Book Review from the May 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard
My Search for Revolution & How We Brought Down An Abusive Leader. By Clare Cowen. Matador. 2019. 350 pages. £19.99
Another book of Trotskyist reminiscences from the 1970s and 80s but with a rather more sinister story to tell, that of the ‘Workers Revolutionary Party’ ending in the exposure in 1985 of its leader, Gerry Healy, as a serial sex abuser. The author was one of his victims but most of her book is about the frenetic activity required of its ‘cadres’, the full-time ‘professional revolutionaries’ of which she was one.
At that time the WRP was arguably the premier Trotskyist organisation in Britain. Funded by Vanessa Redgrave and her sinister brother Corin, and also by the author and later Colonel Gaddafi, the WRP acquired a residential school, a number of bookshops, and a modern printing press on which it printed a daily newspaper. At its height it was able to ‘mobilise’ thousands of ‘youth’ and fill large venues such as Alexandra Palace in London for huge rallies.
Cowen’s account of how it functioned internally is disturbing and suggests it was more like a cult than a political party; its cadres had to devote the whole of their life to the organisation and accept a rigid discipline that included sessions at which they could be accused of being in error and forced to recant.
Fortunately a ‘revolution’ led by such a party never happened, nor was likely to despite the WRP motivating its cadres by proclaiming that it (or, alternatively, fascism) was imminent. When, following the defeat of the miners’ strike, most of them realised that it wasn’t, the whole thing fell apart, though a much smaller WRP still exists on the same basis, putting up 5 candidates at the last general election.
Adam Buick
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