Cancel culture and the IMT

Kathleen Stock and cancel culture Recently, Kathleen Stock, a professor at the University of Sussex, stepped down from her post after a disgusting bullying campaign by far-left woke students who subjected her to a vicious campaign of harassment for weeks. She is the latest victim of ‘cancel culture’. I cringe to think that had I … Read more

Mental Health and Cults

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

The truth about Jock Haston

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

Why the IMT is a cult – a social media analysis

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

A Tribute to Louis Proyect (1945-2021)

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

Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy: Review

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

Ayatollah Woods and the ‘petty-bourgeois renegade’ Paul Mason

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