NOVANEWS
In this email we provided our screenshot evidence as well as greater detail of anecdotal accounts of harassment and misinformation. Furthermore it contains our statements of resignation from Socialist Appeal and outlines our wider political grievances with the organisation. Certain lines that pertained to the organisation’s recent orientation to Scottish nationalism have been included in brackets because they did not appear in the version of the email that was sent but they were present in an earlier draft.
As of 16/04/2015 we have not received an official response from the organisation. Through second-hand reports from Socialist Appeal members who are still on good terms with us, we have heard that the first response of the leadership was to dismiss the concerns of our email and claim that they would not be able to take any action over our concerns because we are no longer members. They also dismissed the screenshot evidence because they believe they cannot be sure that Shaista Waqif did not ‘reciprocate in person’. They described the arguments in the email as ‘rambling’ and ‘politically incorrect’ without explaining why – indeed failing to provide even a single political counter-argument to any of the points made.
In the same vein, we heard that our single offhand reference to Mao Zedong – intended as an example to prove a wider point – was interpreted as a political or theoretical endorsement which was subsequently pompously dismissed. This unofficial response only proved the point we were trying to make: not that we were uncritically proposing Maoism as a political solution but that the tendency preaches a version of Marxism that often appears to be arrogant, disrespectful and aloof toward the real history, traditions, and popular memory of communism as it existed in the 20th century, especially where and how it was/is practiced by the masses in oppressed nations.
Furthermore they made the incredible claim that we are not workers and that we did not understand the ‘class position’ (because apparently petit-bourgeois party activists instinctively have a superior understanding of class politics than working-class Marxists). Finally we heard that we are all permanently banned from the organisation, presumably for the contents of this email.
At the same time an internal email was circulated among CC members and branch secretaries for the purpose of branch secretaries to respond to comrades in their area if any of them asked about our group and the events that unfolded. The email claimed that we “recently resigned from the organisation”. This is the first inaccuracy because we did not resign, the emails sent by Ben Glineciki forced our hand, the tone of these emails heavily suggested they had long ago written us off and were essentially hoping that we did not respond so could remove us without kicking up a fuss.
The best we could do at this point was to leave on our own terms. The email went on to say that we had been “posting personal attacks and serious allegations on Facebook over the last few days. Such attacks speak for themselves about the attitude of these people towards our organisation.” The comments that were made on Facebook were an immediate response to the wall of silence we were faced with after sending our email, some of us resorted to aggressive and provocative comments because we were outraged by the shutting down of any any formal channels of complaint due to their complete failure to respond to our email.
Though vitriolic statements were certainly made about particular comrades who were singled out as the worst offenders in terms of complicity in instances of harassment, we believe it was not without justification: we stand by the principle that in the struggle against oppression a few off-colour remarks on our part is infinitely less dangerous than the unthinking defence of individuals accused of harassment and abuse. In addition, we do not savour being referred to as “these people” when cumulatively we had been committed comrades who fought alongside “these people” for many years.
The email claims that the EC “took the original allegations seriously. They were originally brought to the attention of the EC in June 2014, by way of overhearing rumours…we immediately contacted the comrades concerned with a request that such allegations should be referred to the control commission which would investigate the matter. However they never referred the matter to the control commission…From June 2014 to March 2015, those allegations continued to circulate…The EC and other comrades repeatedly encouraged the comrades concerned to raise the allegations through the channels of the organisation, but they consistently refused to do so.” It bears mentioning that the way the EC responded in June 2014 to these overheard rumours was by taking a very interrogative tone that had more to do with scolding us for speaking out of line and baiting us to prematurely refer our allegations to the organisation before we felt we were ready, rather than a sincere attempts to address our concerns; meaning we were extremely reluctant to refer these allegations to the control commission at that time.
From June 2014 to March 2015 our reasons for not referring our allegations to the organisation were numerous. Many of us still had faith in the organisation and wanted to continue to be a part of its political life . We therefore believed that a) if the organisation did take our claims seriously it would cause irreversible fallout and a huge blow to the organisation which we didn’t want, or b) we were equally afraid that it would not be taken seriously at all, the leadership would dismiss it and we would be politically isolated and for as long as we were in the organisation be considered in far less good standing. Throughout we also carried an uncomfortable suspicion that our allegations would not be taken seriously; the lack of response to this email has only confirmed those suspicions.
