Going into work this week, I could not help but spot from my bus the unsettling sight of Socialist Appeal recruitment flyers everywhere. This is part of the nefarious sect’s recent campaign to get to 1000 members. If they are to be believed (they shouldn’t be believed, by the way), more people than ever are flooding their ranks.
The number is only important for symbolic reasons. It will be something they can boast of publicly and internally, but it will make no difference whether they reach this figure or not. They will remain an irrelevant sect. They are nowhere close to where Militant was at its height, with its 8000 members, nor will they ever get to where the Communist Party was with its 60,000 members.
It appears there is no getting away from this disgusting cult, even when I’m on my morning commute. This week I’ve been reading Leszek Kolakowski’s excellent essay collection, Modernity on Endless Trial, in which he repeats his powerful arguments against Marxism and its utopian delusions and totalitarian implications. A wonderful work which I hope at least some doubting members of the sect will read, though it is no substitute for his magnificent three-volume work Main Currents of Marxism. (I have read the whole thing.) That work in particular contains some wonderful arguments against dialectics which I have used on this blog in my own debunking of it.
I hope that as part of this recruitment drive and the enhanced publicity they are getting as a result, people will find my blog and other sources exposing the truth about this criminal enterprise. It is almost certainly the case that without my blog far more people would be joining their ranks than we are currently seeing. People who would otherwise have been in ignorance of their true nature are finding out what a bunch of jackals and thugs these people are.
I cannot stress enough that you should avoid this miserable cult at all costs. Do not throw away years of your life for a totalitarian political sect that wants to destroy society as we know it and enslave everyone to its dogmatic version of Marxism.
I would not be surprised if the British IMT section (and IMT in general) is watering down their abysmally low “theoretical” standards to get these numbers up. I don’t have all of the information, but at one point, their Canadian section was down $3500 per month from people leaving after last year’s attempted sexual assault coverup. Their entire Norwegian section also resigned as a result of that. This is strictly anecdotal, but I have seen an IMT member quote Castro somewhere online – that person would not have been recruited in the not-too-distant past unless they could be convinced to abandon Cuban Stalinism. This whole thing is cynically about getting raw numbers and money for the IMT.
I have yet to read what Margaret Singer wrote on cults, but she did say the following: the difference between a con artist and a cult is that the former scams some people and leaves town, while the latter scams the same people over and over again. The IMT is clearly doing the latter. And many of us calling them out on this, myself included, are former, dedicated IMT members, not mere “haters” or whatever nonsense they are calling their critics.
I am just waiting for this whole thing to eventually blow up in the IMT bureaucracy’s face.
In fairness, the IMT has always had an ambivalent attitude towards Castroism. They can’t help but pay lip service to Castro’s heroic resistance to American imperialism, whilst disliking his Stalinism. And they generally defend the Cuban bureaucracy when it faces protests from the masses which fall below its rigorous proletarian standards of acceptable criticism of the regime, like they did recently. (After all, Cuba is still a ‘workers’ state’, even if it is backsliding, slowly but surely, into capitalism.) They probably think (with some reason) that the more they ‘integrate’ this individual into the sect, the easier it will be to gradually, softly bully him into conformity.
They are undoubtedly watering down the doctrine in the desperate hunt for recruits. Militant had to do the same thing. They don’t have the time to fully indoctrinate every single member as intensely as they did in the past. Things like ‘Marxist University’ are nice shortcuts that allow them to indoctrinate as many people as possible in as short a time as possible without having to lift a finger. Invariably turnover rates will increase, discipline will become harder to enforce, and an ever-greater bureaucracy of full-timers will expand exponentially in a bid to assert some authority over the process. We will see more cliques, more in-fighting, more disagreements and splits occurring as the organisation reaches a certain point and the mindless uniformity and unanimity they have been able to maintain can no longer be kept in place. Woods will happily expel the majority if he ever decides that the organisation has ‘degenerated’ and is not obedient enough to him anymore. Also, their idiotic position on Ukraine (which admittedly is in keeping with their editorial line for the past nine years) and their republishing of hysterical anti-Ukrainian propaganda and conspiracy theories is probably partly motivated by the need to excite the nastiest elements of the far-left online into flooding into their ranks so they can maximise their recruitment.
Thinking back on things, I have some recollection of the IMT having “loose contacts” in Cuba in IEC reports and congress reports. As far as I have known, the IMT has never really grown that much in Cuba, although they have maintained the odd position that the Cuban Stalinist bureaucracy could somehow be reformed if a revolutionary movement succeeded elsewhere. Could this be an opportunistic ploy for the IMT to legally operate in Cuba? Regardless, I would hate to see some poor Cuban worker give up something like scarce fuel for their 1950s vintage car in the name of “revolutionary finances”! I maintain that people don’t willingly join the IMT (or any group using thought reform); they’re tricked into joining. On that note, I secretly loathed contact work like you did. It is worth repeating that if so many people are open to the ideas of the IMT, then why do contacts have to constantly be prodded by an IMT member with “follow up” work within 24-48 hours?
I will confess that I will be watching the “train wreck” of the IMT suffering the same fate as Militant did with a bowl of popcorn ready in the future. The sociopaths and malignant narcissists that often become “leading comrades” could end up at each others’ throats. There’s also a serious danger of becoming a full-timer in these groups: they ultimately render themselves virtually unemployable in the capitalist job market by withdrawing from it for years on end. Even if they are nominally working for close to nothing, many of their fortunes will sink with the organization when it finally implodes (although I don’t doubt that Woods and Co., or their anointed successors, would seize the finances for themselves and run, even if they are somehow unanimously thrown out). Ted Grant may have been able to reject Taaffe’s methods as bad, but he didn’t realize that they inevitably flow from his flawed organizational methodology.
Shortly before I left, I saw that the IMT was really ratcheting up the milieu control. They suddenly didn’t want want IMT members talking to members in other branches without some sort of CC bureaucrat or trusted stooge present. I have also seen some references to some kind of “war” being waged on “identity politics” within the group. Of course, the IMT’s recent scandals have nothing to do with identity politics, as much as I loathe such a form of politics. It’s all just the continuation of tricking people into joining, complete with IMT members being strategically placed in the audience with prepared “interventions”.
The good news is that the IMT will never end up running a country. The bad news is that they are going to continue to con people out of money and ruin lives while they continue on their downward spiral. Upon leaving, I realized how utterly irrelevant this rotten organization is in the political sphere. However, part of me is still disturbed by how a small handful of people can wreck well meaning peoples’ lives more than the status quo can.