A Revolutionary Party Is Needed

March 2, 2026

The following is taken from a presentation at a public meeting in Detroit on February 22.

Can what happened in Minneapolis spread?

The answer doesn’t just come from Minneapolis. It can come from looking back at history. Because what we do know is that in the past, in this country, the possibility of social revolution was raised two times in the last 100 years, when ordinary people began to move.

In both cases, the conditions the working population faced, including economic hardship and racial oppression, impelled social movements that rocked this society. In both cases, ordinary people raised the question of power.

The Workers’ Movement in the 1930s

The first time was in the 1930s, with the massive strike wave movement, that included sit-down strikes, when workers took over and occupied factories.

The next time was in the 1960s, with the movement of the black population, which took over large parts of cities in the streets.

Let’s first talk about the upsurge of the working class in the 1930s—a decade of deep economic crisis called The Great Depression—but also a decade in which the working class tested different ways to fight back. It included organizing a defense for the unemployed, known as Unemployed Leagues; the 1932 Ford Hunger March of workers to the Rouge plant; and the general strikes of 1934 in Toledo, San Francisco, and Minneapolis.

By 1936, there were over 2,200 strikes.

The whole time, the corporations and their politicians tried to subvert these strikes and the workers’ movement, using newspapers, churches, politicians, goon squads, labor spies, and organizations like the KKK. They resorted to organized violence from every level of the state apparatus to make sure that workers could not organize.

And while often workers were thrown back, they continued to fight. And in that process, they learned to turn their backs on many rules of the capitalists’ order. Workers began to forge a consciousness of themselves as a class. In the words of one of the verses in the song Solidarity Forever, workers, by their actions, were coming to understand that, “Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel would turn.”

At the end of 1936, the dam broke with sit-down strikes that swept the industrial heartland of the U.S. They were the mark that workers were no longer respecting capitalists’ rights to determine what happened to their property. If that sit-down strike wave was embodied in the Flint-sit down strike, it’s because Flint was the center of GM’s power and it effectively engaged workers throughout GM’s empire, and strikes broke out all over the country.

While we could do a whole meeting on bringing to life what the Flint Sit-down strike entailed—I’ll just try to give a sense of what workers were able to do during their 44 days of occupying the plants. Everything required to make that occupation possible depended on the workers’ own organization. The necessities of daily life were organized; meals were prepared both inside and outside the plants; factories were cleaned up and living areas were constructed; safety was monitored; striking workers organized a social life inside the plants, with lively discussions, debates and plays; everyone was responsible for work carried out collectively.Decisions about organizing the strike were taken on the spot, by workers in daily meetings, both inside the plants and in the union headquarters. And workers used their control of the plants, as well as their supporters outside, to defend their positions—from barricades, to patrols, to decoy maneuvers, that showed Flint workers’ willingness to confront the police and national guard. They chose their own means of fighting, rather than the legally acceptable ones, which always render workers powerless, and stepped outside the framework of bourgeois legality.

Faced with this massive and militant upsurge of the working class, from 1932 up until 1941, the capitalist class moved to legalize the organization of millions of unskilled industrial workers into industrial unions—in order to then control them. In this same time period, the working class found in its own ranks militant people determined to fight for the working class to organize itself, militants in communist and socialist leadership. They were driven out, or bitterly silenced, replaced by leaders who collaborated with their bosses. This massive working-class movement that shook the very foundations of this class society did not overturn it and replace it.

This massive working class movement fell short of actually calling the question of power—even though the workers’ power was there.

The Black Movement of the 1960s

The next time the possibility for revolution was raised was in the 1960s, with the black mobilization. That struggle dominated a part of American political life for the better part of thirty years, 1943 to 1971, engaging several generations of black people.

The earlier movement, the civil rights movement, revolved around the overturning of Jim Crow laws. The leadership of that movement rested on “non-violent resistance,” never saying that the government would be forced into action only if it felt the pressure of the determination and massive mobilization of black people. However, the Civil Rights movement did include massive mobilizations of the black community. The Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955 spread to over 150 cities. The sit-ins at lunch counters that started in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 spread to at least 70 other cities. There were Freedom Rides in 1961 and fights for voting rights. The movement showed the courage and determination of hundreds of thousands of people.