The organisation’s internal email goes on to claim that “in March 2015…the EC wrote to the comrades in question, twice, insisting that the complaint be raised through the appropriate structures.” This conveniently omits the threat of expulsion that was present in the EC’s (Ben Gliniecki’s) emails. Furthermore, as can actually be seen in our email below we explicitly state that we are happy to present our evidence to the “official channels of the organisation”, yet the internal email continues to say: “Despite these resignations we are still insisting that the official channels of the organisation be used…[we] are therefore proposing that a control commission be held to investigate the matter”. If this is the case then we would have received a response at this point assuring us that the control commission has begun its investigation. We have received nothing. Moreover, as was said earlier, we have heard – whether it is true or not – that the organisation is relieving itself of the responsibility of investigating these allegations as we are no longer members of the organisation.
We want to make it clear that we do not have any particular sympathy for any other revolutionary socialist group or sect and we are not attempting to publish this in an effort to discredit Socialist Appeal in the eyes of these other sects. Indeed, the problems that we observed in Socialist Appeal are in our experience symptomatic of a general malaise that seems to afflict revolutionary socialist groups in all Western bourgeois societies. In fact, the reason we even joined Socialist Appeal was because we found other groups such as these even more repellent. Despite this, we are publishing this email we want to make public what has occurred within the British section of the IMT to members still in the organisation as well as others in the revolutionary and labour movement in Britain and internationally.
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For the attention of the full-time members of the British section of the IMT,
The following is a response to the emails sent by Ben Gliniecki on the 13th and 20th of March to Ajmal Waqif, Shaista Waqif, Samuel Bayliss and Alex Bollard asking us to give details about certain vague allegations that we have made in the past as well as threatening to expel us if we continue to spread these allegations. After discussing with each other the content of these emails and our experiences within the IMT we have decided to leave the organisation, and the four of us, along with Keziah Keeler who has also been involved directly in the aforementioned ‘allegations’, have composed this response as a collaboration.
We are unconcerned as to whether you have already gone ahead and taken us off the books because we have been disillusioned with the organisation for a long time now. We are responding partly because we believe that it is important that the information included in this document is acknowledged explicitly by the full-timers and partly for it to be known that our reasons for leaving are of a principled nature. We do not want to be quietly shuffled out of the organisation without giving our side of the story. The following sections provide a brief summary of our grievances which include personal, organisational and political grievances.
Personal
If ‘circulating rumours’ and ‘allegations’ is an expellable offence then some action must be taken against Ben Peck as well. If we have ‘circulated rumours’, it is because new comrades concerned about the organisation have come to us to ask about members they have had bad experiences with. On the other hand, almost everyone one of us have heard rumours about ourselves, and those who have told us about them have told us they originate from full-timers, almost exclusively from Ben Peck. Ajmal has been called ‘lazy’ and a ‘backstabbing bastard’, Shaista has variously been called a ‘bourgeois feminist’ or ‘out-of-control’, Samuel Bayliss has been called a ‘coke-head’ or a ‘drug-addict’ of various kinds, Keziah Keeler has had misogynistic and baseless questions asked about her along the lines of ‘how many men has she slept with?’.
These kinds of comments have not been made in secret but in front of many other comrades such at such events as branch meetings or socials. Needless to say these rumours are absolutely disgusting, and have no basis in fact. They have been completely made-up to try and discredit members who have legitimate concerns with the conduct of full-timers. Moreover, they have a political aspect to them, where the female comrades have essentially been portrayed as sexually promiscuous, flirting and with and attempting to seduce older full-timers, sleeping with lots of comrades, etc. The readiness to spread these lies about outspoken women in the organisation accurately reflects the generally abysmal line that the organisation has towards women’s liberation.
