A common attack launched against those who desert the cause is that we were never true Marxists in the first place. There is truth in this. Frank S. Meyer does say in The Moulding of Communists that the true Marxist-Leninist must conform so rigidly to an ideal type so inhuman, that those who fall away can arguably be legitimately described as having never been true Marxist-Leninists in spirit. If being a true Trotskyist or a true Marxist is defined in the following terms:
-Believing that the IMT is the only true Trotskyist, and indeed Marxist, and indeed socialist, organisation, and that only it can save humanity.
-Believing in uncritical obedience and loyalty to an organisation and its leadership, and never questioning its judgement or its internal regime
-Never giving in to doubt or scepticism about the doctrine
-Not having mental health issues
-Being able to suppress one’s individualism and willfulness for the greater good
Then no, I was never a Marxist or a Trotskyist, since I violated all those requirements. Indeed, I can say in all honesty that I was never a Trotskyist or Marxist in spirit, insofar as I still had my ‘pre-cult self’, as cult expert Steven Hassan calls it, buried amongst all of the antiquated and obscurantist rubbish that was piled up on top of the coarse and un-Marxist material of my divided soul. I had any deviation bullied out of me. I was outwardly conforming, and indeed, being more conformist than everyone else, but inwardly, I asked myself whether I truly believed in what I was doing. It was almost like having a dissociative disorder. What I was being subjected to was cultish abuse, and a part of me knew this was the case before I fully woke up to it. I just rationalised it as ‘discipline’. I remember Christopher Hitchens, in his memoir, calling his own experience of this ‘keeping two sets of books’. With his Marxist pals in the SWP he was Comrade Hitchens, the rabble-rousing revolutionary denouncing the establishment. But he was just ‘Christopher’ with his friends in the literary world – people like Martin Amis who he met when he was at Oxford, whom he went drinking and partying and having fun with. I didn’t even have that at university. I was a complete loner with only this awful political cult for company.
Needless to say, this was untenable. Hitchens, too, threw over Marxist revolutionism for the cause of art and literature and free expression when his comrades decided to give their critical support to Islamofascism. It is notable that in the beginning of my final year at university, I rekindled my love of literature. I loved studying English Literature at school and it was my strongest subject along with history. I did English Literature at A-Level and indeed, gained my best grade in that subject. Clearly, I was a better literary critic than a historian or political scientist. Yet such was my passion for history and politics (which I went on to study at university) that I neglected my love of literature and read practically no fiction for about two years. I was ashamed at having never read Pride and Prejudice, or Don Quixote, or many other great works. I realised that I needed to rectify this. So I ordered several books from Amazon and began filling my shelf with said books. I read Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain all within a few weeks of each other. I was consciously trying to move away from only reading Trotskyist propaganda, and diversify my reading material. I believe that this marks the beginning of my intellectual and emotional shift away from the ‘correct ideas’ of Grantism. I had started by reading non-political material – perfectly innocent, in the circumstances, and I had no idea it would lead to my resignation. I would graduate to reading anti-Trotskyist non-fiction, and then I would become a renegade and forsake Marxism. My true spirit was perhaps that of the artist and not that of the political agitator.
After my departure from the organisation, I tried to avoid any political material and read largely fiction. I was not entirely successful. I stopped reading IMT propaganda for a bit and read other stuff. I read Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, his famous anti-communist novel, and really identified with the character of Rubashov. I read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I read The Plague by Camus also, a very topical novel to read during a pandemic. I don’t think I enjoyed the latter two as much as the first one. I remember struggling to focus during much of The Plague. I kept thinking about the IMT and getting incredibly angry and disturbed in the middle of my attempt to read the book. I finished it in its entirety, but I cannot explain it to you properly. I have resolved to re-read it at some point. Eventually, I largely gave up on fiction and focused on reading cult recovery material, stuff on the Russian Revolution and critiques of Marxism, to better process what I’d been through. Escaping through fiction simply didn’t work in the end.
