Trot Watcher Just last night, I had another nightmare about some people I knew from the IMT. There is no understating just how damaging membership in a cult can be to your mental health. My mental health was terrible at university, in large part because of my membership of the IMT and horrific treatment and shunning from … Read more
Jock Haston was one of Ted Grant’s supporters during the struggle to build a Trotskyist organisation in Britain during the 1940s. Exhausted, he dropped out of the movement around 1950, his shot-gun merger with the Healyites having backfired. Alan Woods touches on Haston’s desertion in his book about Ted Grant, but sanitises it – the … Read more
I left the International Marxist Tendency in March of 2020, and have never looked back. I have since embraced the freedom that leaving this cult has provided me. Cults use all sorts of tactics to shame people out of the idea of leaving. One of them is to say that if you leave, you are … Read more
Read it for yourself. These people really are ridiculous, aren’t they?
When I first joined the IMT, the organisation was in the middle of developing its social media presence. This is at the heart of the organisation’s cultish nature. This is what the cult expert Lifton called ‘milieu control’. Against my better judgement, I was persuaded to get Facebook for the first time in order to … Read more
I haven’t posted on here for a while. I have been intensively learning French, and it is incredible what a few weeks of unplugging from Trotskyist bullshit can do for your mental health. Given the fact that it is the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 is today, I thought I may as well give my thoughts … Read more
Louis Proyect’s death was announced just this week. Having just found out the news, I feel duty-bound to write something in tribute. A well-known and well-respected online Marxist commentator, with a blog that attracted millions of hits over many years, he is one of the people to which I am indebted for rescuing me from … Read more
The late American historian of Russia, Martin Malia, wrote a book a few years after the USSR’s collapse entitled The Soviet Tragedy. It is one of the best books on the USSR I have read, together with Nekrich and Heller’s Utopia in Power. It’s a very detailed, scholarly work of historiography that I would not … Read more
Last August, the IMT came out with a couple of stinging articles condemning Paul Mason as a ‘renegade’ and apostate from Marxism. The dispute is too boring to go into detail about, but anyone who is interested can go here and here. Mason foolishly gave the cult more publicity than it deserved by linking to … Read more
When I was in the IMT, we boasted endlessly of our democratic credentials. We compared ourselves favourably with Peter Taaffe’s organisation, which hounded out dissidents mercilessly. We replayed the trauma of the 1991-2 split over and over again. We convinced ourselves that we had much higher standards for our organisation. Little did I know that … Read more