One of the primary complaints we want to make is that members have known for a long-time that Ben Peck, in his interactions with female comrades and contacts has consistently stepped out of line. When Ajmal was first getting involved in the organisation Ben Peck was in a relationship with a female contact which ended in him threatening to destroy her laptop. This contact lived with female comrade Stella Christou and branch meetings were regularly held at their house. When this contact broke up with Ben she asked for branch meetings not to be held at this house any more, something Stella overruled, regularly bringing Ben back. Many comrades are also aware of when he began a relationship with a semi-contact and friend of comrade Ruth O’Sullivan.
At the time this semi-contact was 16 and Ben was 30. Although she was of consenting age Ben was in a position of trust over her, like a teaching assistant or youth counsellor. In instances of sexual relationships between an adult in a position of trust and a minor (even one of consenting age) it is considered statutory rape. Ben Peck was in charge of school-student work at the time. Sleeping with contacts therefore is morally reprehensible and borders on illegal. This is not something that happened in secret either. Many people in North London Branch, as well as comrades at the centre, would certainly have been aware of this and, strangely enough, the appropriateness of this conduct was never called into question.
In general Ben’s behaviour towards young female contacts and comrades has been consistently out of line and many comrades have been witness to this. We’ve attached screenshot evidence of disgusting and inappropriate remarks that Ben made to Shaista when she was just a sixth form student around 2-3 years ago. At the time Shaista brushed these comments off because she was new and wanted to get further in the organisation so she gave him the benefit of the doubt but in no way did Shaista encourage and/or reciprocate this kind of ‘attention’ from Ben. She did not act immediately repulsed because she feared making a scene. It is only later as she saw more evidence of his inappropriate interactions with female comrades that Shaista became aware of how out of line this was and decided to share it.
[Inserted below are a sample of some of the disgusting Facebook messages that Ben Peck sent to Shaista, at the time 17 years old and a comrade for around 2-3 months:]
Indeed, more recently rumours of Shaista’s supposed ‘inappropriate’ behaviour at World School 2013 arose, whereby she has been accused on a number of occasions of ‘flirting’ with senior members of the organisation such as Rob Sewell and Alan Woods. Clearly, this is a ridiculous allegation and amounts to little more than wish fulfilment on their part; especially given both of their inappropriate conduct towards Shaista during World Congress 2012 and World School 2013. As figureheads of the organisation, this behaviour is despicable and also reflects their lack of discipline with regards to their treatment of young female comrades. Shaista was extremely distressed by Alan Woods’ actions and comments towards her which included unambiguously sexual physical contact.
When Shaista informed comrade Adam Booth of this physical contact he accused her of being ‘drunk’ and he dismissed the severity of the situation as “not a big deal”. At the time, comrade Nina Christou appeared to be reassuring to Shaista, but as Nina Christou’s position in the organisation became more prominent she altered her recollection of events to fall in line with Adam Booth’s. Shaista was not ‘too drunk’ and remembers the incident clearly and precisely, which outside of the organisation and by law would constitute sexual harassment. Shaista was disgusted by the complete lack of response to these incidents, and this combined with political disagreements (which will be covered later in this response), caused her to distance herself from the organisation.
As Shaista lessened her involvement in the organisation, a notably hostile attitude towards her developed among the full-timers. This attitude manifested itself in the circulation of malicious gossip with the intention of discrediting Shaista in the eyes of new and existing comrades curious of Shaista’s situation. The wider goal of this character besmirchment was to discourage contact with her and to de-legitimise her grievances. This was portrayed to new comrades as an attempt to limit the influence of a ‘bourgeois feminist’ on them – another accusation that has no basis in fact and is replete with irony when it is aimed at one of only two young proletarian women in the organisation (the other being Keziah Keeler of course).
