Introduction
Today marks exactly a year since my resignation from the International Marxist Tendency. I republish here in full my resignation letter, which most members of the organisation have not read. These things are naturally withheld from the membership. It will help set the record straight about my departure, since all sorts of lies are being spun about it by the scoundrels who run the organisation. The standard procedure for cults is to slander ex-members in the most despicable way. At the time I wrote this letter, I still considered myself a Marxist, just not a Trotskyist. A year later, I no longer consider Marxism salvageable as an alternative to capitalism. No one can claim that my decision to leave was based entirely on emotion or personal grievance – here I lay out my well-considered views, which the corrupt, Stalinoid leadership was unwilling to seriously debate. I have nothing to hide, unlike certain people, who are furious at what this blog is revealing about the real nature of their disgusting ‘organisation’. The letter should give an insight into the sordid, sinister and cynical internal regime that exists in this despicable sect. I also hope that it inspires any doubting members to reconsider their dedication to people who view their sacrifices so cheaply and who look upon them with such contempt.
Letter
‘Not suitable as a party man. – He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks way through the party and out the other side too soon’-Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, s.579
This is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. To be quite honest, I am beyond heartbroken. I have spent the past two and a half years of my life helping to build the IMT. I joined the organisation full of youthful optimism, thinking it was the only organisation that could lead the working-class to socialism. I now see that I was wrong. I must say in advance that I am so sorry to disappoint all those comrades I have known over the past two years, who will no doubt be shocked and upset by this news. Much thought has gone into this decision.
This will come as a surprise to many of you. How could this have happened so suddenly? It is my duty to explain my reasons to you all. I must be plain. I am no longer a Trotskyist. Whilst I admire Leon Trotsky, I believe that Trotskyism is an infantile disorder, a mistake that should be abandoned. One might argue that this has all been too soon, that I have not thought things through, that I am rushing to judgement. To this I can only say, such is the dialectical nature of knowledge. Within a very short space of time, an accumulation of information can lead one to rapidly change one’s mind about a particular matter. I have always insisted upon a scientific conscientiousness, on following the evidence where it leads, and refusing all forms of dogmatic and religious thinking. I read a lot, and therefore I am probably more vulnerable to this change of mind than other people. I consider it a strength, and not a weakness, that I can realise and correct errors in my thought very quickly. The two main reasons are as follows: my rejection of our line on the USSR and my repudiation of Trotskyist party-building.
It all began a month and a half ago when I began research into the Kronstadt rebellion (which took place when the civil war was pretty much over). The narrative which has been taught to us is that it was a counter-revolutionary White Guard plot which had to be suppressed. This was the line the Bolsheviks took at the time and this was promoted by Trotsky and his followers years afterwards. I believed this line, but based on my further reading into the matter, I have concluded that these are lies. The IMT plays its part in propagating these lies. Many of the Kronstadt rebels were the same people as had supported the revolution in 1917. Even accepting the composition of the garrison had changed, a core of old-timers remained and there was nothing differentiating the old-timers from the newcomers in class terms. Kronstadt had always had a high proportion of troops of peasant origin, and the Communist Party in Kronstadt was composed largely of former peasants. The turnover does not appear to have changed the political inclinations of the garrison, which were always anarcho-populist and maximalist in character. There is no reason to believe that the rebellion happened because the newcomers were less committed to the revolution or ‘backward’. In fact, many of the old-timers had been moved out of Kronstadt precisely because they were rebellious and untrustworthy. Had they remained, the rebellion may well have happened sooner. Those old-timers who remained took leading roles in the rebellion. Nor was it a mere peasant revolt. It began in solidarity with striking workers in and around Petrograd who were being suppressed by the Bolsheviks. Moreover, the 15 demands they put forward were overwhelmingly reflective of the demands of the workers as well as peasants. The evidence is there in black-and-white. They NEVER called for ‘Soviets without Bolsheviks’, but for an end to one-party dictatorship and free elections. In suppressing them, Lenin and Trotsky were responsible for spreading disgusting lies about them in order to blacken their reputation. Courageous individuals like Victor Serge and Emma Goldman played a key role in refuting Trotsky’s lies and restoring the honour of the rebel soldiers. For those who wish to do further research into the subject, the historians Paul Avrich and Israel Getzler have both written books on the rebellion, and Samuel Farber covers it in his book Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (Verso, 1990).
