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 this was complete and total bullshit. As I became ‘integrated’ and increased my ‘political level’ within the sect, an irritation was inculcated into me towards those who had ‘incorrect’ views, usually ‘contacts’ or new members. We were taught to see these people as effectively children, who needed to be manipulated and indoctrinated with the ‘correct ideas’, which only we had.
As I have said before, when recruiting people, we told them that they did not have to agree on everything, but only on the main issues. Once they joined, of course, we would pressure them to submit to our ‘line’ on pretty much everything. The organisation’s website is an encyclopedia of information on every topic under the sun, and being a member meant having to read this religiously and discover what the ‘line’ was for every given issue. I got quite good at doing this, and even went so far as to read old articles from many years ago about obscure historical events like the Ethiopian Revolution, just so I knew what our ‘line’ was on that topic and could bring it up if I had to speak to a ‘contact’.
There is no such thing as mere disagreement in a Trotskyist sect. The slightest disagreement on any question risks placing you in the camp of the ‘enemy’ – of the sect, of the working-class, of humanity. For having the wrong position on something as trivial and unimportant as whether to support the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, you are opening yourself up to all sorts of name-calling, slander and even expulsion. Whenever someone joined who had different opinions, the goal was less to win them over intellectually, but more to put psychological pressure on them to abandon their old views and accept the line of the organisation. Initially we might try and be friendly and polite about it – encourage them to read certain texts, have formal and informal discussions with them etc. However, at a certain point, our tolerance would expire. Certainly if one was a long-standing member like myself, there was much less tolerance for deviation from the ‘line’ – after all, you were a ‘leading comrade’. You should know better.
Let me give you an example of how little tolerance there was for even minor deviations from the party line. A new comrade of ours spoke at a meeting of the Warwick Marxist Society about the killing of the Tsar’s family, and how this was a bad thing. For daring to speak his mind, and challenge Trotsky’s justification of the murder of the Romanovs, Thomas, the branch secretary, grumbled angrily behind his back after the event, speaking of the need to rein him in and ‘educate’ him out of his ‘incorrect’ views. This was not even that important an issue, but for daring to question one of the most controversial decisions taken by the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power, he was committing heresy. One could not even have a disagreement on a detail of history without being subjected to judgement. The whole idea of having a ‘party line’ on a historical event is idiotic. History should be the subject of free inquiry, as it is in the real world. Historians are overturning past interpretations of historical events all the time in line with new information. Unfortunately, Trots prefer to cling to the official line put out by Trotsky, James P. Cannon or whoever else about these events, and refuse any critical reappraisal, however dated it may be.
Despite being told when I first joined that disagreements should be aired in branch, I was soon told that I should not do this. Moreover, I was not even to tell other members of the organisations about my disagreements, lest I spread doubt and heresy through the ranks. This is a classic tactic used by cults to preserve ideological homogeneity and isolate dissidents from other members of the group. Instead, one was told to only share doubts with those above – ‘full-timers’ or ‘experienced’ individuals in one’s branch that could discourage you from your heretical opinions.
When it finally came to confronting other (hand-picked for their ‘high political level’) members of my branch with my disagreements over the Bolshevik Revolution and related issues, the subsequent ‘debate’ that we had over the phone with the ‘full-timer’ for our region, Ben Curry, was in some ways a Maoist-style struggle session as much as an intellectual discussion. The goal was to hammer the line, not the engage in criticism and questioning. All of our ‘reading groups’ and branch discussions followed precisely this pattern. The goal was to reaffirm existing thinking and to emphasise the ‘correctness’ of the line, not to encourage new ideas. The tone of these ‘debates’ is rarely friendly, and more aggressive and denunciatory. To disagree meant you were ‘petty-bourgeois’, ‘liberal’, ‘reformist’, ‘subjectivist’, ‘idealist’, or some other crime that made you unworthy to call yourself a Marxist or a member of the organisation.
