Very interesting piece. Cliff Slaughter is clearly economical with the truth in several places. He claims to have immediately called for Gerry Healy’s exulsuon as soon as he learned of his sexual abuse of women. He did not, he engaged in an attempt to cover it up, producing his collected works until they discovered he didn’t have any and to allow him to retire with honour.

The name of Cliff Slaughter will be familiar to many readers of this Blog as a leading light of the Socialist Labour League / Workers Revolutionary Party from the 1950s until the break with Healy in 1985.

We are very pleased to have been offered this interview, conducted by Victor Osprey, a writer and socialist from Australia.

We reproduce the interview in its entirety below with some links to papers and other items in our collections.

Italicised notes are by Victor.

S&F.

Cliff Slaughter has quite a history on the left. He has been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Labour League (later renamed the Workers Revolutionary Party, WRP) sitting on the latter’s Central Committee. He was regarded as its leading intellectual, producing numerous articles, essays, and books in that role.

He was also a member in a series of successor organisations after Gerry Healy, its longtime leader, was expelled from the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1985.

He has continued to write books, all the while engaging in the process of a substantial rethinking of his ideas and politics – drawing particularly from the works of Marxist philosopher István Mészáros in that effort.

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