Professor Aidan Beatty, who is currently employed as a lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has posted an announcement of the upcoming September publication of his book, The Party Is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism.

The World Socialist Web Site will post its detailed review when the book is formally released. But having already received and read a review copy, I will state at this point that Beatty has written an utterly filthy piece of hack work.

Beatty’s degraded and even deranged tone is established in its opening sentences:

This is a book about an authoritarian and abusive Irishman named Gerry Healy, and about the political world he helped create … It is a story of violence and scandals, sexual abuse, cults, conspiracy theories, misguided celebrities, and possibly also international espionage and murder; and at the heart of all of this is one man, Healy … a deeply ugly individual … Healy’s physical ugliness was often evoked as a sign of deeper, more profound political and moral ugliness. [xvi]

This book meets none of the basic requirements of a biography. The life of the subject is placed outside of any carefully examined historical context. Why and how Healy, born in Ireland and raised during the civil war, made the transition from the dominant nationalist ideology to Marxian internationalism is not examined, let alone explained. The political issues within Britain and internationally with which Healy contended over his half-century in the Fourth International are barely noted.

The reasons for the existence of the Fourth International, the political issues underlying the struggle against Stalinism, the conflicts that gave rise to the split of 1953 in the Fourth International and the formation of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), and the ICFI’s subsequent break with the US Socialist Workers Party in 1963 are, for the most part, ignored. Aside from a few disconnected remarks, without serious political content, there is no analysis of the reasons for Healy’s emergence as a major figure in the world Trotskyist movement. Nor is there any review of the political origins and development of the devastating crisis, coinciding with the exposure of Healy’s serious abuse of party cadre, that erupted in the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in 1985.

In fact, Beatty could not discuss and clarify these issues simply because he set out—or, perhaps more accurately, was commissioned—to write a biography of Healy without knowing anything about the history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain or, for that matter, the Fourth International.

In what amounts to an astonishing admission of ignorance, Beatty writes in the acknowledgements at the start of the volume:

I can’t remember when I first ever heard of Gerry Healy, but by the very start of 2020 I had begun to gather material on him, not knowing whether it would lead to a piece of long-form journalism or an idiosyncratic academic article. [ix]

Within little more than two years, Beatty moved from having no knowledge of the subject of his biography to the definitive conclusion that Gerry Healy was a monster. However, it is obvious that Beatty began with this predetermined conclusion and set about collecting the material he needed to substantiate his “thesis.” Thus, Beatty constructed his book by contacting and interviewing as many embittered political and personal enemies of Healy as he could find. A quick Google search would have provided him with plenty of potential witnesses for the prosecution.

Beatty writes: “Across 2022 and 2023, I carried out extensive interviews with former members of the SLL [Socialist Labour League] and WRP, members of related groups, and activists from the broader left.” [xi] What Beatty calls “oral history” consists of transcribing and posting the denunciations, lies and half-truths peddled by many of his interlocutors, who have either been affiliated with organizations opposed to the Workers Revolutionary Party or are ex-members of the WRP who long ago abandoned the socialist movement and even became anti-communists.

However, I am among those contacted by Beatty, who writes in his “Note on Interviews”:

David North initially expressed an interest in being interviewed until, after a weeks-long delay, he sent me a series of angry and condemnatory messages. He later denounced me and the book in a public post on Twitter. [xi]

There exists a record of my exchanges with Beatty, which makes clear the reasons I rejected his request for an interview.

On January 9, 2022, Beatty placed a request on the contact form of the World Socialist Web Site, which read:

Hi I am a historian at the University of Pittsburgh and I am currently doing research on the history of British Trotskyism, with a particular focus on Gerry Healy and the Workers Revolutionary party. I am interested in carrying out oral interviews for this and would like to invite David North to do an interview with me - do you have any contact information for him or would you be willing to pass this email on to him? Thanks for your time Aidan

I replied later that same day, requesting more information about the aims of his project:

Dear Professor Beatty,

Your letter has been forwarded to me.

Before agreeing to an interview, I would like to know more about your project. 

How long have you been working on this project? What has your research consisted of? How familiar are you with the history of the Workers Revolutionary Party and the career of Gerry Healy?
Why do you want to interview me? 

I look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely,
David North

Beatty replied on January 10, 2022:

Dear David

Thanks for getting back in touch with me.

