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.
[citation needed] In the summer of 1974, Dixon (now in the San Francisco Bay Area, California) pushed for the creation of a radical group which would evolve into a party with Leninist guidelines.
[7] In that same period a Central Committee was elected via secret ballot and Dixon wrote an 18-page work known as the Principles of Dialectical Leadership, which constituted the nascent party's first internal document.
Recruits took on new names within the organization, pooled together their income and resources, worked at assigned tasks for ten hours or more, and other activities meant to reinforce a collective culture.
[1]: 142 Self-criticism was also widely practiced to abusive extremes along with other measures to an extent condemned by critics and ex-members as destroying any chances of internal debate.
From 1978–1981 the party operated via front groups such as the Grass Roots Alliance which rallied against Proposition 13 and sought to raise public awareness on various social issues through reformism.
[1]: 160 At this point a definite personality cult began to develop around Dixon as she was promoted as a great theoretical figure within the Communist movement.
The press produced numerous materials for the Party: books, journals, newspapers, pamphlets, fliers, bulletins, direct mail solicitations and buttons among other things.
[1]: 195–6 The DWP produced two academic journals, Contemporary Marxism and the independently edited Crime and Social Justice, which solicited and published articles by well-known Leftist intellectuals.
The publishing house exhibited at major book trade shows, such as the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association, and the Frankfurt International Book Fair, and engaged in fairly large direct-mail campaigns, sending out catalogs and fliers to solicit orders and garner publicity.
These groups sponsored various political activities and campaigns "including the quite popular Tax the Corporations initiatives, Propositions P, V, and M, the latter of which succeeded in 1980 but was never implemented.
The U.S. Out of Central America front organized and conducted delegations to Sandinista-led Nicaragua, and lobbied Congress on various issues related to U.S. intervention policies.
The party also began focusing on foreign affairs while moving away from Maoism (though in the process gravitating towards Maoist-inspired third-worldism and adherence to labor aristocracy)[14] in favor of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact states, Bulgaria in particular, while stressing the importance of the Soviet Union and the belief that the development of the world socialist movement was impossible without the existence of the USSR.
[15] Dixon began traveling to Western Europe, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria with the eventual goal of receiving an invitation from the Soviet Union.