The average contact It might occur to people reading that the only people who would join an organisation like the IMT, or a cult of any kind, is someone who is stupid or crazy. I can tell you from my own experience that nothing could be farther from the truth. It requires a certain level … 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
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
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
In this video from 2019, Alan Woods, head of the International Marxist Tendency (of which Socialist Appeal is the British section) makes the sensationally anti-Semitic claim at 12:34 that the anti-Semitism furor surrounding the Labour Party is a fabrication by the Israeli Embassy and its agents within the Labour Party. Needless to say, I did … Read more
I have been sitting in my living room, looking through ancient bank statements and scrawling through with a fine tooth-comb the cold, expressionless figures that appear on every page, searching for the payments I made to the International Marxist Tendency over two and a half years. I have calculated that I spent over £1000 – … Read more
In the IMT, I was always taught that Lenin and Trotsky had conducted a heroic battle against anti-Semitism, and that it was revived by the evil Stalin as part of the ‘bureaucratic counter-revolution’ that reversed many of the ‘gains’ of the Russian Revolution. I had no idea of the Bolsheviks’ early efforts to stamp out … Read more
I have done quite a lot of IMT-bashing on this blog, being, as I am, a former member. But this blog was also set up to expose other Trotskyist cults, and now seems like a wonderful opportunity to bash the Socialist Workers’ Party, and their antics in a London school. It turns out that this … Read more
Just a few months ago, I would have denied that the IMT was anti-Semitic. I would have said that, for all my problems with them, I did not see anti-Semitism as one of them. I even convinced myself, for a time, that our position on Israel was ‘moderate’ compared to those of other left-wing sects … Read more