Alex Bollard, whom your email was also directed at, has explained how she has suffered parallel experiences of harassment from a full-timer which she chose to detail below:
“Whilst in a “relationship” with Ben G I didn’t realise how manipulative he was in terms of my associations with other comrades, namely “the clique”. He would tell me how inappropriately Shaista had acted at the previous World School (that she had drunkenly made herself look stupid on several occasions, baited Alan Woods in front of everyone) and also how she was not in “good standing” with the organisation. This all had an adverse effect on how I viewed her and those around her. With hindsight, this was hideous, misogynistic behaviour from a full-timer who should not perpetuate harmful, divisive rumours among young female comrades, especially when he had significant influence over me at this time. In addition, a full-timer should never reveal the personal details of a comrade’s standing in terms of subs/attendance in order to rally other comrades against them. I feel that the carelessness of Ben was due to his misogyny- something that he refuses to even identify; he probably never expected it to backfire and for me to actually talk to Shaista and get clarity on these malicious rumours. Since the termination of my close relationship with Ben, following discussions with other comrades, I have come to realise the relationship itself was inappropriate and abusive. I was often drunk or inebriated in some way when I would see Ben and although for a long time I insisted it was a consensual relationship, I feel like he took advantage of my vulnerability as a young woman interested in Marxism. He did not do enough to stop the relationship from developing. I will never deny that I approached him on several occasions and this is what has prevented me from identifying the abusive character of the relationship for so long; he will probably use this as a defence without considering the position of power he had over me.
The secretive character of the relationship is something I find extremely worrying. I never once told a single comrade, not even my close friends such as Nelson Wan or Jack Ashworth (which they can both attest to), about what me and Ben were doing (something he requested of me!!!), and yet the entire organisation found out. This can only mean that Ben himself must have been discussing me with other comrades and I absolutely dread what the content of these discussions entailed; this is something that keeps me away from events to this day for fear of being ridiculed. I have been made aware of vulgar derogatory comments made by other comrades in relation to this, most specifically full-timers when they are in the office!!! I refuse to give money to this organisation while those in reception of my hard-earned wage have openly and freely discussed my sex life. This includes money I have been leant by the IMT in Greece and I am not afraid to openly refuse to give this money back at this time.
I find that being forced to come out with all this is absolutely disgusting. In this email we received from Ben, he gave me and other comrades no option but to discuss this issue although I find it extremely distressing. This further displays the shameless and rampant misogyny in this organisation; it is not the place of full-timers to decide when and if victims of abuse should speak out against these issues.”
Organisational
Although we are happy to submit this complaint and evidence to the EC we do not really have faith in this or any other of the bodies. Because our complaints are aimed at prominent full-timers who are guilty of activities that the rest of the leadership who sit on these bodies has been aware of and often complicit in for a long time we do not believe anything substantial will happen. In all likelihood most of our criticisms of the organisation will not be considered as legitimate because they are not merely aimed at one or two comrades that need to be disciplined but at the very structures of leadership of the organisation. Also at issue are wider problems of the social composition of the organisation. The organisation seems to be predominantly white, male and middle-class. This is certainly true of the full-timers, where not a single full-timer in the past five years has been elected that has not been privately educated. One has to wonder what distinguishes the composition of the organisation’s leadership from the Tory party.
The women who are in important positions are either there for symbolic purposes or are totally in line with the position of the leadership and would never dare or want to speak against them. Most decisions on political lines are formed on the basis of private discussions, often, we presume, through conversations that occur between full-timers at the office. Decisions on promotion to the CC and other bodies are presumably likewise made. Of course a vote is taken at CC meetings or the National Conference but the leadership slate has only once been successfully voted against in recent years.
We find it ridiculous how eager the leadership is to remove us from the organisation. All of us have poured several years of our lives into the organisation and have had much demanded of us in this time. For example Ajmal was highly involved for three years during which he was responsible for saving the ULU Marxist society on several occasions (including incidents involving Heiko Khoo as well as preventing the IMT from being fined thousands of pounds in room-booking fees) and laying the basis for at least two other societies (UCL, SOAS and potentially Goldsmiths), on top of designing almost every single well-known and currently used banner, logo, poster, leaflet, etc.
