For those of you who know me, you know that I’ve been a long time supporter and proponent of the Marxist Center. In fact I became involved in building the organization on Day 1 three years ago. For those of you who don’t know me, you may instead know me as “D.B. Cooper”, the person who produced It’s All About That Base (for clarity’s sake, I no longer endorse the content of that reader). I have more or less dropped my open support for the organization in the last few months and only very recently have I stopped my attitude of quiet vacillation on the integrity and potential of the organization in conversations with people. Given my role in publicly helping build the organization over the last few years, people sometimes view me as an unofficial representative of the organization, or else they come to me to ask why I support it or why they themselves should support it. So the purpose of this document is to briefly explain the gap that now exists between me and the actuality of the Marxist Center.

When the Marxist Center was first coming together as a network of organizers, there was a strong contingent of principled communists whose priority was to bury themselves among the masses of working and oppressed peoples in order to organize them and build proletarian power and political leadership. While we were (and some among us still are) staunch in this position, we, at the time, upheld serious theoretical errors that undermined that position. While going over all of these errors is beyond the scope of this short document, the key error here was the belief that by merely remaining committed as such, we would not be vulnerable to social democratic opportunism.

As time went on, opportunist elements did in fact integrate into the ranks of the Marxist Center network and began pushing for an ever broader program which would include ever more activists from many parts of the left (notably this didn’t include many attempts to bring in more principled communists grounded in mass work, like those of us who were there from the beginning). The principled communists naively maintained the position that they should take the efforts to expand the Marxist Center in good faith and that all of these elements would ground themselves in mass work. This has not been the case.

Multiple problems have arisen over the last 12 to 18 months surrounding these expansionist efforts leading up to then following the official unification of the Marxist Center into a national organization in December 2018. Again, it’s beyond the scope of this piece to elaborate every problem, but the key ones have really shown themselves in the months after the unification conference.

As the principled communist forces allowed themselves to become marginalized in the organization, the opportunist forces were free to shape and mold it into one which primarily serves their interests. What this means in real terms is that the Marxist Center, at one time an uncertain political entity, has now become an inveterate social democratic sect. Nowhere is this more emblematic than in the numerous calls and actual efforts to convince chapters of the now defunct International Socialist Organization to join the Marxist Center. Prior to this, these same forces have worked to convince DSA chapters and caucuses that they should do the same, with some success.

I cannot absolve myself totally from some of this. I myself briefly attempted to work within the DSA before realizing the futility and backwards results of trying to unite principled communists and social democrats.

I do believe some number of the members of the Marxist Center are still principled communists, but by remaining in the social democrat dominated organization, they are pursuing the futile program of principled unity which will only end with the sublimation of communist forces into the dominant social democratic forces.

There are a few principled communist organizations in the United States and the only viable course for communists in the Marxist Center is to align themselves with these groups by either disaffiliating their communist collectives from the Marxist Center or else individually leaving and joining the ranks of these communist organizations. Groups like For the People, which has several chapters across the country, Defend Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, Popular Women’s Movement — Movimiento Femenino Popular in Austin, Texas, among several others, represent the actual forces of the communist movement in the United States and it’s contingent upon communists everywhere to align with them to strengthen and expand the struggle for proletarian revolution.

Many people, including previously myself, mocked and derided these organizations because we either viewed them as cult-like or rankly sectarian when in actuality it was our own sectarian attitude which painted this image of these serious political organizations. How can we denounce For the People as sectarian while we work to merge with former ISO chapters and pull people out of the DSA to join our group instead? How can we denounce the PWM-MFP as a cult while we dogmatically read every essay from every failed tendency in the Comintern and say all we need to win is to follow the advice of those total failures? As we rail against these principled communists and work with the DSA to build a brand new ISO inside the Marxist Center, these communist organizations focus their energies on building power in the working class and exposing organizations like the DSA for the anti-working class forces they are.

It’s not just about having a political organization with a base, I was wrong to ever assert that. It’s only the masses who make revolution. Without the masses, we are nothing, only with the masses, only as an indistinguishable part of the masses, can we obtain victory over imperialism and White supremacy.

Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win.