Democratic Workers Party

The Democratic Workers Party was a United States Marxist-Leninist party based in California headed by former professor Marlene Dixon, lasting from 1974–2008. It has been seen as an example of a political cult with Dixon serving as its charismatic leader.

Marlene Dixon (1936- 2008) had earned a Ph. D at the University of California, Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. She taught sociology at the University of Chicago and then McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She was an admirer of the works of Robert Jay Lifton, Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, but as the party began to unravel in 1984 she criticized the latter two as anti-communists. While Professor at the University of Chicago she gained a following among students and the University's decision not to rehire her in February 1969 led to student protests on the campus lasting for 16 days, including a sit-in. A statement on the University of Chicago sit-in for Marlene Dixon was included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan.

While serving at McGill University she once again built up a following among students, and began organizing meetings with them. Relations between her and the staff of McGill University had begun falling in the early 1970s, and by 1974 she had decided to stop teaching. By the time of the formation of the DWP she was politically a Marxist feminist with Maoist sympathies, also a proponent of gay liberation and anti-racism.

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