Gerry Healy - Early Career

Early Career

Born in Ballybane, County Galway, Ireland, although some sources claim Liverpool, he emigrated to England and worked as a ship radio operator at the age of 14. He soon joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, but then left to join the Trotskyist Militant Group in 1937. He then left to become one of the founders of the Workers International League, led by Ted Grant, Jock Haston and Ralph Lee.

Healy's period in the WIL was difficult and he threatened to resign several times and was actually expelled and readmitted. He was in the group when it fused with the Revolutionary Socialist League to form the Revolutionary Communist Party but grew closer to the leadership of the Fourth International, effectively the leadership of the American Socialist Workers Party, and their representative in Britain, Sam Gordon. They encouraged Healy to form a faction and to take that group into the Labour Party. In 1950, he was rewarded as the RCP voted to dissolve itself into his faction which became known as The Club.

In 1953, Healy joined the split in the Fourth International instigated by James P. Cannon and was soon nominal leader of the International Committee of the Fourth International. The Club recruited a substantial number of former members of the Communist Party of Great Britain after they became disillusioned with Stalinism after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956 which brought Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin and, later that year, the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution. This qualitatively changed the ability of Healy's group to carry out activity and they launched The Newsletter as a regular weekly paper in 1958. He reconstituted The Club as the Socialist Labour League in 1959, and then in 1973 as the Workers' Revolutionary Party.