I now found out, two and a half years after I should have been told, that there was in fact a formal bureaucratic process for raising differences. You had to write a document containing your differences, send it to the Executive Committee (EC) and Central Committee (CC) for vetting, and they would decide whether to grace it with a response. If they were feeling generous, a formal debate would be opened on the question you had raised. (More often than not, such documents were simply ignored, or a curt, official response would be published shutting down any further discussion.) If a debate was agreed to, here is how it would go. The leading bodies of the organisation would meet in secret, and conduct a discussion on the topic. The rest of the membership was not allowed to take part at this stage, and were deliberately kept in the dark. The EC would agree a ‘unanimous’ position, and present it before the CC. The CC would do likewise. The CC and EC, united, would then take their position to the membership. Then and only then would the debate be opened up to the branches. No doubt the branch secretaries, as loyal conformists and servants of the CC (like my own branch secretary, Thomas), would be briefed beforehand on how the debate was to be stage-managed in order to ensure victory for the leadership. The prestige of the leadership and the weight of the apparatus was brought down upon the opposition, who would be humiliated before the entire organisation and either forced into silence, or driven out altogether. If the IMT’s previous practice is anything to go by, this process involves all sorts of skullduggery by the leadership – withholding of documents, forcing people to resign from leading bodies for disagreeing with the ‘unanimous’ position of the rest of the body, the spreading of slanders about opposition members, public displays of ostracism etc – all tactics used by Peter Taaffe against the present leaders of the IMT!
Here lies the problem. The conformist membership, thanks to these tactics, will always vote for the leadership’s line. This therefore becomes the official line of the organisation. However, Trotskyist sect leaders are not satisfied with mere majority support. They want unanimous approval for everything. Therefore, the opposition leaders are placed under psychological pressure to recant their criticisms and accept the will of the party – a classically Stalinist manoeuvre – or leave. Anyone who continues to speak out will simply be expelled. From a very formalistic point of view, this is ‘democracy’ in action – the pro-leadership majority has spoken, after all. In practice, this artificial ‘majority’, the product of an engineered, stage-managed process of ‘internal debate’, is used in a manner that is contrary to the spirit of democracy, to crush dissenting views. The goal is always to bully the membership into obeying, and into accepting every bit of the line. This is a tradition that can be traced to Lenin himself. After all, even the name ‘Bolsheviks’ comes from the Russian word for ‘majority’, derived from the fact that at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903, Lenin temporarily gained a majority when the Mensheviks’ allies, the Bundists and the Economists, walked out of the conference. This boastful appellation, which had a tenuous basis in truth, is testament to Lenin’s political skill and talent for propaganda. Today’s Trotskyist cult leaders will do everything to ensure that they can claim a ‘majority’ on their side. Peter Taaffe of the CWI went so far as to expel the majority of his membership for daring to challenge him, so as to have a smaller organisation in which he could claim to remain in a majority! This is a repetition of tactics he used in the CWI split of 1991-2, in which he rigged an internal debate over party policy so as to gain an artificial ‘majority’ which he could use to batter the Woods-Grant-Sewell faction into submission.
Here is what ‘internal debate’ was like back in Militant, from the testimony of a former member, Mike Barnes:
‘I sent them a long letter to say why I was resigning. So they brought in the full-timers and I was persuaded into having a chat in the university bar. It went on all night and we ended up in someone’s room. It really turned into a theological argument and one full-timer turned to me and said, “You’ve lost your faith in the working-class.” This was after an evening during which I’d been saying it was all religious and they’d been denying it.”-Michael Crick, Militant (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016), p.188
The nature of ‘debate’ in these organisations is a caricature of how Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries of the early 19th century carried out their debates. The same ‘loaded language’, the same words and phrases and labels, are borrowed from the language of Russian revolutionary polemic and used to this day – ‘ultra-left’, ‘opportunist’, ‘defencist’ – regardless of the different context. (A former SWPer, Jim Higgins, describes this and other aspects of these cults in this insightful text.) All of them are aping Lenin, but utterly lacking in his political brilliance and intellectual ability. Because Lenin used vicious abuse, slander and mischaracterisations of his opponents to get his way, these people believe it follows that this is appropriate conduct for Marxist revolutionaries today, in spite of the fact that this intolerance and bigotry created the hidebound intellectual attitude that made Stalinism possible.
