“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. It is one striking difference between cults and normal organisations. When is the last time you saw Labour or Conservative Party activists proselytising on the streets, looking for people to join them? This does not happen. Anyone who wants to get involved with them can find their website, read what they’re about and sign up. The attention of activists is geared towards winning elections and running local party branches. They have enough members as is. Moreover, once joining, there is no pressure to actually do anything. If an organisation has remained tiny and irrelevant for decades, and does not have tens of thousands of people flocking to join it, chances are this is for a reason. The ridiculously high turnover rates that cults have are one reason why they have to keep on with this obsessive recruiting. They are both a cause and a consequence. Those who leave have to be replaced with the next bunch, and those who leave often do so precisely because the pressure put upon them is too much, and the focus on recruiting the next group of people means that the organisation has limited resources for retaining its existing cadre.
My cult analysis is rubbished by IMTers who say things like, ‘We are very open about what we are.’ If only this were true. I remember my own experience of ‘contact’ work, which I always secretly loathed. Yes, it is true, to an extent we were open about what we were. We openly admitted that we were a revolutionary organisation seeking to overthrow capitalism. However, there were all sorts of things we lied or obfuscated about. We had things we said for public consumption, and things which we actually believed ‘internally’. The two did not necessarily overlap. Publicly, we supported the Labour Party. Internally, we rubbished it as ‘reformist’ and dreamed of splitting it. We spoke contemptuously of the left of the party, our ostensible allies, whom we regarded as weak and pathetic. We were the ‘real’ left, and everyone outside our ranks was merely a poseur. One of the boldest claims we would make to ‘contacts’ and other members of the public later on was that we were the ‘Marxist wing of the Labour Party’, thus making it seem like we were officially affiliated to Labour! (We weren’t in the slightest degree, nor did we have any meaningful influence within the party.) Publicly, we said that our Marxist Society meetings on campus were open to one and all, ‘from Trot to Tory’. This was a lie. They were stage-managed events for the purposes of recruitment, in which the chair was expected to manipulate the proceedings and stop the wrong people from speaking. Moreover, we were all expected to parrot the party line, and not to give our real opinions on anything if they diverged from the official message.
Indoctrination began with the recruitment process. Given the CWI’s secret existence within the Labour Party, people who came into contact with it would not have immediately known that it was an organization, with its own annual conference, full time officials and central committee. Potential sympathizers encountered CWI members in the normal environment of the Labour Party or trade unions. Once their left wing credentials were established they would be asked to buy the CWI newspaper, make a small donation, and support CWI motions at other meetings – a process of escalating commitment. Only after a series of such tests had been passed would the person be initiated into the secret of the CWI’s existence, and provided with further internal documents detailing aspects of its programme. As many ex-members have testified, the effect of this was to create a feeling that the potential recruit was gaining privileged information, and being invited to participate in the transformation of history. Furthermore, they could only access more of this knowledge by escalating their involvement with the group. The excitement at this stage was considerable.
In the 1970s, before the CWI grew to any significant size, the mystical aura around joining was heightened by the formality with which it was concluded. New recruits traveled to London, where they were personally vetted by the organization’s founders. When this became impractical they were formally welcomed “in” by the nearest member of the Central Committee – an exercise close to “the laying on of hands” found in baptism ceremonies. Tremendous feelings of loyalty were engendered by this process, and fused together a group which saw itself as intensely cohesive and blessed with the evangelical mission of leading the world revolution. Research suggests that merely being a member of a group encourages the development of shared norms, beliefs systems, conformity and compliance (Turner, 1991). Belonging to a group with such a deep and all embracing belief system as that offered by the CWI encourages this process all the more.
