Trot Watcher

I am reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I thought Nabokov was the greatest English-language prose stylist I had ever read, but after reading Joyce, I may have to modify that judgement. Here is an excerpt from the thrilling final pages of Chapter IV, in which Stephen Dedalus … Read more

I have nothing personal against Ben Curry, noted full-timer for the British section of the IMT. On the contrary, I thank him for helping drive me out of the organisation after his bullying and cultish behaviour in the aftermath of my expressing political differences led to my resignation. Prior to that, we had a good … Read more

This organisation is so evil, I no longer have words. I have said it before, and I will say it again. The International Marxist Tendency is a fascist cult.

Here is an example of a branch agenda, of the kind that, by some strange oversight, was still being shared with me via Google Drive for some months after my departure. Enjoy it in all its mind-numbing glory. Note how, to add to the LARP, the names of members are shortened into initials. I am … Read more

The answer that every IMT cultist has in their heads is ‘Yes, you should have.’ But actually, if you think about it, I did leave relatively quietly, unlike, say, the recent defectors from the organisation. After I handed in my resignation I said nothing publicly for a few months, wanting to just get away from … Read more

The IMT Executive Committee have said, in one of their recent internal meetings (the notes of which have been leaked publicly) that rape is a ‘personal problem’, that the leadership does not exist to protect comrades from abusive behaviour within the organisation, and that it is the responsibility of the members to put the organisation … Read more

Every Trotskyist cult, the IMT most notoriously, is image-obsessed. The sordid search for publicity and self-promotion of these organisations is truly incredible. So much of our activity in the IMT was performative, aimed at making ourselves look like we were doing all this cool stuff for the cause of socialism, when actually, we weren’t doing … Read more

I have recently uncovered yet more evidence that Alan Woods, the leader of the International Marxist Tendency, happily associates with Russian fascists. Aside from the testimony provided by Peter Taaffe about an episode that happened in the 1990s, and his regurgitation of far-right propaganda about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more recently, I have discovered that … Read more

A common attack launched against those who desert the cause is that we were never true Marxists in the first place. There is truth in this. Frank S. Meyer does say in The Moulding of Communists that the true Marxist-Leninist must conform so rigidly to an ideal type so inhuman, that those who fall away … Read more