Several months ago, some of my criticisms of Trotskyism and Trot cults were posted on Reddit by a guy keen to know what the people on the Trotskyism subreddit thought. There were the typical slanders, dismissals of me as a ‘renegade’ and misunderstandings. I hope to reply to these and to affirm the correctness of cult analysis and its accuracy in regard to Trotskyist organisations.
Slanderous Ex-Comrade
Firstly, I must deal with some unpleasant slander on that thread by my former comrade, Jack Shaw, who goes by the pseudonym ‘Quantum Hedgehog’. (Don’t ask me how I clocked that it was him.) Let us put aside the fact that he took a personal dislike to me in the organisation. (Not reciprocated by me. I rather liked him to be honest, even though he had treated me despicably in the past.) To add some context, he was the closest friend of the branch secretary in the branch. They had been first-year flatmates and he was among the earliest recruits. I think he was jealous of me being in the organisation, of my abilities and of and what he felt was my closeness to Thomas and his gf. This is merely a working hypothesis – I do not inhabit his brain and have no desire to do so. Life is short, and time cannot be wasted on such unimportant people. I must, however, deal with his false claims. He says that I was ‘expelled’ for ‘sexual harassment’. This is a bare-faced lie. I was not expelled from the IMT for any reason, least of all ‘sexual harassment’. To avoid repeating myself unnecessarily, I will link to my previous post where I provided some more context to this issue, including a reply I left in the comments to ‘Comrade Nyet’. I admittedly made a number of errors of judgement in some of my actions which gave them ammunition to use against me. They blew the whole thing out of all proportion in order to blacken my name within the organisation, whose leadership saw me as a promising new member. In some of those chats I had spoken candidly about my mental health issues with another member of the branch who feigned friendship and closeness to me, then used these chats against me and blackmailed me with the threat to screenshot and release more of them if I dared to question my unjust treatment.
At this point I had what I can only describe as a mental breakdown and considered suicide, so shocked was I by the immense betrayal and slander. The senior leadership of the organisation intervened, reprimanded the other comrades for engaging in malicious gossip and handling the matter unprofessionally, and came to the even-handed decision that it would be best if I took a leave of absence in the light of recent events. I had wanted a break anyway, even though I regretted the circumstances under which it took place. I took a whole year out of political activity, and spent the summer meeting up with a couple of full-timers in the organisation, in which we discussed my mental health and recuperation and rebuilding my professional relationship with the branch. I returned to political activity after a break of about a year, during which I remained an official member of the organisation, continued paying subs and even had an article or two published in the official press. Some ‘expulsion’. In typical, cult-like fashion, this guy distorts the truth and turns a leave of absence on grounds of mental health into ‘expulsion’.
Even after this horrific experience, I remained in the organisation, my loyalty to the cause undiminished by personal unpleasantness. Let us assume that his slanders against me are true. He is saying that his organisation expelled a sexual predator from its ranks, but let him back in because it placed political expediency over the safety of its female members. He doesn’t realise how bad he just made the IMT look. And the organisation has in fact done this in the past for genuine perpetrators of abuse towards women.
It wasn’t long ago that I was assured that this was all ‘water under the bridge’. Now that I have left, it has been dug up again to be used against me by this individual. This is yet more proof of the organisation being a cult. Only a cult would go out of its way to slander an ex-member in such disgusting fashion, simply because he is no longer a member and is speaking up about his poor treatment. It is identical to the tactics of Scientology, with its ‘hate websites’ against former members, and accusations of sexual impropriety, financial immorality and other claims against dissidents and deserters. An example of this is the treatment handed out to Mike Rinder, Scientology’s former leading PR man. When he left the organisation and began speaking out, his ex-wife and daughter were used against him, and launched a PR campaign to demonise him as a ‘wife-beater’ and deserter of his children. The ‘wife-beater’ allegations are based on a near-comical event that occurred shortly after Rinder’s departure from the sect, when he was confronted by his angry ex-wife and other relatives, who still belonged to Scientology, outside his doctor’s office, where he had just had an appointment. They unloaded with foul-mouthed slander and abuse towards Rinder, right in front of the building. Wishing to escape from this madness, he went to his car and opened the door, only for his ex-wife to try to stop him from closing the car door. In the resulting altercation, she grazed her arm. She had told the police at the time that the pain was minimal and she was largely unharmed. She has since changed her tune and claims to be the victim of domestic assault at the hands of her ex-husband. This is now the basis of a ‘Justice for Mum’ campaign, spearheaded by his daughter, now estranged from her renegade father. The campaign is part of Scientology’s efforts to destroy Rinder’s reputation. Rinder’s guess is that these days, no one except for Scientology members believes the accusations or takes them seriously.
