THE FUSION of the Workers International League and the Revolutionary Socialist League in March 1944, which established the Revolutionary Communist Party as the British section of the Fourth International, marked an important advance for the Trotskyist movement in Britain. It also considerably strengthened the meagre factional forces which Gerry Healy had been able to muster against Jock Haston, Ted Grant and the other former WIL leaders who headed the new party. To Healy’s own handful of followers were now added the more substantial numbers of the ‘Trotskyist Opposition’ from the RSL, providing him with an oppositionist minority of some 50 members.1 What Healy initially lacked, however, was a single distinct policy around which to conduct a struggle against the Haston-Grant leadership.
This leadership was not without its political weaknesses. The decision to launch as a ‘party’ an organisation with less than 500 members, in the belief that it was powerful enough to make an independent bid for the political allegiance of the mass of the working class, indicated that their wartime successes had encouraged illusions among the Trotskyists concerning the real extent of their influence in the labour movement. The wave of radicalisation which swept the working class during 1944-45 in fact poured into the traditional political channel of the Labour Party, leading to the massive Labour victory in the 1945 general election. Although the RCP campaigned vigorously during the election under the slogan ‘Labour to power on a socialist programme’, the failure to build a revolutionary tendency within the Labour Party in this crucial period – it has been persuasively argued – let slip an opportunity for Trotskyism to win a genuine mass base.2
Gerry Healy, it must be emphasised, had raised no objections at all to the tactics of the party leadership on this question. At the RCP’s founding conference, he and his supporters had endorsed the independent party perspective and were reportedly ‘vociferous’ in rejecting the view that, in order to facilitate fraction work, the fused organisation should adopt the more modest title of ‘league’.3 When the Healy minority did issue a policy document in opposition to the RCP leadership, in August 1944, this advocated a turn not to the Labour Party but to the ILP, which was said to offer ‘the best opportunities for fraction work at the present time’.4 Only on the very eve of the 1945 general election did Healy discover that the logic of the ‘Labour to power’ agitation required entry into the Labour Party itself5 – by which point the British Trotskyists had effectively missed the boat.
The force of Healy’s argument was in any case weakened by his dishonesty in trying to pin responsibility for the RCP’s political course on the party leadership, studiously ignoring his own earlier support for open work. ‘It is the fatal failing of Comrade Healy’, the Political Bureau observed wearily, ‘that he never likes to admit that he has been wrong; that he has changed his position.’6 Healy’s case was further undermined by his refusal to abandon the call for work in the ILP, which allowed his tactical line to be dismissed as an attempt to ‘ride two horses at one time’.7 But the major defect in Healy’s proposal for Labour Party entry was undoubtedly its reliance on the erroneous political and economic perspectives of the international leadership – in particular of the Socialist Workers Party (USA), on whose behalf the Healy group acted as an undeclared faction against the RCP leaders.8
The perspectives Healy was given by the SWP consisted essentially of a dogmatic adherence to Trotsky’s pre-war prognoses, which had anticipated neither the long-term viability of bourgeois democracy nor capitalism’s ability to achieve a sustained economic recovery after the war. Whereas the RCP leadership, following the example of the Goldman-Morrow opposition in the SWP, grappled with the problem of re-evaluating the Fourth International’s perspectives in the light of actual developments, Healy merely parroted the ‘orthodox’ formulae of SWP leader James P. Cannon9 – and, later, of the Paris-based International Secretariat of the Fourth International, headed by Michel Pablo. Marxism, Healy informed the 1945 RCP conference, was a ‘precision instrument’ that enabled ‘exact prognoses’ to be made,10 from which standpoint no re-evaluation was of course necessary.
