Workers Revolutionary Party book?

[The Idler]

Is there a book on the WRP and the splits that came from the Workers Revolutionary Party?

[StalinFanboy]

Were there that many that they needed a book to document it?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Do you mean the UK-WRP?

If so, there is this:

http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/pages/Healy/Contents.html

and

Lotz, C., and Feldman, P. (1994), Gerry Healy. A Revolutionary Life (http://www.aworldtowin.net/purchase/LupusbuyGH.html) (Lupus Books).

But the latter is just a hagiography.

One split runs this website:

http://www.aworldtowin.net/

Where you can find more Healy material:

http://www.aworldtowin.net/resources/ideas.html

You can find out more details here, along with the splinter groups that formed from it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_Revolutionary_Party_(UK)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_League_(UK,_1990)

[blake 3:17]

The Healy biography is a hoot and a holler! The fold out pages of his "new dialectics" or whatever is amazing, and the stuff on Vaness redgrave bringing him chicken and bread when he's in hiding... Wow!

Tim Wohlforth's The Prophet's Children , a memoir of his experiences on the American Left, has a fair bit on the WRP which is pretty good. His Workers Party was allied with the WRP.

The group was not insubstantive, and had a fair number of very interesting members from the theatre/film world (Redgrave, Ken Loach, Trevor Griffiths). Griffiths' play The Party is a portrait of Healy during the events of May 68. His disdain for Mandel was enormous.

I know one ex-WRP member, but I doubt he'd dish much dirt.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

There are also these:

North, D. (1988), The Heritage We Defend. A Contribution To The History Of The Fourth International (Labor Publications). This can now be found here (http://www.wsws.org/IML/heritage/heritage_index.shtml).

--------, (1991), Gerry Healy And His Place In The History Of The Fourth International (Labor Publications).

And:

Tourish, D., and Wohlforth, T. (2000), On The Edge. Political Cults Right And Left (M E Sharpe).

Tourish, D. (1998), 'Ideological Intransigence, Democratic Centralism And Cultism: A Case Study From The Political Left (http://www.rickross.com/reference/general/general434.html)', Cultic Studies Journal 15, 2.

A slightly different version of the above can be found here:

http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext27/Cults.html

Anyone interested in following the ensuing debate (which largely centres around the CWI) can do so here:

http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=60690&search_text=cwi

Note my comment at the end:


The ideology of substitutionism

by Rosa Lichtenstein Tue Oct 10, 2006 20:22

Having read the above thread several times over the last couple of years, and largely but not completely agreeing with Denis Tourish's analysis of left wing political cultism and its attendant substitutionism, I note the lack of discussion of their ideological roots.

Religious cults have their holy books and mystical dogmas to divide the faithful. Marxism has something analogous: dialectical materialism -- a doctrine based on the terminally obscure jargon found in Hegel's 'Logic', a book redolent with Hermetic thought.

Comrades might like to know that at my site I systematically take this 'theory' apart, exposing the not insignificant role it has played in the long-term failure of Marxism, and revealing how it has formed the ideology of substitutionist elements in our movement.

Related Link: http://www.anti-dialectics.org

See also here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Edge_(book)