Another ‘Leninist’ justification for the mindless intellectual conformity demanded by these organisations is that Lenin’s role in ‘clarifying’ the ideas of Marxism (often involving splits with people like Martov and Bogdanov, and purges of their supporters) was necessary for the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. (According to the Trotskyist tradition, an intellectually homogeneous organisation is a more effective one, and it is better to split over differences than have an organisation in which people are permitted to engage in critical thought.) Remember, these disputes were often over utterly irrelevant things like abstract questions of philosophy (in the case of Bogdanov the fight between ‘God-building’ idealism versus Marxist dialectical materialism), which had only a tangential relationship to politics. (Indeed, Bogdanov was to the left of Lenin politically). Lenin’s hair-splitting over these issues was seen by the Bolshevik activists back in Russia (including Stalin) as utterly irrelevant to the political situation. If Lenin’s obsessive disputes over these irrelevant issues were necessary to ‘clarify’ the ideas of Marxism, so as to create a more homogeneous political organisation, then why is it that at the beginning of 1917, the Bolsheviks were weak, divided and politically irrelevant, unable to take advantage of the collapse of Tsarism? So much for all those years of ‘cadre-training’ and the drive for a more homogeneous political organisation. As Alexander Rabinowitch has shown in his own study of the Bolshevik Party, the Bolsheviks were anything but homogeneous (despite Lenin’s best efforts at creating homogeneity within the party). Indeed, this actually helped the Bolsheviks, because it meant that the party was more attractive to newcomers, who were often more hot-headed than the experienced leaders in charge, who acted as a break on their revolutionary fervour. Lenin actually took sides with these militant activists against the conservative ‘committee-men’ like Stalin, the very people Lenin had entrusted the party to on the basis that the working-class could only seize power under ‘class-conscious’ revolutionaries, since the workers were incapable of attaining class-consciousness independently. (He borrowed this idea from Kautsky and never fully renounced it, despite our claims to the contrary in the IMT.)
Of course, the truth is that despite Lenin’s authoritarian streak and his intolerance of differences, the Bolsheviks were relatively democratic, certainly compared to today’s sects. There were multiple newspapers in the organisation which expressed different points of view, and were published for all the workers to read. (No secret ‘internal debates’ like today’s Trot sects have.) Only with the seizure of power and the subsequent civil war did the Bolsheviks became more intolerant of internal debate, culminating in the ban on factions in 1921. Even after that, there was still a degree of internal debate and discussion (albeit kept strictly secret from the workers) until Stalin’s purges. Sadly, Trotskyist cults prefer to imitate the organisational structures of post-1921, which led directly to Stalinism, as opposed to the more open regime prior to that. (Trotsky also used the same internal regime for his Fourth International.) This is one reason why all these organisations remain tiny sects, without any influence among the working-class. I always thought dialectical materialism acknowledged constant change, but it seems that these cults prefer to do the same thing over and over again, decade after decade, in the face of endless failure, without changing their tactics. To admit that they might be mistaken is apparently proof of ‘bourgeois pessimism’ and a lack of faith in the working-class. You see, it is not their tactics which are wrong, it is that the workers are brainwashed, or the ‘objective conditions’ are unfavourable, or some other pathetic excuse. Of course, if the right ‘objective conditions’ for success have not been there for the past eighty years, it is unlikely that things will change in another eighty years.
If these organisations encourage debate and discussion, why is it that they have such a high turnover of people leaving their organisation, often over minor political differences? A healthy organisation would be a broad church of people with different views, not a hidebound sect which allows only one way of thinking. There are probably more ex-Trotskyists or Trotskyists who are not in an organisation than people who are active in one. This is an indictment of the whole project. Sadly, the internal corruption of these organisations is unlikely to ever end.