Trotskyist cults are known for lying about their membership figures. They have good reason to. Given the gap between their minuscule size and their brazen boasts of their indispensability, they have every incentive to falsify their figures so as to make themselves out to be bigger than they actually are. Someone from the IMT once boasted on this blog that they now have 4000 members worldwide. Even if this is true, all it means is that their bigger ‘sections’ have several hundred members, with the small ones having maybe a couple hundred. It means nothing. None of them are prominent in their respective countries or have any political influence. Rosa Lichtenstein has shown on her blog, based on an analysis of IMT articles, that most of their ‘growth’ is in fact recovering from damaging past splits. In 2008 the IMT had about 350 members at its World Congress. Due to splits, this number severely decreased over the years. At the 2019 World School (which I attended) we boasted about 400 members in attendance. In other words, it took 11 years for the IMT to make up its losses. This in the years after the 2008 crisis, when one would expect a radicalisation within society. During all this time, it would boast every year of a glorious advance for the organization in terms of membership and political level, including when I was a member.
It is unlikely that any Trotskyist cult has gone above 10,000 members. Militant, at its height, claimed 8000 – and this is likely an exaggeration. What usually happens is that these groups will recruit a few thousand people at most, and then plateau, before collapsing due to splits and people getting fed up and leaving. Since the founding of the Fourth International in 1938, which began with a handful of cadres scattered across the world, Trotskyism has been divided into innumerable sects numbering anywhere from a few dozen to a couple thousand members. Trotskyism’s in-built tendency to factionalism guarantees that no sect will rise beyond a certain figure before having a catastrophic split for some reason or other.
One problem with increasing membership is that it becomes harder and harder to indoctrinate them, and there is always a tendency for a faction within the leadership to manipulate the new, young and inexperienced members by turning them against rival, old-time members, driving them out and setting up a new regime. This is precisely what Peter Taaffe did in his faction fight with Ted Grant in the late 1980s, and it is what Alan Woods and co have done in the IMT with their turn towards student activists, something that involved throwing old comrades like John Pickard under the bus. The more members such an organisation has, the harder they are to control, the more likely there is to be a difference of opinion and the more likely there will be splits and purges to restore revolutionary purity, based on Trotsky’s concept of ‘from a scratch to gangrene’ – the idea that even a slight deviation on the part of a group of members requires a split to restore revolutionary purity.
Another problem is burnout. Only a tiny minority of individuals are willing to be ‘professional revolutionaries’ who waste all their time on endless meetings, paper sales, political indoctrination etc. Even those who join will often end up burning out and leaving. It is known as ‘revolving door syndrome’. The idea that such an organization will ever attract more than a handful of people is pure utopianism. There are more ex-members of such groups than actual members, many deeply embittered about their involvement and who become cynical reactionaries for the rest of their lives. Ultimately, people want to have normal lives – enjoy relationships, start families, have proper careers – and not waste it in the stultifying atmosphere of a cult. As Christopher Hitchens wrote in 1994 about his own departure from the IS:
…I recollect the empty feeling I had when I quietly cancelled my membership and did a fade. I remember trying to tell myself that I was leaving for the same reasons I had joined. But the relief – at ceasing to hear about ‘rank and file’ and ‘building links’ – soon supplanted the guilt.
Of course, Trotskyists would argue that their small size does not matter – that when the ‘objective conditions’ heat up, the masses will come rallying to their sect for leadership, and they will lead the workers to power in a 1917-style revolution. This is based on the experience of the Bolsheviks, who had about 8,000 members at the very beginning of 1917, only for that number to dramatically increase as the revolution got underway. Of course, what they even neglect to mention is that the Bolsheviks had a much more liberal internal regime than that which exists in today’s Trotskyist sects, the kind of internal regime that allowed thousands of ordinary working-class people, who had not read a word of Marx, to join. This was at a time when many of the important cadres of the party were in exile, or dead, and the organisation had been penetrated with police agents. The few leaders that were able to get back to the capital in time for the revolution, such as Stalin, were conservative bureaucrats who acted as a break on the impatient masses – the opposite of being the ‘revolutionary cadres’ that Trotskyists talk about. The Bolshevik leaders gave critical support to the Provisional Government, only to be sternly reprimanded by Lenin, who returned from exile in April 1917 and set about trying to win over his recalcitrant party to the idea of an insurrection. In arguing his case, Lenin leaned upon the rank-and-file, and even threatened to resign from the Central Committee so he could take his case to them directly. If someone tried to do this in today’s Trotskyist sects, they would be unceremoniously expelled and the result would be a debilitating split.
Lenin’s gamble to seize power would not have prevailed without a lot of luck, like the fact that he had no real rivals within the party who could have seriously challenged him, the relatively open internal regime that allowed him to make his case without being expelled (unlike that of Trotskyist cults today), the fact that the Provisional Government was incompetent and did not attempt to have the leading Bolsheviks executed, the fact that the Petrograd garrison remained neutral during the insurrection itself, and the fact that the war had destroyed the old regime and created a massive vacuum of power. This enabled a relatively small organisation (about 200,000 members at the time of the October coup) to take power over a country of almost 200 million people. The Bolsheviks comprised about 0.1% of the total population at the time of their seizure of power. Quite the accomplishment, you must admit. But then you remember that this led to a brutal civil war that lasted for about four years and led to millions of deaths, and that the regime that emerged from it became more repressive as a result of the experience of being under siege, as well as of its commitment to a totalitarian ideology. This regime went on to kill millions more in pursuit of a rapid industrialisation and the destruction of the peasantry, from which the country never recovered. A sixth of the Earth’s surface groaned under the weight of this oppressive party-state that could barely feed its own people for 70 years, before it was decided to accept the failure of the experiment. If this is the model that Trotskyists want to look to for the building of a ‘revolutionary organisation’, I think we have some hard questions to ask about the judgement of the people leading this effort.
Today’s Trotskyist sects are even smaller than the Bolsheviks were in 1917 relative to their populations. Militant, at its height, only comprised 0.01% of the population of Britain. Today, its successor, Socialist Appeal, boasts a membership of about 600 in Britain. That is to say, it comprises 0.0009% of the population. The Communist Party of Great Britain, the age-old enemies of the Trotskyist left, did far better than any Trotskyist sect, gaining a peak of almost 60,000 members around the time of WWII, sharply stagnating after the war’s end. It was dwarfed by the Labour Party and trade unions, that could boast a membership of hundreds of thousands. It can at least claim to have had the same number of members in proportion to the country as a whole as the Bolsheviks in 1917 – about 0.1%. Despite the existence of the USSR and a Communist International and despite the prestige of Communism being at its height, the CPGB never came close to launching a revolution or enjoying state power, how much less the puny Trotskyist sects who have never risen above a few thousand members?
To be in the same position as the Bolsheviks were in November 1917, an American ‘Bolshevik’ sect would have to have about 300,000 members. This will never happen. The Bolsheviks only got to where they did because of a devastating cataclysm that brought down the old regime and made large sections of the population amenable to radical ideas. If anything like that happens again, the world will be destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse. We can therefore rule out any chance of a Bolshevik-style coup happening anywhere anytime soon. Even if a revolution did occur, it would not be led by any Trotskyist group, but by an organisation with ideas that are not borrowed from the experience of a backward empire in 1900s, and not based on the corrupt internal regime the Bolsheviks adopted in the 1920s and which was extended to the Comintern.