I would say I have a strong understanding of the history of the Workers Revolutionary Party as well as of the Socialist Labour League (but I’m happy to be challenged on that!). I have been doing research on them for about two years now and have read through a lot of their publications - both their newspapers and various pamphlets they produced. I’ve also read your published works that directly or indirectly discuss Healy and the WRP (eg. the pamphlet you wrote about him in 1991 and your general history of the Fourth International).

At this stage in my research I feel that I’ve hit two impasses (and I am hoping that interviewing people like yourself who knew Healy and/or had various kinds of interactions with the WRP will help with this):

1. I really struggle with the image of Healy that emerges from a lot of the published works on him (that he was abusive, that he was a terrible public speaker who gave interminable lectures on half-baked understandings of Hegelian philosophy) with the contradictory image that some people still have of him, that he was a high-minded Marxist and an engaging and charismatic leader who was able to convince his followers that a revolution was just around the corner in the UK. There really seems to be a limit to how much I can learn about Healy from textual sources, so it would really help if I could talk to people who actually knew him. I am hoping that this will help me flesh out the depiction of him that I can offer in a future book.

2. There are a huge amount of accusations and counter-accusations that swirl around him and it makes it very difficult to tell a straightforward story about all this. I’ve also come across a lot of evidence that Healy fabricated stories about his childhood. In this light, I would be really interested in just asking you some clarifying questions about Healy and the WRP, as I try to separate fact from fiction.

My general goal in writing about Healy is to try to write a general history of his strand of socialism, and the lessons (mainly negative) that socialists today can take from the activities of the SLL and WRP. One other motivation for me is that I am from Galway, the part of Ireland that Healy was also from, and among socialists in that part of Ireland he still casts a weird kind of shadow - he clearly had a period where he was able to exert influence among at least a section of the global left and yet he did things that were completely at odds with any kind of genuine socialism. As a result, I do have a certain kind of personal interest in his biography (though that’s obviously not a particularly serious motivation, alongside my hopefully more serious reasons for wanting to research the WRP).

If all this sounds amenable to you, please do let me know. I would be happy to do this over Zoom or Skype. I would also be happy to do this in person, COVID-permitting. My wife’s family live just outside of Detroit so I am there regularly (and my understanding is that you live in Detroit, right?).

Thanks for your time

Aidan

As Beatty’s letter seemed to indicate that he was engaged in serious research, I agreed to discuss with him the possibility of an interview. I replied later on January 10:

Dear Aidan,

I am willing to have at least a preliminary discussion with you.

There is no question that Gerry Healy was an immensely complex and complicated political figure. 

I had a very close political relationship with Healy, as I did with Mike Banda and Cliff Slaughter, between 1974 and 1985. In the later part of that period I developed fundamental political and intensively documented political differences with all of them. However, I never developed a personal animosity, let alone hatred, of any of these men. Even when I was compelled to express my differences in the sharpest terms, I was always mindful of the really significant role they had all played in the building of the Trotskyist movement. 

I make these points because almost everything that has been said and written about Healy has been by people who never expressed differences with him during their period of membership in the SLL and WRP, and then—after abandoning the Trotskyist movement—painted him as a monster.

Let me know when you’d like to do a Zoom call.

With best regards,
David

Beatty replied on January 11, 2022:

Hi David

Thanks a lot for agreeing to this. I definitely share your views that just engaging in hostility towards someone is a dead-end - trying to serious [sic] analyze their politics is much more what I want to do.

Would you be free anytime on Monday 17th to talk? I’m free all that day, if there’s any time that works for you.

All the best
Aidan

In retrospect, it is evident that Beatty was dissembling his real intentions. In any case, I wanted more information before agreeing to a formal interview. I replied on the same day (January 11):

Aidan,

My schedule is somewhat unsettled next week. Would you have time tomorrow or Thursday? As I said, this would be a preliminary discussion that would give me a better sense of the scope of your research. I think it would also help you decide whether my input is of value to your efforts.

I do not know who told you that Healy was “a terrible public speaker.” He was arguably the greatest public orator active in the British workers’ movement in the post-World War II era. He was certainly the equal of Bevan, and probably better. I witnessed Healy speak before mass audiences, numbering in the thousands. He had an astonishing capacity to inspire a working class audience, conveying to them a sense of their power as a social force. And there was real content in what he said. 

Of course, his lectures on philosophy—especially in the years of growing crisis within the WRP (and in all sections of the workers movement)—revealed significant theoretical and political disorientation. But what he had to say, even where he was wrong, was not nonsense.

