I am celebrating two years of freedom from the International Marxist Tendency today. I cannot quite believe that it has already been that long since I deserted this malicious enterprise that I so naively attached myself to as a confused undergraduate just four years ago. I am glad to be out of there, and when … Read more
Bullying is a central feature of cults. I am taken back to my rather unhappy days in high school when I think of the horrific abuse I suffered from my peers in the organisation. I am recovering from this evil experience, but I doubt I will ever forget it. I still vividly remember how my … Read more
Anyone under the illusion that the International Marxist Tendency, or any other Trot cult, encourages open and honest democratic debate, should prepare to have their illusions punctured. When I joined the organisation, I was assured that it was a place where disagreement and dissent was welcomed. It was not long before I found out that … Read more
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
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”–Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881. Cults and Recruitment No cult can survive without obsessive recruitment, and in Socialist Appeal/the IMT, this was at the centre of everything we did and said. … Read more
I should be taking a day off today. It goes to show just how much the IMT has colonised my mind that I am expending yet more energy upon them today. Still, it could be worse. I could still be in the cult. At least I am celebrating my second Christmas free of the stultifying … Read more
Several months ago, some of my criticisms of Trotskyism and Trot cults were posted on Reddit by a guy keen to know what the people on the Trotskyism subreddit thought. There were the typical slanders, dismissals of me as a ‘renegade’ and misunderstandings. I hope to reply to these and to affirm the correctness of … Read more
Janja Lalich is a cult expert and a former member of the Democratic Workers’ Party (DWP), one of many left-wing cults that existed in the 1970s. She has been one of the people whose work has been of help to me in my recovery from cultism. She has written and spoken extensively about her experiences … 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