From beginning to end, my time in the organisation involved being told lie after lie after lie. These people will tell any amount of lies, no matter how preposterous, in order to advance their organisation. Cults do not have any regard for the truth. Had I known these truths, I would never have joined the organisation. Here are the top ten lies I was told by the International Marxist Tendency.
- ‘We are a very democratic organisation.’ I was constantly assured of the democratic nature of the organisation. Every member of the organisation, especially full-timers, praises to the skies the essentially democratic nature of the organisation. There was a never an opportunity lost for self-congratulation in that regard. We compared ourselves favourably with the Taaffeites and rival Trotskyist sects, as well as the Stalinists, who did not practice true ‘democratic centralism’, but ‘bureaucratic centralism’. We were different. We were special. We truly believed in the democratic process and the freedom of every member to put forward criticisms and voice their opinions about the organisation. Turns out this was all a load of baloney. The truth is that, like with pretty much every Trotskyist sect, the organisation has a Byzantine set of bureaucratic rules regulating how ‘internal debate’ is allowed to function. Despite being told that differences should be raised in branch, I soon found out when I raised my differences with the organisation that this was not in fact possible, and was in fact strongly discouraged. If one expresses a disagreement with the organisation on any topic, one is generally discouraged from raising it with other members of the organisation, for fear they will be corrupted by ‘heresy’. Instead, one is under party discipline to hide one’s differences and only discuss them with senior members in an approved format. The full-timers will bear down on you, pressuring you to renounce your opinions and accept the party line or leave the organisation. You will be told you are ‘wasting the time’ of the organisation and are a disruptive force. You will be subjected to psychological pressure and isolated from the rest of the organisation. If an informal discussion does not convince you, and if re-reading certain set texts leaves your opinion unchanged, then you will be told to send in a formal document of criticisms to the leadership. This document is invariably ignored in the hope that you will give up and everyone can move on. Sometimes the leadership reviews it, and issues a reply, invariably condemning it as incorrect and condemning the erring comrade as a heretic who must cease and desist or be thrown out as a renegade. Sometimes the leadership will agree to a debate, but this is a very closed, secretive process which involves the leadership meeting in a smoke-filled room, without the knowledge of the membership, and deciding on a position. Once a position has been decided upon, the debate will be opened up to the rest of the membership, with the leadership pressuring the members to accept the agreed position of the wise leaders. Benefiting from its control of the apparatus and the timing and format of the debate, the leadership invariably wins out over its adversaries, unless there is a massive rebellion from within the leadership itself, which necessarily leads to a split, as so many Trotskyist organisations have split over the decades. If the Labour Party leadership conducted debate in this way, we would have condemned it as a bureaucratic, undemocratic travesty and called for a transformation of the party structure. But our ‘revolutionary’ organisation had no use for such ‘formal’ democratic rules. The hypocrisy! Of course, those dissidents who leave are invariably slandered, no matter what their records, even if they have given years and even decades of their lives to helping ‘build the organisation’. That’s gratitude for you. As if that was not enough, the leadership is not elected in a genuine, open election, but via something called a ‘slate system’. The leading members of the organisation all campaign on one slate and are elected ‘unanimously’ by the delegates of all the branches at every yearly conference. Rival slates are not theoretically impossible, but highly discouraged. Who will dare to run against the organisation’s established leaders? No one wants to be ostracised or risk expulsion. Besides, the leaders have all the cards. They have control over the apparatus, control over the resources of the organisation, superior ability to campaign, best public speakers and most well-read cadres etc. They are unbeatable. A similar method is used for all other positions in the organisation, which involve co-opting people who are seen as ‘good chaps’ onto committees and other bodies and voting them through ‘unanimously’. This slate system was borrowed from the Stalinists by the Trotskyist movement in Britain and has been enshrined ever since. The Bolsheviks had a more democratic method which allowed people to run as individuals.
- ‘We want cadres to think for themselves.’ We were told in the organisation that the ideal ‘cadre’ (Marxist revolutionary steeled in ‘theory’) was encouraged to think for themselves and come to the correct conclusion independently of the leadership. This was a lie. Independent-mindedness was frowned upon and seen as ‘petty-bourgeois’. There was strict control from above by the central committee over its members, who were not allowed to think for themselves, but had to parrot the party line at every opportunity. Conformity with a set of ideas in public necessarily causes conformity in private, as this is the only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance caused by having two ideas at variance with each other. This is basic psychology. The result was that we were effectively brainwashing ourselves. When I was in the organisation, members who said the ‘wrong’ thing in branch meetings or meetings of the university Marxist Society were attacked as ‘disruptive’ behind their backs. To give you an illustration, a new member who criticised the killing of the Tsar’s family in a Marxist Society meeting one evening attracted derision from the branch secretary who told us (behind his back) of the need to rein him in. The nature of his ‘criticism’ had no immediate political significance whatsoever – he simply issued an opinion on a point of history, but this was supposedly a dangerous breach of discipline. Moreover, members were discouraged from reading any material that was non-IMT material. Instead, we were supposed to spend all our spare hours reading IMT propaganda, thereby inhibiting our capacity to think.