I make these points only to stress that a book about Healy raises many complex political, theoretical and historical issues. He was, deservedly, a major political figure in the revolutionary socialist movement. Unfortunately, “the good men do is oft interred with their bones…”

I do not know whether you have read the opening sections of my obituary of Cliff Slaughter that was published following his death this past May. They take the story of his life up to 1963, and Healy plays a significant role in this account. This is the link: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/05/slau-a05.html

This material should give you a sense of my approach to political biography. I try to be objective even when—or should I say “especially when”—I am writing about those who became political enemies.

Best regards,
David

There followed several e-mail exchanges for the purpose of scheduling a preliminary discussion via WhatsApp, which took place on January 12, 2022. This discussion did not allay my concerns. Quite the opposite. It quickly became clear that Beatty neither understood nor was familiar with the foundations of Marxism, let alone with the historical experiences and program of the Trotskyist movement. There was no indication that he had studied any of the major historical and theoretical documents of the International Committee, including those pertaining to the conflict between the Workers League (the US affiliate of the ICFI) and the WRP, which had developed between 1982 and 1985. I sought to stress as politely as possible that Beatty had a great deal of work to do before he would be in a position to write a serious political biography of Gerry Healy.

I was particularly struck by Beatty’s comment about Healy being a “terrible public speaker,” because this indicated that he had not even viewed a film of Healy speaking, available on YouTube, that clearly indicates his powerful oratorical ability. Following our discussion, I sent him a link to the film.

Beatty was nothing if not persistent. He wrote again on January 27, 2022:

Hi David—

hope you’re keeping well. Would you be available to do a formal interview sometime in February? Aidan

I replied on January 31, 2022:

Hi Aidan, excuse the delay in answering. The answer is yes. But probably toward the middle of the month.

On February 1, 2022, Beatty wrote:

Thanks, David! Let me know what dates will work for you. Talk soon.

The interview would have gone ahead but for the next e-mail from Beatty, sent on February 10, 2022, requesting contact information for a female member of the British section of the ICFI. I was now fairly certain that his real aim was to write a book that focused on the 1985 scandal in the WRP. Therefore, I sent a text message to Beatty on February 17, 2022 stating that I would not be available for an interview. Beatty replied:

Thanks for letting me know! Obviously if you do have time in the future, I’ll still be happy to do an interview, Best of luck!

On March 19, 2022, I sent Beatty a link to a WSWS statement that I had written on the historical background of the Ukraine war. He replied:

Thanks for sending me this. Hope you’re keeping well.

The next communication from Beatty arrived on May 4, 2022. It consisted of a link to a statement that he had posted on Twitter. It read:

Were you ever a member of the Socialist Labour League, the Workers Revolutionary Party or any of their related groups within the International Committee of the Fourth International?

Were you active on the British Left in the 1960s, 70s or 80s and have contact with the SLL or WRP?

Would you be interested in recording an interview about your experiences and memories of these groups?

All interviews will be handled with the utmost care, no interviews will be made publicly available and can be recorded anonymously.

The interviews will be used as part of a book on the history of the Workers Revolutionary Party.

Contact: Aidan Beatty - wrporalhistoryproject@gmail.org

This was an appeal by Beatty to anyone who might have dirt that he or she might wish to share with him. The type of information that Beatty was soliciting was made clear by his pledge of “utmost care” in his handling of the material, and that the interviews would be “recorded anonymously.”

In response to this unsavory solicitation, I wrote to Beatty via WhatsApp on May 5, 2022:

This will produce nothing but the viciously subjective and essentially anti-communist accounts of people who broke with Trotskyism. As history, it is intellectually worthless.

Beatty replied within minutes:

Obviously I disagree, but I guess we’ll just have to leave it at that. Thanks for your time.

I responded:

It might be worth while, not to mention politically revealing, to ask the participants what they contributed to the building of the Fourth International and the revolutionary workers’ movement after the split in the WRP.

Beatty answered:

Well I’m definitely interested in what positive things people took from their time in the SLL or WRP, even amidst all the negative aspects of those organizations. My invitation to do an interview is always open but I’ll leave that up to you!

I replied:

You seem to have decided to write yet another account of Trotskyism as a political cult movement, focusing on the experiences of various cynical and demoralized people. Why you would want to spend your time on this sort of project is, of course, a question that only you can answer. But I cannot see what it has to do with serious political and intellectual history.

