Reflections on Workers World Party, MOVE and the Philly movement
By: Mattie B.
Tags: Cult, Move Organization, Activism, Accountability, Workers World Party

My name is Mattie Boyd. In 2014, at age 24, I joined the group Workers World Party (WWP), sometimes also known in Philadelphia as the International Action Center (IAC). For the ensuing three years, I was a dedicated revolutionary under Workers World Party’s banner.

I helped recruit other members, I led study sessions, attended protests. I represented the Party in correspondence with dozens of incarcerated people, administered the Party’s social media accounts, wrote regularly for its newspaper. I attended Party conferences in New York and Detroit, and traveled to Boston for union organizing work. It was a whirlwind. The emotional highs I felt during those years, working with my comrades to bring about a better world, are unlike anything I’ve experienced either before or after.

However in the summer of 2017 I made the very difficult decision to leave WWP, citing its complete lack of internal structures for democracy and accountability. At the time I wrote to my friends and comrades that “I don’t believe I can be an effective revolutionary in Workers World Party anymore.” By 2018 I had started relating to my experience in WWP as that of a member of a political cult.

I share all of this now, years later, not to put WWP on trial, but to provide some personal context for what I consider to be a much more important and necessary question: how did we — all of us as social justice activists in Philadelphia — contribute to an environment where MOVE’s abuses were allowed to go on for so long, right under our noses? And what can we do differently in the future to break that cycle?

One of the things I’ve struggled most with since leaving WWP has been the idea of culpability. I deeply, deeply regret the roles I played in recruiting other people into the Party (even if some of those people continue to hold WWP in high regard, or disagree with my assessment that it functioned as a political cult). I’ve also tried for years to figure out whom I could blame for taking in so many amazingly dedicated and good people, and entangling them into this bizarre and hurtful cultic formation. I thought if I could figure out who’s actually at the very top of the WWP pyramid scheme, it’d enable me to put aside my own feelings of guilt for the role I played in that same structure.

But as I’ve sat with the words of the former MOVE members and supporters who have so bravely come forward to share the truth about their experiences with that organization, I’ve had to come to terms with the reality that the categories victimizer and victim, manipulator and manipulated, guilty and innocent, can sometimes be way more messy than we tend to acknowledge. Ultimately, even in a world where we could narrow it down to an exact science (“You’re 65% to blame for what happened, and 35% a victim of what happened”), it still wouldn’t do what we want it to.

Some people around MOVE were certainly in a better position than others to see that there were serious issues with the way children were being treated in the organization. As a member of a group that worked fairly closely with MOVE, I was in a better position than some to see it, and I didn’t. But the truth is that any one of us could have gone online as early as 2004 and read many of those same credible allegations that are still being made today, by people who were also there to see it.

Speaking only from my experience as an active member from 2014–2017, I don’t believe it would have been possible for anybody in WWP to raise this concern about MOVE without either being forced by WWP leadership to drop the issue, or else being completely excommunicated from the Party. And, like many of my former comrades, I had allowed Workers World Party to become the center of my social and political universe, the core of my identity. To be forced out as a traitor would be devastating — certainly even more devastating than voluntarily quitting was.

On top of that, as a WWP revolutionary “in the belly of the beast” you were constantly aware of the threat of reaction from the imperialist ruling class. It was a regular occurrence that somebody would be beaten and arrested at the protests we were always organizing, which served to reinforce the feeling of the Party and the movement being under siege from the outside world. In that environment, questioning one’s own comrades in struggle — and particularly comrades as dedicated and heroic as the MOVE family — would have been unthinkable.

I can only speak authoritatively about my own experiences, but I suspect that these two methods of control — the threat of being shunned, and the feeling of the group being under attack from the dominant society — are commonly wielded in radical organizations and social formations in order to enforce ideological conformity and suppress critical thinking among participants. In some cases, I think these dynamics might even arise spontaneously, such as in some leftist social media cliques, rather than as a conscious effort by some master manipulator.

I also believe that these issues have a very long history on the left, including but by no means limited to MOVE or Workers World Party. I wonder whether this is what the Socialist Workers Party (US) was referring to when they wrote about WWP in 1961, just two years after WWP was officially founded:

“The issues raised here exist and recur across the entire radical movement. The unthinking and total subordination of youth to adult in the radical movement facilitates, for examples, the mindless activism of Youth Against War and Fascism vis-a-vis the Workers World Party[…]” “The only alternative to political development–if the youth do not totally stagnate–is a mindless militancy, which can be whipped up at the demagogic call of the party-sanctioned leaders. That militancy can be used by the party leadership as a club against the party itself. […] Thus Sam Marcy had this club available against Workers World[…]” “The Leninist Position on Youth-Party Relations”

I don’t know what my former WWP comrades — specifically the elder, or “seasoned comrades” as they call themselves — knew about the MOVE situation. I don’t know whether they were as shocked as I was to hear the news, or whether they knew it was coming. I don’t know to what extent they were really deceived by MOVE leadership, or to what extent they were in the know and simply decided to look the other way. Either way, I hope they can find it within themselves to come forward, share what they know, and participate in some sort of accountability process.

But I also know that the internal dynamics of WWP can cause good people to surrender their agency, to go along with things that might not otherwise seem right. And that these dynamics have very likely been part of WWP since before every single Philly member joined the organization.

These and other methods of control don’t necessarily cancel out the positive aspects of these groups. They don’t invalidate the good these groups do. But if there’s to be any sort of meaningful accountability in the wake of the recent revelations about MOVE, it needs to involve some serious community-wide reckoning with these structural issues and the effect they have on our ability to look out for each other.

Finally, I don’t know what accountability within the activist community will look like moving forward. I think it has yet to be determined, and I don’t expect I’ll have much involvement in determining it. But to the people with whom I interacted between 2014 and 2017, under the conditions that I’ve tried to describe here: if I mistreated you, or if I couldn’t see that you were hurting, or if I failed to speak out for you, I’m sorry. I’ll listen if you’d like to talk to me about it.