In Memoriam: Stephen Bloomer (1947-2022)

Our comrade Stephen Bloomer died on November 5, 2022 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was a long-time member of the New York City local, working in the Maintenance Department.

He first intersected the Spartacist League/U.S. in the late 1960s while studying engineering at Cornell University. He was then drafted into the army and stationed in Alaska during the Vietnam War, which politicized him. Our call that “All Indochina Must Go Communist!” really struck a chord with him.

In October 1971, beginning shortly before joining, he sent the party several contributions, once writing that the money came from “my first check from the Veterans Administration division of the ruling class.” With these contributions, the party was able to set up its own offset print shop, which produced Spartacist pamphlets such as the first edition of Lenin and the Vanguard Party, Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam and The Fight to Implement Busing. Over the years, he regularly went above and beyond in providing financial support to the party, comrades and friends.

Steve joined the party’s youth organization in late 1971 while at SUNY Stony Brook and continued working inside Students for a Democratic Society as a member of its Steering Committee. Our party’s aim was to split the subjective revolutionaries away from the Progressive Labor reformists, who were also in the SDS leadership. While at Stony Brook, he helped lead an SDS campaign in support of a CWA telephone strike in New York state. The campaign leaflet explained why workers should oppose the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, which tried to isolate the strike, and should broaden their economic struggle into a political strike against the Vietnam War.

Steve later transferred to Los Angeles. There he became a CWA member and actively participated in the successful 1973 campaign to defend the Militant Action Caucus against the CWA bureaucracy’s fabricated charges and attempted anti-communist purge of MAC supporters. After transferring to NYC, he worked as a union electrician at Harlem Hospital for many years.

The most important thing for him was his party membership, and he closely followed the work of other ICL sections, particularly Spartacist/South Africa. A friend of many years and party sympathizer wrote about how Steve explained to her as a young member that the reformist left capitulates to U.S. and world imperialism not because they are “stupid” but because “they want capitalism to exist with just a more human face.”

Steve was generous to a fault. Although he had a wry sense of humor, he was reserved and rarely talked about himself. He was a passionate follower of college wrestling, loved learning about the latest scientific developments and had an extensive collection of LPs, particularly jazz. In his later years, he enjoyed bird watching in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

A comrade in Maintenance wrote: “One of the things I remember most about him is his revolutionary professionalism. He was a man of few words, always chosen carefully. Everything he did was precise, from maintenance repairs to providing security at protests.” For Steve, there was no division between intellectual and manual labor.