When talking to contacts, we would deliberately lie about how much they would be expected to contribute. ‘Yes’, we might say, ‘we are a revolutionary organisation and therefore expect a bit more dedication than the average political party. However, you don’t have to think of it as a burden. At least come to branch, and one other weekly event, and pay a minimum of £15-20 a month, and we won’t require anything further from you.’ This is exactly what my branch secretary, Thomas, would say to contacts. Here is what Tourish says about it (it is worth quoting at length):
Once in, however, the picture began to change. More and more demands were placed on members. In particular, they were expected to contribute between 10% and 15% of their income to the party, buy the weekly newspaper, contribute to special press fund collections, subscribe to irregular levies (perhaps to the extent of a week’s income), recruit new members and raise money from sympathizers. Tobias and Lalich (1994) argue that cults have only two real purposes: recruiting other members, and raising money. These certainly emerge as central preoccupations of the CWI. Crick (1986, p.178) cites a former member as follows on some of these issues:
“A lot of it boiled down to selling papers. The pace didn’t bother me, but one day I suddenly realized that after a year my social circle had totally drifted. I had only political friends left, simply because of the lack of time. There’d be the … branch on Monday evening, the Young Socialists meeting another evening, ‘contact’ work on Friday night, selling papers on Sunday afternoon, and on top of that, to prove to the local Labour Party we were good party members, we went canvassing for them every week and worked like hell in the local elections.”
Such a level of activity could be physically and emotionally ruinous, and required members to redefine their entire existence in terms of their membership of the CWI. Crick cites another interviewee as recalling:
“The most abiding memories of life [in the CWI] are filled with the sheer strain of it all. If you were even moderately active, you would be asked to attend up to six or seven boring meetings in one week.
“You built up an alternative set of social contacts as much as political activity. It can easily take over people’s lives. It became obsessive. They were almost inventing meetings to attend. There was a ridiculous number of meetings held to discuss such a small amount of work. Even if you didn’t have a meeting one evening, you’d end up drinking with them.
“The kind of commitment … required was bundled together in the form of highly alienating personal relationships. You had to make sure your subscriptions were paid and your papers sold so as not to feel guilty when you chatted to other members. The only way out seemed to be ‘family commitments’ and the unspoken truth that as soon as a young … member got a girlfriend he either recruited her or left” (p.182).
What runs through all these accounts is the boredom which accompanied CWI membership, after the thrill of initiation and the feeling of being special had worn off. For example, recruitment itself, and much of party life, consisted of hearing the same basic ideas endlessly repeated: there might be variations, but they would be variations around a minimalist theme. As Scheflin and Opton (1978) point out, paraphrasing no less an expert on mind control than Charles Manson, such repetition, combined with the exclusion of any competing doctrine, is a powerful tool of conversion. Even if the belief is not fully internalised a person hearing nothing but a one-note message will eventually be compelled to draw from it in expressing their own opinions. But once inside the CWI this became akin to spending every night listening to an orchestra playing the same piece over and over again. However well accoutered the musicians or however superb their performances boredom, tiredness and cynicism inevitably set in.
The recruitment process can also be interpreted as a means of indoctrinating new recruits by presenting them with an escalating series of challenges, or ordeals. Wexler and Fraser (1995) have argued that this is an important method of establishing the cohesiveness of decision elites within cults, thereby activating the extreme conformity known as groupthink. However, within the CWI, it seems that such methods were used on all new recruits in order to embroil them more deeply in CWI activities. Thus, the prospective recruit first expressed private agreement with some CWI ideas. They were then required to advance this agreement publicly at Labour Party or trade union meetings, then contribute money, buy literature, and sell newspapers on the street. This continued until their entire life revolved around the CWI. The process seems to be one of extracting commitment and then forcing a decision. The full extent of the group’s organization and programme would not be immediately made clear, and given the secretiveness of the CWI about its very existence would not be readily known via the media. Nevertheless, a commitment to some form of activity was obtained, and sounded on first hearing to have nothing in common with a life-transforming commitment. One interviewee told me:
“We would routinely lie to recruits about what their membership would involve. They would ask what level of activity we expected, and we would talk mostly about the weekly branch meeting and tell them that they could pick and choose what else to do, if anything. But once they were inside there would be systematic pressure to do more and more. Once they were in, very few could resist. But we knew that if we told them in advance all that was involved they would never join. I remember telling a full-timer once that I thought this new recruit we had met didn’t have any friends. He looked absolutely delighted, and told me that meant we would at least get plenty of work out of him!”
Thus, recruits soon found their initial levels of activity rising: “come to one more meeting”, “attend one more conference”, “read an extra pamphlet this week”. Whether they had consciously decided anything became irrelevant: a real commitment had been made to the organization. They often then found that their attitudes changed to come in line with escalating levels of commitment, and eventually reached such an intense pitch that a formal decision (if it needed to be made at all) was only a small final step – a classic demonstration of cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957).