Thus Healy argued for entry on the grounds that in 1945 the historical conditions for reformism no longer existed, and that this would provoke major conflicts within the Labour Party. The loss of Britain’s industrial and financial hegemony, he wrote, made it impossible to grant ‘the slightest concessions to the working class’, and had thereby ‘stripped the economic base from the bourgeois democratic regime’. Healy claimed that millions of workers, ‘whose elementary problems are insoluble under capitalism’, were moving towards political action. In response, the ruling class was already preparing extra-parliamentary measures and would be compelled to turn towards fascism.11 A year later, Healy was predicting economic catastrophe, insisting that British capitalism was ‘on the edge of an abyss’.12 Despite his future somersaults on the Labour Party question, the main threads of this analysis – impending economic collapse, the erosion of parliamentary democracy, a drive towards right-wing dictatorship, and imminent revolutionary struggles – were to remain constant themes in Healy’s political pronouncements throughout his subsequent career.13
The RCP leadership made a much more sober assessment of the situation. Beginning with an understanding of the fact that capitalism was establishing itself in post-war Western Europe on the basis of bourgeois democracy rather than open dictatorship, Haston and Grant went on to reject the SWP/International Secretariat’s economic perspective of ‘stagnation and slump’, recognising instead the reality of a developing ‘revival and boom’. This economic upturn, the RCP pointed out in 1947, had combined with the reforms implemented by the Labour government to generate substantial working class support for social democracy. No organised left wing was discernible in the Labour Party, still less a centrist current moving towards revolutionary politics; therefore Healy’s entry policy – so the RCP leaders argued – was inapplicable.14 They accused Healy of producing his tactical line with no regard for empirical evidence concerning the state of the workers’ movement or the relationship of political forces. Yet it was precisely in the field of tactics that ‘empirical adaption’ was necessary. ‘When Comrade Healy learns this’, the Political Bureau advised, ‘he will raise his stature as a Marxist.’15
Healy tried to evade this challenge on the concrete details of his political analysis by retreating into a specious debate on philosophy (a trick which he would resort to on many subsequent occasions). Turning the factional struggle against Haston and Grant into a caricature of Trotsky’s 1939 polemic against Shachtman and Burnham, Healy seized on the phrase ‘empirical adaption’ to accuse the RCP leaders of renouncing Marxism in favour of empiricism.16 Bill Hunter, too, was found guilty of an epistemological deviation when he drew on his many years’ experience in the ILP to refute the minority’s claim that this represented a fruitful area of work – only to find himself condemned by Healy for trying ‘to impress us with his knowledge of "the facts"’!17 The dispute over Labour Party entry, Healy announced in January 1946, had become ‘transformed into a discussion on the Marxist method. Consequently the differences between the majority and minority have considerably deepened’.18
In contrast to the later situation in Healy’s own organisation, however, the RCP’s intellectuals did not see their role as providing a veneer of ‘Marxist’ sophistication for Healy’s errors. On the contrary, former RSL leader Denzil Harber in particular took a distinct delight in demolishing Healy’s theoretical pretensions. At the 1945 RCP conference, when Healy made his ludicrous assertion that Marxism offered a guarantee of precise predictions, Harber burst into derisive laughter, justifying this by citing Plekhanov’s dictum that, in the face of absurdity, laughter was the only serious response! And after Harber had demonstrated that there was an important empirical component to Marxism, backing up his argument with a lengthy quotation from The German Ideology in which this point was underlined by Marx and Engels themselves, nothing more was heard from Healy on the subject of the RCP leaders’ alleged empiricism.19
Healy’s contribution to philosophy in 1945-46 did have the merit, in comparison with his later excursions in this field, of at least being comprehensible, but it was no less bogus. What determined Healy’s political line was not Marxist methodology, but blind obedience to instructions from the international leadership. This involved him in some farcical political manoeuvring, notably over the issue of the Red Army and Eastern Europe. At a Central Committee meeting in February 1946, Healy voted for an RCP resolution demanding the Red Army’s withdrawal. Two months later, pursuing what he took to be the line of the IS, he reversed this position and began a fierce campaign against the ‘revisionist’ policy of the RCP leaders. Unfortunately for Healy, in June the International Executive Committee of the FI came out in favour of withdrawal. Confronted by the Political Bureau with a letter from the IEC announcing the new line, according to Ted Grant’s account, Healy looked momentarily stunned – then ‘he threw out his arms, and he looked at us, and said, "Well, so we got agreement"!’20
Healy’s mindless factionalising blighted political debate within the RCP, preventing a serious examination of the party’s political problems and spreading demoralisation among the membership. It also produced widespread disgust at Healy’s dishonest methods, with the result that he failed to gain the support of more than a quarter of the RCP’s members (reduced to little over 300 by 1947). The Healy group – now a formally declared faction – therefore decided to request that the IEC divide the RCP and allow the minority to enter the Labour Party.21 They attempted to justify this by hysterical – and almost entirely baseless – denunciations of the regime in the RCP, charging Haston and Grant with creating ‘an atmosphere of crisis and ideological terror in the ranks’ and hounding ‘worker critics with expulsions and threats’.22 Despite the RCP’s protest against ‘a disgraceful manoeuvre to get rid of the democratically elected leadership of a section of the Fourth International’, in September 1947 the IEC acceded to the minority’s request, and the next month a special conference of the RCP ratified the International’s decision to split the party.23
In 1943, it will be recalled, Gerry Healy had formed an opposition tendency in the WIL under the banner of uniting the forces of British Trotskyism within the Fourth International. Now, four years later, after waging a bitter factional struggle against the national leadership, this proponent of Trotskyist unity had succeeded in breaking up the Fourth International’s British section. To Healy, and to his latter-day apologists, this ‘achievement’ counted as a victory for internationalism. In reality, it served only to demonstrate the destructive consequences of his unprincipled politics.
