Vol. 79/No. 22      June 15, 2015

Aspoy, who was a member and supporter of the Socialist Workers Party for more than 50 years, died on April 28 after a battle with cancer.

“Her lifelong course of action was based on a deep conviction rooted in her own experiences as well as study,” Waters said. “Bitsy grew up in a working-class family. Her parents were garment workers, founding members of the Socialist Workers Party. She was an avid reader and knowledgeable about the history of the modern working-class movement, and the lessons that have been paid for in blood by our class.”

“That’s what underlay her conviction that only if the working class takes political, economic and military power out of the hands of the U.S. capitalist ruling class, transforming itself in the course of that struggle, can we begin to fight for the kind of social justice working people aspire to,” she said, “a world free of war, racism, the exploitation of labor and destruction of our environment, women’s inequality, and all the other social relations that so many of us are fighting to eliminate.”

Waters and Bitsy first met when they were in their early 20s, members of the Young Socialist Alliance and Socialist Workers Party in California in the 1960s. “We were both part of that generation of youth in the United States whose lives were transformed by two world-shaking class battles,” Waters said. One was the victorious Cuban Revolution. The other was the mass proletarian struggle in the U.S. that brought down Jim Crow segregation, “a social revolution that taught us the power of the working class in our own country, capable of carrying out here the kind of revolutionary struggle that we saw in Cuba.”

“The civil rights movement in the 1960s was powered by young people who poured into the streets across the South, brushing aside the fears, objections and cautions of their elders,” she said. “Young people who said, ‘No, we’ve had enough. We’re going. Come with us.’” And they did.

“We’re being reminded of this today as we see another social movement being born with a new generation in the lead: yes, Black Lives Matter.”

Janice Lynn, a member of the Socialist Workers Party in Atlanta who worked with Aspoy building the Young Socialist Alliance and Socialist Workers Party in the 1960s in Berkeley and Oakland, spoke about the party’s leadership role in the anti-Vietnam War movement. “We always fought to lead the movement to reach to the working class. That meant winning GIs to the movement too,” Lynn said. “In the fall of 1968 some 500 active-duty GIs joined thousands in a protest march here in San Francisco demanding bring the troops home now,” she noted.

In the early 1970s, Bitsy and her companion, Ove Aspoy, moved to Washington, D.C., where they joined the volunteer staff of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and National Peace Action Coalition building the massive April 24, 1971, anti-Vietnam War demonstration. Over a million poured into the streets that day in Washington and San Francisco, one of the largest demonstrations in U.S. history.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, “We were part of serious class battles with international ramifications — from Vietnam to Latin America, to national liberation struggles across Africa, the May-June 1968 events in France, the rise of the women’s movement, the ghetto explosions and Black Power movement, the radicalization of the Chicano movement,” Waters said. “But the organized labor movement was largely on the sidelines of all this even as the working class was being deeply affected. And that set limits on what could be accomplished.”

Party’s turn to industry

The next dozen years were the most important period of Bitsy’s political life as she helped lead the party’s work in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. From collaboration with veteran leaders of the civil rights movement like Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth to fights to get women into what were then considered “men’s jobs” and breaking down workplace segregation based on sex, Bitsy led by example.

“Bitsy would spend time making sure everyone had the confidence to do these jobs,” said Anthony Dutrow, a machinist and SWP organizer in Miami who worked with Bitsy in Pittsburgh where she landed a job at nearby Washington Steel in 1991. Many of the messages read as part of the meeting paid tribute to Bitsy’s leadership example during these years. Among many other activities, she helped organize union participation in actions against the racist apartheid system in South Africa and joined the Coalition of Labor Union Women as they fought for affirmative action.

Bitsy “was quick to laugh at things that deserved it, and quick to spot anti-working-class prejudice, disdain or any other kind of prejudice,” wrote M.J. Rahn, who shared the years of party building in Cincinnati with Bitsy and Ove.

During the last decade of her working life Bitsy was a conductor on Caltrain commuter rail. Several of her former co-workers attended the meeting.

“Bitsy had a well-earned reputation not only as a serious, safe and competent train conductor, but as a worker who responded to issues that came up on the job in a spirit of solidarity,” said Jim Altenberg, a member of United Transportation Union Local 1732, who worked with Bitsy at Caltrain. “She fought for civil discourse among workers and was respected for the way she refused to abide racist, anti-women, anti-gay banter and jokes in crew rooms and on trains.”

Barbara Bowman, who also worked with Aspoy at Caltrain, sent a message relating how Aspoy organized the women conductors there to end the way women were relegated to a segregated break room that was a “sorry, cramped, second-thought kind of place” where they could neither sleep nor relax.

“Bitsy took our gripe sessions as an opportunity to organize us to begin using the more spacious engineers’ break room,” Bowman wrote. One day, “in we marched, several of us fearlessly following her lead. After a few minutes of stunned silence on the part of the engineers, Bitsy matter-of-factly explained that craft segregation had to go if there was to be union solidarity. There may have been a few grumbles, but from that day on, we women conductors felt comfortable to take our breaks in the real break room.”

Waters noted that women getting nontraditional jobs in industry was not only a question of combating the superexploitation of women that is part of the very foundation of capitalism. It’s part of the transformation of the working class and building class unity. “We often make the point that the relationship of men and women on the job working on a coal seam together is very different from that between a boss and a secretary,” she said.

At the same time, Waters pointed out that Aspoy was also a very good secretary who served in this capacity in the SWP national office for several years in the 1970s, an assignment essential to the functioning of the party leadership.

“She did an excellent job, and didn’t consider this work unimportant or to be ‘women’s work,’” Waters said.

“Bitsy had an unusual ability to walk into a busy, high-pressure situation in the office and spot immediately what she could do to help relieve the tension,” Debbie Lazar wrote.

Waters called attention to some of the adjectives and descriptive phrases about Aspoy that appeared over and over in the many messages sent to the meeting: warm, objective, irreverent, honest, loyal, unflappable and full of the joy of life.

“Bitsy exemplified the kind of working-class cadre who will always be the heart and soul of a revolutionary proletarian party,” she said.

The meeting ended with a collection of more than $2,500 to help finance the work of the Socialist Workers Party, and many lingered for another hour to talk, eat and enjoy the photo display on Bitsy’s life.  
 
 
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