Sam was responsible for almost all of the written literature of the UCL Marxist society for an entire academic year, Keziah formed the core of the KCL Marxist Society, which is the only area of work that South London branch has. We have all made countless contributions to the organisation. It is revelatory of how little the organisation cares about retaining and maintaining dedicated and theoretically developed cadres. The grounds presented for our expulsion seem to amount to little more than that we no longer provide any use to the leadership. Furthermore, all of us who have collaborated to write this email are young workers and students from working-class backgrounds with a confident grounding in Marxist theory; in any real communist group comrades like us would be considered extremely high priority. Yet, it seems, in the IMT, comrades are only useful to the organisation to the extent that they pay ‘enough’ subs, engage in repetitive and purposeless event organising, read from a very narrow reading list, infinitely repeat certain slogans (referred to as ‘lessons’) and that they overlook the indecent acts regularly committed by full-timers – and for nothing more.
All of us involved in this disciplinary action have been portrayed in the past as not expressing enough revolutionary discipline or sacrifice as befits members of a Leninist party. This normally is because we have not attended branch regularly enough or haven’t met paper selling targets. But if revolutionary discipline means this then it also means to exercise self-control and act in a professional way towards contact work, i.e not making a move on potential contacts, something the full-timers have failed consistently to do. More than one comrade can recall being told by a full-timer that doing contact work is ‘like a date’. This kind of approach to revolutionary work has been detrimental to the growth and reputation of the organisation as a whole.
You imply that our non-payment of subs or non-attendance of branch is either out of laziness or a principled stance. In fact, most of us are workers as well as students. For example, Ajmal who has been directly referred to as ‘lazy’ works 25 hours a week for minimum wage and the rest of the time he studies. It is simply a matter of him not being able to afford to give £20 a month and several hours of his week to an organisation that he does not see as benefiting him or people like us in any meaningful way. (In contrast we would happily continue to pay, for example, Unite membership subs as we know they at least do something to benefit actual workers). Indeed, the fact that the organisation expects poor students and minimum wage workers to pay the wages of full-time members who are middle-class or outright bourgeois and even landowners (!), to write 1-2 articles per week and drink in student bars, is ridiculous.
It also goes some way to explaining why the organisation has consistently failed to recruit young working class people, especially women or those from ethnic minority backgrounds. In London the population is extremely diverse and in these times young workers constitute the most downtrodden generation in half a century: some with degrees but many who never even went to university and lack even that advantage, are working the most backbreaking, humiliating, minimum-wage jobs, they have no or very little future prospects. Yet the ‘youth’ who are recruited by the organisation are the university students who without fail manage to settle into an office job post graduation. By contrast, urban proletarian youth do not suffer fools or charlatans gladly and if they don’t see anything of value in an organisation they will not sink their meagre money and time into it.
The discovery of student work has solved a problem for the organisation insofar as middle-class students are very impressionable with no real experience with which to challenge the ideas about class politics presented to them by the organisation, they are ingrained with a middle-class mentality to ‘get involved in a good cause’ and they have spades of free time and money that the organisation can take advantage of. The fact that middle-class students (and it’s almost always them, working class students are either quickly alienated or join but harbour huge misgivings about the organisation like we did) are being drawn to the organisation only reflects that the set of ideas that the organisation consider proper Marxism are extremely appealing to white, middle-class, male students, and to few others. Social conditions create consciousness and the social background of the majority of the full-timers and the membership has consequences for the political content of the organisation’s interpretation of Marxism.
Political
In the time we have been members we have come across many peculiarities and problems with the organisations political culture. Many of the features of the organisation’s ‘Marxism’ is often baffling and in many cases un-Marxist and un-Leninist. This is also extremely ironic considering the organisations heavy insistence on claiming their particular strand of Marxism is the One True Marxism and anything that deviates from this narrow set of pre-approved interpretations of a handful of texts must be ‘non-Marxist’.
The most obvious example of un-Leninist positions is the glaring absence of any of Lenin’s texts on imperialism, labour aristocracy, social chauvinism or imperialist economism. In recounting the history of the Bolshevik Party in typically mechanical fashion, the organisation makes note of the split that occurred between the Bolsheviks and the other parties of the Second International but bizarrely fails to note that Lenin’s entire polemical output on this subject deals with the above mentioned topics, from On the Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism (1915) to Imperialism and the Split in Socialism (1916). This evidently includes what is considered by almost all Leninists outside of the IMT to be one of the most important, and indeed introductory, of Lenin’s texts: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. This text forms the foundation of all Marxist discussion of imperialism but, as we have often noted, it fails to be included on any reading list of the organisation, whether introductory or advanced.
