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 embrace of the sect, and in the free world. I could so easily be one of those sorry souls who is still stuck in that mess.
One of the many gaslighting attacks made upon me when I was in the IMT was that I took things too personally and allowed anger to cloud my judgement. I now know that my justifiable emotional responses to being abused were being suppressed so the abusers and exploiters in that hellhole could feel better about what they were doing. I think I am perfectly justified in feeling anger at my horrific experience, and only time will cause that anger to subside. The work to rebuild my life is moving at a strong pace. I would be so much worse if I had stayed in any longer.
I think of the massive amount of time and energy I spent on the cult, and my hard work and dedication to an organisation that betrayed, disowned and discarded me when I had outlived my usefulness. It is impossible not to feel a righteous rage at such disgusting treatment. The same people who are outraged at capitalism treating human beings like disposable items treat their own members in an even worse manner. This explains the ridiculously high turnover rates in such organisations.
When I first joined the organisation, I was very different from many of the people who we recruited and proved unreliable. I showed my dedication by showing up to branch every week, showing up at every paper sale, speaking for the organisation at public events, showing up almost every day to the university picket line when there were strikes (more than any other member of my branch, and even making food to take to the staff), devotedly doing the reading we were expected to do, talking to contacts, and so much else. When I was at home I attended meetings of my CLP (alone, as I was the only comrade in the area) and bravely confronted my MP, Wes Streeting, and the other Blairites who were in attendance, before selling the paper when the meeting was over. I even attended trade union meetings and other meetings of the local left at which I did the same thing. I wrote up detailed reports of my experiences for the weekly bulletin. I loyally shared our articles on social media. I never ceased to praise the group before everyone I met. I wrote articles for the organisation. I subscribed to the paper and the theoretical magazine that we published. I attended every national event there was going. My calendar was filled to the brim with IMT-related stuff. I always had something to do. I was determined to do everything in my power to help ‘build the organisation’.
I was repaid with bullying and slander by the comrades in my branch, who tried to kick me out after a few months of dedicated and selfless service on the basis of trumped up charges, slanders and outright lies – perhaps jealous of me and threatened by my rising profile within the group. I spent the next several months in a near-suicidal state, but remained loyal to the organisation through it all. I had no contact with them during this time, and they deliberately shunned me. I returned after a year, having recovered mentally, to work with them professionally in building the organisation. I remained in for another year of abuse, exploitation and tyranny.
If an IMT cultist tries to slander me on social media or anywhere else, and suggests that I abandoned the group because I wasn’t dedicated, they are lying through their teeth. I was more dedicated than the average member, for all the good it did me. In fact, I was too dedicated. It didn’t stop me being hounded out in the end when I dared to disagree with the leadership on something, and it did not save me from the disgusting campaign of slander that other ex-members have suffered when they dare to have a disagreement with the organisation on any issue. There is no correct way to disagree with the group, and no correct way to leave it either. This was always coming. I remember how one of my ex-comrades denounced me on Facebook for openly calling the IMT a cult, telling me to ‘Go quietly’ and ‘Stop insulting your ex-comrades’. He had the gall to do this after he read what I posted on Marxmail about my disgusting treatment at the hands of the organisation, and still chose to side with the cult over me. This gaslighting by him, right after I had left this abusive organisation, was incredible to behold. No doubt he is still in the cult, serving its wicked aims. These people would trample over my broken corpse on their road to utopia, such is their contempt for anyone they cannot use or exploit. They want to destroy me, and anyone who stands in their way. They do not care if I am hurting or feel taken advantage of. They will lie and slander and cheat and kill in order to get their way. We are dealing with people who quite frankly are not capable of human decency, except when it is expedient. When ex-member Mick Brooks died, not a word of tribute could be found on the IMT’s page, because he left on bad terms. Despite the leading role he had once played, and the tributes he gained from across the left, the IMT did not deem him worthy of a mention. By contrast, when a loyal member of our group was killed in a car accident when I was in the organisation, he was given all the tributes and honours that were deemed appropriate. This is a classic example of what Robert Jay Lifton, the American cult researcher, called the ‘dispensing of existence’. If you are ‘one of us’, you are worthy and wonderful and special. If you separate from the herd, you are less than human.
What is particularly galling is that a relatively lazy but conformist member, who toes the line and toadies up to the pathetic leadership, is likely to be rewarded and promoted to ‘full-timer’, and given all sorts of praise and honours, whilst dissidents like myself, who worked hard to build the organisation, are hounded out, slandered and forgotten. When I left, it was something of a fall from grace. I am sure that there were some jealous ex-comrades of mine who secretly rejoiced now that I had left, hoping that my departure will give them a chance to shine. Let them enjoy the limelight before they, too, are forced out, slandered and shunned.
