I am celebrating two years of freedom from the International Marxist Tendency today. I cannot quite believe that it has already been that long since I deserted this malicious enterprise that I so naively attached myself to as a confused undergraduate just four years ago. I am glad to be out of there, and when I look at how much the organisation has degenerated since my departure, I am all the more grateful for the fact that I was strong enough to break off the chains of cultism and choose my own path. Now I must make my way in the world without certainties, without ‘party discipline’, without ready-made answers and an all-knowing, all-seeing authority exercising the most stringent of intellectual and moral dictatorships over my mind and my critical faculties. And yet, I know that I could easily still be inside this malevolent organ of misrule and manipulation.
This loathsome sect did not deserve my loyalty and my dedication. In my first year at university, I dedicated all my free time to ‘building the organisation’. I was rewarded with cliquish rejection by my branch, a campaign of character assassination, a betrayal of the most personal nature regarding my mental health, which was weaponised against me and used to destroy me politically and personally, ostracism, personal abuse and unpleasantness of the very worst kind. I could have resigned then and there and never bothered myself with these scoundrels ever again. I made the mistake of staying, persuaded that I could still play an important role so long as I showed ‘repentance’. Most of my second year was taken up with trying to get back in. The toll it took on my mental health was immense. I felt suicidal for much of that time, wondering whether I really belonged to this sect, and whether I would not be better off if I abandoned it entirely. I was so emotionally distraught and distracted that I could not bring sufficient focus to my academic work, hence my under-performance. The psychological strain was incredible. In hindsight, I am surprised I survived. The experience showed me that my place in the organisation was precarious. I could always be hounded out if I was ever suspected of being a liability or not sufficiently toeing the line. It made me more conformist. I felt, more than ever, under pressure to prove myself. Yet I had nothing to prove. I was already more dedicated than 90% of the organisation’s membership, even when I was technically on a ‘leave of absence’. I had already shown what I could do, and jealousy over my ability is part of why the people in my branch tried to destroy me and force me out.
And yet, the experience also caused me to lose some of my innocence, and become a bit more cynical about my ‘comrades’. I realised there was a darker side to this organisation. It made it much easier to realise the truth when I came round to researching the corruption inherent in Trotskyism at the beginning of 2020, starting with Trotsky’s falsehoods over Kronstadt, and moving on to the totalitarian organisational structures of Trotskyist sects. Realising that I had been conned over two and a half years, and that I had been the victim of mind control, was a distressing but clarifying moment. All the doubts I had had over the course of my membership accumulated, like books on a shelf, until finally, the shelf split. Everything fell into place. So this is what had been done to me. I had seen through it all. It was time to get out.
After several days’ deliberation at the beginning of March 2020, I resolved to quit. There was no point wasting my time with an internal debate over my differences, knowing I would be slandered and expelled anyway. Nothing that I had done for this miserable groupuscule would be remembered, and I would be branded an enemy of the working-class and a petty-bourgeois renegade in any case. Why give them the pleasure of abusing me to my face? I had already been blackmailed with disciplinary measures if I went outside the bounds of the rules set for internal discussion – rules which did not apply to the leadership of course. Despite being assured that our organisation was democratic and that its resources belonged to all comrades, I was not even allowed to write an article for the website outlining my differences on Kronstadt. In practice, the organisation’s corrupt leadership has a proprietorial attitude towards the apparatus, and everything that is published and distributed must reflect the party line. (As I showed in a recent post, the British section is legally the private property of none other than Rob Sewell and his cronies.)
Here is a fundamental hypocrisy of the sect. If you bring up differences or inconvenience them in any way, you are denounced for ‘wasting the time of the organisation’. But they reserve the right to waste your time, energy and resources on all sorts of junk. I gave hundreds of pounds to the sect to spend on the wages of its full-timers, its printing press, its hosting of events, alcohol, etc. I gave time to ‘interventions’ at demonstrations, Labour Party work, trade union work, to branch meetings, to our October School, to our ‘aggregate’ meetings, our weekly Marxist Society meetings, our MSF conference, our national conference, our World School – but it was all for nought. They still insist that I lacked dedication to their corrupt enterprise because I had the gall to leave after being mistreated, as well as spreading all sorts of slanders and lies about me personally. Two years later, I still have nightmares about this cult.
