Our Comrade, David Harding, 1945–2024

Jan 6, 2025

David Harding, a leading member of the Spark organization, died at the end of December 2024, after a period of declining health. He would have been 80 years old in January.

Dave was a militant from an early age, politicized by the U.S. war in Viet Nam and by the struggles of black people against a racist society. When he moved to Baltimore to go to Johns Hopkins University in 1963, he became active against what he saw then as evils in this society. Eventually, he came to understand that the wars and the racism he hated were the products of a capitalist society built on exploitation of labor.

Like many other young people of his generation, he began to understand that it wasn’t enough just to protest the wars and the horrendous amount of organized violence against the black population. Dave came to understand that it was necessary to find a force able to take on the society that produced such outrages. Like quite a few others of his generation, he dropped out of school and “went to the working class.”

In Dave’s case, this meant getting a job at Sparrows Point, which was then the mammoth Bethlehem Steel complex near Baltimore.

Called by those who knew him then, “a lively person,” he quickly was active in the Steelworkers Union (USWA), becoming the editor of the local paper, The 09 Express. It didn’t take long for him to get a copy of a new bulletin that had appeared at the Point, “The Steeler,” put out by what was about to become the Spark organization.

He had been in and around other left organizations, but by 1972, understanding that this new bulletin was a way for people like himself to carry out political activity to the working class, and seeing that the working class had the potential of changing the society he detested, he joined the Spark.

Working at the Point, he suffered the same rounds of layoffs as other workers as the crisis began to squeeze industry, throwing millions of workers out in the street, for the first time in several decades. He picked up odd jobs, like house painting and driving a taxi. Finally, he ended up at a local community college, where he got training in the relatively new field of computers. From there he was hired into the State of Maryland Department of Health headquarters, along with thousands of other clerical and technical workers.

The new Spark bulletin at the State, which started in September of 1984, depended on Dave, as did the local AFSCME union that was organized at the State. He was president of his local union for 10 years.

In 2016, he ran as an independent for the City Council in Baltimore. Proud of his class, he described himself in this way: “I am a long-time worker at the Maryland Health Department and a former worker at Bethlehem Steel.” And he added: “One or two individual council members cannot change the basic direction of this society. That will require a fight to force the bosses to pay for the crisis they created, to take public money and use if for public purposes, to take their stolen wealth away from them—that will require a struggle by working people, a determined massive fight. The elections won’t bring about that fight. But we can use the elections to say we are fed up, to say we want to see that fight happen.”

In 2020, he was one of the early organizers of the new Working Class Party in Maryland. You could find him on a Saturday morning getting signatures from people who agreed that the working class needed its own party. Eventually, he ran as the WCP candidate for governor in 2022, getting more than 17,000 votes.

Like many other people, with few resources, he worked almost up to the day of his death. And he was always ready to join the struggles of working class people to organize themselves.

If you were a friend of Dave, you soon learned this about him: he loved hardware stores, he enjoyed tinkering and fixing things. He would try to figure out how to deal with almost any problem—electrical, carpentry, painting, even plumbing. He was generous with his time, helping other people deal with their house problems, with sheds, garages, and even with an old barn.

Dave was a revolutionary to the end, understanding that there is no way out for working people unless they organize, unless they use their capacity as the class that makes society run, to take control of that society and re-organize it in a humane way that will serve the whole population.