Marjorie Stamberg (1944-2024)

Marjorie Stamberg, a founding leader of the Internationalist Group, died of ovarian cancer on May 29. A radical activist won to Trotskyism, she was part of a layer of youth galvanized by the fight for black freedom and radicalized in opposition to the bloody U.S. war in Vietnam. She joined the New Left Students for a Democratic Society in 1965 and became active in the left wing of the civil rights movement. In 1972, she was won to the Spartacist League. Although for decades we have not been in a common organization, we honor her contributions to the workers movement and extended our condolences to her comrades.

Within the New Left, Marjorie became a hard feminist and soft Maoist. Moving to the Bay Area in 1969, she joined a male-exclusionary group of pro-working-class feminists. She went to work seeking to win Oakland AT&T phone operators to radical feminism through the Operators Defense Committee (ODC). For years, the ODC had a running debate—feminism vs. Marxism—with the SL-supported Militant Action Caucus of the CWA.

In 1971, the operators struck, followed by an IBEW phone electricians’ strike. As she wrote in “Women’s Liberation and the Class Line” (The Internationalist, October 2015): “We had a kind of Maoist-feminist strategy, that correct politics flow through the blood of true feminism, and that consistent feminism leads to socialism.” She continued: “But the opposite was happening, in this litmus test. We saw the women we had recruited into our feminist consciousness-raising groups scab on the IBEW strike, crossing the picket lines of the men workers, and even worse, using the arguments that we had given them.” This experience was a “lightning bolt of shock,” as she described it, and decisive in winning many of the women, including Marjorie, to the SL.

A facile journalist, Marjorie wrote for several “underground” papers in the late 1960s, including the Guardian, the preeminent New Left press at the time. A year after her recruitment to the SL, she transferred to New York City to join the staff of Workers Vanguard and was brought onto the editorial board in 1979. Marjorie was a powerful speaker and agitator. Her 1978 Spartacist campaign for State Assembly headlined: “For a Socialist Fight to Save New York!” In 1985, she ran for NYC mayor alongside her comrade Ed Kartsen, who ran for Manhattan Borough President. Together they canvassed the city, calling for a mobilization of labor and minorities to stop rampant racist attacks. The article “Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics Revisited” in the new issue of English-language Spartacist (No. 69, August 2024) was dedicated to both Marjorie and Ed “who fought for communism in bourgeois elections and beyond.”

In 1996, Marjorie and her life partner Jan Norden, longtime WV editor, were expelled from the ICL and formed the Internationalist Group. We now consider that fight and those expulsions to have been politically unprincipled.

For a detailed account of her life see her obituary in The Internationalist, June-August 2024: “Revolutionary Trotskyist, Marxist Educator, A Leader of Struggles for All the Oppressed.”