Some of the worst treatment I have ever received in my entire life, I received at the hands of members of this worthless, moribund, demented group. Some had the gall to denounce me for speaking out after I had left. How dare I complain about my poor treatment at the hands of these sick people. Unfortunately for them, I have no intention of keeping quiet, and every intention of exposing them for their lies, their bullying, their myriad acts of personal humiliation. I will never forget, and I will probably never forgive.
Seeing their position on Ukraine right now, and their blatant regurgitation of pro-Russian propaganda, has made me even gladder to have left this sect. Reading that drivel makes me apoplectic with rage. Not satisfied with being anti-Semitic kooks who slander all Zionists as fascists, they are now doing the same to Ukrainians. Both Israel and Ukraine are liberal democracies at war with fascists. You can always count on the IMT to provide cover for the fascists by either giving them ‘critical support’ or saying that ‘both sides’ are equally reactionary. If that is their ‘Marxism’, then I would much rather be a liberal.
The intellectual freedom I gained from leaving was immense. In the months after my departure, I still thought of myself as on the left, until the Black Lives Matter movement took the world by storm, with its toxic identity politics and its campaign against the essential aspects of Western civilisation on the grounds that it was inherently racist and evil. Despite being black myself, I was repulsed by much of what this movement represented. I realised I could no longer pretend to be on the left whilst this nonsense was going on. I inevitably went back to my liberal-conservative views, and resolved to be done with left-wing politics for good. I can say that my mental health has improved since I ended this misalliance with left-wing ideology. I no longer have to adhere to a party line, whether imposed by a sect or by Twitter. I still enjoy left-wing writers like George Orwell, E.P. Thompson and Gore Vidal, even though I have next to no belief in socialism as a political doctrine.
Not only am I no longer a Marxist, but I am relieved that Marxism is false. Even if it could be proven to me that Marxism was true, and that the dialectic was heading inexorably in the direction of socialism, I could not bring myself to support Marxism. As critics of Marxism in the 19th and 20th century observed, the inevitability of socialism does not put me under any moral obligation to hasten this eventuality. I am convinced that even in the face of the inevitable, I would fight on to preserve my petty-bourgeois individuality in the teeth of the vast, impersonal, socio-economic forces that would bring about the demise of the individual and his subordination to the herd. Socialist society, with its tendencies towards collectivism and homogeneity, is not something that I could support in good faith. A society which combines a perfect state of individual freedom on the one hand with a perfect state of social harmony on the other is impossible. If you want perfect social harmony, go to North Korea, where the unity of all is enforced by a totalitarian state. If you want freedom, you must settle for liberal democracy, with all its imperfections – its materialism, its egotism, even its nihilism. Society does not owe us meaning or purpose or a feeling of harmony with our fellow men, important though this is. I have learned this the hard way. I prefer the loneliness and alienation of capitalist society to the even greater loneliness and alienation that exists in a society of enforced brotherhood, which can only ever be artificial, but does not involve a real, deep and lasting connection between individuals. How can such a thing exist in a society where you have to live in fear of being arrested at any moment for the indiscretion of sharing your real thoughts and feelings with a co-worker or a friend? This is the atmosphere that existed in microcosm in the IMT, which I was a member of for two and a half years. The thought of all of society being like this if they seize power is terrifying.
Extreme individualism is preferable to extreme collectivism. Both are bad, but the former can at least correct itself. The latter is much harder to correct. In the face of mass delusion, the individual is near powerless. In a society of individualists, at least a first-rate man can be heard in the din of voices, amidst the general conformity that must prevail in any functioning society. If Britain in 1940 had been a totalitarian state rather than a liberal democracy, a Churchill would never have risen up to save us in our country’s darkest hour, when the political elite were more inclined to appeasement and even surrender. By contrast, in 1928-29, Trotsky, who had presided over the building of a political organisation unique in its conformism and intolerance for critical thought, was hounded out by his fellows and thrown out of the Communist Party, then the country. Neither he nor his followers appear to have learnt this lesson. My experience in the IMT has only strengthened my determination to hold onto my individualism at all costs, and to shun the herd.
