When I walked out of the International Marxist Tendency after two and a half years of vicious abuse and mental torment, I knew that it would take me a long time to recover. I may never fully recover, but I have to try. In the days after leaving, I was disoriented and devastated. I wondered … Read more
When I left the cult, an IMT cultist taunted me on Facebook for lapsing back into lost Christian faith. I had been very open about my Christian upbringing and how I resented the fundamentalist nonsense with which I was indoctrinated. Now it was being used against me, in typical cult-like fashion. Of course, Christianity had … Read more
For every single day since leaving the International Marxist Tendency, I have felt anger. Anger courses through my veins like lava flowing through a volcano. My brain pulsates violently with rage as I comprehend the damage that was done to me. Leaving the cult was like being picked up and hurled out of a tall … Read more
In a 1944 article, ‘I Tried To Be A Communist’, Richard Wright explains his brief involvement and disaffection with the American Communist Party. This essay was included in a 1949 collection of essays by former Communists, The God That Failed, in which they reflect on their experiences. Wright’s account is one of the most stirring, … Read more
Orlando Figes was and is a villain in the International Marxist Tendency. When I was a member of Socialist Appeal, he was rubbished as a loathsome bourgeois historian whose sole duty is to besmirch the spotless banner of Bolshevism and the glorious legacy left behind by Lenin and Trotsky. Back in 2013, for some reason, … Read more
One of the many idiotic claims made by Trotskyists is that if only the revolution had spread to Germany, and the other ‘advanced’ countries of Europe, the USSR would not have been ‘isolated’ and it would have received aid from these countries that would have enabled it to avoid Stalinism. No detailed explanation was given … Read more
The 1991-2 split in the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI) brought about the demise of Militant, the CWI’s British section, and gave birth to the two main organisations that came out of it – the Socialist Party under Peter Taaffe, and Socialist Appeal under Ted Grant, Alan Woods and Rob Sewell. When I was … 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
I touched on this in my very first post on diamat, but at least two aspects of dialectical materialism which boggle the mind to no end, are the ideas that (a) one’s social class background is necessarily connected to one’s thought and (b) that human thought exists as part of an organic, homogeneous, dialectical whole, … Read more
For decades, Trotskyists have denied that the degeneration of the USSR has anything to do with Bolshevik ideology. Most of us realise that the seed of Stalinism was in Bolshevism from the very beginning. Trotskyists prefer to blame the difficult conditions specific to ‘backward’ Russia. It was the ‘objective conditions’ of this uncivilised, peasant nation … Read more