Embracing What’s Left of the Left : Politics: In L.A. to promote her memoirs, Dorothy Healey, a longtime party activist, tries to put the collapse of communism in perspective.

Seventeen years after she left the Communist Party and seven years after she left Los Angeles, Dorothy Healey was back in town. Once called the Red Queen by her detractors, the well-known labor organizer, Marxist radio commentator and civil rights activist who led the party in Southern California for 20 years is still calling herself a communist, “but one with a small ‘c.’ ”

More than 200 of her friends, supporters and comrades in the area came out to greet her one recent afternoon at a reception on the lawn of a Brentwood home. They were movement people--labor, women’s liberation, civil rights and civil liberties, human rights. The whole roster of leftist and progressive causes was represented. Many, judging by the number of gray, white and bald heads in the crowd, went back with Dorothy Healey a long time.

Said one woman: “I want to see where 1989 leaves us old lefties.” After the collapse of one communist regime after another in Eastern Europe, she said she was left wondering, “Where are we now?”

Dorothy Healey is still, at least ideologically, on the front lines.

“I’m not one of those repentant ex-communists,” the 75-year-old woman assured them. “The events of 1989 were troubling and complicated, but a new history is going to be written. The page is turning.” Reaffirming the “small c” identification she had first given herself in 1973 when she left the party, she said: “We were part of a great movement. African-Americans, Hispanics, women. . . . There were never more strong bonds created.”

And so it seemed.

The people who had fought the good fight with her, a fight they describe as one for a peaceful and just society, waited patiently in a queue for a chance to greet her and have her autograph copies of the book they had just bought: “Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party” (Oxford University Press), memoirs she co-authored with Maurice Isserman.

Later, Healey described herself as “overwhelmed” by the size and warmth of the turnout. “There were all these pieces of my life coming together.”

Healey joined the Young Communist League in 1928 as a Berkeley teen-ager and has avowed her politics and affiliations ever since. She was never, however, a “party-liner,” and, by her own and others descriptions, always had a reputation as being unorthodox. She criticized; disagreed; spoke up; tangled with hard-core Stalinists; crossed swords with Gus Hall, head of the American Communist Party, and generally let common sense, warmth and humor interfere with a wholesale, uncritical swallowing of what the party leadership was spooning out.

Typically, Healey returned from her first trip to the Soviet Union in 1961 criticizing the privileges the party apparatchiki took for themselves in the deprived nation and deploring the anti-Semitism that party leaders denied. (She is concerned about the nationalism, especially the anti-Semitism that has been unleashed recently in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, she said. She hopes it will lessen, if not disappear, if economic conditions, and people’s daily lives, improve.)

She stuck it out, long after others had left in disgust and disillusion, or fear, trying to reform the party from within. The turning point of her disillusionment of the party finally came in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

With a such a history, Healey’s response to the events of 1989 does not seem surprising.

“Seeing people dance on top of the (Berlin) Wall was one of the more exhilarating moments of my life. When I visited the GDR (East Germany) in 1967, they insisted I go to the wall. I did not want to, so I went and I said, ‘I long for the day when all walls disappear. . . .’ They were furious.”

But she understands the confusion, anxiety and soul-searching going on within the left, she said.

“For several generations of people, these events--starting with 1985 (and Gorbachev’s ascendancy), climaxing in ‘89--turned upside down the concepts people believed in, axioms they took for granted. It’s an incredible period to live through when firmly held beliefs are totally shaken by new reality.”

She recalled that a childhood friend called her after watching the crackdown in and around Tian An Men Square in China and said, “ ‘That does it. I really regret my years. . . .’ I said, ‘Gee, you joined for the same reason I did, because of what you hated in the United States.’ ”

And, as a matter of fact, Healey said, it is easy to understand the upheaval in Eastern Europe. What she cannot understand is why Americans have not taken to the streets to protest the savings and loan scandal.

Do not talk to her about any “triumph of capitalism” inherent in the events of 1989. Rather, Healey sees them as “a defeat of Stalinism--the practices and concepts of that version of socialism, of a centralized, authoritarian bureaucracy.”

“Socialism has to involve democracy. . . . It’s why Marx was so emphatic (that) socialism has to come to advanced countries first, where you have a society educated under democracy,” she said.

Although she is “delighted” about the events of last year, she has a concern for the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, when, after the first euphoric embrace of a market economy, “the workers will start to realize it brings with it mass unemployment, loss of benefits. They will have to think with greater depth about where they want to go for the future.”

Clearly, Healey, who now lives in Washington to be near her son and grandchildren, looks forward to better times with this new page of history. She is still active and serves as vice chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America and broadcasts a weekly, hourlong call-in radio show.

For the Soviet Union, she talked of her hopes for a socialist country under a multi-party system that allows for organized, divergent opinion, a totally different governmental structure with autonomous groups and regions.

“It would maybe represent the first real flowering of ethnic, national relations of a quality the world has never known, a total disappearance of animosity, hatred, prejudice,” she said.

Healey had been speaking plainly and practically until that point. But when she began to speak of what a truly socialist Soviet Union would look like, she let her thoughts take her skyward.

She did not use such phrases as the “withering away of the state” or “from each according to his ability,” but her Marxism was that pure.

Within moments, she was speaking of socialism as a transitional way station, of a time “when you wouldn’t have a state,” except for some administrative functions, of a time of economic plenty, of income based on needs, of a place where “work would be a matter of joy, excitement, fulfillment.”

She sounded more like an idealistic teen-ager joining the workers’ struggle on the eve of the Great Depression than a war-weary veteran scarred by the battles and disappointments of the last 62 years at the front.

After all this, those lofty ideals and beliefs are still in place?

“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful?”