* * * *
‘IF ONE were to undertake to write the real history of British Trotskyism’, James P. Cannon wrote to Gerry Healy in 1953, ‘he would have to set the starting point as the day and the date on which your group finally tore itself loose from the Haston regime and started its own independent work. What happened before that is nothing but a series of squandered opportunities, material for the pre-history of British Trotskyism.’24 This statement combined illusions in Healy, subjective hostility to the Revolutionary Communist Party leaders and ignorance of British Trotskyist history in about equal proportions; but it accurately conveyed the attitude of the Fourth International’s leadership to the movement in Britain. Unable to tolerate the independent political judgement exercised by the RCP, this leadership had found in Healy an unthinking mouthpiece for its political line. By imposing a split on the British Trotskyists in 1947, the International Secretariat evidently hoped to shunt the recalcitrant RCP majority aside and establish the Healy-led minority as the de facto official section.
It was under the political direction of the IS that Healy’s anonymous group – secretly known as the ‘Club’ – began its work inside the Labour Party. The object of this work, FI secretary Michel Pablo confidently asserted, was to win over ‘whole sections of the workers in the Labour Party and in the trade unions affiliated with it to revolutionary action’.25 Yet there is no evidence that prior to entry either Healy or Pablo had made a serious study of the political situation in the British labour movement. Had they done so they would have found that no significant oppositional current yet existed in the Labour Party ranks. And although an amorphous left wing did begin to develop after Herbert Morrison’s ‘consolidation’ speech at the 1948 party conference, which heralded the Labour government’s retreat from further reforms, this left wing was by no means the type of centrist formation, breaking with reformism and developing in a revolutionary direction, the emergence of which had led Trotsky to advocate total entry into social democratic parties in the 1930s. The Labour left did not dispute the right wing’s view that the 1945 Labour government had commenced the construction of socialism, but objected only that the Attlee administration had not proceeded fast or far enough – an outlook which was summarised in the slogan ‘More socialism, not less’. In the late 1940s, even the most militant of the Labour Party rank and file was convinced that a socialist society was to be achieved, not by revolutionary action, but through parliamentary legislation.26
In practice, the entrist strategy pursued by Healy involved abandoning any fight for revolutionary politics in favour of liquidation into this left-reformist milieu. Thus the first issue of Socialist Outlook, the paper launched by Healy’s Club in December 1948, carried a front page editorial headed ‘Back to Socialism’,27 uncritically echoing the illusion among Labour left wingers that, with the right turn announced by Morrison, the Labour bureaucracy had reneged on its ‘socialist principles’. Healy himself informed the readers of Socialist Outlook that in order to win the 1950 general election the Labour Party would have to ‘adopt a full socialist programme today. Dilly-dallying around with reforms and capitalist patch-work will be disastrous’.28 But nowhere did Healy suggest that a necessary step in the transition to socialism was the establishment of independent organs of workers’ power and the overthrow of the bourgeois state. As Jock Haston pointed out, such views were restricted to the Club’s internal discussions: ‘Publicly in the paper it is argued, not by right or left wing Labour Party members but by Trotskyists, that the Labour Party is a socialist party ... and that this party can transform society through parliament.’29
In contrast to his stated intention to ‘build the revolutionary opposition within the Labour Party, on the basis of a real socialist programme’,30 Healy in fact dedicated himself to organising an undefined ‘left wing’ around a social democratic platform. His chosen vehicle for this was the Socialist Fellowship, which was launched at a Labour Party conference fringe meeting in June 1949. Announcing this venture in Reynolds News, Ellis Smith MP, a leading contributor to Socialist Outlook, explained that the aim of the Fellowship’s founders was to resurrect the ‘crusading spirit’ of the Labour Party pioneers. ‘We shall encourage comradeship and fellowship wherever we go’, he wrote. ‘... We shall sing songs again and mean them – the great Socialist songs.’31 Such vacuous sentiments attracted other left MPs like Fenner Brockway and Bessie Braddock into the Socialist Fellowship, and Healy happily engaged in joint political work with them – not on immediate practical issues, as would have been permissible, but on the basis of a common reformist programme.