If a contact who wanted to join our organisation raised the issue of the Kronstadt sailors, could I, in good conscience, repeat Trotsky’s lies? Absolutely not. Nor could I keep quiet and hear others I call ‘comrades’ repeat these lies. Yet this is what is demanded of me. No revolutionary organisation should demand its members lie on its behalf over such matters. Such an approach will struggle to attract honest, intelligent, conscientious individuals to its ranks. In saying this I by no means suggest that the comrades of the IMT are not honest, intelligent and conscientious, merely that these traits will become degraded the more one is forced to repeat untruths. Class loyalty is superior to party loyalty. They are not and never will be the same thing. If I must choose between the two, I will choose class loyalty. Rather than lie to the working-class, I will abandon the party and tell the truth to the masses. It is my conscience as a revolutionary that drives me to this decision.
My research did not stop there. We are often told that the Bolsheviks had no choice but to use dictatorial methods in order to save the revolution. Tragically, these methods led to Stalinism. Nevertheless, it is argued that ‘objective factors’ made them necessary. The backwardness of Russia and the isolation of the revolution supposedly meant that Stalinism was inevitable. My research has shown me that this is false. Many of these measures, like the suppression of workers’ democracy in the soviets and the factory committees, were implemented before the civil war. They were justified on the basis that the vanguard had every right to impose whatever settlement it pleased on the ‘backward’ masses. These measures intensified after the civil war and were clearly ideological in character. War Communism was in part an understandable response to objective difficulties but carried on for far longer than it should have and out of necessity became a virtue. It came to be seen as not merely an emergency measure but a means of building socialism, a position which all the Bolshevik leaders held at the time. It also constituted a utopian effort to destroy petty commodity production and free trade between the town and the country, but in fact had the effect of fostering illegal trade (and with it inflation) and uniting the peasantry against Bolshevism. Militarisation of labour was introduced after the defeat of the White Armies and justified by Trotsky as vital for peacetime reconstruction and the building of the new socialist society. Such a monstrous and unnecessary decision (unpopular even with many Bolsheviks) provided the precedent that Stalin followed. The wholesale suppression of the non-Communist parties and press and the ban on factions within the Communist Party likewise took place only after the war, at the very moment when there should have been a liberalisation.
These things did not ‘have’ to happen. I do not subscribe to the view which sees Leninism as inevitably leading to Stalinism, nor to the Trotskyist view which says that ‘objective material conditions’ meant that a totalitarian behemoth was always in Russia’s future. The Bolsheviks made conscious choices which could have been avoided. I do not believe that all these measures were necessary to defeat counter-revolution. If anything, they hindered the fight against counter-revolution by demoralising and alienating the very workers and peasants whose enthusiasm was needed to fight the enemy. Democratic rights are not ‘formal’, a luxury which it would be nice to have after the revolution and the hard work of overthrowing the bourgeoisie but are part of the process of building the new society. Even a temporary abrogation of democracy should be avoided as much as possible. Any revolution will have to take measures to defend itself, but if a revolutionary leadership cannot trust in the masses, it is doomed from the beginning. It will either degenerate from within or be overthrown by counter-revolution from without. It is possible that the revolution would have degenerated anyway, but it would not have taken the monstrous form it did had certain things been done differently. To hold this position is not ‘subjectivism’ by any means.
