Thus do I speak to you in parables, you who make the soul giddy, you preachers of equality! You are tarantulas and dealers in hidden revengefulness! …I pull at your web that your rage may lure you from your cave of lies and your revenge may bound forward from behind your word ‘justice’. For that … Read more
I’ve just finished reading Notes from Underground, and I must confess to reading few books that have touched the core of my being in such a way. The Underground Man makes the following denunciation of all theories based on man as a rational animal, and demonstrates why, even if ‘Marxist science’ was true, and the … Read more
Over the past month I have read both Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life and Gareth Stedman Jones’ Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Both books have their strengths and weaknesses. Both do a convincing job of correcting the record on Marx and his relationship to the doctrine that bears his name. They put him … Read more
When I walked out of the International Marxist Tendency after two and a half years of vicious abuse and mental torment, I knew that it would take me a long time to recover. I may never fully recover, but I have to try. In the days after leaving, I was disoriented and devastated. I wondered … Read more
Orlando Figes was and is a villain in the International Marxist Tendency. When I was a member of Socialist Appeal, he was rubbished as a loathsome bourgeois historian whose sole duty is to besmirch the spotless banner of Bolshevism and the glorious legacy left behind by Lenin and Trotsky. Back in 2013, for some reason, … Read more
No one wants to admit that they could have been conned, lied to or tricked into entering into a cult or an abusive relationship. They are insulted at the very idea. It is understandable. We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures who are in control of our minds and do not allow ourselves … Read more
There was a time when I was quite charmed by the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Woods, as a naive contact and then member of the organisation. I even imitated his gestures and jokes in his ‘lead-offs’ for my own. He was and is a very charismatic, eloquent and well-read man, gifted with a verve for the … Read more
In the latest example of the sensational anti-Semitism of the International Marxist Tendency, we have the organisation’s take on the crisis currently gripping the country. The author of the article is a member of the German section. Funny that, you would think a German would know better. The article begins thus: The Israeli bombing of … Read more
For decades, Trotskyists have denied that the degeneration of the USSR has anything to do with Bolshevik ideology. Most of us realise that the seed of Stalinism was in Bolshevism from the very beginning. Trotskyists prefer to blame the difficult conditions specific to ‘backward’ Russia. It was the ‘objective conditions’ of this uncivilised, peasant nation … Read more
In the IMT, I was always taught that Lenin and Trotsky had conducted a heroic battle against anti-Semitism, and that it was revived by the evil Stalin as part of the ‘bureaucratic counter-revolution’ that reversed many of the ‘gains’ of the Russian Revolution. I had no idea of the Bolsheviks’ early efforts to stamp out … Read more