Martin was born in 1972 in Michigan and lived there most of his life. He was an ICT sympathizer, IWG candidate and then member over a period of around two years. Though his politics underwent significant changes over the years, he was a lifelong militant in the class struggle.

Martin's own political development must be appreciated through its sheer dynamism; he formed a political group called the Workers' Group of the US, which followed his complicated political evolution. When comrades in the ICT first encountered him, he was syncretizing politics that were close to the “Hekmatist” Worker-Communist Parties of Iraq and Iran which initially emerged from Maoism, as well as the politics of the Socialist Labor Party’s De Leonist tendency.

Later, his group developed an affinity with the politics of the Communist Left and developed an interest in the Russian Communist Left around the Kommunist group and especially in Gavril Miasnikov and his Workers’ Group.

Martin and his group developed the position that only those who were sociologically classified as a worker could join a communist party. At the time he believed this position was in line with that of Miasnikov’s Workers’ Group and that, for example, it was a mistake to allow Lenin into the party, or even Engels into the First International. When he and his group later opened dialogue with the International Group of the Communist Left (IGCL) and the Gulf Coast Communist Fraction (GCCF), this position led to contention between the groups and a breakdown in dialogue.

In early 2019 Martin began dialogue with the IWG when he presented the ICT with the French facsimile of the sealed NKVD files from July 8th, 1932 showing that they received a copy of Gavril Miasnikov’s “Draft Platform” for a Communist Workers’ International in 1930. This later sealed Miasnikov’s fate when he was imprisoned and murdered by the NKVD in Russia after the Second World War. The ICT had already held the documents from the brochure Le Groupe Ouvrier du Parti Communiste Russe 1923-37 by our comrade Michel Olivier. These sources were forgotten about until Martin provided the ICT with the documents. Our comrades in the CWO then wrote an intro to and translated the “Draft Platform” which can now be found here: leftcom.org

Since then, Martin maintained dialogue with the IWG, and through doing so he adopted the ICT's platform, becoming a candidate member in April 2021. Martin was already ill and was hospitalized intermittently throughout this period. He worked closely with other IWG members from time to time, when he felt well enough, on articles. Many are unfinished and unpublished (such as one on the Petrotrin oil refineries in Trinidad and Tobago, drafted in late 2020 and early 2021) as a result of him taking much needed periods of absence from the organization for rest and recuperation.

He became a full member of the IWG in October of 2021, however throughout that year his health appeared to have gotten worse and he could only sporadically participate in the organization's meetings. He was always in great spirits when he could do so; he truly was in his element around his comrades. He was a sympathizer and member during the key phase of regroupment of the IWG and he had a great deal of experience in the class struggle to teach others.

Martin, the lifelong communist militant and comrade of the IWG passed away in June 2022, leaving the world and his family too young. In his personal life he was a fan of science fiction, the Grateful Dead and was a US Civil War historian. We remember the communist militant comrade Martin and continue the struggle for revolutionary class consciousness, and ultimately a new society, with him in our thoughts.