I feel no guilt over deserting this false cause. Two and a half years is more than this rotten project deserved from me. I am aware of the charge that renegades were never true Marxists in the first place, that they committed the sin of ‘bourgeois empiricism’ and ’emotionalism’ in abandoning their faith because of their lack of perspective and the failure of the revolution to happen within their lifetimes. These same people cite every example of Marxist or socialist ‘successes’ as proof that the dialectic is moving in their direction. But if the world-historical collapse of Marxism in the 20th century is cited as proof of the ideology’s bankruptcy, they will viciously denounce this as ‘bourgeois empiricism’ and ‘undialectical’, and insist that it is too soon to pass definitive judgement on the viability of socialism as an alternative to capitalist society. It is they who are suffering from petty-bourgeois emotionalism and sentiment, not those of us clear-headed enough to see the truth. Marxism is a religion, which they cling to in spite of all the real-world evidence against it. Long ago, Hume told us that you cannot reason someone into what they did not reason themselves into in the first place. I can live my life without illusions. Chief of those illusions is the idea that an authoritarian political sect will bring about any sort of liberation or emancipation for the working-class. As Cornelius Castoriadis said in his article, ‘The Fate of Marxism’, in 1966:
Our reexamination of Marxism does not take place in a vacuum. We don’t speak from just anywhere or from nowhere at all. We started from revolutionary Marxism. But we have now reached the stage where a choice confronts us: to remain Marxists or to remain revolutionaries. We have to choose between faithfulness to a doctrine which, for a considerable period now, has no longer been animated by any new thought or any meaningful action, and faithfulness to our basic purpose as revolutionaries, which is a radical and total formation of society.
Good stuff, sir. You might wanna broaden the scope a bit by critiquing the other Trot groups.
Have you seen/read https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/fourth1.html, http://trotskyschildren.blogspot.com/, or Robert Service’s bio of Trotsky?
I’ve read both of those. Sullivan’s critiques are masterful.
I just stumbled across this blog and I must say… you seem quite obsessive. You shouldn’t let this group have such a hold over your mind. You publish a many-hundred-word post every few days, which (for me) would each take of at least an hour to write and copy-edit. That’s at three to five hours a week for the last two years you’ve spent conveying your thoughts here.
You claim to have found happiness, and I certainly hope you have. However, the bitterness and loneliness which still comes across from this blog would seem to betray the truth: you haven’t found happiness and you’re still holding on.
I encourage you to seek out a community. I found this in my church, and my friends and family. If you truly believe Marxism to be false (as any thinking person who has graduated high school should) then neither you nor I have anything to worry about. Liberal democracy is stronger than its ever been, and the temporary relapse in interest for Marxism among the youth of today will be temporary. They too will grow up and realize the error of their ways, just as you have.
With that being said, I hope you manage to let go and you stop wasting as much time as you have on running this blog. It can’t be good for you.
Much love,
Chris
I find this post to be very insensitive. You clearly don’t know much about cults and the effect they have on the mind. I find writing about my experience therapeutic and find that it has been very helpful to others.
‘You claim to have found happiness, and I certainly hope you have. However, the bitterness and loneliness which still comes across from this blog would seem to betray the truth: you haven’t found happiness and you’re still holding on.’
I don’t remember claiming to have found happiness. I am less miserable than I would be inside a cult, that is for sure. My recovery is still very much underway.
I am not religious and therefore will not find community in a church. I may well find it somewhere, but I don’t want to end up in another cult.
I have only just found this blog so maybe I’ve not found a page that describes it, but now that you no longer support the theory of permanent revolution, what is your angle? It would help a lot in understanding the frame in which your criticism forms. Have you abandoned any form of Left theory altogether? Or have you simply abandoned Marxist analysis and found your answers in Marxism-Leninism, or Anarchism? If you have already a page outlining your current philosophy it would help a lot.
