Here is an example of a branch agenda, of the kind that, by some strange oversight, was still being shared with me via Google Drive for some months after my departure. Enjoy it in all its mind-numbing glory. Note how, to add to the LARP, the names of members are shortened into initials. I am … Read more
The answer that every IMT cultist has in their heads is ‘Yes, you should have.’ But actually, if you think about it, I did leave relatively quietly, unlike, say, the recent defectors from the organisation. After I handed in my resignation I said nothing publicly for a few months, wanting to just get away from … Read more
The IMT Executive Committee have said, in one of their recent internal meetings (the notes of which have been leaked publicly) that rape is a ‘personal problem’, that the leadership does not exist to protect comrades from abusive behaviour within the organisation, and that it is the responsibility of the members to put the organisation … Read more
Every Trotskyist cult, the IMT most notoriously, is image-obsessed. The sordid search for publicity and self-promotion of these organisations is truly incredible. So much of our activity in the IMT was performative, aimed at making ourselves look like we were doing all this cool stuff for the cause of socialism, when actually, we weren’t doing … Read more
I have recently uncovered yet more evidence that Alan Woods, the leader of the International Marxist Tendency, happily associates with Russian fascists. Aside from the testimony provided by Peter Taaffe about an episode that happened in the 1990s, and his regurgitation of far-right propaganda about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more recently, I have discovered that … Read more
A common attack launched against those who desert the cause is that we were never true Marxists in the first place. There is truth in this. Frank S. Meyer does say in The Moulding of Communists that the true Marxist-Leninist must conform so rigidly to an ideal type so inhuman, that those who fall away … Read more
When I was in the IMT, my life revolved around the organisation. Every week I would attend branch, for two hours in the evening. I would attend every Marxist Society event (and sometimes give talks), which was another two hours of my time, more, in fact, since we would have a social in the pub … Read more
All totalitarianisms are alike, but all totalitarianisms are totalitarian in their own way. An Islamist nutjob has just attempted to kill Salman Rushdie for the crime of writing a novel, so as to fulfill the fatwa issued against him many years ago by the demented, murderous tyrant Ayatollah Khomeini. Many on the left today, who … Read more