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 jack-shit.
Take strikes, for example. We would ‘intervene’ on picket lines, bringing our papers and doing interviews with staff, especially at university campuses. But we never actually involved ourselves with the mainstream student-staff solidarity networks. We would stand on the sidelines lecturing and haranguing and being sectarian assholes to every other leftist grouping on campus, but we would never subordinate ourselves to their own program. We would march under ‘our own banner’, with our own agenda – that agenda mainly being to get interviews with staff that we could then put in our paper (invariably twisted in line with what we wanted them to say), to sell our literature and to find useful contacts and even recruits. During my time in the organisation, I don’t believe we ever recruited anyone from these ‘interventions’. I secretly resented spending hours out in the freezing cold selling papers like an idiot in the centre of campus and felt awkward going up to staff and trying to exploit their suffering for our gain. Once the strike was over, we would write up a report for the website with cliched ‘lessons’ from the strike, usually criticising the union leadership for being lousy sell-outs who needed guidance from a Marxist cadre organisation – i.e. ourselves, the assumption being that if this was the case, the strike would have succeeded. We got the glory of looking like we were actually involving ourselves in the movement, when we were just using other people’s struggles to poach members for ourselves, and unnecessarily making enemies among fellow leftists.
The same goes for our ‘Labour work’ in Socialist Appeal. This was entirely performative. We didn’t expect to actually take over the party. What we actually wanted to do was use the entrist tactic to recruit as many people as possible. Back in Militant’s days, the dream was to have enough influence in the party to eventually split the party and form a new, revolutionary socialist party that would lead the working-class to seize power. This never happened. Militant had influence, but it was ultimately brittle, and once the Labour Party leadership purged its members, it collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. I don’t think anyone in Socialist Appeal seriously believed that we could pull off such a split in Labour, even though that was still one of the official justifications for the tactic. The hope was to use the Corbyn movement to grow the organisation as much as possible before things died down or we were eventually expelled. As it happens, I don’t think the Corbyn movement actually succeeded in giving the organisation the growth it was looking for. It remains tiny and irrelevant, and no sooner was Corbyn gone from the scene than the organisation was proscribed (again). But our involvement with Labour, and our frustrating experiences at the hands of ‘Blairites’ and ‘bureaucrats’ allowed us to burnish our persecution complex and establish our credentials as loyal socialists fighting against centrist wreckers within the labour movement. We appeared to be doing something for the movement, whilst in practice doing nothing besides advertising for own sect. I am sure the leadership enjoyed the publicity it was getting during the recent campaign to proscribe the organisation from the Labour Party.
Look at the IMT website, and look at the reports of conferences, indoctrination meetings, interventions etc. Every motion is carried ‘unanimously’, every gathering is ‘inspiring’, ‘the biggest conference ever’, or given some other celebratory, self-congratulatory appellation. Every year is a record in terms of recruiting new members – if the leadership is to be believed. Needless to say, no mention is made of the heavy turnover and the large numbers of people who desert the organisation every year. Other Trotskyist organisations were bureaucratic, but we weren’t – we had a healthy system of ‘democratic centralism’ that guaranteed freedom of criticism to all members. Other Trotskyist sects suffered from ‘revolving door turnover’, but we were brilliant at consolidating people and creating proper ‘cadres’. Other Trotskyist cults were sectarian or opportunist, but we avoided both evils. Other Trotskyist cults were zig-zagging from one bad position to another, but we had ‘perspective’ and were never surprised by events. A healthy, normal organisation does not require this endless self-congratulation, which is the mark of serious insecurity within the leadership. A healthy organisation does not have to constantly drum into its members’ heads the idea that ‘We are the best’ and that everyone outside the ranks is worthless, stupid, doesn’t know what they’re doing etc. But this is precisely the internal culture that exists in the IMT. I was just as guilty as everyone else when I was a member. The groupthink is utterly stifling and repulsive to everyone who isn’t part of the chosen. This idea that everything the organisation does is wonderful is so deep-seated that it is impossible to voice any dissent within the ranks. Anyone who does is gaslighted and told that there are no problems with the organisation, that they are the ones in the wrong, that they have something wrong with them psychologically or politically, and they must change their attitude. The leadership is always right. The organisation has always had the correct position on every event in human history, and no one is allowed to dispute this. The organisation has no shame about airbrushing its own history on things like Militant’s homophobia and racism, so as to shield itself from criticism. This reminds me of how the Mormons received a ‘revelation’ some years ago that black people are human after all, and no longer banned from being Mormons. Or the Jehovah’s Witnesses hiding the fact that their leader, Rutherford, sent a letter to Hitler trying to ingratiate himself with the Nazi regime and distance the organisation from the Jews and other ‘undesirables’.
Even splits can be spin-doctored in such a way as to present the organisation in a good light to members and outsiders. The leadership proclaims that splits are a way of purging ‘petty-bourgeois elements’, rather than being a setback or a sign that it needs to change its ways. The rump of loyal members lap it up uncritically. The IMT did this with the 2010 split, and has done likewise in subsequent splits. The organisation’s recent mishandling of rape has done serious damage to an organisation that has already had its fair share of rape and sexual misconduct scandals, but the leadership has even tried to spin-doctor this by slandering those who have left as being corrupted by identity politics, and presenting this disaster as a positive thing. The rewriting of history to airbrush out ex-members who were dedicated and committed for many years, or even slander them as wreckers and traitors, is one of the most disgusting aspects of these organisations, and part of the great campaign of spin doctoring that is used by the IMT and other Trot cults to protect their own image from scrutiny by people outside the ranks who take issue with certain malicious aspects of their organisational practice.
In my entire life, I have never known an organisation so obsessed with its public image and simultaneously so careless about how it comes across to others. On some level, the organisation is aware that Trotskyist groups are not looked upon favourably by most people. That is why, when recruiting people, we would go to extreme lengths to hide anything that might turn off potential recruits from the beginning. We would deliberately withhold certain aspects of the doctrine from contacts, and only revealed the full truth once they were more properly consolidated within the organisation. Our public meetings were stage-managed farces at which a ‘line’ on a given topic was uncritically repeated by the speaker, and we would all uncritically assent and reinforce the ‘correct position’ (god, I hate that cliche), and this would create a false impression of complete unity and unanimity within the group (when in fact, serious differences were repressed until they got so serious that a split and expulsions occurred, or people were hounded out). We would go to extreme lengths to present ourselves in a certain way to attract people. Yet at the same time, we would do ridiculous things like holding paper sales on the street as if we were Jehovah’s Witnesses, or posting conspiracist drivel on our website and making ourselves look deranged to the average person. The average IMT member on Twitter behaves in an utterly cultish manner, as can be seen just from their feeds. This is in spite of the fact that we had a social media code of conduct when I was in the organisation that was ostensibly aimed at protecting the organisation’s image. The contradiction between the elitist, cliquish, inward-looking nature of the organisation and its desire to be a professional political organisation that reaches out to people outside the ranks is an indissoluble one.
These people are image-obsessed. The desire for reputation, for quick wins, to hit a certain target of recruitment, to look better than they actually are, prevents them from engaging in any substantial self-analysis or self-criticism of their organisational practices. As long as they have lots of pictures of hundreds of smiling people in a room raising clenched fists into the air, or of grinning comrades posing with their papers at demos and picket lines, or lots of money coming in from fund-raising, they have the illusion of growth and that is all they care about. Everything revolves around growing the apparatus, recruiting more full-timers, getting bigger and fancier offices, printing ever-glossier magazines and papers and creating a Potemkin’s Village of an organisation that can attract yet more people to the Ponzi scheme. It is truly sad.