Healy "Reconstructs" the Fourth International- Documents and Comments by Participants in a Fiasco. Introduction by Joseph Hansen. Published by the Socialist
Workers Party, 873 Broadway, New York, N. Y. 10003.
40 pp. 35 cents. 1966. Reissued 1970.
In April 1966 the "International Committee," an ultraleft sectarian grouping dominated by the Socialist Labour League of which Gerry Healy is the leader, held a conference in London which the majority of the participants hoped would prove to be a historic milestone in the "reconstruction" of the Fourth International (to which they did not happen to belong).
The enthusiasm at the gathering waned, at least among a sizeable minority, as the participants experienced Healy's methods at firsthand. They were thrown out. Naturally they began to circulate documents about what had happened. The material included letters by Healy himself.
Assembled in a pamphlet, with an introduction by Joseph Hansen, the documents caused a furor in the Socialist Labour League. A member of the Fourth International, Ernest Tate, who sought to sell the pamphlet at the entrance of an SLL meeting in London, was beaten up by stewards in the presence of Healy himself.
Tate sent a letter to various journals of the left, protesting what had been done to him. They published it. Healy immediately went to the bourgeois courts to file suit for "damages."
Out of print for some time, this forty-page pamphlet is again available. If you are interested in such esoteric corners of radical politics as the internal life of the "International Committee" under Healy's leadership, this should be on your bookshelf. Also good for an hour or two of light political reading on your vacation.