I am not trying to be rude to you. But it was apparent from our preliminary discussion that you had not made a serious study of the history of the Fourth International. You had very little understanding of the complex political and theoretical issues that underlay the conflicts within the Fourth International and the WRP. These issues are of vast contemporary significance—for example, of the nature and causes of the Russia-Ukraine War. Perhaps you might take the time to listen to my May Day speech, which is posted on the WSWS.

At this point, Mr. Beatty realized that I had seen through his scheme. He dropped the mask of cordiality, replying:

I’m muting this conversation, David. Thanks for your time.

I then sent my final response to Beatty in the early evening of May 5, 2022:

It is now evident that you approached me in bad faith.

In his “Note on Interviews,” Beatty refers to a statement I posted on Twitter (now X), denouncing both the author and his book. I posted a comment on November 18, 2022, in response to Beatty’s announcement on November 1, 2022 that he would be “signing a contract today with @PlutoPress for my upcoming book on Gerry Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party.” He included in this announcement a scan of his agreement with Pluto Press. As of that date, the planned title of the book was “Split, Split, and Split Again: Gerry Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party.” He subsequently changed the title to The Party Is Always Right, a phrase spoken not by Healy but by a notorious Stalinist bureaucrat in Costa-Gavras’ brilliant film, The Confession, which deals with the infamous 1952 Purge Trials in Czechoslovakia.

In my response to Beatty’s post, I wrote:

Mr. Beatty contacted me last year. It soon became apparent that 1) Beatty knows virtually nothing about the history of the Trotskyist movement; and 2) he is planning to write a smutty book of absolutely no political or intellectual value. I broke off contact with him.

The content of Beatty’s book completely confirms my appraisal.

But one is still compelled to ask the question: What led Mr. Beatty to write this book? The answer is provided in the concluding chapter, titled “Epilogue: Twenty-first-century Healyism.” It is entirely devoted to a denunciation of the Socialist Equality Party and me personally.

The chapter begins with a scurrilous attack on the Harvard University anthropologist, John Comaroff, who was the subject of false allegations of sexual abuse. Despite a vitriolic campaign against the famed scholar in the student newspaper, the allegations were exposed to be without credible substance, and Comaroff, then almost 80 years old, was reinstated. Beatty, ignoring the facts of the case and its outcome, denounces the World Socialist Web Site for publishing “a fawning apologia for Comaroff, despite the credible accusations of sexual abuse against him.” [136-37] In fact, there was no “credible evidence,” and what the WSWS published was not “a fawning apologia” but a series of devastating analyses of the origins and fraudulent substance of the witch-hunt.

The most detailed of these analyses, written by WSWS arts editor David Walsh and published on March 15, 2022, was titled, “The politically driven campaign against Harvard anthropologist John Comaroff.” Following a careful exposure of the meritless allegations, Walsh examined the theoretical underpinnings of the anti-Comaroff campaign, which was based on the spurious claims—assiduously promoted by gender theorists who dominate university discourse—that sexual predators are protected by a “hierarchy of privilege.” Walsh explained:

The “hierarchy of privilege” becomes the magic formula, an all-enveloping force, that accounts for any and all phenomena. If an accusation against a tenured professor is denied or disproven, that is merely further, damning proof that such an “academic caste system” exists. As for active resistance to the attacks, by Comaroff and others, that is interpreted as an unmistakable sign of guilt. The media and the accusers adopt the approach of the Salem trial judges, as Emerson W. Baker outlines it in A Storm of Witchcraft, “Their strategy consisted of constructing a ‘guilty but unwilling to confess’ mentality by which they assumed that the defendants who refused to confess were lying.”

The “hierarchy of privilege” argument is circular, unanswerable—and spurious. If a prominent professor fails to help graduate student X or Y to find employment, he must be deliberately blocking X’s or Y’s career path. The objective facts of the job market and the demanding academic credentials required are simply left out of account.

Beatty does not cite or in any way address the analysis made by Walsh. Rather, he proceeds to brazenly slander the WSWS, declaring:

The website’s blunt defense of Comaroff is not at all out of character: they have also published exonerations of Harvey Weinstein (a convicted rapist), Woody Allen (credibly accused of child abuse) and Louis CK (who admitted to extreme sexual harassment of fellow comedians) and have a general contempt for the debates over sexual harassment that followed the various #MeToo revelations. [137]

This is a pack of lies. The WSWS never “exonerated” Harvey Weinstein. In an article posted on the WSWS on October 12, 2017, David Walsh wrote:

We hold no brief for the Hollywood producer, a renowned bully and abuser of his employees, if nothing else, nor vouch for his morality. If only a fraction of the sexual harassment allegations are true, his conduct has been repugnant and perhaps criminal.

