Spark Conference:
Note of Explanation

May 11, 2025

This issue of the Class Struggle, with the exception of the last two articles, is devoted to the annual conference of the whole Spark organization. In addition to the militants of Spark, there were also invited guests from organizations in France, Guadeloupe/Martinique, Haiti, and Great Britain.

This followed discussion locally, organized around several articles that appeared in CS 122: “War and Crisis in the Time of Senile Capitalism: International Relations” and “In Conclusion”, and two other texts, “Domestic Report, 2025” and “The 50-Year Secular Crisis”, both of which appear in this issue. Also taken up in the two days of the conference were oral reports: “Introduction” and “Response”, which also are included in this issue, as well as reports on the work of the organization. Another report, “On a Couple of Economic and International Questions”, was just republished as the Centerfold in issue #1225 of The Spark, April 28, 2025. These reports were followed by discussion periods for anyone who wanted to take the discussion in the cells further or who wanted to pursue discussion about our work, or any other topic.

Finally, we reprint below a quotation from Rosa Luxemburg, and following that, one from the text, “In Conclusion”, reprinted from CS 122. These are only brief. It’s, of course, important to read more of these texts, but they are a useful reminder of the situation the working class finds itself in today.

The last two articles in this issue deal with questions that came up at the conference, that is the trade war and preparations for war.

Luxemburg:

“Before Marx, there undoubtedly existed a mass of wage workers in capitalist countries who, driven to solidarity by the similarity of their existences within bourgeois society, groped for a way out of their situation, and sometimes for a bridge to the promised land of socialism. Marx only elevated them to the rank of a class by linking them to a particular historical task, the task of conquering political power in order to bring about a socialist transformation of society....

“It was only Marx who succeeded in placing working-class politics on the terrain of conscious class struggle, and thus forging it into a lethal weapon against the existing social order. The basis of today’s social-democratic [today we would say revolutionary communist] working-class politics is the materialist conception of history in general, and Marx’s theory of capitalist development in particular. Only those for whom the essence of social-democratic politics and the essence of Marxism are an equal mystery can conceive of social-democracy, and more generally of conscious working-class politics, outside Marx’s doctrine.”

In Conclusion:

“Yes, to be a Marxist is to fight for the conquest of political power by the working class! That’s where Marxism begins, and as long as you don’t identify with that task, as long as you don’t see the evolution of society and all the current upheavals through those eyes, with that perspective and, to be more concrete, with that goal in mind, you’re not a Marxist. To be a Marxist does not mean to sympathize with the plight of workers, nor to help them retire at 60 rather than 62. To be a Marxist means to aim for the destruction of capitalist society in the only way possible: by wresting political power from the bourgeoisie. It means campaigning for the working class to seize political power, expropriate the bourgeoisie and replace capitalist organization by taking over the management of the whole of society.

“We don’t see the working class only as an exploited social class, oppressed, a social class that is to be pitied, but the social class that is potentially capable of fighting and pushing the struggle to its ultimate conclusion, the destruction of the bourgeois class as the exploiting class. Everything else follows from this. To be a revolutionary communist is not to be a reformist, even if we must also fight for the slightest reforms. Internationalism is not solidarity, even if it’s in the proletariat’s interest to be in solidarity with a multitude of oppressed social categories, and even to contest with nationalists, feminists and others for the leadership of their struggles. More broadly, all the demands put forward at an elementary level in strikes or in major class confrontations are meaningless if they are not carried out with the aim of achieving the destruction of capitalism.

“The revolutionary character of the Transitional Program does not lie in this or that particular demand. Each can be transformed into a bland reformist brew, such as the sliding scale translated into a cost-of-living formula. The revolutionary character of the Transitional Program lies in the fact that, following the dynamic of workers’ struggles, it aims to advance workers’ consciousness toward the need to take power. Even the best and most accurate phrases are only phrases. What changes society are social forces, i.e., social classes. When you forget this, you can’t understand anything…. The most radical demands of the Transitional Program have no meaning and no virtue if they do not lead step to the following step, i.e., to the will to destroy bourgeois power in order to replace it with workers’ power.”