Why the IMT is not ‘just like every other organisation’

Point out to an IMT cultist, or a member of any other Trotskyist sect, that their organisation is a cult, and they will respond, with all the outrage and incredulity that they can possibly muster, to the very bursting of their blood vessels, ‘We are just like every other organisation!’ Ha! As if. We (that is, those of us outside the organisation) all know that this is a load of poppycock. A boatload of baloney. A bunch of balderdash. We’ve seen it, we’ve been through it, and we all know that this is nothing more than the standard line that is trotted out by every high-control group when challenged. Scientology is fond of insisting that it is just like every other religion, and that criticism of them is equivalent to religious persecution. (Internally, Scientology denies being a religion and disparages religion and religious believers, only registering as one officially so as to dodge taxes.)

Why is the IMT not like every other organisation? After all, an IMT member might insist, all political organisations demand subs payments, seek to recruit people, put out propaganda, hire full-time organisers, have a common set of beliefs etc. How then can the IMT be a cult? How is it any different from your average political group?

Do not fall for this threadbare, utterly transparent attempt by cult apologists to pull the wool over your eyes and cover the embarrassing nakedness of their diabolical schemes, and their toxic, sinister ‘activism’, with the withered, puny fig-leaf of a specious and spurious normality. The IMT is not ‘just like every other organisation’ for the reasons I will give in this post, which I encourage any and all doubting members to read and circulate widely. A good companion piece to this post is my old post about Dennis Tourish’s analysis of Militant as a cult and how it applies to the IMT.

Recruitment

‘All political groups try to recruit!’ say Trot cultists. Yes, all political organisations seek to recruit more members so as to advance their goals. So far, so normal. But what mainstream political organisation goes to the extremes that Trotskyist groupuscules do? ‘Contact work’, for example, which is inherently exploitative as a concept. A ‘contact’, or prospective member, is a wannabe who must be initiated by a hardened ‘cadre’ into the mysteries of the group and the doctrine. There is a power imbalance right there. Is it any surprise that some more sociopathic members end up sexually grooming teenagers seeking to join the ranks? Under the guise of a (fake) personal relationship/’friendship’ with someone who is supposedly more experienced in the workings of the group and the ideology, you are gradually roped into an ever more sinister and subterranean environment, in which crucial info about what you’re getting involved in is deliberately withheld from you, for fear that you will have second thoughts about joining. From the very beginning, a contact/new ‘comrade’ is prevented from thinking for themselves and developing their own political identity and understanding, and is modelled on another person, charged with grooming them into the ‘correct ideas’. What normal political organisation goes to such lengths to recruit school students and Sixth Formers, in the way Trotskyist groups do, setting up affiliated societies there and using them to pull in naive and unsuspecting adolescents who are hardly in a position to make an informed decision as to what their political beliefs are? This is what we did when I was in the IMT, and I always dreaded the thought of being sent to a school or Sixth Form and having to give a talk about Marxism to a bunch of bemused 16-year-olds. Thank goodness I never had to do this.

There is no such thing as ‘contact work’ in a normal, healthy political organisation. There is no ‘initiation period’. There is no transition period under the guidance of a long-standing member, who has been assigned to brainwash you and psychologically ‘break’ you, before you become a full member of the organisation. Anyone who wants to join can join straight away, simply by clicking a few buttons on the Internet, and without having to have a face-to-face meeting with anyone in the organisation. A healthy political organisation does not go to embarrassing lengths to recruit people as young as 16. No normal, healthy organisation has public ‘paper sales’, or stage-managed meetings at which a ‘line’ is repeated by rote, in order to recruit people. The Labour Students meetings I went to when I was at Warwick were much more open than our highly-controlled meetings of the Marxist Society.

Nor does any normal organisation have the rapid turnover of recruits that the IMT does. This is down to the monstrous exploitation that new recruits are subjected to once they are in, which few people are able to endure for more than a few years at most. The corrupt leadership, to maintain control of the organisation at all costs, prefers to expel or hound out long-standing members who develop criticisms of the sect, and they are replaced with raw recruits who can be more easily controlled. This ruinous style of recruitment prevents these groups from developing a proper core of experienced people. Instead, a core of a few personnel of several decades’ standing remains in place whilst the majority of members are invariably relatively new and inexperienced.

Leadership

In no normal political organisation does the same person get to run the show for decades and decades without being challenged. Alan Woods has been at the helm of the IMT for thirty-one years, and is now almost 80. Peter Taaffe was at the helm of Militant and then the Socialist Party for even longer. This is not normal. In a healthy organisation, there is turnover of leadership, and a fresh set of faces are granted a turn to run the organisation. Woods prefers to remain in office until he dies, supported by his loyal minions and an enserfed and emasculated membership, which ‘unanimously’ re-elects the same people to their positions every year via the ‘slate’ system. This system has been devised for the deliberate purpose of maintaining the same people in power without challenge indefinitely. Given the laughable incompetence of people like Woods, Taaffe and North, and their long-term political failure, it would be astounding that they are still in place, were it not for the fact that they are able to cling on to power due to their bureaucratic expulsion of anyone who disagrees with them. A normal organisation would have tossed these wretched, senile disasters masquerading as great revolutionary leaders out to pasture by now.