If political liquidation into social democracy was the main feature of Healy’s work in the Labour Party, a prominent sub-theme was his adaptation to Stalinism. In this Healy expressed, in a characteristically crude manner, the failure of the Fourth International to deal with the political problems posed by Stalinism’s post-war expansion. Having followed the FI leaders in denying the reality of the social overturns in Eastern Europe, Healy enthusiastically implemented the International’s opportunist turn towards Tito after the Soviet-Yugoslav split in June 1948. Although only two months earlier at the FI’s Second World Congress it had been characterised as still capitalist, Yugoslavia was now hailed as a workers’ state, and a basically healthy one at that. From then on Healy uttered not a word against Tito, the butcher of the Belgrade Trotskyists, while a letter from Millie Lee criticising the Yugoslav Communist Party was refused publication in Socialist Outlook.32
In 1950, Healy organised a youth brigade to visit Yugoslavia which came back spouting eulogies to the YCP’s success in building socialism in one country, dismissing as ‘groundless’ allegations that political repression existed under the Stalinist regime there.33 Alas for Healy, the brigade’s return coincided with the Yugoslav government’s declaration of support for the United Nations in the Korean War, a development which left Healy and his supporters floundering. Mike Banda described Yugoslav Foreign Minister Kardelj’s speech to the UN as ‘regrettable’ and appealed to this Stalinist bureaucrat to observe ‘the moral principles of Truth and Justice’!34 Even in the Club’s internal bulletin, Healy could do no more than criticise the Yugoslav decision as ‘opportunist’ – and in any case subordinate to ‘progressive developments’ in a YCP which had ‘broken with Stalinism’ and was ‘returning in many respects to Bolshevik practice’.35
As part of his strategy to build the left wing in the Labour Party, Healy had cultivated figures like Jack Stanley of the Constructional Engineering Union, Jim Figgins of the NUR and the MPs Tom Braddock and S.O. Davies. These were essentially Communist Party sympathisers who were drawn to the Socialist Fellowship because they rejected the ‘cold war socialism’ of the Labour left around Tribune, and Healy maintained his relationship with them by making unprincipled concessions to their views in Socialist Outlook. ‘On the plea that it will drive these fellow travellers away from the paper if they criticise Stalinism’, Haston wrote bitterly of the Healyites, ‘they refuse to tackle Stalinism sharply in any aspect of its policy.’36 So although Healy correctly defended the North in the Korean War, he remained silent on the Stalinist character of the regime, while the Chinese Communist Party received uncritical acclaim in Socialist Outlook. Even the Soviet bureaucracy was treated tenderly, Stalin’s support for anti-imperialist movements being described editorially as ‘neither as consistent nor as socialist as we would like it to be’!37 It was only after this scandalous position had opened Healy to attack inside the Trotskyist movement38 that factional considerations forced him to take a clear stand against Soviet Stalinism.39
With the outbreak of the Korean War, the opportunist set-up which Healy had stitched together in the Labour Party came apart at the seams, when Smith, Brockway and Bessie Braddock walked out of the Socialist Fellowship in protest at its condemnation of the United Nations. Nor had the Club itself registered any numerical gains, despite the large circulation of Socialist Outlook and the Healyites’ energetic pursuit of positions in the Labour Party (Healy himself became chairman of Streatham CLP). As delegates to Labour Party conferences, Club members Harry Ratner and Bob Shaw made a significant impact with militant speeches demanding workers’ control of nationalised industries and denouncing the Labour government’s pro-imperialist line on Korea.40 But having buried its real politics in order to acquire influence within the Labour left, Healy’s Club understandably found considerable difficulty in winning recruits to Trotskyism. And Healy’s politically unprincipled methods guaranteed that the few new members who were made could scarcely be trained as revolutionary Marxists.41
