The last several months have been a period of discovery. I have delved deep into Dostoevsky, I am now discovering the magic of Thomas Hardy, and I am probing the wisdom of George Eliot. I am acquiring the rudiments of a literary education. In the sphere of music, I am working my way through the … Read more
Thus do I speak to you in parables, you who make the soul giddy, you preachers of equality! You are tarantulas and dealers in hidden revengefulness! …I pull at your web that your rage may lure you from your cave of lies and your revenge may bound forward from behind your word ‘justice’. For that … Read more
Over the past month I have read both Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life and Gareth Stedman Jones’ Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Both books have their strengths and weaknesses. Both do a convincing job of correcting the record on Marx and his relationship to the doctrine that bears his name. They put him … Read more
When I was a member of the IMT, we were never given a convincing or coherent picture of how socialism would work in practice. The answer to all the economic problems of the world could be summed up by the same vague proposal, uncritically proffered to the starving masses, to implement a ‘nationalised planned economy’, … 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
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 late American historian of Russia, Martin Malia, wrote a book a few years after the USSR’s collapse entitled The Soviet Tragedy. It is one of the best books on the USSR I have read, together with Nekrich and Heller’s Utopia in Power. It’s a very detailed, scholarly work of historiography that I would not … 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
When I joined the IMT, I found myself in this strange environment with which I was both personally, and, as it would turn out, politically incompatible. It was inevitable that it would all end in tears and that, as with so many other times in my largely depressing life, separation, ostracism and anger all round … 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