CINCINNATI — Nearly 40 comrades and friends came to the American Postal Workers Union hall Aug. 23 to join in celebrating the life and political contributions of Ned Measel, a cadre of the Socialist Workers Party for 48 years. Measel died Aug. 4. He was 71 years old.
“Over his decades of party membership, Ned could always be counted on. He acted on his confidence in the working class and in the capacities of the Socialist Workers Party to help lead a socialist revolution in the U.S.,” said John Hawkins, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate and organizer of the Cincinnati branch of the party.
“As a young person, Ned looked around until he found an organization that championed the fight to defend constitutional rights and the need to build a revolutionary party to fight for workers power — the Socialist Workers Party,” Hawkins said. “He joined it, never looked back, and spent the rest of his life building it.”
“A lot was happening in the world in the late 1970s when Ned joined the communist movement,” said Paul Mailhot, speaking on behalf of the SWP Political Committee. “Mass revolutionary struggles had brought workers and farmers governments to power in Nicaragua and Grenada and workers, farmers and soldiers in Iran were mobilizing to topple the dictatorial shah’s regime there. Cuba’s internationalist missions in Africa had joined the liberation struggle against Portugal, the last colonial empire on the continent — a story vividly told in The Cuban Revolution and the Independence Struggle in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Cuban revolutionary leader Víctor Dreke. He led Cuban combatants fighting alongside toilers in Guinea-Bissau led by Amílcar Cabral.
“A movement for union democracy and a more militant leadership was taking hold in the United Mine Workers in the lead-up to the 1977-78 coal miners strike,” said Mailhot. “There were struggles for women’s emancipation, and battles to desegregate the schools in Boston, Louisville and other cities.
“All of these struggles and world-shaking political developments were posing far-reaching questions about the capitalist system. And more workers and young people like Ned were looking for answers that went beyond reform of the capitalist system. That led him to the Socialist Workers Party, and a life devoted to the fights of the working class,” he said.
An attractive display in the front of the room showed photos, many donated by those who worked with Measel, illustrating these struggles. Over time, he had been a member of 11 branches of the Socialist Workers Party.
When Measel joined the SWP it was beginning to expand fractions of its members in key industrial unions, the most powerful sections of the working class.
“Ned fought, together with others, to make the Pittsburgh branch a coal branch. This was a central part of the fight to make the Socialist Workers Party a proletarian party, rooted in the industrial unions,” said Hawkins, who worked with Measel both in Pittsburgh in the 1980s and in more recent years in Cincinnati.
Helping to recruit
“One of the first things I remember about Ned was when I was coming out of my first socialist conference in 2011,” said Sergio Zambrana, a member of the Pittsburgh branch of the SWP and its candidate for U.S. Congress in Pennsylvania’s 12th District. “At the conference many of us signed up to join door-to-door teams introducing the party and its program to working people in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, and we talked a lot of politics during those trips. It had a deep impact on me.
“Up to that point I never would have thought of visiting small rural coal towns, much less talking and having political discussions with working people there. But I came out of it with a much clearer idea of who the working class is. And convinced this was the class with a future I wanted to stick with.
“I joined the SWP in 2014 in Washington, D.C.,” Zambrana said. “Comrades there, including Ned, were very patient. They organized classes with thought and consideration to what reading would be good for a new member.
“A big challenge we faced was getting jobs in industry,” he said. “I’m sure he was very happy to hear when I got my first job in rail four years ago and was able to start building the union and promoting solidarity with working-class struggles there.”
“Ned was a member of the Washington, D.C., branch for 13 years,” said Glova Scott, a member of that branch.
“We both got hired at Walmart in 2014 and participated in the OurWalmart campaign, fighting for a union. OurWalmart was part of a broader movement of workers who had moved past fighting for individual solutions to acting politically,” said Scott. “We fought to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, involving many retail workers.
“As we built actions advocating a union on Black Friday, Ned and I introduced the Militant newspaper and Pathfinder books to our fellow workers. We were able to bring them to Militant Labor Forums. We gave forums too, which helped attract more co-workers.
“When we went in solidarity to other workers’ picket lines, they took note that Walmart workers were fighting for a union themselves.
“The United Food and Commercial Workers union, which was a big part of the OurWalmart campaign, eventually decided to withdraw from the fight,” Scott said. “But in the course of it, many workers, Ned and I included, gained a lot more confidence in ourselves, our class, and the future in front of us.
“In honoring Ned here, I want to encourage folks to seriously consider joining the only revolutionary Marxist party in this country, the Socialist Workers Party.”
Margaret Trowe, SWP candidate for governor in California and a member of the Oakland branch of the party, traced Measel’s party-building activity in a number of branches.
She and Betsy Farley, the chair of the event, read several messages of support that had been sent to the meeting. Among them was a message from Glenda Sumner, a stalwart of the 2023 strike of the Bakery Workers union against International Flavors and Fragrances in Memphis, Tennessee. Measel and other SWP members got to know her while making several solidarity trips to the picket line. She described him as a “good friend and a soldier,” and promised a contribution for the collection taken at the meeting.
Education of cadre
“Ned helped lead efforts of the Socialist Workers Party to reach out broadly to the working class and small producers and to take part in labor resistance, like the Black Jewel coal miners railroad blockade, which drew national attention in 2019,” Trowe said. “Events like this signaled the low point of labor resistance was behind us.
“In the course of long road trips, I learned about Ned’s childhood, growing up in Pennsylvania. He told me about his admiration for his mother, who raised two sons mostly on her own and imbued him with a hatred of racism, a love of learning and a deep respect for women.”
“Ned was a hard-working cadre and party patriot,” she said. “He valued study and encouraged others to do the same. He was a respected worker and unionist. He was a professional revolutionary, a professional agitator, organizer, propagandist and literature distributor, who organized his life and energies to build the revolutionary party and educate its members. It was a pleasure working with him.”
Mailhot described the classes that every party branch is organizing today on Leon Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism with a new introduction by Steve Clark. “We are strengthening our understanding of how necessary it is to build the revolutionary party to lead the working class as the imperialist war drive deepens,” Mailhot said. “How only a party with the steadying influence of immersion in the working class can stand up to the violence and pressure of the rulers. The continuity and leadership of the Socialist Workers Party has made it such a party. Ned spent his life building that party. His is a life to celebrate!”
Participants at the meeting included union members in the area who Measel worked with in solidarity actions. Dave Perry came with his co-worker Ana Hamons, both members of the Teamsters union and the National Federation of the Blind.
Some two dozen messages honoring Measel’s life were sent to the meeting, including from the Communist Leagues in Australia and Canada. Several former Walmart co-workers also sent messages in memory of their fight for a union.
A collection to honor Measel and to advance the work of building the Socialist Workers Party topped $2,700.