In the adverse political conditions of the late 1940s, the RCP too had stagnated. Not only had the Labour Party retained the political allegiance of the mass of the working class, but after its ‘left’ turn in late 1947 the Communist Party once more became a pole of attraction for those industrial militants who had been the RCP’s main source of recruitment. Realistically, the Trotskyists’ task was now reduced to that of maintaining a ‘semi-agitational propaganda group’ in order to take advantage of future political opportunities, as a group of rank-and-file RCPers argued.42 But Haston, demoralised by the failure to build a mass party, began to argue for entry into the Labour Party on a political basis even more liquidationist than Healy’s, a proposal which received the opportunist backing of Grant who, though unconvinced by Haston’s arguments, was unwilling to face the break-up of the RCP’s leading team. In July 1949 the RCP formally dissolved itself, and its members joined the Labour Party. There, by the edict of the IS, they were placed under the leadership of Healy, on the absurd grounds that his utterly false political perspectives had been proved correct. However, the former members of the RCP majority far outnumbered Healy’s 80 or so supporters, and would certainly have deposed him at the Club’s 1950 conference if Healy had observed elementary Bolshevik standards of inner-party democracy.
At the 1949 Labour Party conference, Healy made a stirring speech in defence of ‘a democratic principle for which men and women have fought and died in this Movement: the right to speak, to differ, and to have their opinions democratically discussed without fear of expulsion and fear of threats’.43 But these words would have appeared somewhat ironic to the victims of the purge which Healy now proceeded to carry out within the Club. In February 1950 Haston resigned, unable to tolerate the political atmosphere in Healy’s organisation (‘there was a terrible atmosphere’, Grant recalled, ‘of a low theoretical level, of a really ignorant character’44), and a few months later announced his complete break with Trotskyism. Healy then proceeded to expel all those who refused to break personal contact with Haston.
‘Healy was just getting into his stride’, Bornstein and Richardson recount. ‘Up and down the country he went, dissolving, amalgamating and splitting branches apart at will.’45 Grant, who had been transferred from his own branch into one led by Healy loyalist Bill Hunter, was ordered to get a job in a factory, and when he refused this instruction to become an industrial militant – a proposal which suggests that Healy was not without a certain warped sense of humour – he too was thrown out.46 In reaction to the pro-Stalinist line of Healy and the IS, the state capitalist position of Tony Cliff had won a growing number of adherents in the Club; but Healy, incapable of answering this faction theoretically, resorted to organisational suppression as a substitute for political argument, and the Cliffites were also expelled.
‘You cannot remove people and defeat their ideas by bureaucratic expulsion’, Healy had told the 1949 Labour Party conference. The truth of this statement was to be demonstrated when in later years both Grant and Cliff built large centrist groupings which complemented Healy’s own efforts in politically misleading tens of thousands of genuine militants. In 1950, however, Healy’s victory appeared to be complete. He had succeeded in smashing up what was left of the RCP, driving the overwhelming majority of its members out of the Fourth International and establishing his own exclusive domination over what now passed for Trotskyism in Britain.
Notes
1. Bert Atkinson, interviewed by Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, 4 November, 1977. Transcript courtesy of Socialist Platform.
2. S. Bornstein and A. Richardson, War and the International, 1986, esp. pp.142-3.
3. RCP Political Bureau statement, 20 July 1945.
4. RCP internal bulletin, 9 August 1944. The document appeared over the names of Dave Finch and Bob Shaw.
5. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, pp.187-8.
6. RCP Political Bureau statement, 20 July 1945.
7. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.188.
8. Ibid., p.197.
9. Cannon took this as proof that Healy had broken with ‘sectarian nationalism’ and become ‘a real internationalist’ (The Struggle for Socialism in the ‘American Century’, 1977, p.182).
