Workers Vanguard No. 1130 23 March 2018
Lisa Gruber
1944–2018
Our longtime comrade Lisa Gruber died in the San Francisco Bay Area on March 6 after a lengthy and increasingly debilitating illness. She was 73. Beloved for her empathy, human insight and wit, Lisa was a personable Marxist politician whose intelligence and courage were a great strength to the party. She was among a number of pro-working-class New Leftists who had worked their way through the morass of competing political programs to find their way to Trotskyism and join the Spartacist League. In losing Lisa, we have lost a wealth of political wisdom drawn from experience beginning in the mid 1960s civil rights movement and spanning the next several decades.
Lisa joined the Spartacist League in 1972. In her 46 years as a communist, she was an auto union militant, an organizer and a mom. She spent years leading Spartacist locals in Houston, Cleveland and Vancouver, Canada. Her chronic infirmity eventually forced her to withdraw from daily activity in the Bay Area, but she nonetheless continued to do high-level party work, traveling internationally from Australia and Asia to West Europe. She managed to maintain her combative spirit and intense political interest until the last few years. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Lisa’s son Josh, her sister Mimi and their families, as well as to her companion, Charlie.
Lisa was a “red-diaper baby,” born and raised in New York in a non-religious Jewish, leftist family. She studied art at Reed College in Oregon, going on to University of California at Berkeley. By age 20, she had broken off her formal education to join the civil rights movement. Lisa and her then husband Bob Mandel were among the mostly white students who went South for Freedom Summer voter registration inspired by the leftward-moving radicals of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. As reported in a 23 June 1964 front-page San Francisco Chronicle article, Lisa and Bob were arrested in Clarksdale, Mississippi, two days after three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner—were arrested and went missing in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Weeks later, the bodies of those three young men were found buried in a dam, murdered by the Klan.
Like many youth stirred by the fight for black rights, Lisa joined the swelling protest against U.S. imperialism’s bloody war against the Vietnamese workers and peasants. She and Bob became prominent in Berkeley/Oakland and were both arrested during the 1967 Stop the Draft Week. As Lisa enjoyed recalling, she appeared briefly in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point about 1960s counterculture. In the opening scene’s documentary-like setting of an activist meeting, Lisa questioned Black Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver as to what would make white people into revolutionaries.
Lisa was shaped by a passionate commitment to black liberation and to women’s liberation, but was influenced by prevailing sectoralist arguments, such as “only women can organize women.” In 1968, Lisa headed up a small group within the male-exclusionist New Left feminist Berkeley Women’s Liberation. Lisa and her group cast about trying to find a path to revolution in this flawed framework.
The student eruption and workers general strike in France in 1968 had a big impact on the New Left because it shot through the widespread contempt for the working class as being materially “bought off” and incapable of overturning capitalism. Lisa and others in her grouping, along with some male radicals, decided to move to nearby Hayward, at that time a largely white working-class city. Their collective did youth-centered agitation and workplace actions for several months to combat racism and to try to rouse the working class for revolution. Disappointed with their poor results, some joined another faction of the New Left, the Weathermen.
Lisa and her cohorts instead moved to East Oakland and, with some Maoist women, organized Oakland Women’s Liberation. They continually clashed with the Maoists in their joint study group, and began to read Trotskyist critiques of Stalinist class collaboration and Maoist betrayals. Lisa began to seriously consider the need for a Leninist party and to debate Trotskyism with the SL.
The belief that the working class was crucial to the struggle for socialism collided with feminism when some of the women around Oakland Women’s Liberation justified scabbing on a phone company strike by arguing that the strikers were men! Lisa’s recruitment to the SL required convincing her that feminism and revolutionary Marxism were competing worldviews and that the struggle for women’s liberation had to be the work of the entire revolutionary party, not just women. The SL’s documentation of the work among women by the Bolshevik Party, and of the early Communist International after the 1917 Russian Revolution, was crucial in showing that our party was committed to this task.
In 1972, the same year that she joined the SL, Lisa got a job at the General Motors assembly plant in Fremont. Soon after, Lisa joined other unionists to form the Committee for a Militant UAW (CMUAW), later the UAW Militant Caucus, which was politically supported by the Spartacist League. The Militant Caucus put forward a class-struggle program against the pro-capitalist UAW bureaucrats.
With the auto industry entering a period of crisis, Fremont was in the front line of the battle to preserve this key section of the U.S. proletariat. In 1974, the plant faced the worst layoffs in auto since the 1930s Depression. Lisa and the CMUAW fought tooth and nail for an industry-wide strike against layoffs, raising the call for a shorter workweek at full pay. This program went up against the various reformists in the plant, such as the Maoists whose scheme was to get the company to keep women working while the men were laid off, an open violation of union seniority. After the jobs were axed, these same Maoists launched a lawsuit that would have invited the courts to shred seniority protections. The CMUAW maintained an active campaign against all forms of government interference in the union, insisting that it is the union that must fight discrimination.
Lisa ran for union office in 1977 on the UAW Militant Slate calling for “a workers party based on an explicit program to abolish capitalism and establish a workers government.” Over the years, the caucus sought to win workers to a broader internationalist and revolutionary program. They mobilized around issues including the 1977 murder of South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko and the British Ford strike in 1978. Ultimately, the capitalists dumped Fremont, shutting down the plant in 1982.
Lisa used her hard-won experience as a communist in the trade unions to lead SL locals in Houston and then Cleveland, both of which had important industrial arenas of work. After returning to the Bay Area, she finished her BA degree and trained to become a paralegal. She worked closely with the Partisan Defense Committee’s counsel, Valerie West, on the case of Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), a Black Panther leader jailed for 27 years for a murder the state knew he did not commit. As a high-level paralegal, she attended depositions and pored over records to build a case against the state’s retaliatory prison transfers and other harassment. This work helped keep Geronimo’s cause in the public eye until his eventual release in 1997.
In the 1990s, Lisa was often called on to assist various SL/U.S. locals and ICL sections abroad. This sometimes meant planting herself for chunks of time in countries with many dangers and conditions hazardous to her precarious health. Lisa was especially skilled at disentangling political questions and dealing with disputes in a way that recognized where comrades were coming from. Through her characteristically relentless probing, Lisa proved herself a leader with tough political acumen and determination to build the party. As a comrade from our French section wrote of Lisa’s time there, she had “an external eye, independent thought and a drive to identify problems and propose solutions to make the section function in a more Leninist, Cannonite way,” a reference to James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism.
Despite the excruciating progression of her illness, as a consultative member of the Bay Area local Lisa strove to participate as much as possible—attending meetings, intervening in party discussions, and accepting assignments, such as photographing protests for the party press. She regularly offered to host events in her home, from social gatherings to video showings and fundraisers. She pursued her passion for drawing and photography throughout her life and found a welcome outlet in her gardening.
People were known to spill their guts when exposed to Lisa’s humor and honesty. In a 2011 interview, Lisa laughingly described how she became effective at convincing people to buy Workers Vanguard. She would show them the paper and say: “You don’t know what you’re missing.” In the same interview, she summarized her lifetime commitment to the revolution, as well as that of her comrades going back to the 1960s: “We saw ourselves as right against a world that was going wrong. And I think that sustained us all the way, through these many years. It’s a good thing to latch onto because it gives you direction.”
Lisa inspired us and we will always honor and miss her.
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