I may give the impression of obsessively following the IMT’s activity, but in truth, over these past few months I have become less and less interested in anything this disgusting enterprise and Ponzi scheme says or does, hence why my posts here have become more and more infrequent. Prior to the recent rape scandal in Fightback, I felt very little motivation to post on here. I hardly even go on their website anymore, but I do monitor mentions of the organisation on Twitter, which is now my main source of what is going on in the sect. It is how I found out about the rape scandal.
It appears that due to Covid, the IMT has not been able to hold its usual summer conferences in Italy, and has instead taken to having online sessions, including the newfangled ‘Marxist University’, which would appear to be this year’s substitute for the ‘World School’. I remember the international event last summer which was being advertised on Twitter, with comrades meeting up in each other’s houses and uploading pictures of themselves watching the event being live-streamed. I kept thinking to myself – how sad and pathetic is this? At least going to Italy we could have a bit of a holiday as well as doing serious political stuff, and were sat in a hall with comrades from all over the world. There was some kind of excitement involved, especially when we could all talk to each other at the socials every evening. Where is the fun in sitting in front of a TV in someone’s living room, drinking beer and watching a live-stream of several hours’ duration, with endless pauses for translation and the like? How many people end up making an excuse halfway through to leave and go home? The same thing is happening this summer. Some of the stuff I have seen IMT members posting is genuinely sad. At least one member said, no doubt half-seriously, ‘What will I do with my afternoons when the Marxist University ends?’ I feel nothing but pity for such individuals.
The IMT may boast of a turnout of thousands, but it’s not hard to sign up to an event where you don’t have to be physically present. Most of the ‘contacts’ and sympathisers who attend will not join the organisation, despite having a passing interest. Many of the ‘comrades’ may only watch a few of the sessions. Many will not bother to turn up to the ‘watch parties’. All of this is hot air. It may make a lot of noise and give the organisation some publicity, but it will not actually give them any influence in the real world. It certainly won’t make up for the bad publicity they have generated with their ham-fisted cover-up of rape in their organisation.
This is a gigantic waste of time, energy and money. They are not building anything, they are not helping any workers, they are not moving towards becoming a vanguard of the proletariat. The organisation is nothing more than an over-glorified study group which from time to time involves itself in actual political action, with the short-sighted goal of recruiting people and gaining cheap publicity, but nothing more. It is a clique of tyrannical bureaucrats and egotistical jackasses who think they are the spiritual reincarnations of Lenin and Trotsky and who are convinced that holding endless study groups on obscure 19th and early 20th century political texts holds the key to the liberation of the human race, which only their organisation, out of the dozens of far-left groupuscules on the planet, can achieve. It has no real standing in any actual workers’ organisations – any political parties or trade unions – and appears to have largely given up any sort of outreach in this area, instead spending its time recruiting psychologically vulnerable university students and setting up cliquey study groups on campuses who make it their goal to piss off every other left-wing grouping and ensure their own splendid, sectarian isolation. They issue appeals to the workers that no one reads, entirely for propaganda purposes. They repeat the same cliched formulas over and over again, like magic incantations, to no effect. The prevailing emotions in the sect are fear, pride, greed, anger, hatred – not love for humanity or a feeling of benevolent optimism towards others.
The recent crisis has made me rethink whether I was justified in saying that groups like ISO are more cult-like than the IMT. At least one former ISO member has commented on social media about the recent crisis that the IMT sounds even more cult-like than their own organisation. I wasn’t sure about that, but I have thought about it more and it makes sense if you consider the fact that the ISO at least had the decency to dissolve itself. The IMT will never dissolve itself. What the organisation and other Trot groups have learned from the ISO disaster is the wrong lesson – not that they need to crack down on sexual misconduct within their organisations, but that they must do all they can to cover up any such incidents, and hold on to power at all costs. Never admit wrongdoing. Never punish anyone. Expel all those who challenge the leadership. Like Taaffe, Woods and his cronies would rather expel every single member who disagrees with them, even if that happens to be a majority of the organisation, than fall on their swords. A member of the Executive Committee of the Canadian IMT has been quoted as saying that it would be better to expel every single member who has dared to challenge the organisation’s stance on sexual misconduct, rather than bend to ‘identity politics’. The organisation has managed to conflate the punishment of sexual misconduct with allegiance to post-modernism and ‘alien class ideas’, and all those standing up for the victims of sexual misconduct in the sect are being slandered and driven out – talented, experienced and dedicated veterans who have given years to the organisation, and are now being treated like nothing and having their former friends and comrades denounce them and spit in their faces. This ‘Marxist University’ is nothing more than a stage-managed smokescreen of bombast and bluster, designed to conceal the rottenness at the heart of this sinister organisation. I don’t envy those sitting through hours of boring ‘lead-offs’ whilst I read Dickens and Dostoevsky and use my time in a more profitable manner.
The IMT will not ‘collapse’ – at least, not in the way the SWP did many years ago. It will not dissolve. It will limp on for the foreseeable future. These organisations, as John Kelly has made clear in his study of Trotskyist cults, are very resilient and are able to last decades and decades, not least because of their excellent fundraising abilities, even if they have hardly any members. (A sidenote on the SWP – I think at least one reason why their downfall was so pronounced is because there were still enough relatively independent-minded members left over from the 1970s, when the organisation was considerably more democratic, whereas Militant was always a hidebound sect, giving them more confidence in challenging an increasingly corrupt leadership.) The IMT will remain in existence to menace innocent minds and corrupt more young people, but more and more of these will leave with each passing year, and this ruinous turnover ensures that the IMT will remain as useless to the working-class as a bucket with a hole in it is to a farm labourer.