I am no longer a Marxist or a socialist of any kind. However, if I was I would probably be some sort of libertarian socialist/social democrat. If I was enough of a utopian, I would probably be an Egoist anarchist a la Max Stirner. I think of myself as being some sort of liberal-conservative. I’m not particularly politically tribal though. If there is anything I have learned from being in a cult, it is that I treasure critical thinking over tribal loyalty of any kind.
Hiya. You mention that this organization has degenerated since your departure. Could you elaborate please? I’m not too familiar with them
Their position on the Ukraine crisis is so bizarre and idiotic that it further highlights how ridiculous and cultish and anti-Western it is. Here is a recent post I did on this issue:
https://extrotskyistrenegade.com/exposing-the-imts-fake-neutrality-on-ukraine/
I doubt that in private, even most IMT members really agree with what the senile old crank is coming out with at the moment.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is widespread doubt about the leadership’s line in private, even if there is public conformity. More than one person admitted to me after I’d left that they had had differences with the leadership, but none of them had the courage to be open about it. They nevertheless sympathised with my grievances. However, at least a couple of members upbraided me for going public with my dissent (telling me I should ‘go quietly’) and wore their cowardly conformism as a badge of pride. (‘I may have differences, but at least I obey party discipline!’) What losers.
The degeneration of this sect will only accelerate as time goes on, especially once the old bastard dies. These sects do not manage leadership transitions well. Just as the American SWP became more cult-like after Cannon and Trotsky were gone from the scene, so the IMT will likely become even more cultish once Woods has been replaced with the new guru, who must assert his own stamp upon the organisation. And of course these groups are always coming up with new and more sophisticated means of recruitment and indoctrination. Anything and everything is justified to ‘build the organisation’. The British SWP has become more cultish since Cliff’s death, and Callinicos will no doubt be succeeded by someone even more demented and authoritarian than he is. At least the USSR produced a reform movement that culminated in Gorbachev. But no Trotskyist sect ever produces more enlightened or liberal leaders over time. Funny when you think about it.
Dear Aaron!
First of all: Thanks for this blog. I was also a member of the IMT until around 6 months ago (but in a different country). However, I was there for 5 years, but last summer I finally realized that I can no longer be part of this organization. My private life in particular has suffered greatly from the extremely time-consuming events, often several times a week. From the beginning I hated selling newspapers or doing contact work or the long, endless, trivial discussions about details during the conference period.
The horrible, extremely boring world congress in 2021 that I actually endured for 2 days in full (on the other 2 days I was suddenly “ill”) was the moment I knew I had to get out. Now. I hated every moment. Every single speech was extremely boring and the same shit I’ve heard over and over again for years was repeated. I even paid money (or “donation”) for this bullshit where you meet with your comrades in front of a TV and watch a bad live stream. I’ve been wondering what the hell I’m doing with my life right now and I just want to get out of here. (I couldn’t even get drunk because of course this “mega-important” live stream has to be watched sober. But of course you can pay money for beer afterwards at the social.)
Of course, many other negative experiences have accumulated over the years, but I don’t want to list them all now. Just this much: Your experiences with the organization are very similar to mine (except for the bullying). I guess I wasn’t as loudly critical as you, which I’m ashamed of in hindsight since I was basically a conformist follower. Most of the time I didn’t say my criticism, knowing that there would be endless discussions (I’ve witnessed it firsthand with other comrades during the meetings. Most of them are now ex-comrades). The end was always the same: the criticism was rejected by the central committee and the discussion was thus over.
The question of why I was there for so long depends mainly on two reasons: one is that a good friend of mine brought me to the organization and on the other hand I actually wanted radical political changes but I didn’t see any possibility in the regular parties at the time to make this happen. Luckily our friendship didn’t suffer after leaving, I think he will leave soon too, since he is less and less active there himself and is moving to another city soon. Since I knew that I would have endless discussions and pressure (after all, I was there for a very long time, and when a comrade who was a long time member is leaving it is always a bad image for the organization, especially among the younger comrades) I used the effective method of ghosting: I simply stopped going to the meetings and also stopped taking calls and replying to messages. They tried it for a few weeks and finally gave up. 3 weeks ago I got a last message that I’m now excluded because I haven’t paid my membership fee for months. Oh how terrible 😉
It was so liberating that I finally don’t have to sacrifice time for this organisation or have any obligations to go to pointless demonstrations and events where the same thing is always preached like a prayer wheel. What an increase in quality of life! Thank you for this blog, it helps me to process the whole thing. Keep it up!
