All right, foamers, get out your high-vis red star conductor hats, because today we're going to do one of our favorite things on the Antifada Left Sectarian Train Watching.

We're joined by Aidan Beattie, a lecturer in the history department of Carnegie Mellon University,

a contributor to Jacobin, Washington Post, and the Irish Times, and the author of the new book,

The Party is Always Right, The Untold Story of Jerry Healy and British Trotskyism.

Thanks for joining us, Aidan. How's it going?

I'm pretty good. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, welcome to the show. We're excited to have you.

So obviously this is a topic I'm very enthusiastic about

having written my own book about a weird and abusive Trotskyist sect so it was there is I feel like

we've got we've written sibling books here which is really nice I think so yeah

we're we're building a whole percid genre of...

Some might say you're slowly brick by brick building a party.

I hope not, but okay.

Or at least a section of a leftist bookstore.

But yeah, so we're going to be talking about Jerry Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party of Britain and some hopefully funny and you know enlightening stories about the history of British Trotskyism and Trotskyism in general but let's start by

getting to know you a little bit

Aidan I'm always curious reading these books what what the

political background is of the author and then also how you

came to write about the subject? Sure.

Politically, I don't know if there's a huge amount to report on.

I'm sort of nominally left-wing, but not the most politically active of people.

A couple of years ago I had been writing a couple of different things about

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