As a former member of the International Marxist Tendency, I have come to the understanding that the sect I was a member of can best be defined as a political cult. Many people are offended by the term ‘cult’, seeing it as a term of insult or abuse. However, I insist that the term ‘cult’ has a legitimate usage in an intellectual and academic context. Academics and theorists of organisation, leadership and psychology have used cult analysis to great effect in their work. One of the best criteria for determining whether or not an organisation is a cult was invented by the great cult expert Robert Jay Lifton. He developed it from his analysis of the Chinese Communists during the Korean War, and how they were able to subject prisoners-of-war to mind control, such that they renounced their old beliefs and became convinced communists. The eight criteria are as follows: milieu control, mystical manipulation or planned spontaneity, demand for purity, cult of confession, the sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person and dispensing of existence. An entity which practices most or all of these is almost certainly a cult.
People are often under the false impression that only unintelligent people end up in political cults. Yet we are all vulnerable to mind control. The evidence suggests that cult members are no less intelligent or psychologically normal than the rest of the population. All humans are susceptible to the cult-like practices of organisations like Militant and the IMT.
Dennis Tourish published back in 1998 an academic paper entitled ‘Ideological Intransigence, Democratic Centralism and Cultism: A Case Study from the Political Left’, in which he described Militant, the predecessor organisation to the IMT, as a political cult. A version of it is available in an old copy of a now defunct journal, What Next?. In this work he makes use of Lifton’s eight criteria of mind control and applies them to Militant. I will do likewise for the IMT. Anyone who is either a member or on the verge of joining the organisation should read this analysis, based on my own experience in the organisation.
The first criterion of thought reform is milieu control. The point of milieu control is to control the environment in which the cult member or potential recruit exists, and separate them from the outside world. Milieu control was a big feature of life in the IMT.
A ‘contact’ or potential recruit to the organisation would be hounded with requests for one-on-one meetings, for them to attend paper sales, attend IMT meetings on campus, attend events outside campus, attend Warwick Labour gatherings with a comrade accompanying them, attend demonstrations at which comrades would be present, etc. A full-timer for the organisation once said in a London aggregate, ‘You must be a contact’s best friend. Until they join the organisation – then they realise you aren’t their friend.’ We all laughed at this. A ‘comrade’ would spend several hours a week with other ‘comrades’ in meetings, paper sales and God knows what. Interestingly enough we would often describe the paper as being like a ‘uniform’ or a ‘badge’ showing that we were part of a Marxist organisation. This always sounded strange to me on a subconscious level, though consciously I accepted this obvious wisdom. Of course, it was all part of the milieu control. It served to mark us off from the outside world. When you joined, you were pressured to give more and more time to the organisation. We would play down how much they had to commit then and there, but it was very different once they had joined. The secretary of my branch would say ‘If nothing else, come to branch.’ The hope was that we would build up their ‘political level’ (i.e. how much they had internalised the doctrine) and cause them to become more dedicated to the group. We were encouraged to get social media to communicate with other members of the organisation and diligently share the organisation’s articles online. We were in an echo chamber both offline and online. Gossiping, backbiting and informing on one another was part and parcel of life in the organisation. Secret cliques were formed for precisely that purpose. We were paranoid about losing contact with contacts or comrades, especially if they moved away and there was no branch nearby that could keep them active and politically ‘warm’. We were strongly discouraged from having any contact with ex-members unless they were still friendly to the organisation (in which case contact was cautiously encouraged – we might draw them back in!). We were under ‘party discipline’ to keep much of our activity ‘internal’ and away from the prying eyes of the outside world. Much of this ‘internal’ stuff – frank discussion about entrism, recruitment, organisational finances – was discussed in branch or at national meetings.
The point of milieu control is that members are kept so busy doing stuff for the organisation and spending time around other cult members that they stop thinking for themselves. Time spent away from the organisation is often a prelude to abandoning the organisation entirely. Encountering serious intellectual criticism to my worldview through my own reading on the Internet led to my abrupt loss of faith in the cult. The time I enjoyed alone in my own room, and the internal dialogue I kept up with myself, gave me the space to begin criticising the ideology I had devoted myself to. The months immediately after leaving the cult were the most painful. My old cult self coexisted uneasily with my authentic self. Part of me still felt some loyalty to those I had left behind, but the other part of me knew I had broken with a political cult and that looking back was counterproductive.
