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
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
Life in a cult leaves you bruised and battered. When I left the IMT in March 2020, I knew I had a road both long and thorny to travel before I could recover. I may never recover fully from the experience, but that does not mean that I am not going to try. In recent … Read more
How I became a Corbynista It is the end of an era. Jeremy Corbyn’s time has come and gone. Despite all of the fire and fury, the optimism and exuberance, the tumult and turmoil, the Corbyn movement appears to have collapsed as quickly as it began. That is not to say that the Corbyn movement … Read more
Introduction A central feature of Marxism (and indeed, Trotskyism) is dialectical materialism. Marx developed his theory of dialectical materialism from his re-interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel borrowed the concept from Heraclitus, an ancient Greek thinker, who famously argued that the world was in flux and contained contradictions. On this basis, he stated that ‘No one … Read more
Introduction Today marks exactly a year since my resignation from the International Marxist Tendency. I republish here in full my resignation letter, which most members of the organisation have not read. These things are naturally withheld from the membership. It will help set the record straight about my departure, since all sorts of lies are … Read more
Winston Churchill has become a favourite punching-bag of the far-left in recent years. Some have even gone as far as to put him in the same moral category as Hitler. Since Churchill is seen as one of the great heroes of Western and liberal civilisation, the surest way of discrediting it is to discredit the … Read more
Background Socialist Appeal is the British section of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), founded in 1992 by Ted Grant and Alan Woods after their split with Peter Taaffe and their comrades in Militant (since renamed the Socialist Party). The actual circumstances of the split are shrouded in assertion, counter-assertion, slander, counter-slander and the elaborate falsification … Read more
I am embarrassed to say that I had the personal acquaintance of Canadian members of the International Marxist Tendency, whose section is known as Fightback/La Riposte. I was, after all, part of a large, global network of IMT members on Facebook. The Canadian comrades were among the loudest and most entertaining. Needless to say, any … Read more
For the past few days I have been reading a brilliant book by a man named Steven Hassan calling Combating Cult Mind Control. Hassan is an American mental health counselor and cult expert who was briefly a member of the Moonies in the 1970s, before being rescued by his concerned family. He thereafter dedicated his … Read more