsion of Thornett and his supporters, and there is an increasing turnover of members in the WRP as more and more of its adherents come up against its harsh and monolithic bureaucratic regime. It is here, in the political field, that we must look for the real motives of the Healy campaign.
While the campaign is aimed at the Fourth International as a whole, its principal targets have been Joseph Hansen and George Novack of the American SWP. This is no accident. For years they were Healy's closest associates. After the split in the International in 1953, Hansen and Novack devoted a great deal of their time and talents to helping Healy to build the Trostkvist movement in this country. In fact, one can state quite categorically that they materially assisted Healy's theoretical development.
In the May/ August 1952 issue of Labour Review (Vol. 1, No. 2) there appeared an article by Gerry Healy. It was an in-depth review of Aneurin Bevan's In Place of Fear. Some of us, when we first read the article (subsequently published as a pamphlet), were not only impressed by its theoretical canty outalso surorised - we were not accustomed to think of Healy as a theoret-