Trot cultists would have you believe that dialectical materialism is a profound philosophy whose truths only Marxism and its ‘science’ could possibly have gifted to the world. So much of it turns out to be well-worn philosophical ground, stuff that we started taking for granted a while ago. Take the following statement from Trotsky’s 1939 … Read more
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
Introduction Year One was the second book that was recommended to me by the IMT leadership when I confessed to having doubts about the organisation’s doctrine. It is a mendacious work of propaganda by one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century left, Victor Serge. Serge was the son of Russian revolutionary exiles … Read more
When the leadership of the International Marxist Tendency was confronted with my doubts in February 2020, I was recommended to read two texts to win me back to the ‘correct position’ – Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin and Victor Serge’s Year One of the Russian Revolution. I was told that if I still had differences … Read more
Last night, I had a nightmare about the IMT – one of many. I was at one of those bloody paper sales, surrounded by all the familiar faces. I still marvel at how much time I would waste on these nonsensical endeavours, week in, week out. Steven Hassan does say in his book about cults … Read more
Leon Trotsky was one of the most hopeless and deluded ideologues who has ever lived. His self-righteousness and unwillingness to accept political reality led directly to his defeat at the hands of Stalin. It further led him to adopt all sorts of bizarre and ridiculous positions on fascism and WWII once he was in exile. … Read more
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
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
Jock Haston was one of Ted Grant’s supporters during the struggle to build a Trotskyist organisation in Britain during the 1940s. Exhausted, he dropped out of the movement around 1950, his shot-gun merger with the Healyites having backfired. Alan Woods touches on Haston’s desertion in his book about Ted Grant, but sanitises it – the … Read more