We pride ourselves on our knowledge of dialectics, yet we happily throw dialectics out of the window when analysing the degeneration of the revolution. To argue that the actions of Lenin and Trotsky, and the false ideas which they believed in, had nothing to do with the degeneration is not dialectical at all. One must look at the dialectical interplay between the subjective factor and the objective factor. Human beings are not automatons pushed around by ‘objective conditions.’ They make decisions based on certain ideas they have about the material world. This is basic Marxism, and anyone confused on this matter should consult Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. Within the same set of material conditions people can come to different conclusions and act differently based on those conclusions – as many actors besides the Bolsheviks and within the Bolshevik Party itself (i.e. the Democratic Centralists, Workers’ Opposition, Workers’ Group, Workers’ Truth) did. To say the Bolsheviks had no choice in this matter is to descend to the level of crude materialism, a far greater sin than idealism in my opinion. There is also an extreme hypocrisy here, that we give credit to the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky and their heroic role as individuals for the success of the revolution, but they are on no account to be blamed for the degeneration. The ideas of Bolshevism were supposedly vital to the overthrow of capitalism but had no influence over the evolution of the Soviet state. We are supposed to believe that the geniuses Lenin and Trotsky seized power and then became prisoners of fate, automatons who were simply reacting to events. (If any bourgeois politicians were like this, we would condemn them as empiricists! So much for Lenin and Trotsky being master dialecticians!) If this is the case, then Lenin and Trotsky were not as smart as we think they are and ‘Bolshevism’ as Trotsky defined it is useless as a theory. At best it can tell us how to make a revolution but not how to preserve and extend it. History suggests it can’t even do the former.
As Victor Serge said, Leninism had many germs, Stalinism being one of them. I do not agree with those bourgeois critics of Leninism who say that Leninism led inevitably to Stalinism, but one cannot pretend that there were not problematic aspects to Leninist thought which made possible Stalinism. There is no guarantee that if the objective conditions within Russia had been perfect, there would have been a flourishing soviet democracy. Much depended on the ideological predispositions of those who were at the head of the regime. We should honestly engage with these theoretical flaws instead of ignoring them. We must not make the mistake made by Trotsky of idealising Lenin’s thought and elevating it to the status of religion. Lenin himself would have been annoyed at such a preposterous position. Marcel Liebman, in his Leninism under Lenin, shows how Lenin constantly modified his thought in line with new information and changed circumstances. In the light of what we know after a century of historical experience, we can discard those aspects of ‘Leninism’ that have proven destructive. Ironically, the best way to prove we are good ‘Leninists’ is to ditch Leninism. Therein lies the dialectical contradiction.
Our narrative about the Comintern is also flawed. Lenin and Trotsky, just as Zinoviev and Stalin, bear responsibility for the Comintern’s degeneration. The Comintern of Stalin was not the Comintern of Lenin, but mistakes were made which helped to blur the lines between the two. We go out of our way to absolve the first two of any blame, but was it not Lenin and Trotsky who gave their assent to Paul Levi’s disgraceful ouster from the German Communist Party in 1921? Was it not Trotsky who put pressure on the German Communist Party in October 1923 to launch a premature insurrection? Was it not Lenin who drew up the 21 conditions that imposed upon every Communist Party a ‘Russian’ model, based on the degenerated Bolshevik Party? And did Trotsky not bring Zinovievite organisational norms into the Fourth International, which the IMT mistakenly continues? No one can deny that any of this is the case. Trying to build a ‘world party’ with an all-powerful ‘centre’ laying down the line for every single section has proven to be a complete and utter failure. After a century of experience, let us draw the only scientific conclusion – that Cominternism is bankrupt and should be abandoned.
Nor am I convinced that Trotsky’s opposition to Stalin whilst in the USSR was particularly impressive. Time after time, Trotsky gave ground and compromised. He would not even make an appeal over the heads of the party leaders to the workers, which Lenin almost certainly would have done. He did not in fact campaign for workers’ democracy, but for inner-party democracy, democracy for dissident Bolsheviks, not for the masses. Only after he was forced into exile did he discover the virtues of multi-party democracy. For Trotsky, multi-party democracy was unthinkable in 1921 because Russia was backward, isolated and surrounded by enemies, but was necessary in 1936 even though this was still the case and the situation was if anything even more dangerous. Trotsky came to fetishise the party to an even more extreme degree than Lenin himself, and this fatal cult of the organisation was carried over by him into the Fourth International. Yet the official narrative of our organisation is that Trotsky did almost nothing wrong. Saint Trotsky cannot possibly have erred or blundered in any way. This is cultism, this is idolatry, this is hagiography. It is not Marxism. It is not scientific socialism.