This is obviously connected to Tendency’s absurd position on the national question. “Marxism and the National Question” is repeatedly used as a subject for ‘lead-offs’ at Tendency and Marxist Society events but is treated in the most superficial manner possible. Not only is any consideration of the basis of a Marxist understanding of the national question omitted (namely the economic phenomenon of imperialism) but a number of utter fabrications are trotted out at such events, including the ever-present “Lenin always subordinated ‘the right of nations to self-determination’ to class struggle”. This is a completely meaningless statement that betrays that the speakers have either not read or not understood Right of Nations to Self-Determination.
The national question is self-evidently an important question to ascertain a correct position on, but this complete lack of explanation and analysis leads to a seemingly arbitrary position. We have noted particularly the almost perverse fascination with a very restricted set of historical national struggles, of which Ireland seems to be most prominent, and the tail-ending of world events in support of current national liberation movements, of which the Tendency’s overnight picking-up of the Kurdish struggle when the PKK came into conflict with IS, is the most relevant and obvious. [Another more recent example of nationalist tail-ending, one which – in a diametrically opposite fashion to the Kurdish struggle – we believe a revolutionary socialist party should be stridently against is the change in party line towards Scottish independence after the referendum. This resulted in a scandalous re-orientation of the Scottish section towards working within the Scottish Socialist Party causing justified resentment among Scottish comrades and the departure of several leading comrades.]
In general the organisation does not care about developing in comrades an understanding or appreciation of the real traditions and histories of class struggle. Most of the history of the movement is taught in a formulaic and mechanical way, consisting of this betrayal or that mistake. Most historical revolutionary events are analysed with the same basic, mechanical formula and all are reduced to the same two or three mistakes: either the failure to orientate to the mass organisations of the working class, the lack of leadership, lack of program etc. If only the great revolutionaries of their time who gave their lives for the struggle had only known what this handful of middle-class activists sitting in a university seminar room had known! Armed with these formulas, comrades (even full-timers) feel they are adequately qualified to give ‘lead-offs’ or make long-winded interventions on topics they have never read anything about, but which can be quickly fitted into the same rigid formulas and from which the same simplistic ‘lessons’ can be drawn.
The organisation barely acknowledges any Marxist that was not Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky or Ted Grant. Even out of these, Engels is over-emphasised to a degree even he would not have approved of and Lenin’s work is relegated to State and Revolution and nothing else. Most other Marxists of the 20th century are dismissed out of hand as ‘stalinist’ or ‘academic’ without any knowledge of their ideas or contexts. The fact that a revolutionary like Mao Zedong was to a large extent responsible for the victory of the second greatest revolution in history can be dismissed as ‘not a Marxist’, yet the editors of the Financial Times can be considered ‘unconscious Marxists’ is just one example of this abstract version of Marxism that is unaware and disrespectful of very significant revolutionary individuals and really existing traditions.
This goes along with a complete ignorance to any of the great controversies and arguments that took place within Marxist theory in the 20th century. This is not to say of course that all of the interpretations and innovations of Marxism that were developed over this time are correct or useful but if one is a full-time Marxist revolutionary one should at the very least know who Lukacs was or what Althusser thought, before they attempt to argue against them. One bitter irony of all this is that the tendency seems to pride itself in its emphasis on developing the theoretical level of individual comrades, yet the level of theory of the average comrade (including full-timers) is sometimes shockingly low.
Many members do not have any familiarity with revolutionary or left-wing thought before they join the organisation and therefore have nothing to measure the ideas presented to them by the organisation against. This is not necessarily because they are young and therefore unintelligent but more that the organisation appeals to people who are divorced or quite separate from revolutionary or militant working class traditions or backgrounds. This also has the consequence of creating comrades who cannot debate except through the use of tendency cliches or who are unable to conceptualise major historical events or individuals in any other way than the way they have been portrayed in this or that marxist.com article.
