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 the original article on Socialist Appeal, describing the organisation as ‘mouldering’ and a cult. The latter description is certainly correct. Buoyed by this publicity, Alan Woods himself weighed into the dispute, denouncing Mason with thunderous self-righteousness as an ‘apostate’, ‘renegade’ and ‘deserter’ from Marxism and the Corbyn movement. The word of the high priest of ‘genuine Marxism’ was duly shared on social media by his loyal followers, and news of the fatwa spread far and wide. The unhappy Mason was brigaded by IMT cultists on Twitter, subjecting him to mockery and ridicule. Who knows what fate would have befallen him if the IMT had state power? No doubt he would already have been marked out for a Maoist struggle session so that he might confess his un-Marxist errors, before being sent off to the nearest gulag and murdered. Mason foolishly defended this loathsome cult recently when it was threatened with expulsion from Labour. If I were him, I would have said ‘Good riddance to rubbish’ and welcomed the departure of this toxic groupuscule. But it seems the far-left must stick together against ‘Starmerism’, even when they are full of mutual hatred for one another.
I do not care for either the IMT, whose company I have departed, or the pathetic middle-class intellectuals like Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani or Paul Mason who make up the ‘Corbyn movement’. I must confess that I rather enjoyed this falling out among leftist thieves. I had the opportunity to read Ayatollah Woods’ fatwa against Mason, and it is filled with the kind of Stalinist vitriol that one is used to from the world of far-left cults. Thankfully, Woods is gifted with a literary verve that David North and other sectarian cult leaders do not have, so his article was at least tolerable reading. However, the tone of condemnation and vilification was clear throughout.
The article is interesting to me primarily for the moronic arguments Woods makes to affirm the importance of his insignificant groupuscule. He decries Mason’s use of the term ‘mouldering’:
Now, the word “mouldering”, unlike petty bourgeois and renegade, has no sociological significance whatsoever. It belongs specifically to the category of insults, and nothing else. It is a synonym for “slowly decaying”, something that is old, worn out, moth-eaten and so on.
This is truly rich from Woods. Everyone who knows anything about Trotskyism knows that ‘petty-bourgeois’ is not used by Trotskyists or other far-left sect members as an objective term of sociological analysis, but as a form of ‘loaded language’, a vitriolic insult to be thrown at anyone you disagree with. Trotsky began this tradition within Trotskyism by slandering the entire opposition within the SWP as ‘petty-bourgeois’, regardless of the objective social background of the people concerned (most of whom were workers), and this has been continued ever since. Every time a Trotskyist cult splits, both sides claim that they are representing ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘genuine Marxism’ and accuse the other side of being ‘petty-bourgeois’ and ‘Mensheviks’. I am not a small business owner, but no doubt I am seen as ‘petty-bourgeois’ by my former comrades because I had the gall to disagree with them and leave their ranks.
Woods continues:
Does this definition not accurately apply to comrade Paul? I believe that it does – 100 percent. Of course, if it makes him feel a bit better, we can use another term: say, deserter – but that sounds even worse. Perhaps we can settle for apostate? That will do nicely. But no matter what word we use, the content remains just the same.
‘Apostate’ is a word beloved of by all cults. Its usage by Ayatollah Woods is only further indication of the fact that his organisation is a cult and that his doctrine is not a ‘science’ but a religion demanding blind faith.
I have observed this process many times before, and it always follows the same pattern. First, they find fault with this or that aspect of Marxism. They claim that the “old ideas” (“dogmas”, they always call them) no longer correspond to the present conditions (“empirical facts”).
Then, they look around for “new ideas” , which they easily find readily available from the mass of obscurantist and reactionary theories that are constantly being churned out from the philosophy, politics and sociological departments of the universities with the monotonous regularity of sausages from a sausage machine.
They find these intellectual sausages very much to their taste. They provide them with the necessary arguments with which to settle accounts with the “old, mouldering dogmas”, which satisfied their intellectual curiosity and social conscience in their younger days.