Many things in this resonate with me, particularly the part about finances. I have calculated that I gave over £1000 to this organisation over two and a half years. I would never have joined the organisation if I had known that I would give over so much money. There is also the part about your whole social group coming to depend on the organisation. I came to university as a young, lonely student, and immediately became an IMT member. The branch became my only social circle, but this was an inherently unhealthy situation, not least because the branch members were very cliquey and not entirely comfortable with a newcomer to their ranks. It wasn’t long before I had a massive personal clash with them, which involved them launching a massive slandering campaign against me behind my back, involving screenshots of ‘offensive’ things I had said in chats over Facebook Messenger, including confidential things I told one member about my mental health. Some nice friends these were. There was a campaign for me to be kicked out of my branch, and eventually I did take a break of a year from political activity for the sake of my mental health, sanctioned by the leadership of the organisation, ‘the Centre’. I still have not fully recovered from such evil. It is the most horrific episode of bullying I have ever suffered in my entire life.
Of course, the fact that I had next to no social circle at university meant that I had more time to dedicate to the organisation. I was effectively performing free labour. During the strikes that took place that winter, I was on the picket line almost every day, and even baked cakes to bring to the staff. My reward was to be slandered and hounded out of my branch. I still marvel at the fact that I was capable of such commitment, for no reward whatsoever. I sacrificed more than any other member. Once I had outlived my usefulness, they wanted to get rid of me. It was a slap in the face and a stab to the heart, especially after all the love-bombing I had received just before that. Inexplicably, I remained loyal to the organisation for another two years. Time I could have spent socialising with people who would actually treat me with respect was wasted on this loathsome groupuscule. At some point I even took a break from attending socials as I felt less and less comfortable going to them, especially as I could not bear to see the branch secretary’s girlfriend, whom I had powerful unrequited feelings for. Who knows – if I had never joined this awful cult, maybe I would have found love on campus, with someone who was actually available.
Here is my own experience as a ‘contact’ of the organisation in September and October 2017. I went to an event held on Marx’s Capital in central London, where I met many of the leading members and got to know Thomas, secretary of the Coventry branch, for the first time. I gave him my contact details and arrived in Coventry a couple of weeks later. I began attending branch meetings. We did not normally invite contacts to branch meetings unless they were considered very promising. I felt special. I attended the October School that was held a week or two after my arriving at uni, and, I have described before in previous articles, was love-bombed enough that I was pushed further towards joining. I honestly wanted a bit more time to consider it, but Thomas put a lot of pressure in getting me to make up my mind as quickly as possible. The day after the event I agreed to join. It all happened so fast. I now realise how little time I had to think about things. If only I had taken my time, done more research on the sect, and trodden carefully before bumbling in. What a mistake that was. The tactics used on me were the tactics used on all the people we recruited.
A regime of deceit
So yes, we were ‘open’ about what we were, but only within very narrow limits. There was so much that we were deliberately disingenuous about, and had to be, in order to get people to join. If the whole truth about the organisation was revealed to these contacts, many would never have joined. How many people are in the sect now that would never have agreed to join had they been given full information? The lack of informed consent in recruitment of members is one crucial quality that makes these organisations cults. As part of this deception, we had to avoid appearing too antithetical to the Labour Party, because that would be ‘sectarian’, hence our pretending to be pro-Labour. Once a contact had joined and become a ‘comrade’, they would be initiated into the truth – that our mission in Labour was not to help the Labour Party, but to win over the most promising left-wing Labour members to our group as part of our ‘entrist’ strategy, in the hope that we could split the party later on.