‘Mystical manipulation’ and ‘planned spontaneity’ is the second of Lifton’s criteria. The leadership of the organisation claims superior insight into reality and gives itself the right to rewrite and reinterpret anything it chooses to – doctrine, the historical record, even, in the case of Alan Woods and Ted Grant, the laws of physics. Both of these were features of life in the cult. Ted Grant was a semi-divine, clairvoyant figure, from whom all wisdom was said to flow. He was the ‘unbroken thread of genuine Marxism’. He alone had preserved the scattered forces of Trotskyism in Britain, and indeed, the world. His leadership had been blessed and sanctified by Trotsky himself – we even had a letter to prove it! He was quoted endlessly – our organisation was to grow incrementally at first, finding the ‘ones and twos’ – then by ‘leaps and bounds’. His demented ravings and false predictions were treated like holy writ. Having internalised the doctrine and the belief that ‘our Tendency’ alone had the ‘correct ideas’, we were driven to work like donkeys to ‘build the organisation’ and make endless displays of loyalty to the leadership. At the national conferences, we would always vote through everything ‘unanimously’ in some sort of ritualised imitation of democracy. Big donations from the branches were encouraged – one branch would make an ‘example’, and the rest would follow. (They had almost certainly been approached beforehand, or at least discussed it among themselves.) The lead figure of Ted Grant, who had once been so inspiring to me, became disillusioning when I read more about his flaws (particularly discovering his blatant mistruths and propaganda in his book on Russia, and the truth about his behaviour in the run-up to the collapse of Militant). Our belief that we alone had the ‘truth’ served to legitimise deception of potential members, who never knew what our organisation was really like until they had joined. Our deception also extended to the Labour Party. We pretended to be ‘the Marxist wing of the Labour Party’ (which we secretly hated and wanted to destroy because it was ‘reformist) and publicly supported it. In private we would fiercely denounce it for its flaws and talk of one day splitting it to form a party of true socialists. History was rewritten by the leadership to present Ted Grant and his followers as uniquely prescient and wise, having always taken the ‘correct position’ on every event from WWII through to the Troubles to the present day. Predictions and claims which had not dated as well were written out of history. Past events in the history of the workers’ movement were given a superficial analysis borrowed from Trotsky and repeated by rote. The leadership had no qualms about making sudden shifts in strategy or tactics if they felt it necessary – for example, ditching Labour work for student work – even if this meant losing members wedded to the old ways.
The third of Lifton’s criteria is the ‘demand for purity’. Cult members are encouraged to see the world in black and white terms, with themselves representing goodness and light and their opponents darkness and evil. There is therefore a constant striving after perfection. The cult defines what it means to be ‘good’, and anyone not measuring up is subjected to ritualised shaming. In the IMT, we were never good enough. We were always under pressure to read and re-read the ‘great thinkers’ – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Ted Grant, Alan Woods – and reinforce the doctrine. Those interested in ‘suspect’ thinkers like Nietzsche or Foucault were shamed into abandoning those ideas, or forced to leave. We would shame anyone insufficiently optimistic or enthusiastic enough about the cause, as ‘Marxists are meant to be optimists.’ Under no circumstances was it acceptable to entertain the slightest doubt or scepticism – this was evidence of a ‘petty-bourgeois’ and ‘conservative’ mindset. There was also an obsession with ideological homogeneity and complete unity on every single question – from politics to history to philosophy. In the organisation, we were subject to the laws of ‘democratic centralism’, according to which no one was allowed to openly criticise or challenge any aspect of the organisation’s doctrine. One had to agree to either keep one’s disagreements to oneself, or go through a formal bureaucratic process for raising disputes. This usually took the form of writing a document and sending it to the Central Committee, which would in many cases not bother reading it. On the rare occasions that it did, there would be no real debate, simply a curt dismissal of the criticisms and a shutting down of the discussion. Dissidents were forced out, either by being made to resign or by being expelled. Within Trotskyism is a tradition which says that even the slightest disagreement within the organisation is evidence of a ‘petty-bourgeois tendency’ that has corrupted the purity of the revolutionary vanguard and must be removed if the rot is to be stopped. We have Trotsky and his dispute with the SWP Opposition during the last 1930s to thank for that. On social media comrades would police each other for wrongthink, and the full-timers would monitor what everyone was saying, combing it for heresy.
