Finding Community Outside A Cult

The Social World of the IMT

There is no real love or friendship or brotherhood in a cult. Since leaving, I have tasked myself with rebuilding whatever sense of community I had outside the organisation. When I was a member of Socialist Appeal, it was ridiculously easy to make friends and acquaintances. We were all part of the same band of ‘comrades’ fighting to bring about world socialism. Alas, these ‘friendships’ are entirely artificial and are lost once you leave. I always knew that if I left, I would be leaving these people behind, but I tried to suppress this awful thought, and told myself I would be a loyal comrade for many more years to come. It was not to be. I thought too much, and read too much, and sooner or later had to break with the herd and make a great dash for freedom.

Without wanting to sound boastful, I think it is fair to say that I was well-known in the organisation, well-liked and somewhat popular among the comrades. I cannot say the same was true for the people in my branch in Coventry during my first-year, who decided within a few months that they disliked me intensely, and subjected me to an incredible amount of psychological torment. They were jealous that I was well-spoken, well-read and well-thought of in the organisation. They saw me as an interloper. They never saw me as one of them, particularly as I eschewed drinking and drugs, and even made the mistake of disparaging these things openly and calling them ‘degenerate’. This became the basis for a campaign they launched behind my back to kick me out of the organisation on the grounds that I was ‘puritanical’ and ‘un-Marxist’. Might I just say that my attitude was moderate compared to that of the Militant Tendency back in the old days, when anyone caught doing drugs would be kicked out without apology. I suppose they should ‘cancel’ their founder, Ted Grant, for being a puritanical enemy of drugs and drunkenness and for never having had a sexual relationship. As if that was not enough, a member of the branch, who had feigned closeness to me and who I had confessed intimate details about my mental health to, proceeded to turn on me viciously and begin circulating things I had said to him via Facebook to the other ‘comrades’ as part of a campaign of slander and abuse. I was so horrified I considered suicide, and remained in a suicidal state for the next year or so before I rejoined the branch. This abusive, herd-like behaviour was like something out of high school. I had never experienced anything so horrid in my entire life, and questioned my continuing loyalty to an organisation filled with people of this low character. As it happens, I remained in for two more years.

I tried to put this incident aside. What mattered was serving the sect professionally, and I did not have to be friends with everyone I knew. Which in fact was precisely the attitude expected of us in the organisation. We were always comrades first, and I had no problem with this. This is as it should be, and in this sense, the IMT is no different from any other political organisation (as its apologists always insist). However, there is a twist. There is no such thing as leaving the group on good terms. If you leave a mainstream political organisation, you can remain on good terms with the people you knew and associated with in the group. There is not much in the way of tribal pressure preventing you from talking to or having friendly relations with people outside the organisation. Even MPs from different parties are known to get along and enjoy good personal relations, and occasionally, close friendships. By contrast, anyone who leaves the IMT or any other political cult will be shunned by almost everyone they knew, and even people who you thought of as good friends will subject you to the most disgusting slander and abuse for daring to desert. This is not at all normal. It is the sign of a cult-like mindset, or what Lifton called the ‘dispensing of existence’. When I left the sect, only a few people who I knew from the organisation bothered to reach out and express sadness at my departure. Most ignored me. None of the full-timers, with the exception of Ben Curry, bothered to express any regret at my resignation. This was their response after two and a half years of selfless dedication to their loathsome cult. Once I was no longer of use to them, they washed their hands of me.

I can see why they were so eager to recruit me. I was young, idealistic, eloquent, black (how wonderful for making their sect of white, middle-class students look more diverse!), and seemingly pliable. I remember the warmth that was shown to me during the process of recruitment, and contrast it to the pitiless ostracism that occurred after my resignation. I told myself after leaving that it had all been an illusion, that these relations had been built on sand, and that the only thing tying me to any of these people had been my uncritical enthusiasm for the organisation’s line on every single issue.

I had some horrendous experiences with people in the organisation, but also some very good ones. I still remember with fondness certain individuals I knew in the sect, and pity them for being trapped in a cult. As we speak, the most despicable slander is no doubt being spread throughout the organisation to turn those who knew me against me and convince them that I am an utterly loathsome individual. When I was ‘one of them’, they did not have enough words to express their praise and pride at my being a member of their organisation. This love-bombing turned to bitter curses when I turned out to be a critically-thinking human being, and not a conformist drone. How deep was their despair, how intense the mutual disillusionment between those who had lived this lie, this phantom relationship that we called ‘comradeship’, between myself and the people in the organisation. As Nietzsche puts it in aphorisms 605 and 619 of his Human, All-Too Human:

What is dangerous in independent opinions – Occasional indulgence in independent opinions is stimulating, like a kind of itch; if we proceed further in them we begin to scratch the spot; until in the end we produce an open wound, that is to say until our independent opinions begin to disturb and harass us in our situation in life and our human relationships.

