When I was in the IMT, my life revolved around the organisation. Every week I would attend branch, for two hours in the evening. I would attend every Marxist Society event (and sometimes give talks), which was another two hours of my time, more, in fact, since we would have a social in the pub late into the evening, talking to ‘contacts’ (which I hated doing) and other crap. If I hadn’t been so lonely and without any other outlet for social interaction, I would not have wasted so much time socialising with these awful people. I came to almost every paper sale, which was usually over an hour. I would attend Labour Party and trade union meetings for the purposes of ‘intervention’. During the summer, I would attend demos in London selling papers on behalf of the cult. I attended every national event and met other comrades from other branches. I was in the top 10% of most active members in the organisation. I played a leading role in my branch at uni as my branch’s Labour officer, conducting our interventions in the local labour movement. I paid high subs. (A common slander against ex-members is ‘Oh, they didn’t even pay subs’ or that their subs payments were derisory.) When I was at home, I would spend hours reading IMT propaganda and interacting with other members on social media. What a healthy life.
I am telling you all this (and repeating it throughout all my posts) so that if any IMT cultists try to slander me by re-writing history and revising my record, they can be rebuked with the stone-cold truth – that I was a very dedicated and loyal (indeed, over-dedicated and over-loyal) member. I remained loyal despite bullying, slander, ostracism and unpleasant behaviour from other members in my branch during my first year, who pretended to be my friends to lure me in, but were simply using me to build their cult and exploiting my enthusiasm and energy for their own purposes. My presence, as a black member, allowed them to feel less guilty about largely being clueless, white middle-class students who had lived sheltered lives and had no idea what reality and suffering and ‘oppression’ is like, besides the garbage they had read in Trotsky. They were disappointed when I didn’t kowtow to their prejudices and voiced ‘reactionary’ opinions like the evils of excessive drinking. Thankfully they mostly left, allowing me to really flourish in my final year as a member of the branch. They are still spending their sorry lives in the cult whilst I am free, and repaying me for my dedication and loyalty by spreading lies about me throughout the organisation. Well, at least I’m out. And ever since I have been living a cult-free life. I have read dozens of books, discovered a new world of art and culture that has been indispensable to my mental recovery, gotten myself a paying job and feel like a fuller human being than ever before. I have abandoned Marxism for good and returned to the path of Nietzsche, Emerson, Stirner and Hitchens. I am recovering psychologically from the evil that was done me. This horrific experience has proven to be good for my spiritual growth.
It is possible to live a cult-free life. So many of the people in these organisations will leave once they realise the truth, and this blog is meant to help them reach the correct conclusions more quickly. I spent two and a half years on the IMT. You do not have to spend that long. Some people leave after a year or a few months. You don’t have to spend years and years on these people, deferring living your life for the revolution. Anybody who tells you to sacrifice yourself and defer living your life now for a glorious future is a scoundrel who is trying to swindle you – whether that is a religious fundamentalist, a self-help guru or a revolutionary socialist organisation. We must, as Nietzsche and others have argued, relearn the value of a healthy selfishness, and throw off the corrupt, Judaeo-Christian ethic that self-sacrifice is the highest good. Those who issue the loudest calls for sacrifice are, invariably, those seeking or enjoying power over others. We must sacrifice so that they can enjoy the ego trip of being great leaders and visionaries without having to make any sacrifices of their own. This is not true for all people, but it is true for many. It is certainly true for the leaders of Trotskyist cults. Why the hell was I paying £30+ a month in subs to Socialist Appeal for Alan Woods to write lengthy articles that no one read, to fly around the world giving lectures to rooms that were three-quarters empty, for Wellred to publish expensive new editions of Marxist ‘classics’ (with no reason to justify the increased price beside a glossy new cover and a foreword by Woods or Rob Sewell), for a fancy office that must have cost thousands a month to rent, for full-timers to live on poverty wages – why? Was this organisation worthy of all those sacrifices? Absolutely not.
Whilst IMT cultists have wasted the last eight months on a cult, here is what I have been doing:
-I completed an internship with the Henry Jackson Society
-I read Orlando Figes’ brilliant book on the Russian Revolution, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, Vivan Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life and Gareth Stedman Jones’ Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, The Dawn, The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, all of Dostoevsky’s major novels and short stories, the second volume of Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin, Book I of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, On Liberty by J.S. Mill, Hamlet and The Tempest by William Shakespeare, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens and The Stranger by Albert Camus.
-Got a new paying job, as aforementioned
-Listened to all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies and discovered Mahler’s Third Symphony
-Went to see a production of The Tempest in The Globe Theatre in London
If I had still been in the IMT, would I have had the time to do all this reading and cultural exploration? Of course not. Instead of reading all these brilliant authors, I would have been reading garbage from Alan Woods, Rob Sewell and their minions. You are what you read. If you fill your mind with nonsense, that will define your life. If you fill your head with wisdom, with what Matthew Arnold called ‘the best which has been thought and said’, that, too, will define your life. I am absolutely convinced that I am better off reading Dostoevsky, Dickens and Nabokov, George Eliot, J.S. Mill and Shakespeare and Friedrich Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as opposed to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Ted Grant, and other pseudo-intellectuals and cult leaders. And I am absolutely better off listening to Beethoven and Mahler than the idiotic lyrics of ‘Solidarity Forever’ (Christ, I hated that song) and other ridiculous revolutionary songs.
Isn’t it good to be free?