BY HARRY RING

LOS ANGELES - A celebration was held at the Pathfinder bookstore here on March 15 to honor the life and political contributions of May Stark, a veteran cadre of the Socialist Workers Party.

"May Stark - Fifty-six years in the fight for socialism," read a banner over an attractive display of front pages of the Militant spanning the late 1930s to today and photos of Stark over this period.

Some 65 people attended the event, including family members and friends, SWP members and supporters, and Young Socialists.

Stark died of a heart attack February 29, a week before her 80th birthday. She joined the SWP in 1939 and remained politically active to her last day.

Gale Shangold, organizer of the Los Angeles SWP branch, opened the program. Shangold is a garment worker and member of the United Needletrades Industrial and Textile Employees union.

The last political activity Stark attended, Shangold said, was an SWP meeting called on short notice to plan a campaign to protest a new wave of hostile measures by Washington against Cuba after two planes were downed February 24 while violating the island's airspace. The intruding aircraft were piloted by Cuban counterrevolutionaries based in Florida.

At that meeting, Shangold recalled, Stark described a discussion she had with a plumber who came to do a repair job at her home. Learning he was Cuban, Stark engaged him in a conversation on the February 24 incident. "We disagreed," Stark said, "but I think I made an impact on him." Always approaching other working people as equals and trying to engage them in politics was a quality Stark developed over decades in the communist movement, Shangold said.

Joel Britton, SWP national trade union director, spoke on behalf of the party's Political Committee. He described some of the events in the late 1930s that shaped the party Stark joined: capitalist depression, the victory of fascism in Spain, and the rivalry between capitalist powers for world domination.

Britton noted that political developments in the 1930s paralleled in many ways what is opening up today with a worldwide capitalist economic crisis, imperialist war preparations against China, Cuba, and Yugoslavia, sharpening trade offensives by Washington, the growth of fascist currents, and the beginning of labor resistance.

1939 antifascist fight
May Stark joined the SWP in New York and participated in the party's efforts there to help mobilize the labor movement and antifascist youth to oppose ultrarightist groups that were gaining strength at the time, the SWP leader said. Earlier in 1939, the German-American Bund and other fascist organizations had called a rally in Madison Square Garden. The SWP led a campaign for a mass workers counterdemonstration. Some 50,000 workers turned out, pushing back the rightists.

Britton noted the participation of Sam Stark and his brother in the antifascist action; both attended the Los Angeles celebration. Sam, May's companion for 55 years, was part of the young worker cadres of the SWP and union movement who were an essential component of the 1939 action. Party leaders took turns atop the sturdy shoulders of Sam and others, addressing the crowd.

May Stark joined the working-class campaign by the SWP to oppose U.S. entry into the second imperialist slaughter. She sold the Socialist Appeal - the name the Militant took at that time - which promoted the party's program of struggle to overthrow capitalism.

In a single weekend of street sales during this period, 6,000 copies of the socialist weekly were sold in New York by the "Appeal Army," as reported in the paper's sales column of the same name.

At the time, the SWP campaigned with the slogan of opening the U.S. borders to Jews and others fleeing the Nazi terror in Europe. The Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt stubbornly kept them out.

"As May was committing to a fighting party," Britton said, "others were preparing to desert our cause under powerful pro- imperialist pressures."

A political crisis in the SWP broke into the open, precipitated by the Stalin-Hitler "nonaggression" pact between the governments of the Soviet Union and imperialist Germany on Aug. 22, 1939, and the outbreak of World War II a week later with the German invasion of Poland.

Struggle for a proletarian party
A substantial minority in the SWP leadership and membership concluded there was no longer anything progressive in the Soviet Union to defend. This panicky recoiling from historic conquests of the international workers movement reflected a more fundamental retreat from the perspective of building a revolutionary proletarian party in the United States.

Britton explained that the SWP actively collaborated with Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian revolution who had been expelled from the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin's regime and forced into exile in Mexico. Trotsky intervened actively in the debate, supporting the party majority in its unconditional defense of the Soviet Union against imperialist assault and its simultaneous effort to deepen the orientation of the whole party toward political work in the factories.

Stark, said Britton, stood firmly with the majority, which also organized SWP members not already in industry to get factory jobs and systematize the practical political activity of the entire party in industrial trade unions.

At the time, Stark was a member of the branch in the Bronx, New York, composed almost exclusively of white-collar workers, most of whom supported the petty-bourgeois minority in the party. She had recently graduated from college and was a social worker.

Move to Los Angeles
In 1941, Britton said, Stark made something of a "jailbreak," leaving home, where she felt restricted by her family ties. She quit her job with the welfare department and moved to Los Angeles to join the turn to industry.

There Stark learned to operate a drill press and got a job in a tool-making plant. She got hired at Douglas Aircraft and carried out the party's campaigns on the job until the end of World War II.