I really did not want to have to deal with that issue here, but ignoring it would have looked bad, since I am addressing a thread in which serious and slanderous claims were made against me of a very personal nature by someone who knew me in the cult (and had a personal issue with me). I did not bother to deal with it at the time, as I doubted any sort of confrontation over Reddit would be worth it. Besides, everyone in that subreddit is biased against me by virtue of my being an ex-Trotskyist, and predisposed to believe the lies. Biding my time and waiting for the right moment to address the claims was perhaps the better way, particularly on a platform like this, which isn’t just an echo-chamber, unlike Reddit.
Might I also add that I shared a room with this guy during the World School of 2019, a week-long event that took place in northern Italy. He wasn’t particularly bothered about sharing a room with a supposed sexual predator. (I was rather open about being bisexual.) This same individual greeted me during an aggregate meeting we had in Coventry in January 2020 with a warm embrace, as if we were best friends. (He had graduated and since moved to Manchester, where he had found work.) This is what he is saying about me now. Incredible isn’t it?
Why does he dedicate such energy to slandering me? To distract from my criticisms of his organisation. That is why the less I respond to such bullshit, the better.
Back to business
Jack ridicules me for saying that I was ‘love-bombed’ in the organisation:
Some examples he states, my particular favourite being how he was “love bombed” at our October conference. I’ve been to these conferences and what actually happened was people friendly to each other, like anyone would be at a conference surrounded by likeminded people.
I fear that being treated with kindness was something he was unfamiliar with, so looking back has decided it was part of some nefarious cult practice.
Isn’t there some stuff you’re missing there, Jack? Like how the event was planned for in advance to ensure that the organisation appeared more united and ideologically homogeneous than it actually was? How members were encouraged to have pre-prepared statements to make ‘interventions’ in the event affirming the party line? (I was always good at this, and always received praise from Jack and the others. How things have changed.) How branches would compete to see who could bring more ‘contacts’ (potential members) along? About how these contacts would be buddied up with experienced ‘comrades’ and never given a moment’s time alone, so that they were deprived of even five minutes of critical thought? How we would bombard them with intense attention in order to get them into the group, like overly eager used-car salesmen? About how anyone seen as critical or disruptive would be blanked by the chair? Some people from the Weekly Worker found out just how stage-managed these meetings are by attending in person. They confirm much of what I have written here. Jack argues that these are just ‘normal’ conferences with ‘like-minded’ people. But that is precisely the problem. A normal conference has all sorts of people with all sorts of opinions. The IMT cult has conferences in which everyone has almost exactly the same opinion about everything. At a Labour Party conference you will find Marxists, Blairites and everyone in between. At a Tory Party conference you will find libertarians, traditionalists, neocons, etc. At an IMT conference you will only find Trotskyists who are devotees of Ted Grant. Any other kind of Trot is not welcome, let alone any other kind of Marxist. This extreme homogeneity of ideological belief is very cult-like. Any differences of opinion that do exist within the organisation are hidden for PR purposes, and everyone must parrot the party line, whether they really believe in it or not.
Jack claims that I was not familiar with being shown kindness, hence my branding the ‘friendliness’ of the members love-bombing. This is just a pathetic ad hominem attack, and even if true, would not change the fact that love-bombing is a facet of this organisation’s operation. The superficiality of the friendliness is shown by the fact that if you have the slightest difference of opinion within the sect, ‘friends’ and ‘comrades’ who have known you for years will suddenly shun you and repeat the most disgusting slanders about you, all because you went against the leadership. This was my experience and the experience of Dennis Tourish, Mick Brooks, John Throne and other ex-members of these Trotskyist cults. There is a big difference between someone being genuinely friendly, and someone showing you excessive kindness in order to get something from you. This is what is meant by love-bombing, in which cult members will make you feel wonderful and loved and welcomed, all in a bid to get you to lower your guard and accept the cult’s practices and doctrine.
Jack concludes with the following:
He also claims the org isn’t democratic. This is because when he started to question Trotskyism (claiming Trotsky was an outright reactionary towards the end), he wasn’t able to change the position of the entire IMT, and that we instead tried to win him back to a Trotskyist position
No Jack, it’s because the same old fool has been at the helm for the last 30 years now, with no challengers, all of whom have been expelled or forced out for daring to disagree with him. It is a cult because this individual, who is a political failure and has achieved very little in his long career, is worshiped as a fount of wisdom and knowledge, and his every word is treated as sacred. It’s because the leadership of the organisation, far from being accountable to the members, makes changes to the doctrine and the line whenever it pleases, without any real regard for what members actually think. It is because a rigged ‘slate system’ is in place by which the same leaders, loyal to the Woods-Sewell clique, are re-elected year after year in a farcical national conference, at which the members turn up merely to be cheerleaders and lavish praise on the leadership for their wisdom and foresight. This is not how the old Trotskyist Fourth International, or even the Bolsheviks, elected their leaders. It’s because anyone who has a different opinion on any topic, like I did, is slandered and forced out rather than engaged with. It is only half-true that the leadership tried to win me back to the ‘correct position’. I was actually told that I should simply leave the organisation unless I stopped reading bourgeois historians and accepted Trotsky’s lies about Kronstadt, War Communism and other issues. In fact, the leadership rarely allows any sort of internal debate, and this is rigged in advance to allow the leadership to ‘win’. The conformist membership usually votes in line with what the leadership wants, and the dissenters are under ‘party discipline’ to continue to uphold things they don’t believe in or leave. This is the ‘democracy’ of the sect in action. Imagine if the Conservative Party voted to force anyone who thinks David Cameron was a bad PM to resign from the party, and forced everyone who was a party member to uphold a ‘party line’ position on every Tory government that had existed since the Duke of Wellington. This is what Trot sects do when they have splits and expulsions over issues like the USSR.