Also, the role of ‘full-timer’ is very different in Trot groups than in normal organisations. In a normal political organisation, a full-time bureaucracy exists, but plays a more functional role. It does not generally set policy itself, but implements the decisions of the elected leadership and the members in the local branches – a leadership that is chosen in a properly democratic fashion which rarely sees ‘unanimity’ of any kind. Conversely, it can act, within limits, act somewhat independently of the leadership when it comes to things such as disciplinary action. (Jeremy Corbyn, as Labour leader, was unable to prevent some of his supporters being expelled by the party bureaucracy, despite repeated interference from his office in order to, at the very least, slow down the process, if not halt it altogether.) By contrast, in Trotskyist groups, the full-timers play not just a bureaucratic but a directly political role. They dominate the official committees (which include a sprinkling of members who aren’t full-timers to act as a fig-leaf) and use their bureaucratic authority to force through policy changes which the membership must accept as a fait accompli. There is therefore a conflict of interest. In a mainstream organisation, one can speak of some independence of bureaucratic personnel from the leadership. In Trotskyist cults, they are one and the same thing. The ‘Control Commission’, which handles disciplinary issues, is the puppet of the full-time political leadership, which is able to protect people from being thrown out for things like rape (as the Canadian comrades of the IMT are now discovering).

Trot groups have a disproportionate number of full-time employees compared to healthy political organisations. Militant boasted of having more full-timers than the Labour Party, as if this was a good thing. There is no justification for such a bloated apparatus when the organisations in question are so small and irrelevant – unless, of course, the purpose of the organisation is to subsidise a rotten core of egotistical ‘leading cadres’ and an ever-expanding bureaucracy whose power and prestige depends on having ever more full-time colleagues and subordinates to create the illusion of influence and fervent activity. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they don’t even pay their full-time employees properly. They are given poverty wages which they must top up with welfare payments. From people who call themselves champions of the working-class, is this not sick? This is labour trafficking, not socialism. The official explanation is no doubt that the full-timer is expected to represent sacrifice and self-denial in the cause of revolution. At least one very good reason for such miserable wages is to keep the full-timers in a state of miserable dependence on the organisation, making them more conformist. After all, when your livelihood is literally dependent on political loyalty to whatever line your comrades have decided upon, are you going to stick your neck out and try and change things or challenge wrongdoing? Dennis Tourish, John Throne and many a brave soul in these organisations tried to do so, and were repaid by being thrown out and left destitute and emotionally ruined.

Subs

I have written at length on this before, but the amount demanded in terms of subs’ payments outweighs anything a normal organisation would demand. IMT members themselves know this. I am confident that the average Bolshevik member, who in all likelihood was a struggling industrial worker or impoverished student unable to practice his or her chosen profession, was not able to spare the sheer amount of money that Trot groups today demand of their members, yet they were not thought any less of by their revolutionary comrades.

Activity

The amount of activity demanded from the average member is far in excess of what a normal organisation demands. It is ruinous, making a member’s life revolve around serving the sect, all for the power and prestige of the crooked apparatus that, Ozymandias-like, oversees these hideous exertions and revolting sacrifices. Branch every week is already two hours of your time, plus paper sales, which is another hour or two, student society meetings, which is another couple of hours, then the occasional demo, Labour Party event, or other ‘intervention’ at which you may be expected to be present. This is not healthy. The average member is bombarded with political propaganda every single week – the same cliches and slogans, the same ‘lessons’ given by rote for every political event, the same absurd predictions and anticipations of catastrophe and apocalyptic horror, unless the revolution happens and the sect, the one true organisation that can save humanity, seizes power. Where do you get the time to live your life in between all this ceaseless and unnecessary activity? In a normal organisation, you are not expected to do much beyond pay subs and attend the odd branch meeting. Most people don’t even do the latter. Political organisations don’t have the mass memberships they used to, and people don’t want to dedicate so much time to political activism, when there are a million other things demanding their attention, and a million other causes that have come to take centre-stage beyond the purely political.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, the formal and informal ‘socials’ that are held after branch, or deliberately scheduled every other day, week or month, force you to redefine your whole social life in terms of the organisation. These are not innocent social gatherings, but tools of social control, in which you are surrounded by other ‘comrades’ (and contacts invited for indoctrination purposes) for several hours every week, and aren’t socialising with real friends and family, with people who actually like you for who you are (and are not just hanging out with you because they have no choice and have practically no one outside the group they interact with), with people who make your life worthwhile and strengthen you emotionally and spiritually. There is invariably very heavy drinking at these ‘socials’, and endless political discussion in which the same rote themes and proclamations are repeated over and over again. Normal political organisations do not have these endless social events. Most members are too busy working and looking after their families to spend all their time attending these gatherings. Only in my bohemian student days could I afford to go to these events all the time. I don’t think the Bolsheviks spent so much time throwing drunken parties in between their trying to avoid detection by the Tsarist police and infiltration by spies. You could probably count in the handful the number of social gatherings Lenin attended during his entire lifetime. It isn’t great for the professionalism of any political group, and creates the image of privileged middle-class people, insulated from the cares of the real world, behaving like over-grown students, quoting Lenin and Trotsky like the Bible at their never-ending, exclusive social gatherings whilst getting sloshed every week and spending remarkable amounts on alcohol. A proletarian existence it is not. The average worker does not have the time or money to spend on such nonsense. This is what the subs of the organisation are being spent on, and the energy of so many ‘cadres’ is being wasted on. Such an inward-looking social environment further cuts off the members from actual workers, and guarantees the irrelevance of any such organisation.