No healthy Marxist organisation will be based on idolatry of any figure in history. Such an approach is anti-Marxist. The essence of scientific socialism, of the Marxist method, is ruthless criticism. Marx’s motto was ‘Doubt everything’. We must scrutinise even our own heroes, not shying away from exposing their flaws and castigating them for their mistakes. Without such an approach, we will learn nothing. Yet what would happen if a comrade in our organisation wrote an article critical of Trotsky? I think we all know what would happen to that comrade. The IMT website certainly would not publish such an article. I will leave it to your imagination as to what that dissident comrade will be subjected to for such blasphemy.
I have had the opportunity over the past couple of months to study closely the real history of the Bolsheviks, the Comintern and the Fourth International, and my critiques are inspired by the writings of Louis Proyect, Peter Camejo and Hal Draper, among others. I am convinced that the ‘Leninist’ party-building model is intellectually and morally bankrupt and cannot lead the working-class anywhere to socialism. It is based on Zinovievism and not the genuine traditions of Bolshevism from the pre-1917 period. The pre-1917 RSDLP was an incredibly decentralised, democratic party, in which there was lively debate, polemic and factionalism on a constant basis. No one was made to defend a ‘line’ on what happened in the French Revolution or on the events of 1848. Arguments were fought out in public. At one point the Bolsheviks had multiple newspapers all promoting different lines on the events happening in that country. It was precisely this vibrant internal life that allowed the Bolshevik Party to seize power in 1917. The idea of a tightly centralised, disciplined Bolshevik organisation seizing power is a complete myth. We are building a caricature of genuine Bolshevism. I cannot imagine anything like the public polemics between Lenin and Martov happening in our organisation. Everything must be secret, internal and hidden from the unwashed masses, whilst presenting a monolithic front of unity on all questions to the outside world. That is not a ‘Leninist’ organisation in the sense understood by Lenin himself. That is a cult. Even the Bolsheviks, living under conditions of Tsarist repression (in fact, even when they were in power up until 1921), didn’t have this unhealthy internal life. Nothing was hidden from the masses. Lenin himself mocked the Cadets for their excessive secrecy. Marx and Engels refused to join the Communist League unless it abandoned its secretive, conspiratorial methods and became an open, democratic organisation. Yet we insist on copying the methods of Scientology rather than genuine Marxism.
‘Democratic centralism’, in the days of the pre-1917 Bolsheviks, meant unity of action (i.e. in a strike, a demonstration or an insurrection), not ideas. However, ‘democratic centralism’ in the IMT and similar organisations means that in public, everyone must uphold the same set of ideas, regardless of whether they believe them or not. This means defending every conceivable theoretical position of our organisation, from the labour theory of value to whether or not China is a workers’ state. (Some comrades will make the disingenuous claim that we do not demand this, and that all that is necessary is that you agree with the basics. Yet the truth is that once a comrade joins, they are put under enormous peer pressure to follow our line and abandon any ‘funny’ or ‘alien class ideas’ they might have.) If the EC, CC or Congress of the organisation decides that 2+2=5, everyone must publicly uphold this and convince everyone else that indeed, 2+2=5, an absurd situation. Minor differences become the pretext for expulsions or splits. We forget that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks managed to be in the same party for fourteen years. We must all parrot a ‘line’ on all sorts of historical and philosophical questions, instead of being permitted to think for ourselves. This is, quite frankly, Stalinism. It serves to place an intellectual straitjacket on comrades, with people being warned to stay away from anything which contradicts the historical record or the ‘correct’ theoretical position as we perceive it. Anything else is contaminated with ‘bourgeois ideology’ and is unworthy of being read. Peer pressure serves to dissuade intellectually curious comrades from reading ‘bourgeois’ historians, who have done immense research on such matters, or any theoreticians that are not Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Ted Grant. The assumption is that such people are always hostile to the Bolsheviks and therefore are to be avoided. This leads to a one-dimensional