 Hardcover edition | |
| Author | Dennis Tourish, Tim Wohlforth |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | cults, political cults, politics |
| Publisher | M.E. Sharpe |
Publication date | September 2000 |
| Media type | Hardcover |
| Pages | 246 |
| ISBN | 978-0-7656-0639-6 |
| OCLC | 43434639 |
| 303.48/4 21 | |
| LC Class | HN17 .T69 2000 |
On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left is a non-fiction book about political cults, written by Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth.
On the Edge discusses the role of 'cults' and political cults in politics, as well as describing some of the history involving individuals such as Lyndon LaRouche and Fred Newman. Other individuals and groups discussed include Marlene Dixon, the Christian Identity movement, Posse Comitatus, Re-evaluation Counseling, Synanon, and Aryan Nation. [1] Additionally, the book discusses actions of Trotskyist groups in the United Kingdom particularly those led by Ted Grant and Gerry Healy.
Tourish is a professor of Leadership and Organisation Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London and was a leading member of the Irish wing of Militant group from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. He has recently published a new book: 'The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective', in which he revisits some of his earlier criticisms of the Militant group. [2] Wohlforth was the author of The Prophet's Children: Travels on the American Left (1995) about his experiences in American Trotskyism from the 1950s through the 1970s; he was also an author of detective fiction. [3] He was the leader from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s of a United States Trotskyist group, the Workers League, which was affiliated with the UK-based Workers Revolutionary Party (one of the groups profiled in On the Edge). [2]
In his review [2] of On the Edge, Bob Pitt, editor of the online Marxist journal WhatNext and a former member of one of the groups profiled in the book, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP), stated that the "central purpose of the book is to mount a slanderous attack on the revolutionary left, which often goes further than anything you might read in even the most anti-socialist sections of the bourgeois press." Pitt describes the authors as "two embittered former members of far left groups." [2]
Pitt states that the authors "seem immune to the idea that far left sects – even the most cult-like – can occasionally play some kind of progressive role in wider society." [2]
In the same review, however, Pitt stated that in the case of one leftist group profiled in the book, his own former WRP, "there are grounds for viewing it as a type of cult. It featured a ruthlessly authoritarian internal regime presided over by an all-powerful, all-knowing leader, who maintained his position by subjecting cadres to psychological manipulation and physical and sexual abuse." Pitt also termed the Lyndon LaRouche organization an "actual cult."
In 2003, WhatNext? republished the 1998 article by Tourish from the Cultic Studies Journal which had served as the basis for the chapter of On the Edge on one of the leaders of Militant tendency, Ted Grant (The Lonely Passion of Ted Grant). Pitt criticized this On the Edge chapter in his review by stating: "When it comes to the Militant Tendency, the authors’ attempt to apply the cult paradigm breaks down. A moment’s consideration would reveal that the notion of Ted Grant presiding over a regime comparable to Healy’s is laughable." [2]
The What Next? reprint [4] of Tourish included a lengthy new introduction by him defending On the Edge and stating: "Some people have objected to the term "cult", even if they agreed with the substantive points that the paper makes about the Militant tendency's internal regime. This is unfortunate. The word cult is not a term of abuse, as this paper tries to explain. It is nothing more than a shorthand expression for a particular set of practices that have been observed in a variety of dysfunctional organisations. [5] "
Nevertheless, Pitt argues that Tourish's application of the word cult "expands the definition of the term to the point where it becomes pretty well useless." [2]
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky identified as an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik–Leninist. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin's theory of socialism in one country in favor of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists also criticize the bureaucracy that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
The Church of Jesus Christ–Christian is an American Christian Identity, white supremacist church, which was founded in 1946 by Ku Klux Klan organizer Wesley A. Swift. Swift was the son of a Methodist Episcopal Church, South minister and is considered a significant figure in the early years of the Christian Identity movement in the United States. Swift's work and copyrights are carried on by Kingdom Identity Ministries.
Socialist Appeal is the publication of a Trotskyist tendency which was founded by supporters of Ted Grant and Alan Woods after they were expelled from the Militant group in the early 1990s.
The Workers Socialist League (WSL) was a Trotskyist group in Britain. The group was formed by Alan Thornett and other members of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) after their expulsion from that group in 1974.
The National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) is a political organization in the United States founded and controlled by political activist Lyndon LaRouche until his 2019 death. LaRouche sometimes described the NCLC as a "philosophical association."
James Robertson (1928–2019) was the long-time and founding National Chairman of the Spartacist League (US), the original national section of the International Communist League. In his later years, Robertson was consultative member of the ICL's international executive committee.
Timothy Andrew Wohlforth, was a United States Trotskyist leader. On leaving the Trotskyist movement he became a writer of crime fiction and of politically oriented non-fiction.
In modern English, a cult is a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or by its common interest in a particular personality, object or goal. This sense of the term is controversial, having divergent definitions both in popular culture and academia, and has also been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study. It is usually considered pejorative.
Captive Hearts, Captive Minds: Freedom and Recovery from Cults and Other Abusive Relationships is a study of cults and abusive relationships, by Madeleine Landau Tobias, Janja Lalich, Ph.D., and Michael Langone. It was published by Hunter House Publishers in 1994.
On the Edge may refer to:
Under a variety of names and within a number of organizations over at least 17 years, the group around Harry Turner, or Turnerites was a presence within Trotskyism in the United States.
The Spartacist League is a Trotskyist political grouping. They are the United States section of the International Communist League, formerly the International Spartacist Tendency. This Spartacist League named themselves after the original Spartacus League of Weimar Republic in Germany, but the current League has no formal descent from it. The League self-identifies as a "revolutionary communist" organization.
The Revolutionary Tendency within the American Socialist Workers Party was an internal faction that disagreed with the direction the leadership was taking the party on several important issues. Many groups and movements would have their roots in the RT, both in the United States and internationally, including the Socialist Equality Party and the world Spartacist and LaRouche movements and their various splinters.
The Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) was the youth section of the Labour Party in Britain from 1965 until 1993. In the 1980s, it had around 600 branches, 2,000 delegates at its national conferences and published a monthly newspaper, Socialist Youth. From the early 1970s, it was led by members of Militant.
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is the name of two Trotskyist internationals; one with sections named Socialist Equality Party which publishes the World Socialist Web Site, and another linked to the Workers Revolutionary Party in the UK.
Thomas Gerard Healy was a political activist, a co-founder of the International Committee of the Fourth International and the leader of the Socialist Labour League and later the Workers Revolutionary Party. The part of the Trotskyist movement associated with Healy between 1950 and 1985 was at times the largest in Great Britain.
The Workers Revolutionary Party is a Trotskyist group in Britain once led by Gerry Healy. In the mid-1980s, it split into several smaller groups, one of which retains possession of the name.
The International Marxist Tendency (IMT) is an international Trotskyist tendency founded by Ted Grant and his followers following their break with the Committee for a Workers International in the early 1990s. Their website, Marxist.com, is edited by Alan Woods. The site is multilingual, and publishes international current affairs articles written from a Marxist perspective, as well as many historical and theoretical articles. The IMT is active in over 30 countries worldwide.
Edward Grant was a South African Trotskyist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. He was a founding member of the group Militant and later Socialist Appeal.
Michael Banda, born Michael Alexander Van Der Poorten, was a Sri Lankan socialist activist best known as the General Secretary of the British Workers Revolutionary Party.