However, Walsh cautioned readers that “Weinstein has constitutional rights, including due process and the presumption of innocence.” He continued:

There is a lengthy history of sex scandals in America (and Hollywood—Charlie Chaplin and others), none of which has led in a progressive direction. The sex scandal is a mechanism through which other issues are resolved, often to the satisfaction of powerful economic interests and generally with the result that politics is pushed to the right. The Clinton-Lewinsky affair, manipulated by the right wing and a subservient media, took center stage in American political life for nearly two years and almost led, in what was an attempted coup d’état, to the removal of a twice-elected president.

These principled considerations have informed the WSWS’s coverage and denunciation of the reactionary #MeToo movement, which has fomented a witch-hunting atmosphere that has destroyed the careers of artists, writers, actors and other public figures—based on salacious, unproven and false allegations—on a scale not seen since the McCarthy era. As for the case of Weinstein, his conviction in kangaroo court proceedings overseen by an unscrupulous judge has been overturned by the New York State Court of Appeals.

What then is the connection between Beatty’s so-called Healy biography and his denunciation of the SEP and WSWS in the Epilogue? It is a dishonest attempt to link Healy’s abusive behavior in the 1970s and 1980s to the Marxist class-based politics of the Socialist Equality Party. He writes:

The SEP has its roots in the Workers League that had once been led by Tim Wohlforth and closely influenced by Gerry Healy. Developing the ideas it learned from the WRP, the SEP’s privileging of class over all else has ended up not just downplaying race and gender, but outright sexism and racism. [137]

By this point, the political motivations underlying Beatty’s book become all too clear. He is writing not as a historian but as a political flack for the Democratic Party. He denounces the SEP for its “ultra-leftist perspectives on current events and bad faith attacks on the recent crop of democratic socialist politicians, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez especially, but also Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.” [137] What he calls “bad faith” is the well-known Marxist critique of the middle class political agents of imperialism.

As Healy has been dead for 35 years, Beatty must find another devil who can be presented as the reincarnation of that evil spirit. And so Beatty turns his attention to me, announcing that “North is circumspect about his early life … Even within the SEP, not much is known about his background.” In order to correct this troubling situation, Beatty fixates on details of my childhood and student years that are totally irrelevant to a book that claims to be a biography of Gerry Healy. Having ignored in his previous chapters the numerous documents in which my political differences with Healy are recorded, he turned instead to Ancestry.com to uncover records of my family background.

Among his discoveries is that my legal name (David Green) was acquired from the man my mother married following the death of my biological father in 1953. He also uncovers the damning information that my grandfather was the Polish-German and Jewish composer and conductor Ignatz Waghalter (1881-1949), and that my mother was an opera singer who, following her withdrawal from the stage, founded a travel agency. He writes: “The family were wealthy enough to spend summers in Switzerland. From an early age, David North was blessed with cultural capital as well as raw economic capital.” Any other complaints?

(Those interested in learning more about the career of my grandfather may access the Wikipedia entry on Ignatz Waghalter or listen to his compositions on Spotify or YouTube.)

Beatty’s research into my mysterious background included scouring the archives of Trinity College, which I attended from 1967 to 1971. He has uncovered the shocking fact that during those years I progressed from being an increasingly disenchanted 18-year-old left liberal to a 21-year-old Trotskyist. He discovered a newspaper interview, conducted in 1968, in which I stated, “I personally am very, very dissatisfied with American society.” Not only that, I served as editor of the campus newspaper and spent a semester in 1969 (not 1970, as stated by Beatty) working as an intern and speechwriter in the offices of the anti-war Democratic Party Senator Vance Hartke.

Following several pages of additional exposures, such as the fact that the SEP supplemented its income by maintaining a commercial printing company, he concludes his indictment with a vitriolic political denunciation of the WSWS:

WSWS infamously served as a forum for duplicitous criticisms of Nikole Hannah-Jones 1619 Project, thus playing an unlikely role in helping foment the far-right Critical Race Theory panic of 2021. For all their Marxist posturing, the SEP provided multiple platforms to conservative historians, such as Gordon Wood, sharing with them a contempt for organized anti-racism. North’s antagonism toward Critical Race Theory is strong enough that he was willing to come out of character and to write a letter under his government name [!] to his alma mater’s alumni magazine, Trinity Tripod, to censure the college’s racially conscious teaching methods. [147] [Note: the Trinity Tripod is the campus newspaper, not its alumni magazine. This is just one minor example of the innumerable factual errors in Beatty’s manuscript.]

