When I first joined the IMT, the organisation was in the middle of developing its social media presence. This is at the heart of the organisation’s cultish nature. This is what the cult expert Lifton called ‘milieu control’. Against my better judgement, I was persuaded to get Facebook for the first time in order to be part of the sect’s network of communication. This drew me into an echo chamber which served to give me a whole bunch of ‘friends’ and comrades in Britain and across the world. It was a deliberate tactic we used to ‘integrate’ members. The average member would be bombarded with endless IMT propaganda on their feed, and the peer pressure that resulted from being part of this bizarre social network would enforce conformity on the part of every individual. We were encouraged to post IMT propaganda in the form of sharing articles written by the sect and promoting our ‘line’ on each and every issue. Anyone who made the mistake of falling on the wrong side of the sect would be publicly shamed by other ‘comrades’ on social media, and whatever they said would be filed away and used against them when it became expedient to do so.
This sort of echo chamber is not unique to the IMT. One can find echo-chambers of all kinds on social media, regardless of political ideology. Of course, far-left cults like the IMT and the woke left have particularly toxic echo-chambers. The phenomenon of ‘cancel culture’ is a means by which anyone who dares to think critically is shunned, excommunicated and has their career and their personal life destroyed for daring to speak out against the barbarous, ignorant (largely left-leaning) herd on social media.
Being part of this echo-chamber was one of the most traumatic experiences of my entire life. My past self would not have spent even five minutes interacting with such fanatics, but would have crossed the other side of the street to avoid them. Now here I was in the midst of these Leninist loons. There was no escape. I had feelings of foreboding from the very beginning about the whole thing, and I was proved right when I was publicly humiliated for resigning two and a half years later. I should have listened to my gut instinct and fled for my life rather than spend any time at all around these cranks. Instead I dedicated my life to a cult and was burned in the process. Never again.
One of the weirdest aspects of being part of the IMT’s social media cult was how the organisation would create profile badges for us to wear, often related to this or that heated political topic. As you can see from the above screenshot, the latest one is related to the internal struggles within the Labour Party. There was no surer way of proving one’s dedication to the cause than wearing one of these badges in your profile. On Twitter, an IMT member can be easily discerned by the fact that they share the organisation’s articles uncritically, have ‘IMT’ in their bio along with a bunch of flags (red flag, LGBT flag, Palestine flag) and use the usual ‘loaded language’ of the organisation, including jokes about diamat. When you enter into this environment, you are entering a world of regimentation and conformity of the kind that social media is adept at creating. For people who bang on about how self-realisation is stymied under capitalism and dream of the lives they will live under ‘fully automated luxury communism’, they have no problem reproducing everything they hate in their sect, with their cultish slogans, their mass-produced badges, their boilerplate articles that mirror the jargon-laden prose of your average FTSE 500 company, their uncritical obedience of the party line, etc.
Another thing has also struck me. If you go on Tory Twitter, or Labour Twitter, or the Twitter space of just about any mainstream political organisation, you will find party members and supporters complaining about and openly criticising their party or its leadership for this or that failure. You will find Democrats whinging about Joe Biden’s uselessness. You will find Labour Party supporters mocking Starmer or ridiculing Corbyn. You will find Tory party members bashing Boris. But you will not find any IMT member criticising their organisation. You will instead find them saying nothing but good things about the cult and encouraging people to get involved. You will never see an IMT member criticise Alan Woods on Twitter or Facebook, or say openly that they disagree with this or that aspect of the organisation’s doctrine or positions. This is the definition of a cult – an organisation in which everyone, publicly at least, holds to the exact same positions on every question. When I was in the cult, we were told not to air any of our political differences on social media or anywhere online – this was strictly for ‘internal debate’ that could be stage-managed by the leadership. After all, we wouldn’t want our enemies to use it against us, would we? When talking to ‘contacts’, we would only share the good sides of the organisation, and hide any untoward aspects that would put them off joining. Soon it would be too late – they would be ‘in’, and only painful experience would wake them up to the reality of the group.
IMT members disingenuously claim, in response to my cult criticisms, that they could apply to any political organisation, and therefore my cult analysis is invalid. But what other political organisation with a healthy internal regime bans its members from expressing any critical thought publicly? The Labour and Tory parties do not feel any need to do this. Granted, the government of the day imposes ‘collective responsibility’ on all of its members, preventing them from airing disagreements in public, but this is in order to preserve a functioning government. It does not apply to the whole party, especially not grassroots activists. Imagine if Tory members were banned from publicly criticising Boris Johnson. The average grassroots member, who is invariably to the right of the leadership, would end up walking out in protest rather than remain in such a stultified environment, leaving behind only time-servers and careerists. Many Labour members reacted angrily when Blair made moves to reduce the channels through which grassroots members could criticise his leadership, and said so openly. Yet Trotskyist cults do not hold themselves to similar standards. The fact that members can openly air their views is why mainstream political organisations are so big and have hundreds of thousands of members, whilst Trotskyist cults will only ever attain a few thousand at best. Most people do not want to be subjected to such thought control, and instinctively rebel against it. That is why only totalitarian dictatorship will guarantee the triumph of Trotskyism.
So, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. The IMT is a cult.