and false view of history. It is simply ‘poisoning the well’. This is not the scientific conscientiousness displayed by Marx and Engels themselves, who insisted upon reading and studying the great bourgeois thinkers in all fields, and even assimilated much of their work. That certain criticisms of the Bolsheviks are made by ‘bourgeois’ historians does not make those criticisms incorrect. We, after all, are happy to base our perspectives concerning world affairs on the analysis of the serious bourgeois media. We would also happily cherry-pick from those writings by ‘bourgeois’ historians which make Lenin and Trotsky look good. This approach guarantees that your organisation will be riddled with robots who have given up their critical faculties. As Rosa Luxemburg said in her 1906 article, ‘Critique in the Workers’ Movement’:
‘The PPS went to great lengths never to expose themselves to a discussion with their adversaries before the working masses, making every effort to avoid it, so that the masses would not hear any criticism of their program. Indeed, as such critique only led to factitiousness, then it was lost time. Workers who were members of the PPS were not allowed to bring the publications of other parties into the organization. They were supposed to believe what the PPS said, just as devout Catholics are supposed to believe what the church teaches.
Just as churches expect their “little sheep” to believe in the shepherd’s words and not talk back, so the PPS instills in the masses certain ideas, as articles of belief, using every means in its power to prevent members of the party from encountering the arguments of adversaries, denouncing every difference of opinion in the ranks of their party as disorganization and factitiousness, and attempting to form not a cadre of conscious, critically thinking workers, but a church of believers. They made fanatics of their supporters, enveloping their minds with a cloud of beliefs so dense that no light could shine in. Their work was not to raise workers’ consciousness, but to distort their minds.’
Instead of turning people into robots parroting the exact same position, a Marxist organisation should allow for the open expression of different lines on various issues, if there is general agreement on the ‘minimum programme’ of the organisation (i.e. expropriation of the top 200 monopolies, etc). Such an organisation is much more likely to attract the enthusiastic support of as broad a layer as possible. We are not in Tsarist Russia, we are not facing heavy state repression and there is no need to apply Lenin’s emphasis on a small, tight, homogenous band of revolutionaries to our own time. Such an entity will be able to recruit at most a few thousand people, after which it will plateau and collapse, like the SWP, Militant, ISO and countless other similar ‘Leninist’ formations. It will not take much – a rape scandal, a heated theoretical dispute, a power struggle – and the whole pack of cards will come tumbling down, so fragile is the organisation. Can something so brittle ever hope to lead the masses out of a paper bag, let alone to socialism? It is still worse when splits are fetishized as ‘purifying’ and not seen merely as unfortunate consequences of political struggle but necessary, even desirable. Everything comes down to Bolsheviks vs Mensheviks, to Cannonites vs Schachtmanites, and the whole poisonous legacy of Trotskyist ‘polemic’ is brought to bear.
We do not have genuine internal democracy, but a self-selecting CC which is ‘elected’ on a slate system. The slate system, mind you, was introduced in 1921 and abused by Stalin. Prior to that, the Bolsheviks elected people as individuals. Not only that but dissent with the ‘line’ is next to impossible either in public or in private. When I first raised my heresy with the leading comrade, he explicitly discouraged me from raising it in branch lest I ‘confuse’ the new comrades. That is, he had so little faith in the new recruits, and had such a low opinion of their intelligence, that he did not trust them to decide for themselves whether our line was correct or not. He was afraid that in an open and honest discussion, he would lose. Any dissent is seen as ‘disruptive’ or likely to ‘miseducate the cadres’. It would be best if everyone just kept their doubts to themselves and toed the line, and if necessary, lied about their real beliefs. I did not leave the church for this. No healthy organisation is built this way. This is how cults operate. Our interpretation of ‘democratic centralism’ is little more than a tool to control communication between comrades, hence the paranoid obsession the full-time apparatus has with policing Facebook discussions for fear that they will encourage ‘factional’ activity.
