Inprecor Top right,Socialist Outlook, despite accomodations to Bevanism, as graphically illustrated by the headline, its tactics and line were vindicated. The Newsletter was a real service to the left, while Labour Review opendd its pages to writers on the sole criterion of enriching Marxism. Its analysis of the early years of the British Communist Party remains one of the finest to this day.
Tom Kemp wrote a fine reasoned article on the class nature of the Soviet Union. Chff Slaughter at that time was acknowledging the importance of Gramsci and even Lukacs. Even twenty years later many of the articles of this period could be reprinted with profit. Labour Review stands as one of the high points of a theoretical journal in Britain to date, which still has to be fully appropriated for the Trotskyist movement in Britain. It achievedits encoet locause, in eractiv the same way that Socialis Culeok had gone out in a Don-sectarion way to be a real organising contre for the Bevanite milieu, so Labour Review set out to organise and begemonise a whole layer breaking from the Communist Party after 1956. Nothing less like the sbril ranting monologues of latter day Healyism could be imagined.
At the same time that Labour Review developed as a non-sectarian organising contre for various lavers bresking from Stalinism around important theorelical questions, Healy also heiped found, in May 1957, The Newslester. With its first editor, Peter Fryer, the ex correspondent of the Communist Party in Hungary who bad broken with the Patty over his support for newspaper with particular emphasis on trade union struggies. Linked to the trade union cadres recruted from the Communist Party it came to reflect the major intervention of the Healy current into important industrial struggles in 1956-59 — in particular the Loodon busmen's strike and a number of important building strikes. Through this activity The Newsletter was able to call an industrial conference in November 1958 which was attended by over 600 militants. This was folloned up by a number of good pamphlets and a second confereace the next year.
Crucial In retrospect it can he seen that the period 1956-59 wis a crucial one in Healy's development. He was still working with the SWP (Novack's famous essay on uneven and combined development (24) was written because Healy was scared by the type of conceptions the ex-Stalinist intellectuals were bringing inco his organisation) hut hy naw the ties were much weaker. • a sercice to socialists Vol. 2 The Fall of MOLOTOV new phase of Stalimist Crisis May 10, 1957 JULY-AUGUST No. 4 The Future of the Forums Towards Labour's Conference Mao's Speech British Communist History A Discussion on Trotskyism Problems of British Capitalism A Question of Dialectics BOOK REVIEWS TWO SHILLINGS
The bloody after math of the Hungarian uprising. The ensuing crisis in the Communist Party produced many recruits for Healy. ind with the International Committee in practice nob-existent, Healy began to break with the two great political assets, ties to the International and non-sectarianism in orientation, which had brought him from utter obscurity in the RCP and WIL to the position of the dominant revolutionary current in Britain, Instead Healy fell back on his own resources and the few Marxist intellectuals and theoreticians he had recruited from the CP. As Healy himself put it to the SWP:
In 1957 when the SWP claimed differences (with be International Secretariat) were growing less, we were undergoing an Important theoretical develop ment.' (26)
The resus of that theoretical development* were to bring Healy to his present state!
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LABOUR REVIEW