First Published: Frontline, Vol. 5, No. 4, August 3, 1987.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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One of the more controversial efforts to build a new Marxist-Leninist party in the U.S. during the 1970s was the Democratic Workers Party (DWP). Among the qualities that made the DWP an object of wide dispute was its deeply entrenched sectarianism toward all other forces on the left; consequently, few activists in the broad progressive movement were dismayed when they discovered that the DWP’s membership had voted unanimously to dissolve the organization at the end of 1985. And for the DWP’s remaining members, the dissolution was a moment of release, freeing them from a cult-like internal party life that was the obverse side of the DWP’s external sectarianism.
But if the DWP has passed away un-mourned, the lessons of its experience should not. Summation is especially valuable because the DWP’s history provides a vivid example of extremely common ways in which Leninism was distorted by the main party building attempts which grew out of the political explosions of the 1960s.
The DWP was formed in San Francisco in 1974 by a small collective of women led by Marlene Dixon, a Marxist intellectual whose firing by the University of Chicago in the late 1960s had sparked broad student protest. In the course of its 12-year existence, the DWP took up numerous areas of political and theoretical activity, but was best known for three of these: a series of “Tax the Corporations” initiatives in San Francisco in 1979-80 that attracted broad popular support and for a time made the DWP a significant force in the Bay Area progressive movement; extensive theoretical efforts through the Contemporary Marxism journal and through fielding DWP members as speakers at gatherings of left academics and intellectuals, both in the U.S. and abroad; and the formation in 1983 of the U.S. Out of Central America (USOCA) organization.
Invariably, DWP’s efforts were characterized by a curious set of contradictions. On the one hand, DWP-Ied campaigns were conducted in a serious and professional manner and had a measure of success in building a base in sectors of the working class. The propaganda work of the organization and its various mass initiatives was polished and of generally high quality. And the organization was prepared to deal in sophisticated fashion with numerous theoretical debates – especially over the political economy of contemporary imperialism and the nature of women’s oppression – that many other forces on the left were unwilling or unable to address. On the other hand, the DWP was preoccupied with building itself at the expense of all other left forces and it consistently split mass organizations when it had the chance to gain recruits by doing so. The group was absolutely incapable of sustaining a principled coalition relationship with other left and progressive organizations, and it flip-flopped from one priority to the next with no explanation whatsoever to people it had been working with just before it made the change. Worse yet, the DWP was not above trying to psychologically and at times physically intimidate other activists on the left, ex-DWP members in particular. Finally, the organization had a bizarre cult of personality around its founder and general secretary, Marlene Dixon.
USOCA, the last serious initiative before the DWP’s demise and the one that caused the most open controversy on the broader left, was the supreme embodiment of all these contradictions. The tours it sponsored to Nicaragua were politically top-notch and its propaganda vehicle, the Central America Alert, was excellent. But USOCA was formed in direct opposition to all other solidarity and anti- intervention groups and it demanded to be recognized as the leading force in the solidarity movement before it had done one bit of work. As if to advertise USOCA’s blatant sectarianism, the organization gave its bulletin the same name as CISPES’ main national publication: in their smug isolation, DWP leaders did not even know the name of the CISPES bulletin when they launched their own Alert and – when they discovered the duplication after their first issue – still refused to change the name.
At the core of such backwardness was the DWP’s primitive conception of Leninism and the Leninist party. The DWP’s infantile approach was not always apparent on the surface because in its published materials the group appeared relatively sophisticated. Though arising in a period when Maoism dominated most efforts to build a new, Marxist-Leninist party, the DWP rejected Maoism’s retrograde anti-Soviet international line and the shallow homilies of Mao’s Little Red Book. At a time when most of the new Marxist-Leninist forces were ignoring the considerable theoretical work and ideological influence of U.S. social democracy, the DWP gave that trend significant attention; in fact, the polemic with academic social democracy was a principal axis around which the DWP was initially built. And though the main, theoretical anchor of the DWP – a version of the “world systems theory“ perspective associated with such figures as Emmanuel Wallerstein – is dubious from a rigorous Marxist point of view, it could hardly be considered simplistic or primitive.
But when it came to the practical substance of constructing apolitical organization, the DWP was as idealist and superficial as the most doctrinaire Maoist sect. In a fashion typical of ultra-left currents, the DWP regarded organizational discipline and ideological purification of its ranks as the essence of Leninism. This deviation lay at the root of the DWP’s cult-like internal life, With its endless struggles over members’ “attitudes,” its promotion of unquestioning obedience to leadership as the litmus test of members’ commitment to a fighting organization of the proletariat, and its enshrinement of Marlene Dixon as the sacred leader whose arbitrary whim was working class wisdom. It also undergirded the DWP’s primitive notion of revolutionary practice, according to which the purified proletarian party directly organizes all the genuine masses in their millions, exposing the opportunism of all other forces in the people’s movement and leading the revolution all by itself.