Hello,
I am so happy you found this blog. 5 years is double the length of time I was in it. I’m glad you are now free. I was at the World School of 2019, and I enjoyed myself at the time, but in hindsight I think it was one of the most intense indoctrination experiences I ever had in the organisation. I glanced some of the videos of the 2021 World Congress and thought it was utterly depressing stuff. It’s one thing to be sat in a big hall listening to the ‘lead-offs’ and the stirring rhetoric, because there is at least a physicality to it. It is quite another to be watching several-hour-long videos on YouTube of the same nonsense being uncritically repeated by the organisation’s leaders. The Orwellian unreality of it all hits you soon enough. I can imagine many comrades didn’t sit through the whole thing. The whole thing about gathering with comrades to watch it in a living room was also utterly bizarre – I saw ‘comrades’ posting pictures of it on Twitter. I guess they wanted to make up somewhat for the inability of the comrades to congregate in Italy due to the pandemic.
And yes, the ‘discussions’ are stage-managed in such a way so as to force out people with different opinions. The point is not to discover the truth, but to hammer home the line (‘clarify certain questions’, to use their euphemism) and exert peer pressure on non-conformists to keep their differences to themselves, or leave. There is no room for serious debate or discussion, which is why entire sections have split in recent years. This is the case for all Trotskyist cults. Once you read stuff about cults by people from Steven Hassan, Dennis Tourish etc, it all falls into place, and all the tactics they use to indoctrinate people become comprehensible. Long live freedom!
I find your writings helpful, as it confirms my gut feeling, which I have
about the IMT and their local installment in my country. When they
write articles it’s so blatantly intellectual dishonest, it stinks to the sky.
They publicly mock ideas like pacifism, idealism, liberalism and other concepts which they all denounce as “burgeoise”. Without bringing any
real proof to the table besides some quotes from Trotzky or other “marxist”. I doubt that Karl Marx himself would be considering that such
conduct in his name would be good.
I noticed the following part in your text above: “Extreme individualism is preferable to extreme collectivism. Both are bad, but the former can at least correct itself.” and I question myself “what is extreme individualism and extreme collectivism?”. I find the opposition of these points not
convincing. Both are for their reasons bad, but both are ideas.
A society of individualistic individuals is clinging to the idea of individualism
and as such is clinging to a mass delusional idea.
A collectivist society is clinging to the idea of collectivism. Both societies
can’t correct themselves as they are clinging to their ideas. They are,
from my humble understanding, the same side of the coin. Preferred should not one over the other, but they need to be balanced as they are
parts of any human society. Sometimes we act as individuals, sometimes
we need to act as groups to achieve anything.
Like getting over the current climate catastrophe. Individuals would maybe buy only CO2 friendly products, others would then do the inverse and buy extra steaks, fly regularly transatlantic and drive extra big SUVs to show their disrespect towards the do-gooders. Collectivistic actions would mean that rich countries pay extra for their past climate mischiefs, enforce
laws which not everybody will agree on. And maybe getting over
capitalism, if that is even possible, to some economy which performs better in the realm of global ecologic collapse.
Or during the COVID-19 pandemic, people who didn’t vaccinate
themselves came always up with the extreme individualistic stance, that they “don’t want to”. Maybe even with a reason, when you were lucky.
But when we consider, when we trust the words of “experts”, then 90%
or more need to be vaccinated in a country to have sufficient protection
of the population, so that the pandemic dies out, finally. If that is true,
and for the sake of the argument, let’s pretend it is. Then a country
needs to act in a collectivistic fashion: everybody needs to get vaccinated.
By whatever means, the more peacefully this happens, the better. The
point of this part is, that collectivistic action is needed.
Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. I hope I made clear why I find the
opposition of “extreme individualism” vs. “extreme collectivism”. Not
convincing. I think not one of those is better over the over and that any
society needs to incorporate both modes of human group think and need
to balance them, to be a working society.
Thank you, for your time.