Recently, the IMT held its World Congress, which takes place every two years (the organisation alternates between holding a ‘School’ and a ‘Congress’ every year). It boasted that it was its best Congress ever, with 2,800 comrades across the world in attendance. Of course, due to Covid-19 it took place entirely online, and therefore these figures are artificially inflated. There is no way that 2,800 people would have been able to attend in person.
I attended my first world event in 2019, the World School. It was the most intense experience I had ever had in the organisation. The milieu control was stronger than it had ever been at any previous IMT function I attended. For a week myself and the comrades were in northern Italy, separated from the outside world, put into hotel rooms with one another and given a schedule of endless lectures and meetings to attend. Each section delegation had its own small meeting at the end of every day to be briefed on certain matters. At the time I felt exhilaration to be meeting all these comrades from around the world, and was filled with a sense of pride at being part of this glorious international movement for the salvation of the proletariat. Now I look back and feel utterly traumatised. This feeling of closeness with so many people was utterly artificial and illusory. When I left, I was no longer part of this great community of fighters for truth and justice. I was an ‘ex-comrade’, to be scorned and slandered. Now, in hindsight, I feel psychologically violated.
Over the course of several days, we were given ‘lead-offs’ by leading figures in the organisation about World Perspectives, Zinovievism, post-colonialism vs Marxism, the hidden history of the Spanish Revolution (with Alan Woods himself giving the lecture) and much more. For hours at a time, we would sit in a large room, hundreds of us, in the sweltering heat of the Italian summer, and be bombarded with propaganda. Another difference between the IMT and mainstream organisations that exposes the IMT as a cult is that a normal political organisation generally does not have a week-long conference with an agenda entirely controlled by the leadership. The Labour Party’s conferences are usually a 4-day affair.
The feeling of togetherness with comrades, constantly being surrounded by other members of the organisation, day and night (eating with them, drinking with them, sleeping with them, selling papers with them, sitting through lead-offs with them, socialising with them) was very taxing on my introvert’s energy. By the end of the week I was exhausted but thrilled and overwhelmed with my experience. I will now remember it as one of the most traumatic, psychologically damaging and utterly disturbing moments of my entire life. For an entire week I was surrounded by a bunch of strangers all united by little more than a fanatical belief in the doctrine of Trotsky and his interpreters Ted Grant and Alan Woods. And I had no escape. At least with the National Conference I could go back home every evening and rest my mind. I could not even do that at the World Congress.
I recall a highlight of the event was Rob Sewell making his customary speech at the Italian restaurant we all went to eat at at the penultimate day of the conference. He recounted the story of the original split in the CWI in 1991-2, and we all roared with laughter as we celebrated the split in the ongoing split within the CWI. Sewell repeatedly exclaimed, whilst sloshed, ‘The Taaffeites are shafted!’ This sectarian ridiculing of another Trotskyist group would have been utterly alienating to anyone not in our ranks, but needless to say we didn’t notice this at the time. I now look back with utter bewilderment and embarrassment.
This is not an event which anyone who wants to keep their mental health intact should attend. The amount of psychological manipulation you are opening yourself up to cannot be put into words.