Another member writes:
I’m not a tremendous fan of the IMT or Grantism, but these criticisms don’t really seem all than honest. Talking to people about politics and reading the bulletins of the organisation you’re a member of doesn’t a cult make.
The reasoning behind the attack on the Revolution summer school would be equally applicable to every conference, seminar, and course I’ve ever been to – political or otherwise.
Describing the phrases “lead-off” or “subs” as some sort of niche cult phrase I think demonstrates just how bizarrely out of touch these articles are.
It’s all just a bit silly and despite writing as much as he had, it’s clearly not a serious criticism.
Except it wasn’t just ‘talking to people about politics’. It was indoctrinating people to believe that only our organisation had the correct answer to every human problem. It was claiming that only the IMT had been correct on every historical issue that had ever cropped up over the whole of human history. It was claiming that the leadership of the organisation was gifted with a special clairvoyance by virtue of its possession of the dialectic, that made the chiefs of the IMT the smartest people on the planet and the only people who could save humanity from destruction at the hands of capitalism. It was holding up the organisation’s ‘perspectives’ as prophecies of the future of capitalism that would vindicate the sect and catapult it to supreme power – i.e. a claim of omniscience. It involved rubbishing anyone outside our organisation, even other Trotskyists and Marxists, and portraying them as enemies of the working-class. We were the chosen few who would save the world. This is cultism 101.
The ‘loaded language’ of the sect, which this user dismisses as trivial stuff, was actually central to closing our sect off from the outside world. Such terms gave us our own vocabulary with which we shut out the impure individuals from our ranks, and constrained our thinking patterns to within the narrow limits permitted to us by the organisation. All cults have it. Scientology talks of ‘wogs’, ‘going clear’, ‘operating thetans’, ‘the Organisation’, ‘routing out’, ‘declared’, ‘suppressive’, ‘body thetans’, ‘entheta’, ‘overts’, ‘knowledge reports’, and other weird terms that actually have their own dictionary, created by L. Ron Hubbard himself. This may seem funny or quaint, but it is more substantial than that. Wittgenstein said that ‘the limits of language are the limits of my world’ for a reason. George Orwell, in 1984, introduces us to Newspeak, a whole new language invented by the ruling party for the purposes of controlling the population. Reading Orwell’s essay on ‘Politics and the English Language’ some days before my resignation was rather eye-opening in terms of the way in which language is manipulated by totalitarians of all kinds. The cultish vocabulary is all part of the aim to create an insular group of the chosen few, with their own special code language.
Someone else says the following:
Nah definitely not. Whatever you wanna criticize IMT for, this guy’s polemics do not give a good case against it. Not without being so broad as to include any and all student organizations and political parties within the cult-category. Holding events where they have an agenda to share their views, attempting to recruit members and expand, publishing too many books, seeking to convince rather than debate. As nefarious and totalitarian as it’s made to sound, it’s hard to see what kind of motivated group wouldn’t seem a threat to critical thinking through this lense.
Ah, the standard claim that cult analysis is ‘too broad’ and that the IMT is no different from any other political organisation. As I have said in a previous post, it is true that cults and normal organisations have much in common. But there is a big difference, which is that a normal organisation generally does not claim the exalted metaphysical position for itself that the IMT and other Trot cults do. As I said at the time:
Sure, the IMT shares features with mainstream political and religious organisations. All forms of human association, healthy or otherwise, will share universal features. Dialectical materialism may be baloney for the most part, but it isn’t entirely wrong about the world being interconnected. Everything has at least something in common with something else. To use an analogy I would like to borrow from Dennis Tourish, a rusty bicycle in a garage has something in common with a Ferrari. But the differences between the two are far more significant than the similarities. There are striking, empirically-observable differences between the Trotskyist sects like the IMT and mainstream political organisations. To deny this is simply foolishness. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, Trots never fail to boast of the uniqueness and superiority of their organisations over every other organisation on the left. Why do they change their tune when scrutinised as cults?