What this shallow perspective fails to grasp, of course, is the decisive element which allows a Marxist-Leninist party to play a vanguard role in the class struggle – and which gives a materialist underpinning to the ideological struggles and organizational norms which make up inner-party life. That element is an historically specific class analysis, political line and strategy that can guide the maturation of the working class movement. A Leninist party does not lead fundamentally because it has grown larger than all other groups, because its cadre are the most disciplined on the left, or because it is most eloquent at criticizing other parties’ opportunism – though any or all of these things may be true at one time or another. At bottom, a Leninist party leads to the extent that it most accurately assesses the political potential of each class and class stratum in society; best illuminates the tasks at each stage of the working class movement’s development; and displays the most skill at grouping together all political forces who can make a positive contribution at each stage. A Leninist party plays a vanguard role when that party has a vision of how each stage is linked to the protracted process of accumulating enough revolutionary force to eventually capture political power. A political strategy concretizing that vision is the centerpiece around which a proletarian class standpoint and meaningful party discipline can be effectively consolidated; without that centerpiece, activists are left in an ideological quagmire where petty bourgeois moralism replaces materialism.
Concretely, two particular points regarding revolutionary strategy and party building stand out from the DWP’s experience – if only through that group’s negative example. First, in the U.S. class struggle, forging a broad united front of different trends, tendencies, organizations and parties in the working class movement is of absolutely central importance. That front is not a tactical mechanism through which the communists try, to gather sufficient forces to someday“ go-it-alone”; rather, it is a strategic vehicle in which communists must maintain alliances with other conscious forces right through the revolutionary seizure of power. This understanding serves, among other things, as the anchor for the fight against sectarianism, taking that fight out of the realm of mere attitudes and underscoring the immense political stakes involved.
Second, the DWP’s cult-like distortions of internal party life are a pointed reminder that Leninist ideological and organizational standards are not something abstract, divorced from concrete circumstances such as the relative intensity of the class struggle, the degree of unity or fragmentation on the left, etc. To be sure, there are certain general principles on which any Leninist party must be based: it must be an activist party, it must operate with unity in action, it must delegate to the leadership authority to make numerous decisions, etc. However, such specific matters as what exact level of involvement is required of each member, what are the forms and extent of inner-party democracy, what information can and cannot be revealed to individuals outside the party ranks – all these are determined by a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” – not reference to some rulebook that exists outside of history.
Unfortunately, the DWP – like so many other failed parties of the 1970s – never understood these things. And perhaps even more unfortunately, the promotion of infantile leftism under the banner of Leninism by the DWP and others has produced an anti-Leninist counter-reaction. The resulting loss to the U.S. communist movement of many veteran activists with considerable experience is quite painful, especially since U.S. Marxist-Leninists are still building the structures necessary to ensure that the next generation which experiences mass radicalization does not have to repeat the same errors as the generation that surged leftward in the 1960s.
As for the political trajectory of the bulk of activists coming out of the DWP – who have gone in numerous directions since the dissolution – it is still too soon to tell. The immediate trigger for disbanding the organization was not a comprehensive reexamination of its external political practice, but the first-ever open discussion of the bizarre internal life of the DWP – a process which resulted in a unanimous decision to expel Dixon and officially disband the organization but agreement among former members on virtually nothing else.
A year and a half after the dissolution, only one circle of former members has issued (just this April) any written accounting of the DWP experience. This circle has provided a useful factual chronicle of the DWP’s history and by doing so has displayed a refreshing sense of responsibility to the broader left. In terms of political conclusions from the DWP experience, the authors frankly state that they differ in their opinions, but the weight of the paper implies that the DWP’s errors were bound up with certain inherent flaws in the Leninist conception of the party, at least for an advanced capitalist society. Now circulating informally, the document will be published soon by the left social democratic journal Socialist Review, where it will likely be utilized to advance that magazine’s arguments against Leninism.
A portion of the old DWP core, meanwhile, has continued’ to work together, transforming the Institute for the Study of Labor and the Economic Crisis (ISLEC), which had published Contemporary Marxism, into a new research and advocacy grouping named Global Options. Global Options is a loose-knit umbrella for various projects, including Contra Watch, a resource center and clearinghouse for information about the Nicaraguan contras, and an effort to re-launch Contemporary Marxism under a different name.
Unfortunately, Global Options seems to be continuing at least part of the sectarian legacy of the DWP in its lack of accountability to the broader people’s movement The transition from ISLEC was made without even the most minimal written acknowledgement that it had anything to do with the dissolution of the DWP; nor was any statement issued by former DWP members in Global Options containing a self-criticism for the DWP’s past practice. In fact, Global Options’ first newsletter implied that the name change was a mere technicality, due to a change in focus from labor to international affairs. However, in interviews with Frontline, individual board members of Global Options did present a self-critical evaluation of the DWP (though, as with other ex-DWP members, different individuals draw different conclusions from the experience); these individuals also agreed that there were problems with how the transition to Global Options was handled. How this will translate into Global Options’ future writings and practice remains to be seen.