Furthermore, the organisation seems to lack any understanding of the politics of oppression, and failing to provide a properly Marxist analysis of the origins of different forms of oppression (often even claiming that pointing out oppression is divisive for the movement!!!) they manage to fall into the crudest of economic reductionism. Every new female comrade that joins is immediately told that feminism is bourgeois, any subsequent talk about women’s liberation is met with the suggestion of doing a lead-off on Engel’s Origins of the Family after which the topic is never broached again.
When an ethnic minority comrade joins they are quickly told that all national liberation movements were actually objectively bourgeois and/or an utter failure. When individual members of the organisation do however acknowledge oppressions it is always in a completely shallow liberal way, e.g. of course women have the right to work, of course there are no superior or inferior races, etc but without giving a sufficiently class-based, Marxist analysis of these oppressions means they are just liberal niceties arbitrarily tacked onto a narrow economic reductionism.
The organisation’s culture encourages a separation between the political ideas members claim to espouse and their personal conduct, so much so that their personal conduct does not reflect even the little commitment they claim they have to the emancipatory practise of Marxism. This means that members can have the most middle-class habits, the most reactionary prejudices etc in their personal lives, which they will never reflect on in a political way and yet still claim in meetings that they stand for the liberation of all peoples. For example, everyone agrees that the ‘working class’ is the revolutionary class but when an attempt is made to recruit actual working class people they are thought of as having too low a theoretical level, or being not yet ready to join or placed as very low priority contacts.
This arises from a particular idea – essentially mythical – of a working-class defined by the caricature of “flat caps and chimney stacks”. If this portrait of the working class were ever relevant it is by now long since anachronistic. Such an attitude is quite clearly alienating to young workers and students of a working-class background who cannot but reject such a pastiche of their experience of being working class. This is a direct product of the fact that all or most of the full-timers are entirely disconnected from the mainstream of working-class life, either having been born into privilege or having operated within a milieu composed almost entirely of members of the organisation for the better part of twenty years. It is therefore not surprising that any of the full timers are incapable of forming an accurate summary of a class with which they have no contact.
The full-timers display a marked hostility towards those characteristics of genuinely proletarian youth that are inconsistent with this image and display a Whiggish superiority in making the elimination of these supposedly vulgar and “ill-disciplined” characteristics a prerequisite for full participation in the organisation. Similarly most comrades are in theory for the liberation of women, but I have never seen this stop male comrades from making sexist jokes or engaging in inappropriate behaviour. Often the argument that sexism or racism will only truly be abolished after the revolution is used as an excuse to not even challenge or acknowledge it in the here-and-now.
The organisation displays a near obsession with developing a Marxist interpretation of the natural sciences to the exclusion of any attempt at developing a rigorous science of society. Principles derived from the natural sciences are applied mechanically to the analysis of society as if there were no distinction between the two phenomena. Academic social science is dismissed as vapid at best or petit-bourgeois at worst even where this concerns merely empirical observations. However a double standard is implemented with regard to the natural sciences since even the most vulgar of popular science is considered to be some form of “unconscious Marxism”. This approach produces often bizarre results with much of the organisation’s “analysis” of society consisting of arguments by analogy in which purely natural phenomena are used as metaphors for social processes. To do so appears absurd to those who are not trained in such elaborate rhetorical trickery and displays clearly the disconnection from social movements that those who formulate the organisation’s theoretical perspectives must have.
This attachment to a Marxism that relies exclusively on principles from the natural sciences arises from an obsession with the virtues of rationality and objectivity. Marxism however teaches that no individual can express entirely objective, supra-historical or supra-societal truths. Lingering too long on objectivity and rationality betrays the full-timers conception of Marxism as simply an excellent, extremely rational plan for the best organisation of society and use of its resources. Capitalism – which Marx understood at the same time as irrational and unjust – is reduced to simply irrational. In other words, capitalism should be replaced simply because it does not work.