619 In the fire of contempt. – It is a new step towards independence when first we venture to express views regarded as disgraceful in him who harbours them; even our friends and acquaintances then begin to worry. The gifted nature must pass through this fire too; after it has done so it will belong much more to itself.

The two and a half years I spent in this organisation was two and a half years I did not spend building alternative social networks, hanging out with people who actually liked me for who I was and engaging with people who would uplift and encourage me spiritually, emotionally and intellectually. All my spare time was spent on political activity for the cult. As Dennis Tourish says in his 1998 paper on Militant:

6. There is an intense levels of activism, precluding outside interests. Social life and personal “friendships” revolve exclusively around the group, although such friendships are conditional on the maintenance of uncritical enthusiasm for the party line. Members acquire a specialised vocabulary (e.g. they call each other “comrade”), which reinforces a sense of distance and difference from those outside their ranks. The group becomes central to the personal identity of members, who find it more and more difficult if not impossible to imagine a life outside their organization.

No doubt the cult will protest that nothing was stopping me from making friends outside the organisation, except for my own incompetence and unlikeable nature. The truth is that the organisation demands so much of your time and energy that one does not have the emotional reserves to look for companionship elsewhere. The path of least resistance is to spend your time around other ‘comrades’. Besides, they are the only ones who understand the ‘Truth’. Why waste your time with reactionaries outside the ranks? Such attitudes made me a psychological prisoner of the organisation. I was suffering from what Janja Lalich called ‘bounded choice’.

The conditional ‘friendships’ of the cult are no friendships at all. It is far better to cast them off and find real companions.

‘Comradeship’ and Homogeneity

I have since come to the conclusion that for an organisation to create such intense bonds of fellowship within its ranks, to the point of destroying any and all individuality, is actually deeply unhealthy and dangerous. Stalin’s rise to power is a case in point. One reason why Trotsky was defeated by Stalin was because deep down, Trotsky could not bring himself to accept that Stalin, who, despite all his personal foibles, was a ‘comrade’, would do him or his followers any real harm. He could never have imagined that Stalin would become a murderous dictator that would suppress any dissent within the party, kick him out of the USSR and proceed to slaughter all his supporters inside and outside the country. He tried to find various ways of explaining it – ‘Russian backwardness’ had allowed a bureaucratic clique to rise to power, and Stalin simply came to power climbing on its back. The civil war had ‘exhausted’ the working-class, and made them incapable of further exercising their dictatorship. But he never accepted that he, personally, was ultimately to blame in his false estimation of Stalin. All of the other Bolshevik leaders were also blind to Stalin’s real nature. He was just another comrade. He was no one special or spectacular. Yet he would rise above them all, and kill them without mercy to cement his rule. By the time they saw who he really was, it was too late.

Stalin could never have become dictator had he not posed as the ultimate ‘party man’, without any selfish interests or loyalties. Trotsky was the great showman, who loved to be the centre of attention. Despite all his later denunciations of ‘petty-bourgeois individualism’, Trotsky himself was the supreme individualist. It was a point of pride for him to distinguish himself above everyone in the party, rather than conform. Stalin was much better at doing this. Trotsky’s later desperate attempts to make up for this by posing as a party man par excellence (his infamous ‘the Party is always right’ speech being one example) fell flat, and indeed, made things worse by tying his hands in the fight with Stalin. For all that, Trotsky continued to see himself as a true Bolshevik with impeccable standards of revolutionary morality, and foolishly believed that Stalin saw things the same way. As a result, he was blindsided by Stalin’s later betrayals. As late as 1933, Trotsky was sending secret letters to Stalin and his associates asking to be readmitted to the leadership of the USSR, and for he and his followers to be restored as ‘comrades’. Not only was this hypocritical on Trotsky’s part, it is pathetic and sad. For six years after his final defeat, Trotsky had continued to hold to the illusion that Stalin was simply an erring ‘comrade’, not the logical conclusion of the state he and Lenin had brought into being. Trotsky later insisted that the Bolsheviks had always predicted that something like Stalinism would emerge if the revolution remained isolated. This may be true, but they never have predicted that it would be Stalin that rose to lead this ‘Bonapartist’ counter-revolution against the October Revolution. Clearly, dialectical materialism does not mean ‘foresight over astonishment’.

