The Spark
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- There was also an unrelated website called "The Spark"; see The Spark (website) for more information.
The Spark is a small Trotskyist group in the United States. The group originated as a tendency within the Spartacist League around Kay Ellens who had spent a period in France working with Lutte Ouvrière. Having split from the Spartacist League in 1968 the embryonic group began factory based work eventually issueing the paper Wildcat.
Formally the group was founded in 1971, issueing the first number of Spark superseding Wildcat in August of that year and it has since closely followed the policies of the Internationalist Communist Union (Trotskyist).
The Spark places a great emphasis on doing factory-based work and works only in a few cities (Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.). It produces a quarterly magazine called Class Struggle and a fortnightly paper, The Spark.
In its orientation to the working class, Spark places an emphasis on politicizing workers who can gain influence amongst their co-workers and play a leading role in workplace struggles. As a way of politicizing workers, Spark publishes workplace bulletins which they write with groups of workers from a given workplace and which denounce conditions on the shopfloor, ridicule supervisors, and give workers a political perspective on domestic and international events. Middle class members of the organization are asked to use their class privilege for the benefit of the communist movement and to commit themselves to find jobs that give them enough free time to recruit out of the universities and to help put out agitational material at targeted workplaces.
[edit] Politics
Spark describes itself as socialist, communist, and Marxist (and uses these words interchangeably). It calls upon the heritage of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, the Russian Revolution and the first four Congresses of the Communist International, as well as the Transitional Program of the Fourth International.
Spark considers the Soviet Union to be the only country where the working class took power, and hence the only proletarian state to have ever existed. Their analysis of the Soviet Union is that a bureaucracy took control from the workers, describing this situation as a degenerated workers state (as described in Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed). They maintained this position through the collapse of the Soviet Union.
They are in the Leninist tradition and hold that a revolutionary party with roots in the working class is necessary for the creation of socialism. Only the working class can carry out the socialist transformation of society, by fighting conscious of its own interests as a class. They maintain that a socialist revolution must be internationalist in focus.
Their critique of the rest of the Trotskyist movement is that while that movement represents the only genuinely Marxist tradition within the international communist movement, its functioning has generally been confined to the student activist or left intellectual milieux. While many Trotskyist groups within the United States have claimed a theoretical allegiance to the working class, very few make this social sector the focus of their political energies. As a logical consequence of this drift away from practical efforts in the working class, many began presenting theoretical positions claiming that some group besides the industrial working class (e.g. peasantry or intellectuals) could play the leading role in a socialist transformation of society. In line with this, Spark does not consider any other country to be proletarian in nature, viewing the various countries that called themselves Socialist or Communist as bourgeois nationalists who broke with imperialism.
