Recently, it has emerged that the Labour Party NEC plans to vote to proscribe several far-left groups within the Labour Party, including my former cult, Socialist Appeal, the British section of the International Marxist Tendency. The group has no influence within the party and comprises only a handful of members, so this will make little difference. But it will send a strong signal that anti-Semitism and far-left extremism are not welcome in the party. Personally, I think it is very welcome news.
This disreputable sect has spent years conducting ‘entrism’ in the party and promoting its toxic ideas. As a former member, I spent two and half years as part of this motley crew, denying anti-Semitism, attacking Jewish MPs, defending the loathsome Jeremy Corbyn and his allies and blaming Labour’s failures on a Blairite conspiracy with the Israeli Embassy to bring down the party. Its expulsion is well-deserved. These hypocrites yelp about being expelled for their ideas, yet they have spent years calling for the expulsion of the Blairites on the same grounds. Moreover, within their own sect, they operate a virtual dictatorship in which members with heterodox views, such as myself, have been purged and forced to resign, if not expelled. The Labour Party NEC should pay no attention to this self-serving, utterly cynical and disingenuous whining. If expelling them makes their entrist work that much harder, that can only be a good thing.
The thing about all cults is that they simultaneously believe, to quote Umberto Eco’s description of Ur-Fascism, that the enemies are simultaneously too weak and too strong. On the one hand, the group insists that they are just like any other Labour Party members, and that they are being unjustly persecuted for the crime of supporting Corbyn. Yet internally we would always boast of our superiority to every other group on the left, and speak contemptuously of everyone outside our ranks, including others on the left, who we believed were unreliable, untrustworthy and would always buckle to the interests of capital. We saw the Corbyn movement has something to be used to grow our membership – nothing more, nothing less. A classic feature of a cult is that it has an ‘internal’ and an ‘external’ set of positions, one for internal consumption, the other for public purposes. Socialist Appeal is no different.
Publicly, the cult will go into ‘defence’ mode, protesting that they are being unjustly persecuted by the evil Blairite and left-reformist bureaucrats. Internally, they see this as a wonderful opportunity for using their ‘victim’ status to gain sympathy from the rest of the left and further undermine Starmer. As Nietzsche observed of the socialists in his own day:
Strengthening a party. – If you want to strengthen the inner constitution of a party, you should give it the opportunity of being treated with obvious injustice; it will thereby accumulate a capital of good conscience that it perhaps previously lacked.
The comrades will protest that organisationally, they are no different from Momentum, or Progress – an affiliated organisation of like-minded individuals who happen to support Labour. Yet the latter can at least claim to be officially affiliated, unlike Socialist Appeal, a hardline Trotskyist sect which will never gain affiliation to Labour of any kind. Moreover, whereas the last two work within the party with the aim of getting it into power, Socialist Appeal and other Trotskyist sects seek only to sabotage their work by parasitically recruiting young, naive members and fomenting factionalism at every turn. As a basic safeguarding measure, the party should make it harder for such disreputable groupuscules to prey upon its young members and subject them to its repressive cycle of paper sales, branch meetings and national rallies, which can only do them incalculable psychological damage. The basic hypocrisy of such sects is that they will insist that they are just like everyone else, whilst simultaneously insisting that they are different from and superior to every organisation that has ever existed. We should not be fooled.
The time has come to kick out the Trots!