I have returned to fiction in the last several months, with a vengeance. After finishing two extremely dense books on Marx back in April, I have resolved to read fiction for the foreseeable future. The thought of reading another book about Marxism or the Russian Revolution makes me ill. Rediscovering my love of literature, reading all those books and writers I never got to read or never read enough of, and regaining an appreciation for fiction that I had lost, or was in danger of losing, has been magnificent. Just a couple of days ago I read Book II of Middlemarch by George Eliot, and was blown away by Eliot’s craft and her gift for characterisation. With every day that passes, I identify more and more with the idealistic doctor Lydgate, who hates playing politics in the stuffy provincial town, the passionate young artist Will Ladislaw, with his unrequited passion for Dorothea Brooke, and the aimless young Fred Vincy and his (unrequited or not?) love for Mary Garth, who seeks some way of escaping from his training for the Church. These ‘petty-bourgeois individualists’ of a nineteenth-century provincial England that was excoriated by Marx and his contemporaries for its philistinism and monstrous oppression of working-class people are as far from the ideal of Marxist revolutionaries as chalk and cheese. Yet I feel an emotional connection with them. And this makes me thoroughly un-Marxist, though I don’t care one bit.
This is how I know I was never cut out to be a Marxist. Precisely because there is some detachment of art from life, one is able to dream a little and explore new provinces of the soul, thus attaining spiritual and psychological growth, whereas Marxism denounces rumination on the inner life as petty-bourgeois navel-gazing and a distraction from conscientious revolutionary action in line with the scientifically-ascertained laws of History, which are beyond the province of individual experience, and to which the individual, whatever his fancies, must bow. I reject that foul preaching. Even as a Trot, I was still more of a Romantic than an Enlightenment kind of guy. And if I must choose between romantic individualism, with all its imperfections – its love of escapism and intoxication, its cult of feeling and its sentimentality – and the ‘scientific’ pretensions of Marxist pseudo-science, I would much rather plump for the former as not pretending to be in strict alignment with reason, and being more in harmony with my own spirit. I remember telling myself before I left the IMT that even if I was totally wrong about my increasing doubts about the organisation, I would rather be wrong and exercise my own will in leaving and being free to think for myself again, than remain in the group to be bullied back into the ‘correct’ position. This sudden rebelliousness, this raging wantonness that led me to cast off the shackles of two and a half years of pretended associations and artificial acquaintances, didn’t come from nowhere. It came out of the striving of my imprisoned soul to be free, its kicking and screaming against the iron bars that held fast against my freedom and the world’s reality. But in the end, daylight, wonderful daylight, inimitable daylight, bearing truth in its rays, shone through the gaps of my cage with marvellous force and illuminated my dark world full of deceit and despondency, ending my long, lonely, lacerating night of a life lived at the mercy of mendacious tyrants. I would find my own way, I would walk along my own path, I would no longer be afraid of my own will and my own whims, and would have the courage of my convictions to solemnly declare what I thought and felt before the entire world, determining that my every word would be as the Yea and Amen of the Lord Almighty. Having said to myself that I would resign, I refused to go back on my resolution. I would do the unthinkable, and do what I had not dared to do before. I would break free of this monstrous entanglement and declare my independence. As Dostoevsky has his narrator say in his brilliant work, Notes from Underground (1864):
What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice…
I was never a Marxist in spirit. I was always a non-conformist, a loner, a rebel, and an individualist, who liked doing things my own way, and kept myself apart from the herd. It was never going to end well for me in the IMT. I would either rebel and reclaim my freedom, or I would remain trapped, hating myself for not being brave enough to exercise my will so as to either openly rebel, or more fully conform. Just as Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch thinks that she can make her husband Casaubon love her more with ever more sacrifice and self-abnegation, so I thought that if I showed ever more conformity and loyalty to the IMT, I would be rewarded some day when the revolution came and I could boast of having played a small part. I was wrong.
At long last, I have rediscovered myself. After a long exile from native territory, wandering along the vast seas of enchantment and disenchantment, illusion and disillusionment, you must forgive me if I utter a delighted shriek of recognition when I catch a glimpse of the shimmering, golden coast that forms part of that illustrious hinterland that I so shamefully abandoned in a fit of self-boredom and whimsical self-deception. Paradise, my own personal paradise of the self, was lost, but paradise has been regained, and with that, my lost time, and with that, my lost memories, which shall be as a sturdy foundation-stone and cement upon which I shall construct my imagined mansion of a future life, lived in freedom.