Another thing we would lie about was the internal regime of the organisation. When recruiting people we claimed that our organisation was democratic and encouraged debate and discussion. This was a lie. Anyone who joined would soon find out that the exact opposite was true. I remember being told that if we have a disagreement, we should express it in branch. I soon learned that I could not even do this, and that expressing any differences at all was ‘disruptive’ and would ‘miseducate’ the newer recruits. We would grumble behind the back of any comrade that did this, and seek to rein them in. We were not allowed to air any differences publicly, for fear that this would be used against the organisation. We were reprimanded if we dissented from the party line on social media, which was to be used entirely for promoting the organisation’s agenda. If you go on social media and look at the activity of IMT users, you will see nothing but tweet after tweet and post after post promoting the party line. You will not see anything negative or critical. This does not happen in any normal organisation. There are Tory and Labour supporters on social media who are always critiquing their organisation. There are Republicans and Democrats who loudly criticise and complain about their own party on social media. They are not threatened with disciplinary measures or expulsion from the group if they dare to dissent from the leadership. Sadly, this is the case with the IMT or any other Trotskyist cult.
In fact, when being recruited, I do not remember being given an accurate description of how the organisation was run. It took a while before I gradually realised how the sect was structured. You had the ‘full-timers’ on top, a priesthood of Marxist doctrine, which controlled the organisation and set the ‘line’ on every issue. Alan Woods was the top dog, along with his half-brother Rob Sewell, the official head of the British section. Below them, you had the branch secretaries. Then you had the rest of us, divided between those with a ‘high’ political level (like myself) and a lower one. Most of the ‘full-timers’ sat on the Executive Committee (EC) and the Central Committee (CC), which was elected in a rigged ‘slate system’ method of election at every national conference. We did not elect people as individuals, like in a normal political organisation. Instead, all of the top leaders would run on a single slate, manipulating their prestige and control over the organisation’s communicative channels to guarantee re-election every year. No one would have thought of forming an alternative slate to challenge them, and anyone who did so would likely have been expelled. Would I have joined the organisation if I had known this? Probably not.
I distinctly remember that when recruiting people, we would go so far as to tell them that they did not have to agree with every aspect of the organisation’s doctrine, just the most important ones, like the need to build a revolutionary organisation to overthrow capitalism. No sooner had I joined than I realised that this was not entirely true. We had a ‘line’ on a vast array of topics, from Venezuela to the USSR, and being a member meant proselytising the line on every one of these topics, and not admitting our dissent on any issue to other members or anyone outside our ranks, unless they were a more senior member (i.e. a comrade with a ‘higher political level’, as we might term it) that could talk us out of our position. Effectively, people were deceived into thinking that they could join the organisation whilst maintaining some independent political thought. They would soon learn that this was not the case. To give you an example, in our organisation, our line on feminism was that it was reactionary. Marxism was inherently pro-women’s emancipation, and ‘feminism’ was a bourgeois doctrine that could not be meaningfully reconciled to revolutionary politics. However, we were also told by the leadership that if we encountered ‘contacts’ who identified as feminists, we should not quibble over the label. Rather, we should emphasise that we, also, were in favour of gender equality and women’s emancipation, and that they could most effectively further their feminist work by joining us. Only once they joined would they realise that we didn’t actually agree with feminism, but had merely pretended to be in order to get them to join our organisation. The idea is that once ‘in’, we would ‘correct’ their ‘confused’ views. Ditto for someone who identified as a Labour Party supporter, or an environmentalist. We could easily pretend that we were in favour of what they were, but merely had different tactics. Using this method, we would persuade them that we were on the same side and get them involved in the organisation.
Another thing I remember about being in the organisation is the toxic positivity that was forced upon us. We were told that ‘Marxists should be optimists’ and that we always had to project a positive, hopeful attitude when talking to people we were seeking to recruit. We projected a false image of blind faith in the future and in the socialist revolution that was to come. We pretended to be all-knowing, convinced that only our doctrine held the solution to mankind’s problems. We were expected to have an answer to every objection put to us by a contact or new recruit.
‘Contact work’ was generally discussed at our weekly branch meetings. We had an entire database of people with their contact details, and we talked about who seemed most promising and how far we were proceeding in winning them over. My branch secretary was so obsessive about recruiting that he was willing to be more patient than the rest of us with contacts, even spending a month or two at a time with a contact in order to try and win them over to the group. At least a couple of former members/contacts have told me of their frustration at him pressuring them to get involved with the organisation. At some point we would see who was a waste of time, and who could be brought over to our side. At least a few members of the branch would have ‘contacts’ assigned to them, and would report on the progress they had made on them. I felt very uncomfortable during this part of the branch meeting, listening to all of the gossip and backbiting about the people we were trying to win over, whom we would often disparage in the most obnoxious manner. I never got used to ‘contact’ meetings. Towards the end, I didn’t believe half the things I was supposed to be trying to convince them of, and I felt like I was manipulating clueless, naive young students who didn’t really know what they were getting into.
