I Tried To Be A Communist

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

Totalitarianism and Cultism

The essence of totalitarianism is the desire to remake all of society into a gray homogeneity. Islamism, communism, fascism – all seek to impose on society a stultifying sameness and uniformity of opinion, dress, manners, culture and language. The Islamists seek to impose on everyone strict adherence to their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, and force … Read more

Debate in Trotskyist Sects: Part 10

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

Contact work: The manipulation of the youth

“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

In Defence of Cult Analysis: A Response To Reddit Trotskyists

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

Why the IMT is a cult – a social media analysis

When I first joined the IMT, the organisation was in the middle of developing its social media presence. This is at the heart of the organisation’s cultish nature. This is what the cult expert Lifton called ‘milieu control’. Against my better judgement, I was persuaded to get Facebook for the first time in order to … Read more

Ayatollah Woods and the ‘petty-bourgeois renegade’ Paul Mason

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 … Read more

The terrible truth about the IMT Split of 2010 – or, Debate in Trotskyist Sects: Part 8

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

How I raised my differences in the IMT, or Debate in Trotskyist Sects: Part 7

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