Yet Marx would have said, it needs to be replaced not only because it doesn’t work but also because it is unjust, it is unfair and is the source of all human suffering. The tendency as a rule tends to shun any talk of the overthrow of capitalism as ‘just’ or ‘fair’ in favour of what is ‘rational’ or ‘logical’. A true communist however would support the overthrow of capitalism even if it was scientifically proven that capitalism is a better way of organising humanity’s resources. There is a link between these kinds of views and a very idealist, middle-class viewpoint which exists in a completely separate sphere to the life-and-death struggle of actual workers in their day to day lives.
The other side of this emphasis on ‘rationality’ is a disregard for any kind of idea or activity that is perceived as ‘irrational’ or ‘sentimental’. Any expression of anger, excessive passion or righteous indignation on the part of workers or the oppressed is seen in this way, and is seen as expressing an excessively ‘subjective’, ‘sentimental’ or ‘unscientific’ world-view. To dismiss the anger, indignation and violent outbursts of the oppressed in this way is to mirror the scorn and disdain that the bourgeois show to the actions of the oppressed and exploited masses, especially those newly becoming involved in politics.
In terms of history, the organisation subscribes to a consistently Whiggish, teleological productive forces determinism. In most of the summaries of the historical materialist method that the IMT publishes, the productive forces are seen as having agency and demanding things of the people of a certain epoch: the productive forces want to be developed, the productive forces can no longer be contained, etc. It falls into an idealist, Hegelian trap of thinking abstract forces have agency and real, living people do not. This replaces the history of class struggle, which is what historical materialism actually is, with a history of the economy, which is what the bourgeois theoreticians (e.g Adam Smith) did and which is antithetical to the Marxist view of history. Once again, it is no surprise that this is what passes for historical materialism in the organisation; it is easier for middle-class ‘revolutionaries’ to relate to abstract forces than with the class struggles that have been waged by toiling people throughout history.
We have always had these criticisms of the organisation’s theory and in our time in the organisation have attempted to correct it using the channels we believed were available to us as members. Yet, as mentioned earlier there doesn’t seem to be any substantial debate on political line except the conversations that take place at the centre. These are then presented to be voted on and although amendments are proposed, no document ever seems to be significantly modified in its contents during the course of any one of these votes. The one time Ajmal and another comrade Achille Marotta decided to take initiative and publish an independent “zine” in the summer of 2014 they were quickly reprimanded for not sticking to the party line in one of the articles.
However the organisation has no position on that particular area but full-timers disagreed with it and therefore it was deemed incorrect – it seems the personal opinions of full-timers are a suitable stand-in for a party line. When Ajmal and the comrade who wrote the article, Keziah Keeler, decided to debate this article at their local branch like they were asked, they happily obliged. They believe they made a strong argument for their position despite several full-timers at the branch meeting responding with arguments that were of a low theoretical level and, indeed, a very hostile tone, and in the end Ajmal and Keziah’s arguments won the vote. Since then however we have not seen the ‘banned’ article republished or even a slight shift in the party line.
We are not the only ones who feel this way about the organisation and many young comrades that we have encountered have expressed similar viewpoints. Most of us still like and respect a lot of the rank-and-file membership of the organisation who we still consider great comrades and we are proud to have fought alongside them. It was partly because of the personal links we had with the organisation that for a long time we refused to leave and believed that it could be improved and certain mistakes it was making could be rectified. If only we could modify this or that theoretical line of the organisation or if only we could recruit more working-class/women/ethnic minority comrades.
However what we have found repeatedly is how this is almost impossible, certainly for us who are only a handful of young proletarian students, with neither the time, money, nor the energy or motivation to help improve the organisation. We understand that there are still comrades within the organisation who in their own way are trying to push forward with some of these improvements and we respect and endorse their cause. In contrast to them however, we are happy to be taken off the books. Yet we remain Marxists and Leninists, we believe that the revolution is not far off and we’re pretty confident that at its head will be young working-class revolutionaries that resemble us a lot more than they resemble IMT full-timers.
Signed,
Ajmal Waqif
Shaista Waqif
Samuel Bayliss
Alex Bollard
Keziah Keeler
One thought on “Statement of Five Comrades on their Departure from the International Marxist Tendency”
I blame Lyndon Larouche.