The vast majority of contacts turned out to be unserious about getting involved, and the remainder blew hot and cold. Thomas always assured me that it was fine – the main goal was getting them to sign up and join the organisation. Once they were attending branch meetings at the very least, we would get more opportunities to indoctrinate them and pressure them to commit more time, energy and resources. I felt like this was all just an exercise in mass harassment of people who we should just leave alone. I also remember Thomas telling me that when talking to contacts, we should not bring up issues over which we are likely to disagree, but leave that for later, when their ‘political level’ was higher. This is a classic cult tactic – when a recruit proves difficult, you turn their questions back on them, or dodge the issue altogether, hoping that with time they will forget about their objections and allow themselves to be pressured into accepting the cult’s doctrine. The Moonies and Scientology act in a similar way towards recruits. L. Ron Hubbard said that certain information about Scientology should be withheld from new members or non-members until the appropriate time, otherwise the information could make them seriously ill and even kill them!
Another one of the ‘contact rules’ we had was that a contact should be followed up within 48 hours. The argument was that if we left it too late, they would lose interest. We needed to strike whilst the iron was hot. But I didn’t understand this logic. If they really wanted to join, they would do so, without our needing to pressure them or bombard them with messages. This sort of behaviour only makes sense once you’re out of the sect, and you realise that the organisation is a cult.
Then, of course, the ‘love-bombing’ of contacts. I vividly remember attending an ‘aggregate meeting’ in London, of all the ‘comrades’ in the area, at which the full-timer for the London region, Ben Gliniecki, made the startling remark: ‘When you make a ‘contact’, you must be that contact’s best friend. Until they join the organisation, then they find out you aren’t their friend.’ We all laughed at this brazen cynicism – yes, it sounded harsh, but anything for the revolution and to grow the organisation! I found it funny then. It is not funny now. After all, I, too, was the victim of this fake ‘friendship’ from members of the organisation, who all promptly disowned me after I left. I cringed at the excessively chummy way Thomas would act with contacts, whom he barely even knew, laughing and joking with them as if they were old pals. I had a much more serious demeanour, and preferred openness and honesty rather than fake friendliness when it came to contact work. Perhaps that is why I was less successful at it than him. No doubt he is already on his way to promotion to ‘full-timer’, if he is not one already.
One of the most pointless things I ever did in my life was related to ‘contact work’ in the organisation. I was in my third and final year of uni, and I had volunteered to come to campus early to take part in the ‘freshers fair’ stall with Thomas, back from a year abroad in Germany and once again in charge of the branch. On the first day of the fair, we stood in the sports hall, the two of us, all day, hawking the paper and taking down people’s contact details. Frankly, the Labour Party conference, which was going on at the same time, would probably have been even more fun to attend, but I was willing to make the sacrifice for the good of the branch and the organisation. The rest of the week was spent outside, in inclement weather, repeating everything we’d done on the first day. I remember the evenings we would spend in the pub jotting down people’s contact details, written in illegible handwriting, on my phone, and falling asleep whilst doing it. At the same time we would also invite ‘contacts’ to come and talk to us. The last thing I was up for after a long and exhausting day was a couple of hours of political discussion, and I preferred to let Thomas do the talking. He was happy to oblige. I look back on all that time I wasted, and think of all I could have used that time for.
I look back on all that, and I just think to myself how good it is that most of those ‘contacts’ never bothered to respond to our messages, and escaped the clutches of this disgusting cult. Those who did join would be subjected to an inane routine of paper sales, recruitment, branch and society meetings and national events, and would find any critical thought slowly being sucked out of them. Some would drop out, to be replaced with the next bunch. They were all interchangeable. They meant nothing to us than raw meat to be used and abused, then thrown away. The irony is that they attack capitalism for precisely this – the systematic exploitation of the masses. How much worse they treat their own members.