The artificial homogeneity created by far-left organisations can blind us to who the people we interact with in these sects really are. I am just as guilty as everyone else. We all hid our real selves to conform with the cult. People would rarely admit to hating paper sales, or confess to feeling demoralised after a political setback. We all put on a show. Our performative radicalism was all part of the game we played to win approval from the leadership and our peers. This meant suppressing any and all doubts, and loudly and uncritically endorsing the programme. I can see in hindsight how unhealthy these relationships were, and I am glad to be rid of them. It is very difficult to think of people I once liked and admired as bad people, who are exploiting and bullying others. It was hard of me to realise that Alan Woods, Rob Sewell, and other ‘leaders’ I had looked up to, were in fact scoundrels and tyrants who were up to their necks in corruption. I never expected to be subjected to the intense bullying that I endured from people in my branch, because I could not bring myself to think badly of my ‘comrades’. The enforced homogeneity allows people to hide their darker side behind politics. When my branch sought to hound me out, they invented political justifications for their personal hatred and abuse. Under the guise of politics, people’s more hideous impulses – their ambition for social status, their vengefulness and desire to lash out and exercise power over others – came to the fore. I rationalised it all, because as ‘comrades’ we were supposed to be above such petty personal attitudes. I trained myself to think the best of everyone, and to excuse any unpleasant behaviour. This was the price to be paid for the extreme social homogeneity enforced upon us in the organisation.

It is crazy to think about how these organisations, which claim to be bringing about a better world, can bring out the very worst in people. I still have nightmares about my involvement, and likely will for many more years.

Moving On

I’ve always been a fairly lonely and introverted person. Being in the organisation provided me with the illusion of friendships and community, but nothing more. I realised ultimately that I would have to desert the sect to find real companions, rather than subject myself to being in an abusive relationship with ‘the Organisation’. Since leaving, I have made progress in this respect. Refocusing my life away from politics has helped. I further developed my love of country music, which helped get me through a lot of unhappiness when I was in the organisation, and I have even managed to find a Facebook community of people who share my appreciation of this art form. It is an entirely virtual community, but I find more value in it than any of the cult relationships I enjoyed in the IMT. My relationship with these people is based on a shared love of an art form, rather than simply sharing the same political opinions. It’s better than nothing. I get a tremendous amount of satisfaction out of interacting with people 3000 miles away about my favourite country singers. It is highly unusual for a black British guy from East London to have any interest in American country music, associated with white people from the American South, many of whom are quite conservative and even racist. I am aware that this is idiosyncratic, but I do not feel the slightest guilt. This is who I am and I am happy to stand aside from the herd and proudly proclaim my love of country music. What a change from having endless and surreal arguments over whether or not the USSR was a ‘workers’ state’! I feel more kinship with these people than with the corrupt sect I was once a member of.

I recently joined the Conservative Party, after much trepidation. It would probably have been more sensible to stay out of any political organisation for the foreseeable future after my dispiriting experience in the IMT. This was my initial plan, but the impending fall of Boris Johnson has made me realise how much I want to vote for the next Prime Minister. I am also coming to terms with the fact that I have always been, deep down, some sort of liberal-conservative, and always will be. Two and a half years of Trotskyist brainwashing wasn’t enough to change that. The wonderful thing about being in a mainstream political organisation is that there is no pressure on an ordinary member to think a certain way, or read certain ‘approved’ texts, or even to get involved with any ‘activism’. There is no pressure on me to go to canvassing events, attend conference, or even turn up to local meetings of the constituency party. There are no bigoted ‘full-timer’ activists turning up to my door to interrogate me about my opinions or to subject me to ‘struggle sessions’ to force me into conformity with the party line. I can openly criticise Boris Johnson or other Tory ‘big beasts’ on social media and elsewhere, and not be expelled. I can get away with doing diddly-squat. I don’t ever have to physically meet up with other party members. All I have to do to maintain my membership is pay subs. How different this is to the IMT, or any other Trotskyist cult. These people will simultaneously insist that ‘We are just like every other organisation.’

It is so much better to be alone than to be in bad company. I would not return to the IMT even if I was paid – not that they want me back anyway. I would rather be by myself and shunned by the herd, than be part of a false community, fighting for false ideals and seeking to destroy everything I hold dear – individual freedom, critical thought and the open society. I now finally accept that socialism and individualism cannot be reconciled, and that Marxism will always mean tyranny. I hope that the people I left behind in the IMT will come to these conclusions as well.