When I joined the IMT, I found myself in this strange environment with which I was both personally, and, as it would turn out, politically incompatible. It was inevitable that it would all end in tears and that, as with so many other times in my largely depressing life, separation, ostracism and anger all round would result. Perhaps it is just as well to have all these awful experiences whilst one is young. Pain is a great teacher. I should never have sacrificed my passionate individualism for the good of this miserable sect from hell. Still, I did everything I could to be a good comrade and gain the approval of everyone else in the organisation. Never before had I been so dependent on peer approval. I had shunned such things as for the herd, and was self-confident enough not to care about what other people thought or felt. Now here I was having to learn humility and be part of a group. I think I did a decent job, but sooner or later, my natural individualism and contempt for groupthink would reassert itself. Such a ‘petty-bourgeois’ attitude is incompatible with being part of a cult of any kind, especially a Marxist one. Marxists have this strange belief that wanting to think for yourself and have your own opinions is a trait that originates from small shopkeepers, and that a ‘real’ proletarian and revolutionary is someone who subordinates himself to ‘party discipline’ and the will of the party leadership at all times – in other words, turns himself into a parrot for the party line. (Which shows how much contempt they have for thinking people who happen to be working-class. I suppose they are not ‘real’ proletarians, for they have become corrupted with the un-Marxist idea that they are individuals with a right to their own thoughts and feelings and argue with the Party, which, as Trotsky infamously said, is the only instrument that history has given for deciding the correct position on any given issue.)
At some point in either late January or early February 2020, I discovered Louis Proyect’s blog. I’m not sure how ended up there, but somehow I chanced upon his blog via Google. I cannot remember the first time I discovered it, but I think it may be around the time I went to London for an aggregate of the London comrades. Nothing gave me greater joy than leaving the dump that was Coventry and meeting the London comrades again. To be brutally honest, I liked them a lot better than the Coventry comrades. I remember sitting in the cafe that evening after the aggregate was over and reading one of his many articles that was critical of Trotskyist sects like the IMT and SWP. I don’t think anything registered at the time. My loyalty to the IMT was, as far as I was aware, unshakeable.
I went home to Coventry and found myself reading more of his articles over the following weeks. At the same time I started to have doubts on the question of Kronstadt. It occurred to me that I had never ventured to look at the other side of the story, but had uncritically accepted Trotsky’s viewpoint. It didn’t take much digging to find stuff that was critical of Trotsky’s own explanation for those events, like Emma Goldman’s. I then stumbled onto the anarchist website that had first helped win me over to socialism. I never became an anarchist, but I found the debunking of neoliberal economics to be worth reading. I now found anarchist criticisms of the Bolsehvik Revolution, and well-sourced ones too. I had never considered that Bolshevik ideology might have played a role in the degeneration of the revolution after all. Instead, I clung to the IMT’s dogmatic belief that the entire reason for the degeneration was the ‘difficult objective conditions’ of civil war, economic backwardness, imperialist intervention, etc. Ted Grant was adamant on this point. To posit a theoretical flaw in Bolshevism as responsible for the degeneration was a stepping stone to suggesting that Marxism should be abandoned altogether. And as Trotsky had argued in ‘Stalinism and Bolshevism’, In Defence of Marxism and elsewhere, the ‘gains’ of October remained intact despite the Stalinist degeneration, and made the Bolshevik inheritance one that was worth defending, despite the temporary setback that had occurred due to the failure of the revolution to spread. The USSR, for all its flaws, was Marxism realised, Bolshevism realised. To see the USSR entirely as a negative phenomenon, and ignore the ‘progressive’ elements of the new regime, was an undialectical error.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realised the basic stupidity of assuming that nationalised property relations automatically equated to ‘progress’. Moreover, criticisms I read on Anarchy FAQ and others made me reconsider my blind belief that the degeneration only set in in earnest after Lenin’s death, as Trotskyists conveniently believe. Trotsky had, after all, been partly responsible for the degeneration. The Bolsheviks had suppressed rival parties, rigged soviet elections, created a Cheka which imposed terror, implemented War Communism which alienated the peasantry, and so much more. Trotsky had failed to effectively oppose Stalin after Lenin’s death, and had supported the suppression of past opposition groups within the Communist Party, like the Workers’ Opposition. I did not believe that Stalinism was inevitable, but was convinced that the Bolsheviks could have done some things differently to avoid the degeneration. I then had to combine this new knowledge with the revolutionary new insights I had gleaned from reading Proyect’s blog and his criticisms of Trotskyist organisations, as well as of Lenin and Trotsky’s handling of the Comintern. I was not yet ready to give up on the IMT, however. I was a loyal comrade. Perhaps I would win my comrades round and get them to reconsider certain aspects of the doctrine. Deep down, I knew how unlikely this was. Part of me realised that I had begun a path that would almost certainly lead me out of the organisation. But I refused to suppress my doubts. I would think for myself and allow myself to follow my the evidence I was presented with to its logical conclusion.