Beatty concludes his volume with an extended denunciation of the Trotskyist program of the SEP:

A certain kind of vulgar Marxist logic underpins the SEP world-view, based, as it is, on a claim that a true socialist should only be concerned with a narrowly defined conception of class struggle; any politics of race or gender is thus divisive, a distraction and inadmissible. A post-1968 hostility to identity politics, seen as an abdication of class consciousness, is also at play here. The SEP’s very orthodox strand of Trotskyism, inherited from Healy, also has a specific problem with any social movement that does not operate within a circumscribed idea of a Bolshevik-style mass proletarian party with Trotskyist leadership. [147]

Beatty’s book is a political hit job, not a scholarly biography. There are many questions about the writing of this piece of hack work that will be explored in a subsequent review. There is good reason to believe that Mr. Beatty is not the sole author of this work, and that he had substantial assistance in collecting this mass of odoriferous material. As it is published by Pluto Press, which is affiliated with a political tendency hostile to the International Committee, one can reasonably assume that it provided Beatty with substantial support in the “researching” and writing of this volume.

Moreover, one must wonder how he even found the time to produce this work when he was simultaneously engaged in the writing and publication of a major work, on which he had been working since 2015.

His Acknowledgements for Private Property and the Fear of Social Chaos provide a detailed account of the process that led to its publication in 2023. Much of the concluding critical work, especially the writing and editing, took place while he was supposedly researching and writing his Healy biography. How did Beatty manage to combine the two projects?

In explaining the process that led to the publication of Private Property and the Fear of Social Chaos, Beatty writes that “the manuscript went through a long period of being chaotic and slapdash.” [ix] He notes that “two anonymous peer reviewers provided a very helpful series of constructive comments that helped me shape an overly rough draft into something (hopefully) more coherent.” [ix]

Nothing approaching this rigorous process preceded the publication of The Party is Always Right. There is no reference to a peer-review of his manuscript. Beatty thanks his immediate family for “listening to me ramble on about anecdotes from the history of British Trotskyism…” [ix] And that is what his biography consists of: “anecdotes”—for the most part based on gossip and hearsay—told by haters of Gerry Healy and bitter opponents of Trotskyism.

One significant detail is the information, included in the Acknowledgements that precede the text of his Healy hit-piece, that Beatty’s “research in Britain was funded by the Program on Jewish Studies and the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh, who were generous enough to see the Jewish, Israeli-Palestinian and global connections of this project.” [Italics added] It is by no means apparent, without additional information from Mr. Beatty, what these “connections” are. In this regard, it must be noted that Beatty’s main expertise as a historian is in the field of Jewish and Israeli studies. His first book, Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, was a comparative study—heavily influenced by petty-bourgeois academic gender theory—of Irish nationalism and Zionism. Substantial funding for that project came from the Azrieli Institute, which is a major pro-Zionist foundation.

It is hardly unreasonable to conclude that the commissioning of this attack, and the speed that it was moved to publication, is a response to the campaign conducted by the World Socialist Web Site against the genocidal war being conducted by the fascistic Israeli regime. This is perhaps what Beatty was alluding to when he noted that his sponsors “were generous enough to see the Jewish, Israeli-Palestinian and global connections” of his anti-Trotskyist project.

Whatever the truth may be, one thing is certain: with the writing of this miserable book Mr. Beatty has dealt a blow to his professional reputation from which it will never recover. Despite the tragic character of his final years, Gerry Healy will be remembered as a significant figure in the history of the British working class and the international struggle for socialism. All that he contributed to the defense of the revolutionary perspective against the betrayals and crimes of the Stalinists and social democrats over many decades will not be forgotten.

But unhappily for Beatty, the fate of books and their authors are inextricably linked. The evil men write lives after them. This is the book for which Beatty will be remembered.

For more information on Gerry Healy and the history of the Fourth International:

• The Heritage We Defend
• Gerry Healy and his Place in the History of the Fourth International  
• The Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party
• Lectures to the Socialist Equality Party 2023 Summer School
• Leon Trotsky and the Marxism of the 21st century