Cultic Studies Journal, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1992, Page 46
After this came the lesbian purge during which I lost friends and a lover. I was put on trial,
suspended for four weeks, and demoted. My new assignment was to be the party’s typesetter
working 12-hour shifts. I remember that entire experience --the investigations, the
interrogations, the purge, the trial --as completely devastating. During and afterwards, I felt
such repulsion at the things that had been said to me at my trial by my comrades that I no
longer wanted to be “that person” who had committed such sins against the party. One
symbol of my rejection was that I took off the jacket I had on at the trial and never wore it
again. I could barely touch it. Months later I found it in the back of some closet and threw it in
the garbage.
The incidents just described are meant to help clarify the process by which a person changes:
deception, dependency, dread. This process is different for each member, but thought-
reforming episodes are not chance happenings just because someone happened to like
basketball or happened to want a baby. In the WDU, these events were called “cadre tests”
they were meant to induce a “cadre crisis.” They were, each one of them, planned and forced
to happen. This change process was targeted for each member (sometimes even for a
recruit) in the case of a purge or a campaign, it happened on a partywide scale. These
“tests” chipped away at the person, at one’s thoughts, beliefs, self-image, and core being --
until the party woman or man emerged.
Thus, the WDU managed to gain total control over its members not because each person had
a desire for power or even a desire to be mistreated or punished. Rather, this control came
about through a concerted effort and skillful manipulation, with every step calculated to
achieve “transformation” of the member. Over time strong-willed individuals and independent
thinkers became “willing” participants in a vicious and harmful closed society --all in the
name of “serving the working class.”
How then did such a powerful and controlling group fall apart?
III. Some Theories on the Demise
In the WDU, there was always a correct answer for everything. It was a black and white
world, even though at times black was white. Nevertheless, the party had the answer and the
party was always right. In reality, things are much more complex thus, presented here are
some of the factors that I suggest contributed to the demise of Doreen Baxter’s “human
experiment.”
These factors center on the group’s ideology, the practical work in relation to the ideology, the
leader, the relationship between the leader and her second-in-command Sandra, and the
long-term effects of living under cultic pressure.
Departure From the Working-Class Foundations
The WDU’s founding ideology, as explained to recruits and members, was to build a
revolutionary feminist organization that would fight for real change in the daily lives of the
U.S. working class, eventually leading to the advent of socialism. In the early years, there
was a great deal of emphasis on labor committees, workplace organizing, community efforts,
and so forth. At one point in the late 1970s, the WDU led a grass-roots organization of nearly
one thousand members who worked on local political issues many of the members lived in
the city’s communities of color.
Over time, because of Baxter’s obsession with academia and intellectuals, the focus changed
from local work to international causes, from a biweekly newspaper distributed locally by the
members to academic books and theoretical journals put out by the party’s publishing arm
and distributed through trade and academic channels. Although militants still did some local
organizing (usually in the form of support work for revolutionary struggles in Central
America), most members were more and more distanced from what the party was espousing
After this came the lesbian purge during which I lost friends and a lover. I was put on trial,
suspended for four weeks, and demoted. My new assignment was to be the party’s typesetter
working 12-hour shifts. I remember that entire experience --the investigations, the
interrogations, the purge, the trial --as completely devastating. During and afterwards, I felt
such repulsion at the things that had been said to me at my trial by my comrades that I no
longer wanted to be “that person” who had committed such sins against the party. One
symbol of my rejection was that I took off the jacket I had on at the trial and never wore it
again. I could barely touch it. Months later I found it in the back of some closet and threw it in
the garbage.
The incidents just described are meant to help clarify the process by which a person changes:
deception, dependency, dread. This process is different for each member, but thought-
reforming episodes are not chance happenings just because someone happened to like
basketball or happened to want a baby. In the WDU, these events were called “cadre tests”
they were meant to induce a “cadre crisis.” They were, each one of them, planned and forced
to happen. This change process was targeted for each member (sometimes even for a
recruit) in the case of a purge or a campaign, it happened on a partywide scale. These
“tests” chipped away at the person, at one’s thoughts, beliefs, self-image, and core being --
until the party woman or man emerged.
Thus, the WDU managed to gain total control over its members not because each person had
a desire for power or even a desire to be mistreated or punished. Rather, this control came
about through a concerted effort and skillful manipulation, with every step calculated to
achieve “transformation” of the member. Over time strong-willed individuals and independent
thinkers became “willing” participants in a vicious and harmful closed society --all in the
name of “serving the working class.”
How then did such a powerful and controlling group fall apart?
III. Some Theories on the Demise
In the WDU, there was always a correct answer for everything. It was a black and white
world, even though at times black was white. Nevertheless, the party had the answer and the
party was always right. In reality, things are much more complex thus, presented here are
some of the factors that I suggest contributed to the demise of Doreen Baxter’s “human
experiment.”
These factors center on the group’s ideology, the practical work in relation to the ideology, the
leader, the relationship between the leader and her second-in-command Sandra, and the
long-term effects of living under cultic pressure.
Departure From the Working-Class Foundations
The WDU’s founding ideology, as explained to recruits and members, was to build a
revolutionary feminist organization that would fight for real change in the daily lives of the
U.S. working class, eventually leading to the advent of socialism. In the early years, there
was a great deal of emphasis on labor committees, workplace organizing, community efforts,
and so forth. At one point in the late 1970s, the WDU led a grass-roots organization of nearly
one thousand members who worked on local political issues many of the members lived in
the city’s communities of color.
Over time, because of Baxter’s obsession with academia and intellectuals, the focus changed
from local work to international causes, from a biweekly newspaper distributed locally by the
members to academic books and theoretical journals put out by the party’s publishing arm
and distributed through trade and academic channels. Although militants still did some local
organizing (usually in the form of support work for revolutionary struggles in Central
America), most members were more and more distanced from what the party was espousing