I presented my doubts to the branch secretary. We had a friendly but largely unproductive discussion, which simply further cemented my doubts. I agreed not to tell the other comrades about my differences, as they were still new and inexperienced. I might mislead them! We wouldn’t want to spread heresy now, would we? Being a loyal comrade, I had no intention of doing anything disruptive. It is precisely when one has disagreements with the party line that the pressure for ‘loyalty’ from the leadership intensifies. It is a time-honoured method of psychological manipulation that can be brought to bear against anyone who is guilty of thinking too much for themselves.
The full-timer for the region was informed of my doubts, as was natural. Any deviation of thought is communicated with military efficiency upwards to the leadership. I had been in the organisation long enough to know how this worked and become somewhat acclimatised to it. I didn’t allow myself to question something which seemed perfectly reasonable and sensible. I still did not want to draw the awful conclusion that I was in a cult. Granted, if I had known what the organisation was like before joining, I would never have joined.
I attended the Marxist Student Federation conference a few days after confessing my doubts. There, I confronted the full-timer with my heretical point of view. We had a friendly exchange of views, but I left with foreboding. I foresaw that my exit from the group would be a matter of time, but I badly did not want to leave. I did not want to desert everything I had worked for for two and a half years, and endure the ostracism, the humiliation, the psychological turmoil of splitting with the sect. But I was starting to miss being able to think for myself.
On the coach trip back to Coventry, I re-read Leszek Kolakowski’s 1974 Open Letter to E.P. Thompson, which I believe I had come across before at some point, though I suspect I may have skimmed it. It was a searing condemnation of the whole dissident Marxist movement, Trotskyism included. I felt as if Kolakowski was speaking to me directly, giving voice to my own doubts, exposing the hypocrisies embedded within the anti-Stalinist left. Some time before I had read Thompson’s 1956 essay, Socialist Humanism, in which he subtly suggested that Stalinism could not simply be reduced to economic conditions, but constituted an ideology in its own right – something Trotsky had always refused to countenance. How could the anti-intellectual mediocrity, Stalin, be regarded as a serious Marxist theoretician? Did Stalinism not represent nothing more than Russian backwardness? Was Stalin’s ‘Marxism’ not a mere adaptation to Russian conditions, a thin veneer concealing his desire for power over an impoverished and isolated nation exhausted by revolutionary upheaval? Of course, I knew deep down that this could not be further from the truth. Thompson challenged the old-fashioned, orthodox Marxist understanding of Stalinism as a primarily socio-economic construct, the product of ‘objective conditions’, rather than a political doctrine, an autonomous superstructure which imposed itself on the material base and transformed it as part of its totalitarian nation-building project. The whole Trotskyist understanding of Stalinism no longer made any sense whatsoever.
After I arrived back in Coventry, I spoke briefly to the regional full-timer via phone. He had wanted a private, one-on-one discussion before we did a reading group that we had agreed to involving himself, the branch secretary and one other ‘advanced’ comrade concerning my differences. He warned me darkly that if I continued down this path, I would abandon Marxism and become a liberal. He told me that I was under ‘party discipline’ not to tell anyone else about my doubts, and to keep them to myself. Only those in our narrow circle taking part in the reading group could be told anything about it. In other words, I was already being made to feel that I was a disruptive agent and a ‘problem’ for the organisation. Not exactly morale-boosting, and a naked example of the apparatus being brought to bear in a threatening manner before I had even had a chance to properly express my differences. This same full-timer had, during our conversation at the Marxist Student Federation, waxed lyrical about the difference between Zinovievism and principled democratic centralism. What a hypocrite! I was also told that I was under party discipline to defend the organisation’s line on everything regardless of whether I was convinced of it or not, so strong was this ‘party discipline’ imposed on all members. I said this was unthinkable. ‘That’s your problem,’ he said to me coldly. I weakly put forward my objections on certain things, and he swatted them away with the same arguments – ‘formalism’, ‘subjectivism’, ‘idealism’, ‘undialectical’, ‘stuff taken out of context’, and other nonsensical repetitions of the party line. I had a sense this was coming. I put to him the question of how I could guarantee to someone I was trying to persuade of ‘the ideas’ that a future revolution would not degenerate. ‘There is no guarantee,’ he said coldly. ‘In other words, blind hope,’ I said. ‘It all depends on the “objective conditions”.’ ‘Well,’ he said, back-tracking, ‘we have a part to play in that.’ So when it suited him, he would stress that ‘objective conditions’ gave the Bolsheviks no choice but to implement things like War Communism, the suppression of the soviets, the ban on factions etc, but in other contexts he would stress the ‘subjective factor’. It was so nakedly transparent that this was nothing more than a rhetorical device being used to absolve Trotsky of all blame for anything that went wrong with the USSR. Meanwhile, I wanted to put forward a more nuanced understanding which saw Stalinism as a product of a dialectical relationship between objective conditions and the subjective factor.