Between 1943 and 1948, a labor radicalization spread in the United States, along with an upturn in the fight for Black rights. Stark helped build large demonstrations and meetings of workers and youth against Gerald K. Smith and his antilabor, anti-Jewish Silver Shirts - a pro-fascist group that had been formed in 1932.

Stark joined the Los Angeles branch's orientation toward struggles of workers in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Although she had no knowledge of sewing, Britton said, she stubbornly persisted, going through job after job until she acquired a good amount of skill. She was eventually able to hold steady jobs in the industry and remained a garment worker until the late 1960s.

What in the eyes of Stark and other young revolutionists at the time looked like a straight line to revolution was not to be, Britton said. What followed instead was a retreat of the labor movement and the anticommunist witch-hunt of the 1950s.

"Sticking with the building of a proletarian party during that retreat was what steeled May Stark for a life-long commitment to be a disciplined, professional revolutionist," the SWP trade union director stated. During the 1950s, FBI agents visited the Stark household several times.

Active in his union at a Firestone tire factory, Sam Stark was fired after a visit by FBI agents with his bosses. May's modest but more stable garment worker income helped them survive.

Anticolonial revolutions
Stark identified with the powerful postwar anticolonial struggles that broke out, including the 1949 Chinese revolution, the fight by the Korean people who held off the invading U.S. armies, and the 1959 triumph of the Cuban revolution .

Stark was a resolute defender of these and other revolutionary gains throughout her life, Britton said. "She inspired us with her never-failing identification with and active support for the struggles of all the exploited and oppressed of the world."

In the United States there was an upsurge of the Black struggle and the emergence of Malcolm X as a major revolutionary leader. "Many who considered themselves socialists and communists found it hard or impossible to recognize the revolutionary importance of Malcolm X," Britton said, "but not May."

Stark's identification with the struggle against racism began early when as a youth her parents operated a restaurant in Harlem. As Sam Stark put it, "May believed in justice and she saw Black people in Harlem weren't getting justice."

Britton, who worked with Stark in the Los Angeles branch in the late 1960s, and again from 1982 to 1992, noted her participation in a day of protest against the Gulf War on Feb. 21, 1991, when most party members took the day off work to participate in student-led protests against the U.S. war on the Iraqi people. Britton joined Stark and younger socialists at an antiwar rally at Occidental College. "May made regular use of the campus library and was known to a good number of students and others," Britton pointed out. "We didn't have an official permit for the table, but no one tried to make us take it down - I think May's presence made a difference."

Afterward, he said, Stark helped get together students interested in participating in a socialist discussion group.

Britton noted that for many years Stark was part of a grouping within the SWP that rejected the party's assessment that the Chinese regime headed by Mao Tse-tung was Stalinist. This grouping tried unsuccessfully to win support in the party ranks for their point of view.

In the late 1960s the group considered a proposal to quit the SWP and join the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist sect. May and Sam Stark, Britton said, immediately replied that they would stick with their party.

Thabo Ntweng, a member of the SWP National Committee who is an airline worker and member of the International Association of Machinists, and Reina Aparicio, a member of the Los Angeles Young Socialists, also addressed the meeting. Messages from long-time comrades of Stark were read during the meeting.

Elizabeth Stone, a leader of the SWP in Newark, New Jersey, also spoke. She got to know Stark in the 1980s in Los Angeles. "During the '80s." Stone said, "May got a kind of second wind -

maybe we could say a third or fourth wind - and made some important contributions.

Pathfinder bookstore
"Two major political developments were occurring at the time that inspired May and were to have a lasting affect on the workers movement in Los Angeles.

"The first was the victory of the revolutions in Nicaragua and Grenada and the strengthening of the Cuban revolution. The second was the transformation of Los Angeles resulting from the addition of hundreds of thousands of workers from Central America, Mexico, and other countries." Many of these immigrants, Stone said, moved into the area where the Pathfinder bookstore is located and quite a few were active in efforts on behalf of the Nicaraguan and Cuban revolutions, and in support of the revolutionary struggles in El Salvador and Guatemala.

Stark was a regular participant in public meetings and protests in solidarity with the revolutionary struggles in Central America. She also contributed to recruiting young workers to the communist movement, especially immigrant workers, drawing on her long experience as an industrial worker, Stone said.

Stark's most important contribution in this period, Stone stated, was helping to transform and expand the Pathfinder bookstore. "May regularly worked one shift a week in the bookstore and more when needed. She helped make the expanded store possible, and you could tell she really enjoyed it."

She was often the first volunteer many newcomers to the store met. "Later," Stone said, "people would tell me how impressed they were on first coming to the bookstore and meeting this woman in her 70s, a fighter, talking revolution."

Her commitment to getting the political weapons produced and distributed by Pathfinder Press into the hands of as many other fighters as possible marked her through to the end, Stone said.

Harry Ring closed the event with a fund appeal in honor of Stark's life. Those present contributed more than $800 to the Books for Cuba Fund, which makes possible donations of Pathfinder books to libraries and other institutions in Cuba.  
 
 
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