Oberlin, 2026: History & Sentiment

Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes presents political report to June international party conference. With Barnes, from left are SWP leaders Paul Mailhot, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark. (Photo credit: MILITANT/LAURA ANDERSON; Caption: The Militant)

This week's Militant* publishes the first part of two reporting on the Party's 2026 International Conference held last June in Oberlin, Ohio. The title is SWP conference: Building a working-class party on Marxist foundations in the fight for workers power amid today’s capitalist crises and wars, and reports on the speech by Jack Barnes. Speeches by Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark will presumably be discussed next week. Comrades Jack, Mary-Alice and Steve constitute the central leadership of the Party, which I have dubbed the Troika.

Back in 2013 I proposed a framework for analyzing Comrade Jack's speeches, and it goes something like this:

• The speeches put great weight on history. Every event is deeply meaningful and subject to dialectical, Marxist interpretation. This makes them important.
• They are very sentimental, invariably referring to something that happened back when comrades were young (e.g., Malcolm X). So the speeches are inspiring.
• They make some odd-ball claim that sets the Party apart. For example, nobody else on the Left (or even the world) believes that the US lost the cold war. This inspires group solidarity.

Mr. Barnes makes an important historical claim that a Marxist, revolutionary-socialist Party in the Leninist-Bolshevik tradition already exists in the USA. It does not need to be reinvented or refounded. The hard work, according to Comrade Jack, has already been done. The article makes several points that I'll summarize in bullets.

• "Vanguard workers parties can grow with stunning speed amid deep going revolutionary events."
•  “We keep on building the party through our involvement in the class struggle and mass work of all kinds.”
• The Party's size is not important--that can change very quickly when the time is right.
• The Party "is proletarian in our program, our class composition and our norms and habits of political conduct. 'Our communist program is stronger than ever,' he said."

The SWP, with perhaps 100 members, is the vanguard remnant, the seed from which a future revolution will be brought forth. Their cadre, he claims, is proletarian to it's core.

I'll take issue with that last claim: their cadre was proletarian. Today they're increasingly retired. I think the average age is over 70. Comrades Jack and Mary-Alice are both about 85, and Steve is perhaps pushing 80. I wrote a post entitled Abandoning the Working Class about a revolutionary's retirement. What is the class nature of Bolshevik retirees? I suggested they might be declassed, like students.

The word "death" does not occur at all in the document--yet comrades are dying--obviously dying faster than new comrades can be recruited. Two comrades passed recently for whom obituaries appeared in The Militant.

The first was John Benson, who passed on March 6th at age 85. He met Jack and Mary-Alice when they were all students together at Carleton College. His leading accomplishments:

After joining the SWP in 1962, Benson helped build and lead 10 different party branches and organizing committees, served on the party’s National Committee for 15 years, carried out responsibilities helping build the international communist movement and worked at numerous industrial jobs, where he worked to strengthen the union.

Along with party members, supporters and others interested in learning more about the party, members of Benson’s family attended the meeting. This included his brothers Ken and Steve, with whom John shared a lifetime love of golf, a sport he mastered growing up in Crete, Illinois, some 30 miles south of Chicago.

I think all that organizing has been washed away with time--most of those branches don't exist anymore.

The second decedent was Dave Prince, a handsome man who frequently sat on the dais at Oberlin conferences alongside the Troika.

Prince, who joined the SWP in Cleveland in 1965, died on Jan. 25 at age 82, after a long battle against cancer. A member of the party’s National Committee since 1977, he shouldered a wide variety of central leadership responsibilities for the SWP’s party-building activity and international work. He helped organize and lead the financing of the party nationally, as well as the editorial preparation, printing, and circulation of books on working-class politics and program.

Mr. Prince is survived by a brother and sister, along with his longtime companion, Vivian Sahner.

No children and no grandchildren for either of these gentlemen.

For contrast, check out the obituary column for any small town America. I randomly picked Burns, Oregon, where a fellow died earlier this month at age 78. His very long obituary includes:

He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Andrea; his children, Matt, Luke (Missy), Megan (Tyler), and Trey (Jamie); his grandchildren, Chad (Serina), Tara (Jake), Colton, Jaxon, Taylen, Cali, and Tell; his great grandchildren, Cannon, Carter, Tell, Tilly, Tabor, His brother, Lou (Mary Jo) and numerous nieces, nephews, extended family members, and friends.

Folks with children and grandchildren, not to mention great grandchildren, are the people who will determine the future. This man is an example of a life well lived.

So I'll give great credit to my former comrades who made heroic sacrifices on behalf of the movement. They moved hither and yon across the country, dropping career, friends, and everything to respond to the momentary needs of the revolution. They never married or had children. If success had followed sacrifice, then it would be easy to admire them. As it is, they're to be pitied.

For they have not been able to reproduce themselves. Certainly not in the biological sense, but also not politically. They have not been able to recruit a younger generation of comrades to keep the flame going after they die. The biological and political are linked: red diaper babies are comrades who were the children of comrades. Our crop of aging, one-time proletarians are leaving no red diaper babies to follow in their footsteps.

May I suggest a fanciful solution? Our mutual friends over at Left Voice are all Millennials, many of whom aspire to be Trotskyists. Indeed, some of them are part of the Trotskyist Faction of the Fourth International--hard to get more Trotskyist than that! But they need an education: like our comrades 50 years ago, they're green behind their petty-bourgeois ears. They also need to disabuse themselves of their alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. But if--and it is a very big IF--then this is a Young Socialist Alliance in waiting. As Comrade Jack puts it, the Revolutionary Party already exists. No need for these young whippersnappers to reinvent it.

The second bullet in the analysis of Mr. Barnes' speeches is something sentimental that brings back fond memories of youth. Comrade Jack delivers hugely!

The SWP was founded as a Trotskyist party, in close collaboration with Leon (the Old Man) Trotsky himself, during his exile in Coyoacan, Mexico. While prohibited by law from being a member of the Fourth International, the Party stood "in fraternal solidarity" with the International, engaging in rousing sectarian disputes with people like Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. Then, for reasons that now escape me, the Party "abandoned Trotskyism," not completely, but certainly downplaying the connection.

Well, Trotsky is back! The group-read for the conference (200 copies were sold!) was In Defense of Marxism, now available in a 2026 edition published by Pathfinder Press, with a new introduction by Steve Clark. The book is a collection of correspondence to and from the Old Man during a faction fight and eventual split within the Party over World War II.

Nothing gets more sentimental than the resurrection of old Leon himself! My second bullet is more than satisfied.

The third bullet is a position that is so outlandish that it serves as a marker for group solidarity. I'll claim that is the Party's current position on Iran. But that looks to be a topic from Part 2 of The Militant's coverage of their conference, due to appear next week.

So stay tuned. 

*The Militant is the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), often referred to as the "Party." Jack Barnes is the National Secretary (CEO), a position he's held since 1972.

Further Reading:

• Left Voice and the SWP
• The March 17th Militant: A Review
• Trotskyist Ephemera