- The CWI split in 1991 was all Peter Taaffe’s fault. This was one of many distortions of history told to us by the IMT leadership. Yet a closer examination of the circumstances of the split reveals that Ted Grant made serious errors and misjudgments which contributed to the break-up of the organisation, such as his false predictions about what was happening in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc and his absurd prediction of a 1929-style crash in the 1980s. (Alan Woods still insists that Ted was in fact right all along because of the 2008 crash, so Ted was only twenty years out!)
- Slanders about those who left. Ex-members were always slandered to us and painted in the worst possible light. The most ridiculous lies were told about them and we would blindly believe them. Now I have left, I am facing the same treatment (even though when I was ‘in’ I was feted as a star comrade). Anyone who leaves will be lied about, or have unsavoury information about their past rediscovered and used to smear them. For people who whine about Blairite smears, they are very fond of engaging in such behaviour themselves. I am not the only person who has received such treatment. John Throne, John Pickard, Darrall Cozens, Mick Brooks and many others can attest to the treatment you receive once you leave.
- ‘We are different from, unique to and superior to every other organisation.’ This is a lie. The IMT is not much more different than other Trotskyist sects, except perhaps in degree – other Trot sects, like Gerry Healy’s, have undoubtedly been even more cultic and authoritarian than the IMT. But the difference is one of degree and not of essence. The internal life of Trotskyist sects is practically identical. The IMT, CWI, the ISO and SEP in America, the SWP in Britain – have very little dividing them. Alan Woods, David North, Jack Barnes and Peter Taaffe are more similar to each other than they think. All these sects have a guru figure and a gang of minions through which they run the organisation as a personal fiefdom. National ‘sections’ are subordinated to the mothership and periodically purged from the organisation when they fall foul of the leader, before being reconstructed with loyal supporters.
- ‘This has been the best national conference/World School/Word Congress ever!’ Alan Woods’ catchphrase whenever he made a speech at the end of an IMT event. Every year was a year of spectacular growth for the organisation, a year of progress, a year of advance. Setbacks were never admitted. ‘Conservatives’ and ‘pessimists’ were roundly abused. Only optimism and positive forecasts were permitted. We were told that crises and upheavals were on the horizon, and that the revolution was not far away. Back in Militant’s time, a date was fixed for the revolution – a timetable of about fifteen years. It never arrived.
- ‘Members aren’t expected to agree with everything.’ A lie. When I was recruited I was told that when we are seeking to recruit others, we shouldn’t press too hard on issues on which there is disagreement, but encourage them to join the organisation and then ‘educate’ them inside the organisation. In theory, all one had to agree with upon joining was the need for a revolutionary organisation to overthrow capitalism and the belief that this had to be modelled on the experience of the Bolsheviks in Russia. In practice, upon joining, members would be pressured to sign up to a whole host of positions on the Russian Revolution and the class nature of the USSR. When I first joined the organisation, I was convinced that the USSR was state capitalist, but this was not seen as an issue. Perhaps it’s because I wasn’t very loud about it. I discovered that the IMT had a different position and changed my position due to peer pressure, before deciding that the IMT’s position was wrong and leaving. There is one exception – Woods’ and Grant’s bizarre views on science – but even then, there is peer pressure encouraging members to submit to their rather odd understanding of science on the basis that dialectical materialism is the key to understanding pretty much everything about the world.
- ‘Ted Grant was the main figure in British Trotskyism, who alone kept alive the flame of genuine Marxism.’ A lie. Tony Cliff did just as much if not more in that regard than Ted Grant. Militant was very quickly eclipsed after the 1980s and the furor of its entrist effort into the Labour Party, after which the Trotskyist left has been dominated by the Cliffites. Most people found Grant uncharismatic and uninspiring, and the success of Militant is thanks to other key figures like Peter Taaffe, John Throne, Peter Hadden and many more. A collective leadership helped see through Militant’s success, but we would inanely credit all of its successes to Grant’s genius. We even re-wrote history so as to only mention other figures in Militant insofar as they were connected with Grant, but anyone who fell on the wrong side of the 1991 split was generally ignored or slandered in our official account of the history of the organisation.
- ‘Only Ted Grant and his disciples have had the correct position on every subject for decades, unlike other Trotskyists.’ A nonsense. Militant was homophobic, indifferent to women’s rights, had a ridiculous position on Ireland, made false prediction after false prediction and never publicly admitted to its errors.
- Membership figures. The IMT is now boasting that it is bigger than ever. Yet a cursory examination of its past World Congresses suggests that most of its recent growth is actually simply recovering from damaging past splits. The entire IMT combined is smaller than Militant was in the 1980s, and each national section has no more than a few hundred members at most, and is largely unknown except in hard-left circles.