Woods thinks that he is on to something, when really he is making a display of his own astounding ignorance. What he describes is the normal process of intellectual growth and maturation, in which one discards certain ‘sacred truths’ in favour of those that make better sense of the world in which we live. After all, it was Marx who said ‘doubt everything’. For him to throw away the word ‘obscurantist’ at others when his own brand of Marxism is a fossilised set of dogmas that didn’t even explain the world in the 1930s, let alone today, is simply rich. What Woods is talking about is the normal process that any intellectually honest person goes through. I can name several intellectuals who went through a similar process – all of far more brilliance and intelligence and who have contributed far more to the world than Woods and his cronies. Leszek Kolakowski, Jacek Kuron, Christopher Hitchens, Irving Kristol, Arthur Koestler – the list goes on. They constitute the cream of the intellectual crop of the twentieth century. Woods is not even close to being among that number, nor is his mentor, the cult leader Ted Grant, who adopted Marxism as a religion as a 13-year-old and never gave up his faith, even as it was disproved again and again by events. The fact that he has chosen to cling to the outworn shibboleths of his youth does not mean that we must also do so.
Paul Mason insisted that Labour had to adopt a position of defending a second referendum and Remain in the last election. Banging the drum for the Remainers immediately alienated swathes of traditional Labour supporters in the North of England, which was a major factor in the election defeat. Bravo, Paul! Long live political realism!
Woods evidently believes that had Labour taken Socialist Appeal’s position on Brexit, those voters wouldn’t have deserted Labour anyway. The truth is that Labour was doomed to defeat, and there is nothing anyone could have done about it.
If Paul Mason paid the slightest attention to the empirical data, to which he refers so frequently, then he would know that the IMT and Socialist Appeal are in a state of rude health. While every other left group is in crisis, splitting and falling to pieces, we are growing and spreading our influence by the day. And this fact is acknowledged by friends and enemies alike.
About one week ago, the IMT held a summer school under difficult conditions of lockdown, which was subscribed to by 6,400 people from 116 different countries. That shows that the ideas of revolutionary Marxism are thriving and finding an ever-wider and enthusiastic audience on a world scale. Empirical data, my friend, empirical data!
The old charlatan will make no mention of the fact that it is very easy to get high attendance to a Marxist event when it is held entirely online. Moreover, the vast majority of those 6,400 people will already be members, and a small number will be ‘contacts’, most of whom will never join the organisation, and even if they did, the organisation would collapse as it lacks the ‘cadres’ to consolidate them. The truth is that the sect has little more than 4000 members worldwide, and 600 in Britain alone. (Assuming every member attended the ‘Marxist University’, that means that about 2,400 of those who attended are contacts, despite the resources invested in trying to attract as many people as possible. Why not 8,000? Why not 10,000? Why not 15,000?) This is after 30 years of non-stop activity and in a period of historic crisis for capitalism. Utterly pathetic. He also omits the damaging splits the IMT has been through in the last ten years. He should rest assured that there will be many more, especially as the organisation gets bigger. More members means more sections, which means more disagreements, leading to more splits, leading us back to where we started.
For our part, we do not believe there is any need to reinvent Marxism, just as we do not need to reinvent the wheel. Of course, it will be necessary to introduce this or that modification, but what is really remarkable is how few adjustments we have to make to the ideas that were worked out by Marx and Engels in the 19th century and developed and enriched by Lenin and Trotsky in the 20th century.
Therefore, we see absolutely no need to change course. Those who, like Paul Mason, wish to abandon ship are very welcome to jump overboard and disappear beneath the waves. But please do not invite us to join you!
What drivel. Quite frankly, if I ever find myself trapped on board a ship with a bunch of totalitarian cranks and petty dictators like the IMT leadership, I hope I will have the bravery to commit suicide and toss myself overboard into the icy waters of eternal freedom from mental servitude and intellectual stultification, rather than continue to endure their rotten regime for even five minutes. Their leaking outfit will crash into the indomitable iceberg of reality before too long, and sink like the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic beneath the bottomless blue waves of irrelevance, but unlike the Titanic, it will not even leave the shattered traces of lost glory.