But by 1963, changes showed in the consciousness of the black population, starting in Birmingham, Alabama, when people, especially young people, poured into the streets and challenged business as usual, interfering with businesses, that practically came to a halt as a result.

Within 10 weeks of Birmingham, similar demonstrations and civil disruption campaigns were underway in over 150 cities.

Birmingham is 1963. The Civil Rights Act is passed in 1964, a legal change, on paper. But by that time, already sizeable layers of the black population had already turned their backs on the hope that a bill passed in Washington could change their situation. And that reality was made more clear when the urban rebellions began to spread to the North.

Almost as soon as the Civil Rights act passed, people took to the streets in Harlem. And the next years were dominated by the rebellions in the streets—from Harlem, to Paterson, N.J, to Philadelphia, to Watts in L.A. to Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, Tampa, Atlanta, Buffalo, to Detroit. And then everywhere else in 1968. There were major and smaller rebellions that spread across the whole country, including in the prisons.

What started as a struggle of black people against the racists—who would openly, systematically and legally deny the whole black population—became transformed into a movement wherein the black masses found themselves opposing their forces to that of the whole American state apparatus—and pulling after them white workers in the plants.

The black movement of the 1960s too, like the workers’ movement of the 1930s, shook the very foundations of this racist, class society.

But there was no one who prepared the black population, who were in motion, for the necessity of bringing bourgeois society to a halt and using their numbers and their determination to do so. The opportunity was lost because there was no organization, neither civil rights nor black nationalist, which acted on the view that a working-class revolution could be, at the same time, the solution to the problems facing the black population, who in their vast majority, were workers, with power, in the very heart of the economies of cities, like Birmingham and Detroit.

And so, while the black movement raised the question of power, the bourgeoisie, itself, understanding that power, did everything to subvert, derail, and divert that movement—from destroying the most militant organizations, by killing off, or imprisoning, or isolating its leaders, to extending privileges to what became the Black Democratic Party political apparatus and a certain black bourgeoisie.

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There will be another movement sometime, somewhere, another movement that does begin to spread. And when that happens, there could be another mass movement like in the 1930s or the 1960s.

What happens then? A movement against something like ICE can spread and then begin to raise all kind of issues, issues about people’s worsening standard of living, issues about the lack of good health care, issues about our children’s future. A movement can happen against the devastation of a war.

The Working Class Needs a Revolutionary Party

It can start anywhere. In 1917 in Russia, a protest march by women workers demanding bread started an uprising that led to a revolution.

A movement that spreads and becomes a mass movement will begin to raise the question of who runs the society.

Whenever the next big movement starts, a movement like the 1930s or the 1960s, whenever it starts, the most important thing for the working class is not to be fooled again into accepting a partial victory. The working class can’t stop short this time and let the same capitalist ruling class continue to run the society. Workers can’t let some politicians or union leaders lay out a few crumbs that were won, tell us that’s enough, and then continue on in the same society that caused all the problems in the first place.

The movement in Minneapolis today is a moral protest by people from across many parts of the population, people who didn’t like what was going on and wanted to do something about it. What this movement did not have was an understanding that to go further they have to see where the problems are really coming from; they have to see that the problems come from the functioning of the whole capitalist system. And that system can’t be taken on unless the working class does it.

The working class is not moving today. But the working class sits in the middle of the whole productive economy. The working class makes everything run. The working class can make everything stop. The working class is the only force that has the power to bring down this whole capitalist system and can make everything run in a new society. A revolution led by the working class is the only way for all of us, the only way for humanity to have a better future.

So, it is important for all of us who understand this, it is important for us to talk this and say this all the time, to everyone we know. We have to prepare for when the next movement starts. We need more people who agree that the working class can’t stop short next time. We need more people who agree that next time we can’t stop until we get rid of this system and build a new one.

In order for that to happen, we need a revolutionary party in the working class. That’s what we in Spark are aiming to build.