The reading group took place over the phone and involved an awful lot of back and forth. The details are too dull to go into. Suffice to say that neither side was convinced. Soon after this, the regional full-timer confronted me on Facebook for ‘derailing’ the discussion and wasting everyone’s time. I took exception to this, and responded very roughly. The conversation terminated frostily. He closed off by saying icily, ‘I have given you a lot of my time, more than my comrades would give.’ So that was how he saw me. As a ‘project’ which needed to be worked on, as someone who needed to be shaped and moulded and was frustrating his ambitions by daring to have my own ideas.
My mood darkened as the days went on. After the disastrous reading group, it seemed that I had reached a dead-end. The prospect of leaving became more and more inevitable. I was told to read Marcel Liebman’s Leninism under Lenin and Victor Serge’s Year One of the Russian Revolution, and if I was still unconvinced of the organisation’s line on the Russian Revolution, I should write a document to be circulated internally. By now, I had read Louis Proyect’s sharp criticisms of Trotskyist organisational methods, and had encountered other critical information on the Internet, including Dennis Tourish’s analysis of Militant as a political cult, and stuff about the 2010 split. It became clear to be that I was going to be subjected to the same treatment as every other person who had dared to challenge the party line – be hounded out like a dog who had outlived his usefulness, and then slandered. I became more and more distressed and angry. I had been betrayed. This organisation, which I had dedicated my life to, was a cult that was stultifying my intellect and denying me the right to think.
It was made quite clear to me that there was no question of my raising my differences in branch. I was assured by my branch secretary that though it was my ‘democratic right’, I was strongly discouraged from doing so. Of course, the full-timer had been more blunt and told me that I did not have such a ‘democratic right’ at all. I was only to express my differences in the manner approved of by the organisation. In these sects, there is no ‘correct way’ to express one’s differences. As Dennis Tourish, a full-timer in Militant for six years during the late 1970s and 1980s, put it:
Now, this case is not terribly significant initself. It is only important in that many, many ex-members could tell similar stories – moreover, the ex-members of innumerable Marxist-Leninist organisations could do the same. Please note the pattern. There is never is a right way to go about raising dissent in the CWI, or any similar organisation. You inquire about how to openly raise an issue, but the big guns of the leadership try to talk you out of it, and tell you that you risk the destruction of your political credibility if you carry it forward. You talk to people informally (a perfectly normal activity) – this is a conspiracy. You write to them instead – you are by-passing official structures. You raise it on a committee – you should have informally discussed it first, rather than risk disorientating the membership. You submit a critical article to the Internal Bulletin, but are denounced for not discussing it informally (at the risk of starting a conspiracy!), before committing your views to writing. But whatever you do, it will be wrong. The trick is to make your despicable behaviour in how you express your dissent the issue, rather than engage with the dissent itself. The full weight of the apparatus is then mobilised to destroy the person concerned. Unless you are Peter Taaffe, Hadden or some other Leader, in which case whatever you want to do goes. I am certain that Finn and Clem faced similar pressures, and as busy people with a real life and above all a sense of proportion figured they had better things to do. I personally just felt demoralised, and left for a breather which has thankfully turned into a long and more satisfying alternative life.
