In the annals of British Trotskyism, a grotesque figure looms large. First involved in the Trotskyist movement in 1937, Gerry Healy would after World War II become a leading figure, going on to head the Socialist Labour League and, from 1973, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). For a time among Britain’s biggest far-left organizations, the WRP was famous for its coterie of celebrity members, its relationship with Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, and its authoritarian leader Healy.

Not only did the WRP have a culture of violent punishment of its own members, but Healy was accused of sexually abusing dozens of female members. Eventually, in 1985, he was expelled from the party, with the WRP fracturing as a result. His longtime impunity is often attributed to the culture of the WRP, from its leader cult around Healy to its control over other members’ behavior. But why were so many thousands of people were willing to join such a party?

Aidan Beatty, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University, is the author of a new biography of Gerry Healy, The Party Is Always Right. Beatty’s work casts the WRP not as a weird aberration but as an extreme version of an authoritarian and failed Trotskyist organizational model. In an interview, he spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the WRP’s “vanguardism,” its abusive culture, and Healy’s role as a supposed working-class leader.