Spark Conference:
Response to Discussion

Apr 20, 2025

The situation facing the working class requires a party, a working-class party, a revolutionary communist working-class party.

But it doesn’t exist. We know this, we’ve said it how many times. And many others who call themselves communists or socialists say the same thing. But the question is: what to do?

This lack of a party has led some activists to pretend as though they themselves were at least the nucleus of that party—issuing a program for today around which they expect others to coalesce. It has led others to seek out a quicker return on their work in milieus other than the working class, hoping to rest on movements they see—or expect to see—emerging among students, women, environmentalists, today even among a movement they hope will develop in opposition to Trump. It has led still others to direct their primary activity toward trying to create oppositions in the existing unions.

We don’t say it’s an easy problem. And we don’t pretend to offer an answer good for all people in all situations. We simply know what choices we have made, and why.

In the absence of a revolutionary political party, a communist party, in the working class, we set ourselves from the beginning the task of trying to establish revolutionary groups in workplaces, groups organized around a regular political expression, with a kind of editorial, aimed at giving a revolutionary answer to the political problems of the day, and at the same time allowing the workers’ immediate problems to be expressed in the newsletter.

We also set ourselves, from the beginning, the task of recruiting revolutionary militants, winning them to the Marxist program of our day, that is a program based on the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, but also based on the history of the workers’ activity in this country and internationally. Those militants might be workers or petty-bourgeois, but, if they are petty-bourgeois, they should be ready to break with the future their class has in store for them. They would put their capacities to work in support of the struggles of the working class, the one social force which has the possibility to free humanity from the barbarism to which capitalism has condemned it.

Over the last decade, we also set ourselves the task of expressing the revolutionary program via bourgeois elections. Our goal was to raise Marxist ideas in broader sections of the working class and other ordinary people beyond just those in the workplaces where we had sought to establish and develop work, and beyond the unions in which some of our militants were active.

We heard the organizational and finance reports, both of which gave, again, some sense of the very small steps we have taken in all this work.

We are not necessarily opposed to what others do. And it’s obvious that our militants would take part in the unions where they work, including running and holding union office. It’s also obvious that the militants of a revolutionary organization, even one as small and limited as ours, would take part in demonstrations, for example, for women’s access to abortion, or against the attempt of the Trump administration to deport immigrants, etc. And we did all that. It’s also obvious that our newspaper would write supporting such movements, even while trying to develop a description of the way these problems proceed from the organization of capitalist society, and not just a result of one politician’s or one political party’s choices. Our newspaper has also spent time and space, for example, showing our support for the right of the Palestinians to have their own free existence, which does not mean we equate Hamas with the Palestinian people.

When we criticize other organizations which throw themselves into the women’s movement, for example, or the environmental movements, it’s not because such work couldn’t be important, and even useful. We even say that a revolutionary working-class party if it existed, would have to find the way to intervene in some of these struggles.

But that’s exactly the point. That party doesn’t exist. And to focus on these other struggles, divorced from what the working class can do, simply keeps us caught in the same vicious circle. It’s not enough just to proclaim the historic capacity of the working class from the housetops, while rushing to take part in non-working-class social struggles. What’s needed is a focus aimed at rooting Marxist tradition in the working class, and specifically among industrial workers. And this has been our focus since the beginning.

The other aspect of our work that is key to what we are is expressed in the ties we have developed with political organizations in other countries, and specifically with those of the Internationalist Communist Union (ICU), with whom we share a long history. Without those links, without face-to-face contact, without the possibility of sharing experiences and political perspectives, we would be condemned to the narrow limits of a perspective shaped only by the reality of living within the dominant imperialism. It’s obviously a work that takes time and preoccupation, travel and attention paid to what other parts of the ICU tradition have written. It takes, for Americans, most of whom grow up without real access to other languages, the effort to break out of the handcuffs that having only one language puts on us. But it also rewards us, because it links us, through the history of these organizations, back to the whole history of the Marxist movement. And it links us in an immediate way with the experience that groups like LO, CO, OTR, WF and others have.

Reactionary laws in this country may forbid us from being integrated inside one international organization, but they cannot prevent us from realizing that organically we are part of a tradition that goes back to Marx.