Democratic centralism

Every functioning organisation, political or otherwise, requires unity and common values, with a leadership that is respected and obeyed, within reason. Everyone agrees on that. IMT cultists, and other Trots, will use this as a strawman argument, to suggest that attacking the ‘democratic centralism’ used by these organisations is tantamount to saying that no organisation should have a baseline of discipline and ideological unity. But this is a deliberate exercise in missing the point. The amount of unity and loyalty demanded by Trotskyist sects of their members goes far beyond what a normal organisation would demand from its members. Trotskyist cults abuse the loyalty of their members to create conformist drones of their supporters, and stultify any and all critical thinking. Blind and uncritical obedience is demanded from all members, and anyone who asks difficult questions or tries to challenge anything the leadership does or says to even the slightest degree is made unwelcome and shown the door. The slightest ideological difference will open you up to slander, bullying and abuse, and, at the most extreme end, expulsion. ‘Democratic centralism’ is nothing more than a euphemism used by Trotskyist cults, and all other far-left sects, to describe an internal regime in which there is complete ideological unanimity and conformity on all issues, to the smallest possible degree. Go on the website of any Trotskyist group, and you will see that all of their votes at national and international conferences are described as being ‘unanimous’. Is this normal? In what normal political group does the membership unanimously vote for anything? Is this not a sign that there is some bureaucratic manipulation and social pressure being exerted on the members to uncritically wave through everything the leadership wants? Did the Bolsheviks, prior to the 1920s and the bureaucratisation of the party, have ‘unanimous’ votes on anything at all? Was Lenin not frequently in a minority? Is there anything healthy about this unanimity, or is it not a sign of a disturbing level of groupthink?

In fact, the Bolsheviks were rife with factions, and there was a lively amount of political debate within their ranks. There was no single Bolshevik ‘paper’, but a bunch of different papers which published different points of view within the organisation. No Trotskyist group allows this today. Instead, there is a single paper, controlled entirely by the full-time bureaucracy, which only includes the approved political line. In my two and a half years of membership in the IMT, I never once saw any meaningful political disagreement on anything. This is not normal. At all. It is one of the sure signs of the organisation being a cult. Any horizontal communication within the organisation is banned, and all political discussion must take place through the approved channels so that the leadership can control, and ultimately cut off, any discussion that is not to its liking.

A normal organisation does not ban people from reading outside a narrow reading list, or demand that everyone uphold a precise ‘line’ on a controversial event that happened over a century ago, even if it is one to which many in the organisation hold a sentimental attachment. Saying that a member of a Trotskyist group must uphold a precise line on obscure and complex historical events and arguments, like the question of whether or not the USSR was a workers’ state, and uncritically celebrate the legacy of the 1917 revolution, is like saying that a Tory Party member must uphold 1979 as the greatest year in history because it marked the accession of Margaret Thatcher, and any scrutiny of 1979 from within a conservative point of view should be banned and anyone who attempts it hounded out. By that metric, more traditionally-minded Tories like Roger Scruton or Harold Macmillan would not have found a home in the Tory Party. Or if a liberal party demanded that all its members uncritically celebrate 1789 and the French Revolution, and created a cult around Robespierre, thus preventing more conservative-minded liberals from being a part of it. Moreover, no normal organisation expels, hounds out and slanders dedicated veterans to the extent that Trotskyist groups do. It is a bit like if Lenin had decided to expel Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Luncharsky, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, Kollontai etc.

Conclusion

Anyone who says that the IMT, or any other Trot cult, is ‘just like every other organisation’, is talking out of the dark, subterranean depths of their posterior.