Of all the Trotskyist groups that have existed in the UK, none can be quite so strange, quite so cultish, and quite so odd as Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). Whether or not one agreed with his political views, I suspect many would concur that the late Auberon Waugh was a wonderful columnist. In 1976 he described the WRP in a column for the Spectator. I copy that description below:
[T]he Workers Revolutionary Party…only seems to cater for people of limited intelligence whose various personality disorders include a paranoid distrust of the media. Perhaps, at the back of their minds, there is also a dim awareness of how horrible they look, with their staring eyes and fanatical white faces, and even how ridiculous they sound in any company but their own.
Source: Auberon Waugh, “Poles apart,” Spectator, June 26, 1976, p7.
Can Trotskyism be described as a cult? Why would anyone in their right mind sign onto a worldview with “official positions”?
Beakerkin, I did not describe Trotskyism itself as a cult, but I did say that the Trotskyist group, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, was cultish – and I think with good reason. As I have commented elsewhere, the fat old man who led the party was guilty of sexual abuse of 26 young females in the Party. Healy was also a very violent man and there were instances of Party members being beaten. More than this, because Party members had to work so many hours on Party matters, and because the revolution was truly just around the corner, they often did not have sufficient time to spend with their families. While I do not think that subscribing to a tiny minority political view such as Trotskyism means that someone is in a cult, the sort of atmosphere that exists in any organisation that would allow such behaviour as occurred in the WRP for years on end to go unchecked is one that tends towards cultism.
You might enjoy Gary Younge’s wonderful article from the Guardian on February 15, 2000: “Memoirs of a teenage Trot.”
Such a constricted worldview, while not a cult in itself, leads towards such tendencies….cults are the logical outcome of it. Organised religion, which has ‘official positions’ on all kinds of matters, would be a cult if it was a minority movement and on the fringes, it does not have to use aggressive recruitment and control it’s members in such an extreme way as it is established. Such movements, be they secular or religious in nature, question authority when they are in the minority or opposition but repress any dissidence when they achieve power. Marx himself saw parallels between his nascent movement and early Christianity. It seems that an all embracing worldview that claims to answer every question leaves little room for individual thought, and the Marxism displayed by most Trotskyist groups is vulgar and textbook in nature…..the cartoon nature of religious fundamentalism springs to my mind…
Mr. Ezra
After reading that I am more convinced than ever that they are a cult. I took a class on the subject and part of the techniques are the bullying and control games.
I am too much of a free spirit to submit to that type of totalitarian dogma. Being ordered about by a political figure and being given party platforms offends something in my core values.
Elizabeth,
Thank you very much for your useful comment. I think the problems are not just with Trotskyist groups, but with Leninist groups of all stripes.
Beakerkin,
Yes, as I said in my main post, of all the Trot groups, the WRP were the most cultish in nature. It wasn’t just bullying and control, Healy came out with a bunch of gobbledygook with his so-called dialectics and the members simply accepted it. One of the more amusing capers was in 1984 when the Party determined that Britain was no longer a bourgeois democracy, but that it had become a Bonapartist dictatorship. The members had no choice but to go along with this nonsense. Waugh, who I quoted in my main post, got it right when he said that they sounded ridiculous in any company but their own.