The International Marxist Tendency conned me out of over £1000

I have been sitting in my living room, looking through ancient bank statements and scrawling through with a fine tooth-comb the cold, expressionless figures that appear on every page, searching for the payments I made to the International Marxist Tendency over two and a half years. I have calculated that I spent over £1000 – the exact figure being elusive for a number of reasons. Firstly, with my statements I can only go back to April 2018, and I joined in October 2017. Secondly, there is a lot of money I gave the sect in cash, the exact figures of which I simply cannot remember now. I make no bones about the fact that I was financially conned by this loathsome organisation. Let me explain.

When recruiting people, we would insist that they only had to pay a minimum sub (around £10-20 or thereabouts, if I remember correctly), plus paying for every fortnightly edition of the paper (though we were pressured to subscribe to it for the whole year round so as to avoid having to pay in cash and guarantee the organisation a larger cash flow at a predictable point in time of the year). Once they had joined, they were pressured to give even more than this. At every branch meeting we would raise the issue of finance, and peer pressure was exerted to get people to increase their subs payments. They were also pressured to subscribe to the quarterly theoretical magazine that came out every season, which was even more money. One could subscribe to both the paper and the magazine (as I did) for the grand sum of £4 a month (£48 a year). Beyond this, people were encouraged to make donations for the branch to give at the National Conference (as part of an inter-branch competition) and give to the ‘Fighting Fund’ as often as possible.

We effectively conned people into giving more money than they otherwise would have. People joined believing they would only pay x. Before they knew it, they were paying a ridiculous amount of money to the organisation – the result of psychological pressure and milieu control. As Dennis Tourish explains in his analysis of Militant as a political cult:

Once in, however, the picture began to change. More and more demands were placed on members. In particular, they were expected to contribute between 10% and 15% of their income to the party, buy the weekly newspaper, contribute to special press fund collections, subscribe to irregular levies (perhaps to the extent of a week’s income), recruit new members and raise money from sympathizers. Tobias and Lalich (1994) argue that cults have only two real purposes: recruiting other members, and raising money. These certainly emerge as central preoccupations of the CWI. Crick (1986, p.178) cites a former member as follows on some of these issues:

One of Tourish’s interviewees testified to the use of psychological pressure to extract money from ignorant and naive members:

“High dues or subs were extracted from members. A certain minimum sub per week was set, which at several pounds a week was far in excess of what normal parties extract. But people were ‘encouraged’ to go beyond this. At big meetings a speech would be made asking for money. Normally, some comrade would have been approached beforehand and would have agreed to make a particularly high donation – say £500. The speaker would then start off asking for £500, its donation would produce an immense ovation and people would then be pressurised to follow suit.

Among the other methods we employed to raise money was encouraging members at national events to purchase snacks pre-purchased by the organisation for the event instead of going out to buy food. There was also encouragement to buy books from Wellred Books (a bit like how Scientology pressures its members to purchase L. Ron Hubbard’s weighty tomes) and other merchandise, much of it utterly embarrassing – T-shirts with the organisation’s insignia on them being a particularly stomach-churning one.

Of course, if people knew that they would end up paying so much money to the organisation, they would never have joined. We would never be up-front about the financial contribution we were expecting. The key thing was to get them ‘in’. Once this was accomplished, the logic was that we could persuade them to do anything we wanted, with a mixture of psychological pressure and political indoctrination. Thus, when people joined they did not have informed consent. They did not know what they were getting into. This is the essence of a political cult. No normal political organisation demands so much money from its members. Your average Labour Party or Conservative Party member does not have to contribute such ridiculous sums as are demanded from the average Trotskyist sect member. Moreover, there is not a concerted effort to trick the members of such organisations into giving more money than they otherwise would have paid.

It is thanks to the ingenious money-making methods of Trotskyist sects like the IMT that such tiny cults are able to keep going, year after year. Now what is the money spent on, you ask? Well, on the wages of full-timers, on the printing press, on maintaining the website, on hiring halls for national events, on food, on alcohol, etc. Of course, all this money is an absolute waste, because none of these ludicrous groups are going to come to power. It is all a gigantic Ponzi scheme. If every Trotskyist organisation dissolved itself and gave all its money to charity, they would do a greater service to the working-class than any Trotskyist organisation has done in eighty years of the movement’s existence.

The pecuniary deceptions practiced by far-left cults on unsuspecting youths like the IMT is a subject demanding greater scrutiny, not least for the purpose of warning off anyone people from joining such disreputable groupuscules. I have learnt my own lesson from how my enthusiasm and idealism was preyed upon by unscrupuous cultists, and I hope others take note.