Instead of my critiques being honestly engaged with, I found myself being directed to a few ‘sacred texts’ in the hope that I could be won back to the ‘correct’ line. A reading group in which I defended my ideas resulted in the regional full-timer, his ego bruised at being caught out on a particular issue he was not well-read on, condemning me for ‘lowering the political level’. I supposedly did this by bringing in a topic which was apparently off-limits, and which I merely mentioned in passing. Nevertheless, it was blown completely out of proportion and used to paint me as a dishonest person trying to derail discussion. It was even preposterously suggested that I was trying to attack or sabotage the organisation! (An insult to someone who has dedicated the past two and a half years of his life religiously to the IMT.) A common trick, it seems, is to make the issue with the way you express disagreement, instead of dealing with the disagreement itself. Quoting from an ex-full-timer for Militant in Ireland, Dennis Tourish, on his own experiences:
‘Now, this case is not terribly significant in itself. 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.’
My disagreement was not seen as a minor point of friction but as a disaster that imperilled the very building of the organisation, which, as we always insist, alone can save the working-class from the apocalypse. This is only possible on the basis of the ‘correct’ ideas, so it follows that anyone challenging these ideas is putting the very future of the entire working-class in danger. Heresy must be mercilessly dealt with. This explains the paranoia I was met with when I made the mistake of admitting that I had doubts about our interpretation of how Stalinism happened. This is the problem with basing a revolutionary organisation around a certain, narrow interpretation of history, and making everyone parrot it unthinkingly. Even the slightest deviation from the official narrative by any member is seen as a danger to the organisation itself. Such an organisation will never lead the working-class to power, such is its intellectual fragility. Doesn’t the prospect of being forced out of the organisation due to a disagreement over what happened in Russia 100 years ago, or the class nature of China, strike anyone as absurd? Does it not bear a distinct resemblance to the behaviour of early Christian sects?
As part of the conspiracy to keep my doubts from the members for as long as possible, I was advised to spend my time drawing up an internal document of criticisms, to be circulated to all comrades as part of a ‘democratic debate’. Yet I know from the nature of our organisation and similar organisations that I could not expect it to be either democratic or a debate. What would almost certainly have happened is that the CC would have been mobilised to bear down on my disgusting heresy. I would have been subject to vilification and character assassination and driven out of the organisation as a petty-bourgeois heretic. The full-timer apparatus would have been mobilised to inform everyone that I was trying to destroy the organisation and had to be crushed. I would either have been expelled or forced to leave due to other comrades I know and respect shunning and disowning me. I was being censored even in my own branch! In the interests of fairness I should state that I was assured that it was my ‘democratic right’ to bring up these questions, but strongly discouraged from doing so. I have an idea of what fate awaited me if I had exercised these paper rights. A complaint would have been lodged to the regional full-timer (not for the first time) that I was playing a ‘disruptive’ role. The EC would have met, and my suspension would have been decided upon, and I would have suffered the same fate that befell John Throne of the CWI many years ago, and Heiko Khoo, and many other people, without even having the chance to form a faction within the branch to fight for my ideas. A monolithic ‘unity’ on all questions is preferable to open and honest discussion, it seems.
Unsurprisingly I have preferred to spare myself the trouble. Others before me have tried and failed. I refer to the Iranian, Swedish, Polish and Spanish comrades as early as 2010, who echoed identical criticisms and were hounded out of the organisation for their pains. (I have read their and others’ account of the dispute and I must take their side. The behaviour of the IMT leadership on that occasion was, quite frankly, disgraceful). I have no faith in my ability to change the organisation, as it has been built completely around falsehoods, and abandoning these falsehoods would destroy it, as well as the lives of those who have built their careers around it, who would be forced to question why they wasted so many years on something doomed to fail. It was precisely my loyalty to the organisation that has made me hesitate in abandoning it. I felt that I had a duty to at least try to win my comrades round, but I now see that this is impossible. I am saddened to be doing this, but the eventual outcome would have seen even more bitterness and anger. This way is better.
