In my view the former members of the Workers Revolutionary Party (UK) were mostly used up by the experience. Just as they tended to lionise Healy when he was alive, they tended to demonise him after he was dead, loading all their own errors onto Healy as they had previously imbued him with near mystical powers.
There was some good theoretical work done in the forerunner of the WRP, the SLL on Marxist theory, though most of this was of a formal nature. Examples would be Tom Kemp and Geoff Pilling's books on Marx's Capital (though notably Pilling's on Keynes was rather weaker). Peter Fryer, a veteran of the Communist Party and the WRP paper wrote some good stuff, too.
However, the post-collapse WRPers mostly reverted to the opportunist politics that underlay their organisational sectarianism - the Workers Aid to Bosnia being a good example, an activity that put a radical gloss on imperialist intervention in the Balkans.
The dynamic of the WRP's implosion was that their analysis told them that the crisis was deepening, and the working class was being radicalised by the experience. Though their own experience was telling them otherwise, they refused to believe that they were not increasing their influence but losing it. The party lived beyond its means, running up huge debts setting up youth training centres and other fronts. All the time, the leadership willing deceived itself, as the party apparatus - massively bloated - forged reports from non-existent branches about successful recruitment drives that never happened. When the organisation went bankrupt, the central committee turned on Healy and made him scapegoat for their collective failures.
The real failing, though, was not organisational, but political. The organisation's analysis of accelerating class struggle appeared to be confirmed by the 1984-5 miners' strike, but if they were capable of paying attention to what was really happening they would have seen that this was the end of a cycle of class conflict, not the beginning of one. Unable to correct their analysis, they simply overshot the end of the runway, and blew up.
In message <20010226154529.E12609 at egenetics.com>, Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> writes
>A number of ex-Healyites seem to find Bhaskar attractive - I had some
>peripheral interaction with the ex-Healy scene while in the UK. The
>trajectory of Healyites after Healyism is quite interesting - while no
>doubt some of them cling to the faith, the spectacular nature of the
>implosion of Healyism has led to some soul-searching. For instance,
>some fairly intelligent ex-Healyites are arround the journal Revolutionary
>History, others are behind the 'Movement For Socialism' which seems to
>be an attempt to re-centre activity on supporting struggles, rather than
>Party building (e.g. the Workers Aid to Bosnia, Workers Aid to Kosova
>groups have attracted a number of ex-Healyites, and seem to be doing
>good work).
>
>While Gerry Healy presided over a sad and destructive chapter of UK Left
>history, it seems that there something honest, albeit slightly strange,
>might come out of Healyism yet.
>
>The Weekly Worker, btw. is the premier scandal sheet of the UK Leninist
>left. The CPGB (PCC) people seem to make a profession out of silly little
>fights, which they provoke and document tirelessly. Always good for a laugh,
>or laughable, or something like that.
>
>Peter
>--
>Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com>
>NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics
>"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
>shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain
>and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844
>OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B
-- James Heartfield