The fourth of Lifton’s criteria is the ‘cult of confession’. Members are encouraged to confess their failure to live up to the demands of the group, easing their consciences and making them feel less bad about calling out the failings of others. I confessed to ‘reactionary’ beliefs in a past life to ease my conscience, and told myself I was a new man. It wasn’t entirely true, but it made me feel better about judging other people and things as ‘reactionary’. I would strive to drive reactionary thoughts and feelings out of myself and police myself so I was not falling into that mindset. One summer, I even sold a bunch of ‘reactionary’ books I still had on my bookshelf because I was so embarrassed at possessing them.
The fifth of Lifton’s criteria is the ‘sacred science’. The group believes that only it possesses the Truth and cannot be questioned. This was certainly the belief of our organisation. We preached that only the IMT was the true heir to the Trotskyist movement, and that all the other sects were only so many pretenders and charlatans. We represented the ‘unbroken thread of Marxism’. The only Marxist thinkers worth reading were Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Ted Grant, Alan Woods and the leading theoreticians of the IMT. No one else. On the IMT website you will find nothing about E.P. Thompson, Louis Althusser, Perry Anderson, etc. It is as if they didn’t exist. We only had the ‘correct ideas’, by virtue of which we would save humanity from the scourges of capitalism. We had the ‘correct position’ on everything under the sun, from Northern Ireland to Palestine to China. Anyone who dared to question the doctrine was belittled, ridiculed, bullied and forced out of the organisation – as I found to my cost. It was taken for granted that Trotsky was right about everything. His every utterance was to be taken on trust, his every word was holy writ.
The sixth criterion is ‘loading the language’. In cults, an alternative vocabulary of stock words, phrases and cliches is used to short-circuit the critical thinking process. In the IMT, these thought-numbing cliches were used in all situations. Our recruitment strategy (which was also called ‘building the organisation’) was ‘finding the ones and twos’, a quote borrowed from Ted Grant. A time would come when we would grow by ‘leaps and bounds’, but that would be when the ‘objective conditions’ heated up. For now, we needed to find ‘true believers’ and ‘cadres’, and not get demoralised over not recruiting loads of people. Any expression of pessimism or doubt was countered with ‘Remember dialectics – things are always changing’ and references to the exciting opportunities in the ‘coming period’. Our headquarters was ‘the Centre’, and simply speaking of it was enough to jolt one’s mind to attention, for it represented the greatest thinkers of Marxism and revolutionary socialism, the greatest generals and strategists of our revolutionary army, and their instructions were semi-divine. We reverently spoke of ‘the Organisation’, called ourselves ‘the Marxists’ (as if no one outside our ranks was), called our full-time employees ‘full-timers’ or ‘leading comrades’ and associated them with purity, dedication and self-sacrifice, called our treasury the ‘Fighting Fund’, made ‘interventions’ at demonstrations and Labour Party events, etc. This bizarre vocabulary further distanced us from the outside world, as members could only relate to each other. Cliquey in-jokes about dialectics and Lenin’s baldness was the kind of ‘banter’ we would engage in. I never got used to it – there was always something ‘off’ about it.
The seventh criterion Lifton puts forward is ‘doctrine over person’. The integrity of the doctrine is held to be more important than the actual experiences of individuals. If the doctrine says X, and someone experiences Y, it is not that the doctrine is wrong, but there is something deficient about the person in question. In the IMT, our doctrine demanded that as a Marxist, you express optimism at all times. Therefore, pessimism of any kind was frowned upon. Ex-members were demonised as ‘renegades’ and ‘reactionaries’ who weren’t cut out to be part of the vanguard, had a ‘low political level’ or were ‘petty-bourgeois’, and never had a good reason for calling it quits. If people became disillusioned it was not because of any flaws in Marxist ideology or in our organisation’s internal regime, but because they were stupid, mentally weak, or some other deficiency.
The eight criterion Lifton uses is ‘dispensing of existence’. The cult believes that only its members are worthy of life, health and happiness, whilst its opponents deserve death, suffering and torment. For our organisation, only the vanguard were truly worthy and good. Everyone outside our ranks was worthless and evil or stupid. Only we had the ‘correct ideas’. Outside our organisation there was no salvation. Only we could make the revolution. Outside our ranks there was only reaction, reformism, liberalism. If we had ever seized power, we would gladly have imposed a totalitarian Leninist dictatorship and even killed our political opponents.
So there you have it. The International Marxist Tendency – a political cult.