An unpleasant encounter with the International Marxist Tendency (IMT): A former cultist speaks out
By: Aaron Kyereh-Mireku
Tags: Marxism, Socialism, Cult, Trotsky, Politics

Joining the IMT

After the exhilarating three-day festival, I was sold. I became a ‘comrade’ and began paying ‘subs’, beginning with around £20 a month and increasing to at one point nearly £40 a month. I was that dedicated to the organisation. I threw myself into the routine of political education, branch meetings, paper sales, contact meetings and weekly events held by the Marxist Society for students on campus. This was all in the hope of recruiting and ‘building the organisation’. We were trained to see ourselves as ‘Bolsheviks’, working towards a 1917-style revolution in Britain, which our organisation would be leading. Everything we did was geared towards grounding ourselves in ‘Marxist theory’ (i.e. a very rigid and desiccated interpretation of Marxism borrowed from Trotsky and Ted Grant), raising money and gaining more members.

Upon joining, my ‘political education’ commenced in earnest. Anyone who joined was bombarded with our organisation’s literature — our paper, our quarterly theoretical journal, books from our publishing house, articles from our website — all to keep them distracted from reading anything that was not ideologically pure. The person being initiated into the ranks would end up absorbing each and every aspect of our doctrine.

A special edition of the Socialist Appeal paper

At branch meetings, a comrade would give the ‘line’ on this or that issue, and it would be absorbed by the rest of us uncritically. We would discuss ‘contact work’, which I never got used to and found cultish. We would talk about how the last Marxist Society meeting went and plan for the next one. At the weekly meetings of the society, a comrade would give a talk for 30–40 minutes on this or that aspect of Marxist theory, putting forward the line of the organisation to a largely bemused and ignorant audience of students. Other comrades were present to make ‘interventions’ and affirm the line, deliberately creating an echo chamber in which our ideas predominated. Publicly, we were open to everyone ‘from Trot to Tory’. This was nonsense. Privately, we all knew that the main purpose of these meetings was to put forward our line and recruit to our organisation. Every cult has knowledge for outsiders and knowledge for insiders. Ours was no different.

Paper sales were another method by which members of the organisation were indoctrinated. We were kept busy and deprived of the time to think, and spent more and more time around other ‘comrades’, so that we were continuously absorbing the doctrine. Indeed, paper sales were seen as a useful opportunity to chat to contacts of the organisation. In terms of how useful they were in raising money/making recruits, the results were minimal, but we felt like we were making a big sacrifice for the cause.

Every March, at the end of second term, the organisation held its national conference. Despite the name, the average member had little say in what went on. The leadership controlled the agenda for the conference, making sure that only what it wanted to be discussed was on the program. A couple of weeks before the conference, the ‘perspectives’ for that year would be sent to all comrades. This was composed of the organisation’s analysis of that year’s political events and how the situation was likely to unfold over the course of the next few years. It was banal stuff, scraped from the pages of the Financial Times and The Economist, reworked and presented as profound Marxist analysis. Comrades were expected to take time out of their busy lives to read pages and pages of this dull, catastrophist nonsense masquerading as profound dialectical insight into the workings of global capitalism. I would be surprised if most people even read it. Those who did were encouraged to bring forward amendments, although the leadership would recommend which ones be accepted and which ones rejected. The outgoing Central Committee would present the same list of names (barring a few changes) for re-election, and out of loyalty, they would be ‘unanimously’ re-elected, and the perspectives for the coming year ‘unanimously’ adopted. Such a rate of voter approval would create envy in the most totalitarian dictatorships. Really these things were just a loyalty test, and were symbolic in nature.

The national conference

We developed our own special vocabulary, which served to create a sense of difference from those outside the ranks. Robert Jay Lifton, the famous cult expert, called this ‘loading the language’. Never before have I been in an environment in which Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’ proved more true. We called each other ‘comrade’ (a label not afforded to others on the left, but only for people who were ‘one of us’). We made cliquey in-jokes about dialectical materialism. Potential members were ‘contacts’. Talks or lectures on aspects of Marxist theory were called ‘lead-offs’. We were trained to think of ourselves as ‘cadres’, the officer corps of the future revolutionary army. We spoke of the future as ‘the coming period’. Our headquarters/national leadership was referred to as ‘the Centre’. We referred to the sect, with an air of reverence, as ‘the Organisation’. We spoke of ‘subs’ payments, our treasury was the ‘Fighting Fund’. Our full-time employees were called ‘full-timers’ or ‘leading comrades’, and were associated with moral authority and self-sacrifice. We planned ‘interventions’ at protests and events scheduled by the Labour Party, the trade unions and the labour movement more generally. We referred to our recruitment strategy as ‘finding the ones and twos’. We were promised, in the famous phrase of Ted Grant, that we would grow ‘by leaps and bounds’. We conducted ‘entrism’ in the Labour Party in the hope of achieving Grant’s vision of an organisation that would go from slow and incremental growth to rapid expansion and a mass revolutionary organisation. These perspectives were falsified in his own lifetime, but he never gave up hope, retaining his delusional faith in revolutionary socialism to the very end of his long and misspent life. By means of thought-numbing cliches, we helped to keep the flame of an 80-year-old faith alive — a faith with fewer adherents in Britain than ever before, a movement which has utterly failed in the tasks set out for it by its founders.

We were governed, as all Trotskyist groups are, by ‘democratic centralism’. In practice, this was a euphemism which meant that all comrades had to publicly defend every aspect of the organisation’s line, whatever they privately thought. This was an excellent tool for corrupting people mentally and spiritually and imposing intellectual conformity. It is also the reason why even minor differences have led to splits in the Trotskyist movement, since there will always be people headstrong enough to break party discipline so that they can freely air their views. If this means breaking with the organisation, so be it. Between conferences (which were stage-managed anyway), the leading bodies of the organisation had full control over every aspect of the organisation, including the line to take on day-to-day political events and what went in the paper and on the website.

In the run-up to the 2019 election, we were loud in our support for Corbyn. He was on every front cover of every paper for weeks, if not months. Before the election, we insisted that whatever the result, our perspectives were correct. If Corbyn lost, it was because of the right-wing media and Blairite sabotage. If he won, it was because his left-wing manifesto cut through the class divisions created by Brexit. Whatever happened, we believed that the working-class would become radicalised and move in a socialist direction. Our position was effectively unfalsifiable. Anything which transpired could be cited as ‘proof’ that only our doctrine offered salvation for the labour movement. Once all power was given to Alan Woods and the IMT, we would make the world a paradise.