The truth is, there is no guarantee that if I had hunkered down and written up a document of my criticisms, it would have been circulated. I read what had happened to other dissidents in these organisations in the past. The leadership may well have suppressed it. Perhaps they would have read it, but issued a curt response denouncing it as heresy and shutting down any discussion. Perhaps they would have ‘generously’ agreed to an internal debate, but it would have taken place in the following format, typical for pretty much all Trotskyist sects – the EC voting ‘unanimously’ in favour of the party line, following by the CC, then a stage-managed ‘debate’ in which the membership votes in line with the leadership’s wishes. Where would this have left me? Under party discipline to shut up about my criticisms and publicly uphold things I didn’t believe in. It would have solved nothing. A ‘correct position’ is not hit upon as a result of a majority vote. Did Alan Woods and Ted Grant accept the ‘correctness’ of the Majority which voted against them in Militant? Certainly not. That is why they split. Why did they believe their organisation was any different?
Funnily enough, the IMT published an article several months before my departure on the case of an American comrade who had deserted the organisation due to political differences. Like many who leave, this individual was slandered for having left without discussing his differences as part of a ‘democratic debate’ that would ‘educate’ the whole membership. The broader context behind his departure was, of course, suppressed to paint him in as bad a light as possible, which is part and parcel of the disgusting behaviour of these loathsome cults. If I remember correctly, it was suggested that this individual was an agent of a rival sect. I find this hard to believe – why would they bother infiltrating a rival organisation which is itself so tiny and irrelevant? Nevertheless, no slander is too far-fetched for these Leninist loons. It does not occur to these people that if so many people have left their sect, including high-profile members, complaining of the lack of democracy, maybe the organisation is not in fact democratic. Here is an extract from the article, which is supposedly a communication from the EC to the comrade in question:
From the EC letter dated March 14th a substantial part of the first paragraph has been removed:
“None of the disagreements you raise in it emerged during your time in NYC; you did not raise them with comrades in MSP when they first arose, and you did not raise them with comrades you knew well from your time in NYC—although you saw some of them over the holiday break. Instead, you waited several months and then presented a fully worked-out position in writing, even before basic discussions could be had on the questions you raise.”
Interesting! So in my case I was criticised for the way I raised my differences in the reading group and directed to put my differences in writing. This time, another individual in the sect chose, sensibly, to wait several months to collect their thoughts, then put them into writing afterwards, before participating in an formal or informal discussion on the differences in question. What was wrong with that? Yet it was still wrong according to the IMT. It was ‘disruptive’. He should have discussed his differences with his comrades first, and given them a chance to talk him out of it, before writing something down.
These sorts of procedural arguments are deliberately used to avoid dealing with the criticisms from dissidents politically. This extract simply proves that the individual who left the IMT was correct in his criticisms of the organisation.
Here is thing. The leadership is obsessed with controlling the thoughts and actions of every member as much as possible and preventing any critical ideas from ‘spilling’ into the ranks. Instead, dissidents must be monitored, browbeaten, corralled, forced into struggle sessions and theological arguments etc, in order to wear down their resistance. Anything they do will be seized upon and made the target of ruthless criticism. If they raise their differences outside of a ‘sacred circle’ of advanced comrades, they are condemned for disrupting the organisation. If they choose to write a document first, then circulate it, they are condemned for disrupting the organisation. Even in confessing to differences, they have marked themselves out as ‘disruptive’ and will either be made to conform or driven out of the sect. A campaign of slander is launched to utterly blacken their names forevermore and steel the loyalty of the cadres.
The days went by and I became more and more bitter towards the organisation, especially as I found more and more criticisms of Trotskyist sects online. Nevertheless, part of me wanted to at least go along with the ‘internal debate’ that had been proffered, knowing it would be a stage-managed farce, just to test the organisation’s pseudo-democracy and see it in action. I ordered Samuel Farber’s book Before Stalinism from Verso, and was excited to see that Farber was making identical arguments to myself. Instead of lazily arguing that Stalinism was the inevitable result of Russian backwardness, Farber pointed to the dialectical relationship between ideology and objective conditions. To say that it was all objective conditions was a fatalistic outlook that no revolutionary could seriously accept.
In the end, my frustration and anger got the better of me. I confessed my predicament to the people on Louis Proyect’s Marxmail mailing list, and indicated that my departure was inevitable. None other than one of the international full-timers, who happened to be on Marxmail, discovered it, along with other IMT members who were on it. My expulsion from the sect was clearly imminent. I had ‘broken discipline’, and revealed myself to be a treacherous scoundrel and enemy of Trotskyism. It was time to make a hasty exit. It was not the dignified end I had hoped for, but I doubt that I could have left on good terms whatever I did. One does not generally leave a cult and remain on friendly terms with the cult members. That was how I ended up resigning from the International Marxist Tendency. Two and a half years of intense devotion to this abusive groupuscule had come to an end. I was free – and alone.