“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”–Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Dawn, 1881. Cults and Recruitment No cult can survive without obsessive recruitment, and in Socialist Appeal/the IMT, this was at the centre of everything we did and said. … Read more
I still remember my first October School. I have written of it in my Medium piece. I remember how exciting it all was. Now, I look back and realise I was the victim of mind control. The October School is the IMT’s flagship event, held every October in order to celebrate the October Revolution (which … Read more
When I first joined the IMT, the organisation was in the middle of developing its social media presence. This is at the heart of the organisation’s cultish nature. This is what the cult expert Lifton called ‘milieu control’. Against my better judgement, I was persuaded to get Facebook for the first time in order to … Read more
When I was in the IMT, we boasted endlessly of our democratic credentials. We compared ourselves favourably with Peter Taaffe’s organisation, which hounded out dissidents mercilessly. We replayed the trauma of the 1991-2 split over and over again. We convinced ourselves that we had much higher standards for our organisation. Little did I know that … Read more
When I joined the IMT, I found myself in this strange environment with which I was both personally, and, as it would turn out, politically incompatible. It was inevitable that it would all end in tears and that, as with so many other times in my largely depressing life, separation, ostracism and anger all round … Read more
Life in a cult leaves you bruised and battered. When I left the IMT in March 2020, I knew I had a road both long and thorny to travel before I could recover. I may never recover fully from the experience, but that does not mean that I am not going to try. In recent … Read more
When I joined the IMT, I was soon appraised of the potential dangers of the Internet. The Internet, for us, had its uses. It was useful for promoting our propaganda on social media, encouraging traffic to our website and winning ‘contacts’ and new comrades. However, we were also warned to be ‘disciplined’ in our use … Read more
All cults have a special vocabulary to cut off members from the outside world. Trotskyist cults use bizarre words and phrases to control the thinking patterns of their members. My experience in the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) involved precisely this sort of thing. ‘Comrade’ – a member of the organisation, ‘one of us’. Creates warm … Read more
IMT cultists have taken exception to my description of their organisation as a cult. They have raised some key objections to my analysis of the IMT. They are as follows: (a) cult analysis is a distraction from discussion of their political ideas, (b) cult analysis can describe such a wide variety of organisations so as … Read more
As a member of the IMT from October 2017 to March 2020, I was also part of the Marxist Student Federation (MSF). This was advertised as the youth and student wing of Socialist Appeal. From what I learned when I joined the organisation, it was originally designed to be one of the organisation’s many front … Read more