I am embarrassed to say that I had the personal acquaintance of Canadian members of the International Marxist Tendency, whose section is known as Fightback/La Riposte. I was, after all, part of a large, global network of IMT members on Facebook. The Canadian comrades were among the loudest and most entertaining. Needless to say, any friendly feelings have dissipated since I took the path of renegacy. The little bit of respect I might still have had for their organisation has gone up in smoke ever since I found out the terrible truth about the events of 2018 at York University in Toronto, Canada.
As a new comrade who had been in the organisation for a few months, we were made aware of strike action that was underway at York, where our comrades were heavily involved. I also remember being told that our comrades had been ‘slandered’ by ‘petty-bourgeois’ leftists who were involved in the official strike campaign (a coalition of numerous groups) with charges against one of their members of sexual assault, and barred from participation. Needless to say, I only heard the organisation’s side of the story. We were mobilised in time-honoured fashion to uncritically ‘defend the Organisation’, ‘defend our comrades’ and repudiate the attacks being made on our sect. With only a superficial understanding of what had transpired, I took it for granted that we were indeed being slandered by jealous rivals who were incapable of responding to our political arguments, and so resorted to personal attacks.
Having now left the organisation, I have chanced upon material available online which reveals what really went down at York in 2018. Having read a full account of what occurred, my reaction is the same as any right-thinking person’s – disgust. Just when I thought this organisation couldn’t get any worse, I found information that indicated that I hadn’t set the bar quite low enough. I could not be more ashamed of having been a member of such a loathsome entity.
An account of the sordid behavior of Fightback can be found here and here. I do not wish to rehash all of the details on this blog. Anyone who is interested can read the full account for themselves. I will simply give a general overview. In time-honoured, Trotskyist fashion, the Fightback comrades appear to have made a concerted effort to hijack the strike campaign for the sake of promoting their own organisation and recruiting members. My own experience in the organisation is that our approach to strikes was precisely this. We looked down upon ‘activism’, only getting involved in campaigns if we thought we could gain ‘contacts’ and recruit. We were always warned not to over-extend ourselves and burn ourselves out working for broader campaigns or movements. Rather, it was believed that our activity should be strategic in nature, calculated to maximise the benefit for our organisation. Rather than subordinating ourselves to the wider campaign group, we preferred to act separately if this gave us greater freedom to publish our own propaganda and carry out our own activities under the cover of supporting the strike. That is not to say that we were indifferent to the outcome of the strike. We wanted the strike to succeed. But we regarded the success of the strike as less important than the long-term goal of ‘building the Organisation’. When the strike invariably failed, we would write an article containing formulaic ‘lessons’ from the strike activity, something which gave as ample opportunity to denounce the treacherous reformist leadership and point out the need for more radical (i.e. Marxist) leadership. (An example of this can be found here.) Around the same time as the York saga, I was involved with Socialist Appeal comrades at the University of Warwick in our own strike campaign, part of a wave of university staff strikes that took place nationwide in 2018.
In the case of York, there was a strong negative reaction by the rest of the left on campus to the blatant attempt made by Fightback to hijack the strike. As if this was not enough, a former member who was involved in the strike campaign stepped forward to accuse Fightback of failing to punish a member who had sexually assaulted her. The response of Fightback was to subject her to a horrific campaign of harassment and abuse, including publicly shouting down her accusations with cries of ‘Slander!’. Such was the disgust of the rest of the campaign that Fightback was kicked out of the coalition and banned from the picket line. Fightback now attempted to present themselves as the victims of malice by ‘Stalinists’ and ‘petty-bourgeois leftists’.
If you go on the Reddit discussion page I linked, you will find IMT members in the comments’ section (some of them not even from Canada!) trying in vain to defend their organisation. At least one user called them out for this, having observed their account histories and smelled something fishy about their activity.
I can verify the accuracy of the above comment. The groupthink in our organisation was so strong that our response to any criticism whatsoever was uniform, monolithic, uncritical defence of the cult. This does not happen in a normal, mainstream organisation with a healthy internal regime. All you have to do is look at the divisions in the Labour Party over how to deal with the accusations of anti-Semitism to see that a healthy organisation does not demand blind, uncritical support from its membership when it is facing external criticism. Instead, members are given the scope to debate (publicly) the extent to which their organisation bears any culpability.
Our standard response to criticism from others on the left was to blame it on their ‘sectarianism’, ‘Stalinism’, ‘petty-bourgeois’ nature, or some other sin, whether real or imagined. We could never accept that our organisation might be responsible for thoroughly alienating everyone else on the left. In hindsight, I can now see why we were so hated, and understand that much of this hatred was deserved. Even at Warwick, I recall the chilly relations between ourselves and the established left grouped around Warwick Labour and similar organisations. We would attack all those who disagreed with us as the sectarians for refusing to work with us, even though we were the real sectarians preaching our own righteousness and virtue at every conceivable opportunity, carrying out our own work under our own ‘discipline’ and with our own agenda, decided behind closed doors.
I should get one thing straight. I have no political sympathy either with the IMT or its critics. Indeed, if I was still a socialist, I would still be politically closer to the IMT than I would to the established left-wingers who attack it. I always liked the IMT’s strong stance against identity politics, and would never have joined any organisation sympathetic to such nonsense. This post should not be interpreted as political support for those who would criticise the IMT from the perspective of intersectionality, one of the few things the IMT gets right (even if they do, in typical Trotskyist fashion, go overboard). However, the methods of this sinister sect when it comes to things such as activism, recruitment, fund-raising, entrism etc are just as toxic as those of any other Trotskyist groupuscule. If there is one thing Trots are good at, it is antagonising just about everyone who might be politically sympathetic to them. The question these people need to ask themselves is this – ‘If we produce so many bitter and disgruntled ex-members, and attract so much dislike from everyone on the left, even people whose politics are similar to ours, maybe, just maybe, there is a problem with our organisation?’
If the information I have provided here is not enough to persuade people that this organisation is bad news, I am not sure what is. The truth is, I had no idea what a den of vipers I had landed myself in. I am just glad that I was not a young female member of the IMT or any similar organisation. Imagine if I had been subjected to sexual assault, or even rape, by a member of such an organisation. I shudder to think of what the response would have been.