No one realises how much time they will end up dedicating when they join a cult like the IMT. I had no idea how intense an experience this would be. I did know that as a born-again Marxist, I was keen to get stuck in with a serious organisation. The IMT seemed to fit the bill. If only I had had informed consent. If only I had done five minutes of googling on this organisation to see what it actually was. I would have seen all of the past scandals, splits, abuses of power by the leadership, etc. Knowing what I know now, would I ever have joined? No way. Certainly my first branch meeting, the subject of this post, was an underwhelming experience. It would take a little more persuasion before I finally joined the sect.
I first had the ‘pleasure’ of meeting the branch secretary, Thomas, on campus, for the second ever time. We had initially met in London at an IMT event that October, ‘Capital in a Day’, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Capital’s publication. I do not remember much from the event, which passed by in a blur, but I had enjoyed it and been further interested in the organisation. This is in spite of being very underwhelmed by a copy of the paper, which contained simplistic slogans and agitational material rather than the high-brow, intellectual stuff that would be more to my taste.
The second time I met him, we had further discussions about the organisation, of which I was not yet a member. I had been invited to a ‘branch meeting’ on campus, where I was to meet the other members of the organisation. When the time came, I arrived at the appointed location and walked in. None of the other branch members, as I recall, even said hello to me. I thought nothing of it at the time. Perhaps they were just nervous. I don’t have the most amazing social skills in the world myself, so it didn’t bother me. Someone else would have been offended and thought that they were cold and unfriendly, but I prefer to avoid such judgemental attitudes and give people the benefit of the doubt. It is one of the things that kept me in the cult, when the red flags of cultism where everywhere. Besides, I hadn’t come here to make friends, I had come here to dedicate myself to a revolutionary organisation. I could hardly trouble myself with petty personal things of this nature.
I walked in and sat down. The rest of the branch members were friends Thomas has made in university and managed to recruit. They constituted a clique which I never became a part of, and couldn’t have if I tried. For the simple fact that I had joined the branch after they did, was at least a year younger than them and did not go through any of the experiences they did as freshers or politically during the first flushes of Corbynism, there was next to no emotional bond I could have forged with them. I was just the latest ‘contact’. Would I disappoint like so many others had?
Jack, best friend of Thomas, who thought the Bolsheviks were a family prior to being recruited (such were the limits of his political knowledge) and was the butt of all sorts of jokes for his drunkenness and incompetence and political cluelessness, gave a lead-off on diamat based on Trotsky’s essay, ‘The ABC of Materialist Dialectics’, from his In Defence of Marxism, a ridiculous book that one should read to appreciate how much of a sophist Trotsky was. It is filled with your standard diamat banalities, like how things are constantly changing and therefore formal logic is incorrect. If only refuting Aristotle was as easy as preaching the astonishing discoveries of Trotsky and Engels. The fact that he didn’t seem to know what he was talking about only made the lead-off seem more preposterous. A born conformist, he was simply doing what Thomas had appointed him to do.
When it came to giving contributions, I was my natural, confident self, and revealed that I had read a lot more of Marxist theory than anyone in the room bar Thomas himself. Perhaps I came across as an arrogant asshole showing off all his reading. This would not have been an unfair judgement for them to make. Maybe I should have shown more self-awareness and not made the mistake of appearing too clever for my own good. Maybe I would not have attracted so much jealousy from my comrades over the next several months. They would make me pay for making them feel inferior.
I wish I had noticed things more. I might have spotted some red flags. Alas, I remember little about the branch besides all I have just written. I was underwhelmed and unimpressed with the other comrades, but I thought they seemed like decent people. I had no strong opinions of anyone in particular except for Thomas, who I saw as a kindred spirit – a well-read intellectual guy like myself with a knack for public speaking.
He would be the bane of my existence for two and a half years. Most of the love-bombing came from him. The others were still fairly new and not yet schooled in the techniques of love-bombing. That would change as time went on.