‘Democratic centralism’ and ‘Leninist’ party-building has produced nothing but sects and cults, of the Trotskyist, Stalinist and Maoist variety. Attempts to reclaim ‘true’ democratic centralism end up repeating the same mistakes. I think we should call time on this false god. Let us be genuine Marxists and apply a materialist analysis to ‘Leninist’ party-building. We must conclude that it has failed, and in the year 2020, solutions are needed other than rebuilding an idealised version of the 1917 Bolsheviks.
It will no doubt be said that I have a ‘petty-bourgeois’ spirit and could not take organisational ‘discipline’. Before making such a superficial judgement I would remind you that critical thinking and a refusal to be subject to false authority is a proletarian virtue. Workers suffer enough regimentation and micro-management in their daily lives. There is no reason to replicate this in the organisations of class struggle, which should be the tools of their emancipation. Toeing the line and conformity has always and will always be a trait of fools and reactionaries. The greatest fighters for the proletariat always stood alone, if necessary, going against ‘party lines’. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Paul Levi, Alexander Bogdanov and Karl Liebknecht are all examples. In any case, as I have already said, the Bolsheviks were able to seize power precisely because they were a loose organisation in which individual party members could think and act for themselves. Few workers and students want to join an organisation which demands not just their time, money and energy, but their very minds. Such cult-like formations will rightly be shunned by thinking people, who will create their own organisations of struggle, free of such nauseating groupthink.
The greatest thing a revolutionary can possess is not membership of this or that ‘revolutionary’ organisation, but his or her integrity. Marx and Engels put their revolutionary integrity above everything else, even loyalty to organisations supposedly forged in their name. This was the attitude Marx took to both the SPD and the French Marxists, to name just two examples. The greatest contribution made to revolutionary politics in history has not been that of any organisation, but the work of Marx and Engels, collaborators and friends over an entire lifetime. In a time of relatively low class struggle, how revolutionaries organise, though important, is less important than maintaining one’s capacity for independent thought, analysis and judgement, without having to defer to a party line. Without this, we will become disconnected from the working-class, seeking shelter from the rigours of capitalism through the creation of incredibly toxic ‘revolutionary’ sect-cults, whose role revolves entirely around ‘disciplined’, stage-managed propaganda (‘interventions’) and therapy for the disillusioned and declassed. The entire history of the 20th-century shows us the damage done to the revolutionary movement by that kind of dogmatic ‘discipline’. It has led to the wreckage of countless lives, parties, movements and left some people so broken and so demoralised as to drop out of revolutionary politics altogether. Even if we were in fact in a revolutionary situation, it would still be necessary to have an open clash of ideas like the Bolsheviks had in 1917, so that the revolutionaries can clarify their approach and go into battle not as obedient, unthinking foot-soldiers, but men and women convinced of the correct course of action and consciously seeking to shape society.
I have the greatest respect for many of the comrades I have met over the past two and a half years. I still have great respect for Alan Woods as a Marxist theoretician, even if I can no longer be part of the party-building venture. I still believe that the IMT is the best Marxist organisation out there. But I am no longer blind to its profound flaws. It pains me to be breaking with so many people I consider good friends. But principles are more important than friendship. Moreover, if these friendships cannot be sustained in the absence of political agreement, they are not friendships worth keeping in the first place. I must confess that I dedicated the past two years of my life to a cult – a cult of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Revolution.
Some might be worried for the purity of my ideological soul. I would like to reassure them. I remain a Marxist and a revolutionary socialist and intend to fight for a better world in my own way – unencumbered by the need to follow a party line. I will also set about studying the great Marxists who came after Trotsky – E.P. Thompson, C.L.R. James, Hal Draper, Raya Dunayevskaya, Isaac Deutscher, among others. And yes, I will even go back to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, a thinker who peer pressure compelled me to disown. The Saxon sage has always been a source of great comfort to me. There is a wealth of knowledge beyond the 1938 Transitional Programme and the collected works of Ted Grant. I hope others will take advantage of this knowledge.