10. J. Callaghan, British Trotskyism, 1984, p.82. Trotsky took a fundamentally different view: ‘Every historical prognosis is always conditional .... A prognosis is not a promissory note to be cashed in on a given date’ (In Defence of Marxism, 1971, p.218).
11. RCP internal bulletin, 30 June 1945.
12. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.189.
13. The origin of Healy’s politics in the immediate post-war programme of the Fourth International no doubt explains why Ernest Mandel later preferred to explain Healy’s ultra-leftism as the result of an early training in ‘Third Period’ Stalinism. See J. Hansen, ed., Marxism Vs. Ultraleftism, 1974, pp.62-3.
14. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, pp.174-7, 189-91.
15. RCP Political Bureau statement, 20 July 1945.
16. Callaghan, p.35.
17. RCP internal bulletin, 27 November 1945.
18. RCP internal bulletin, March 1946.
19. Ibid.
20. M. Upham, ‘The history of British Trotskyism to 1949’, unpublished PhD thesis, Hull University, 1980, pp.391, 404; Bornstein and Richardson, pp.197-8.
21. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.195.
22. Callaghan, p.36, where the quotation is wrongly attributed to the IS. The minority’s only legitimate complaint was that they were allowed no representation on the Political Bureau. Yet the RCP leaders were denounced for imposing ‘a regime which systematically violates the elementary principles of democracy in the service of a sectarian political line which departs more and more from the traditional line of orthodox Trotskyism’ (RCP internal bulletin, July 1947). In the light of Healy’s later organisational practices, this description appears laughable.
23. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, pp.195-6.
24. C. Slaughter, ed., Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, vol.1, 1974, p.262.
25. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.194.
26. For a useful account of the Labour left in this period, see D. Rubinstein, ‘Socialism and the Labour Party: the Labour Left and domestic policy, 1945-50’, in D.E. Martin and D. Rubinstein, eds., Ideology and the Labour Movement, 1979, pp.226-57.
27. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.210.
28. Socialist Outlook, June 1949.
29. J. Haston, letter to the Club, 10 June 1950.
30. RCP internal bulletin, August 1947.
31. Reynolds News, 22 May 1949.
32. Haston, letter to the Club.
33. Socialist Outlook, October 1950; Bornstein and Richardson, p.212.
34. Socialist Outlook, October 1950; Healy later claimed that, at a reception for the returning youth brigade given by the Yugoslav Embassy in London, he instructed the Club’s members to criticise Kardelj (Slaughter, Trotskyism Versus Revisionism, vol.1, p.145). If Banda’s article is anything to go by, the criticism must have been extremely mild.
35. Marxist Review, n.d., but early 1951 from internal evidence.
36. Haston, letter to the Club.
37. Socialist Outlook, August 1950.
38. Anon. [E. Grant], Letter to the BSFI [British Section of the Fourth International], n.d., but 1950 from internal evidence.
39. Socialist Outlook, November 1950.
40. Labour Party Conference Reports: 1948, pp.137, 200-1; 1949, p.162; 1950, pp.81-2.
41. Cf. R. Kuper, ed., The Fourth International, Stalinism and the Origins of the International Socialists, 1971, pp.97-8.
42. RCP internal bulletin, 14 February 1949. The Open Party Faction, as this group was known, argued that the RCP should do fraction work in the Labour Party but concentrate on intervention in the trade unions, combining this with an emphasis on theoretical clarification and political education of the membership.
43. Labour Party Conference Report, 1949, p.121. Healy was opposing the expulsion of Stalinist fellow travellers Zilliacus and Solley.
44. E. Grant, lecture on ‘History of British Trotskyism’. Transcript courtesy of Socialist Platform.
45. Bornstein and Richardson, War and the International, p.231.
46. This account, which is based on Grant’s ‘History of British Trotskyism’, has been condemned by Bill Hunter as ‘typical of the imaginative tales of horror about expulsions from the "Club" after the fusion’. But Hunter’s own account is only marginally different. (See B. Hunter, Lifelong Apprenticeship: The Life and Times of a Revolutionary, vol.1, 1997, pp.237-9.) Grant’s expulsion was so blatantly unconstitutional that it was subsequently withdrawn under instructions from the FI. He was finally expelled at the FI’s Third Congress in 1951, on the proposal of Ernest Mandel.