When I was in the cult, we would talk about the heroic efforts of those around Ted Grant to build a Trotskyist organisation in the 1940s and 1950s – people like Ralph Lee, Jimmy Dean, Jock Haston etc. We never reflected on the fact that all these people dropped out in disgust with the ‘movement’ after a few decades, and never returned. Haston ended up renouncing Trotskyism altogether, and decided that the whole idea of sect-building was a blind alley. This is a guy who served jail time in service to the cause. Does this not tell us something about Trotskyism? If some of its brightest and most dedicated adherents ended up giving up on it, does this not suggest that it is intellectually and morally bankrupt? In the IMT we would simply say that such individuals had allowed themselves to become ‘demoralised’. It wasn’t that Trotskyist doctrine was wrong, it was that they weren’t mentally strong enough to endure political defeat. In some ways this is a very ableist attitude. It explains why my branch secretary shamed me as ‘un-Marxist’ for struggling with my mental health. The idea that revolutionaries should be super-humans who never give in to feelings of disappointment or pessimism is utterly preposterous, but it is what was preached by the cult. This is in spite of the fact that sometimes demoralisation is a rational response to events. It would have made perfect sense for any Trotskyist to become demoralised when Trotsky’s prophecies of what would happen after WWII failed to materialise. It would have been entirely rational for them to accept that Trotskyism had failed and given up on the ‘movement’. This was what Felix Morrow and others did. Sadly, people like Ted Grant and James P. Cannon made the utterly irrational decision to bury their heads in the sand and continue like nothing had changed. Leon Festinger analysed this phenomenon and came up with the concept of ‘cognitive dissonance’. This was from his observation of a cult, in which the members intensified their beliefs after they were falsified.
From the start of this blog, I preferred to discuss my personal experiences from an almost entirely intellectual point of view. I have started being more personal recently, because I feel more comfortable with it and because I feel that my anger and bitterness are less likely to run ahead of me. I was also afraid of provoking more slander from my ex-comrades, especially those who knew me in my branch, if I brought up vivid personal details like my treatment at their hands. After all, they could always spread career-destroying lies about me if they so chose, simply to get back at me for leaving and speaking up against them. (Cults have done this – Scientology has ruined countless lives and gotten people sacked from their jobs because of the slanders they have spread about them.) I am less afraid of this now. I am convinced that most people are likely to sympathise with me and not them, given how repulsive the organisation is by its very nature. Moreover, anyone who chooses to believe their lies about me probably isn’t worth it and I shouldn’t worry about them. Besides, if the price for keeping a perfectly clean reputation is to keep quiet about my traumatic experiences as part of this sect, then I don’t think it’s a prize worth seeking.
I think of everything I did for this organisation, how loyal I was to it, and how little I gained in return. It’s not as if the more than £1000 I gave to this organisation over my two and a half years of membership is likely to be returned to me. This probably doesn’t include the money I spent travelling across the country and within London to attend conferences, branches, Labour Party events, etc. I did everything I possibly could, and it wasn’t enough for these people. It hurts to know that, but I can at least know that I left on my own terms when I put my foot down and expressed a refusal to accept the more tyrannical demands they were making on me. If they wanted to run their organisation like Scientology or the Italian-American Mafia, they were free to do so, but I would not be part of such a sinister entity which claimed to be seeking a better world.
Sometimes I think of how my time in the cult possibly deprived me of time I should have spent processing the loss of my dad to cancer the year before I went to university. After his death I threw myself into my studies, finished Sixth Form and then had to get ready for university life. Once in university I threw myself into this sect. I wonder whether I ever properly grieved for him. I even suspect that stress associated with leaving the organisation may have caused me to neglect my physical health. In the long months of lockdown, I gained about two stone, something I only found out last month when I weighed myself. My cortisol levels were presumably through the roof, and I probably indulged in more than my fair share of comfort food in the form of English breakfasts every afternoon. I have now lost about a stone thanks to some careful calorie management, and possibly the exercise provided by having to walk around a lot in my part-time retail job. It feels good to be going back to my normal weight, but I am astounded that I could have let myself go like that.
I can at least look back and say that I gave my all, even if it was for something I now know was evil. If I could be so dedicated to something that is bad, surely I can put the same energy into doing good for humanity – genuine good, not building a cult.
Reading helps, especially reading about cults. I listen to podcasts about cults. I listen obsessively to music. This is a recent playlist I made with my favourite singers:
Note how ‘un-Marxist’ these songs are. They are all songs about the lonely individual, rejected by society, bravely struggling alone. I have felt like this all my life, and never more than now. Marxists may claim that individualism is nothing more than a post-modern fiction, and that only the herd, the ‘class struggle’ and the ‘movement of history’ matters in the last analysis. I believe that is a load of bullshit, and that the heroic individual still counts for something, even in this post-modern machine world with its plastic entertainers and its empty materialism. There is a reason that Thomas Carlyle is one of my favourite writers. I will never give up my belief in individualism, and I will never cease to defend the free-thinking individual against the conformist majority. I am proud to stand in the same tradition as Christopher Hitchens, Leszek Kolakowski, Cszeslaw Milosz, Vaclav Havel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and so many other brave strugglers against totalitarianism and cultism.
My path to recovery continues.
Excellent.