The average contact
It might occur to people reading that the only people who would join an organisation like the IMT, or a cult of any kind, is someone who is stupid or crazy. I can tell you from my own experience that nothing could be farther from the truth. It requires a certain level of sophistication to be hoodwinked, especially when the organisation in question is a political one, which claims that it has the answer to the problems of humanity. We didn’t go looking for dumb or hopeless people to recruit as ‘contacts’. We wanted intelligent, committed, talented people who could help us grow our organisation. People who were too much effort for us were dropped. When I became a liability to the branch because of my mental health issues, I was forced out and made to take a year off of political activity. During this period, not a single member of the branch bothered to maintain any real communication with me. Worse still, my mental health was linked to having ‘un-Marxist’ political views, and I was slandered for this in my branch to the other members. No political organisation can be completely responsible for the mental health of its members, but when the organisation in question exploits and abuses its members in the way that the IMT and other Trotskyist cults do, they must undoubtedly take a good chunk of the blame.
Of course, we were primarily in the business of recruiting students, who were vulnerable emotionally and intellectually. They were moving away from their families and friends for the first time, and living independent lives on a big campus. They were going through a period of profound transition that made them ripe for recruitment and exploitation. Cult experts have noted that people who go through periods of turmoil or transition in their lives are more vulnerable to cult recruitment. Recruits are no different psychologically from ‘normal’ members of the population. They just happen to be in a period in their lives when they are at risk of being seduced by such an organisation. The loss of a loved one (as I lost my dad to cancer the year before I went to uni), the break-up of a romantic relationship, moving to university – all these are things which leave someone vulnerable to cult recruitment.
A contact could be anyone – someone we met on the ‘freshers fair’ stall, someone who came to a Marxist Society meeting on campus, someone in our friendship group, someone in our family, someone who attended one of the events we held nationally, someone who got into contact with the organisation online, etc. As a member of the Marxist Society on campus, most of the ‘contacts’ I interacted with were, naturally, students. We were encouraged to see anyone as a potential contact – even a housemate. To be brutally honest, I don’t remember ever single-handedly convincing a single person to join the organisation. I only ever participated in ‘group efforts’ at recruitment. I did tell you I was useless at ‘contact work’. I felt like a manipulative used-car salesman every time I spoke to a ‘contact’.
Even the term we used to describe potential recruits, ‘contact’, was dehumanising. It was part of our ‘loaded language’ that we used to create a distinction between ‘comrades’, who possessed the truth, and the ignorant wannabees that we needed to ‘educate’ and initiate in order to turn them into ‘cadres’. I still cringe at the very mention of the word.
Initiation
Let us say that someone turned up to the Marxist Society meeting to hear a talk on Marxism and Black Struggle. They would immediately have at least one of us going up to them and making conversation with them. We would ask them questions, plant ideas in their head, and encourage them to speak in the meeting or to come to future events. If someone left early, we would try and apprehend them before they left to ask them what they thought of the meeting and to try to sell them a paper. IMT publications would be placed strategically on all the desks so that people could have a flip through before and during the meeting. What Lifton referred to as ‘milieu control’, or the control of a cult member’s environment, was already at work as we set about working psychologically on these ‘contacts’. After the event was over, we would invite people to join the rest of us in the pub to continue to discuss Marxist theory. Sometimes we would be unlucky and there would be no takers. Sometimes we would get at least a couple of people accompanying us, and we would continue to have political discussion into the evening. During the meeting, we would pass around sheets encouraging people to put down their contact details, and also ask for financial contributions to fund the branch’s activity.
Because we branded ourselves as the ‘Marxist Society’, an unsuspecting student would think that we were just like any other society on campus – just a group of people hanging out and engaging in perfectly innocuous group activities. Someone would actually have to come to the meetings to be disabused of that notion, and see that we were affiliated to a political organisation. Even then, it might not hit them that we were trying to recruit people until much later.
Once we had the ‘contact details’ of a few promising individuals, they would be bombarded with requests for one-on-one meetings to further ascertain their potential and discuss politics. The more promising people would be invited to attend a ‘branch meeting’ of members of the organisation on campus, and even asked if they would like to attend a ‘paper sale’ on campus or in the city centre. We were gradually initiating them into what it was like to be a member of the sect. As Tourish explains in his 1998 paper on Militant, this had the effect of making it easier for them to consider joining. Once they had spoken at a meeting, bought a couple of IMT publications, agreed to attend branch, agreed to come to a paper sale or two, it wasn’t so hard to take that final step of joining and becoming a ‘comrade’. After all, they’d come so far. We would always have people who got cold feet at the last minute and dropped out. This was to be expected. As long as we had the really serious people, that was all that mattered. At branch meetings we would discuss ‘contact work’ and how we could play upon the personal vulnerabilities of these people to get them into the organisation. I vividly remember a conversation with Thomas in the middle of a contact meeting, at which our contact had to briefly leave for the bathroom. Thomas turned to me and said, ‘What’s the dig on her?’ No sooner was her back turned than we began engaging in gossip about how to manipulate her into joining. When it emerged that she was in fact a member of a rival political organisation, he came up with a master plan that would involve allowing her to join our organisation and be a member of the other organisation at the same time. Gradually, we would ‘educate’ her to the point where she would abandon the old organisation and commit fully to ours. Deception of the highest order! Of course, we had to be very careful in doing this as we did not want to appear ‘sectarian’ towards the group she was currently in. I still feel sick thinking about this incident.
Milieu control
The cult expert, Robert Jay Lifton, used the term ‘milieu control’ to describe the way in which cults control the physical and mental world of recruits and members. A cult member lives in an alternative universe in which he is surrounded by other cult members, only reads cult publications and has redefined his entire existence in terms of the organisation of which he or she is a part. This is what happened to me when I got sucked in, and this is the same thing that happened to people we sought to recruit.
The most obvious form of milieu control was our stage-managed society meetings, at which ‘contacts’ or potential contacts would be surrounded by posters, banners, publications and individual members of the organisation making conversation with them and love-bombing them. It continued when we invited them to come to national events like the October School, or the National Conference, where they would be surrounded by other true believers. All of this worked to create peer pressure that would have one of two outcomes – (a) scaring the person away, or (b) pushing them to join. If they attended paper sales, they would spend yet more time with members of the organisation, and less and less time in the real world, talking to their real friends and involving themselves in non-cult activities.
Resistance
Now and then, we would get resistance from ‘contacts’ who had last-minute doubts about involvement. Here are some of the ways we would get round this. If a ‘contact’ said, ‘I don’t know enough about the organisation to get involved,’ and asked for more time to consider it, they would be told that ‘The best way to educate yourself is to join a revolutionary organisation!’ If they complained that they did not have enough time, then, as mentioned in my previous post, we would lie about how much they had to commit, before pressuring them to give more and more time once they were ‘in’. If it was an issue of political difference, we would enter into repeated discussions with them and suggest to them certain texts to read, whether they be ‘classic’ accounts by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky or stuff on our website. Or, as mentioned before, we would play down the differences between our positions so as to get them to join, before pressuring them to drop their previous views and fully accept the position of the organisation. Of course, if a contact was firm about not wanting to get involved, we would have no choice but to respect their decision and let them go. Leading up to that, of course, we would pull out the stops in trying to pull them in.
Conclusion
‘Contact work’ was among the most unpleasant aspects of our activity, and a key reason why the IMT deserves to be referred to as a cult. No normal organisation puts such energy into conning people into its ranks.