Chris Knox
(1944-2025)

Chris Knox died on 14 April 2025. We honor him in particular for his invaluable contribution in formulating the guidelines for revolutionary working in the trade unions which have guided our intervention ever since, first in the Spartacist League and the international Spartacist tendency (from 1989 on the International Communist League), and then in the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International.

Chris joined the Spartacist League in 1965 as part of a layer of student recruits from Cornell University. Many were to play leading roles in the organization. Chris was animated when telling the story of how in 1966, at the University of California’s Berkeley campus,
he was grabbed by the cops while holding a sign reading “Soviet Nuclear Shield Must Cover Peking, Hanoi.” That was in advance of, but in line with, the Spartacist League’s banner, raised in an April 1970 antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., saying “All Indochina Must Go Communist”. Early on, Knox contributed articles to Workers Action, the predecessor to Workers Vanguard (WV), and in 1972 became editor of WV before being succeeded a few months later by Jan Norden.

A printer by trade, Knox headed the SL’s newly-formed Trade Union Commission, helping to write the SL’s foundational documents guiding its work in the unions. Studying the history of the Communist Party’s Trade Union Education League in the 1920s and the Trotskyists’ work in the 1930s and ’40s, particularly the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strike, he authored the four-part series on “Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions” published in WV in 1973.¹ In that seminal work, in contrast to the practice of left groups forming blocs on the basis of simple trade-unionism, the SL called for building a pole in the unions fighting to cohere a revolutionary leadership, with caucuses based on Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program and his 1940 essay on “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” stressing the vital importance of independence from the state,

Knox directed the SL’s intervention and class-struggle caucus-building in the maritime, auto, telephone and steel industries. After a militant strike in 1974 at KNC Glass Company in Union City, California in which undocumented workers defiantly battled the employer and their watchdogs, the police, the strikers had to confront the Stalinist leadership of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) who undermined any kind of militant action against the employer. That struggle was led by SL members in the longshore and warehouse divisions, and out of that came the decision to organize a caucus in ILWU.

Knox was fond of saying a revolutionary program is not something to be stored in a safe place for posterity, nor is it to be doled out in bits and pieces as various reformists and centrists are wont to do. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International are uniquely carrying forward the orientation first formulated by Knox in the then-revolutionary Spartacist League, to fight against the “labor lieutenants of capital” on a program leading to a revolutionary workers government. This has been the case with the Class Struggle Caucus led by the Liga-Quarta Internacionalista do Brasil that grew out of the 1996 fight to expel police from a municipal workers union (which the latter-day SL/ICL deserted in the heat of battle), and also with the Class Struggle Education Workers and Class Struggle Workers – Portland, fraternally allied with the IG.

Knox left the Spartacist tendency in 1981 over one of several fights in the Australian section. He never joined another self-proclaimed Trotskyist tendency but continued to work for a socialist future. He helped organize demonstrations on the San Francisco docks in support of the 1984 longshore workers’ boycott action of a ship from apartheid South Africa, the Nedlloyd Kimberley. In 1999, he assisted in organizing the 25,000-strong march in San Francisco connection with an ILWU Local 10 port shutdown calling for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s freedom, linked to a work stoppage by teachers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, organized by the LFI and the LQB. In his later years, Knox continued to be active as organizer of the Bay Area Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia, working with our comrade Jack Heyman and others of Mumia’s many supporters.

In the 1980s, Knox was very involved in protests against U.S.-backed wars in Central America, and he later wrote extensively on the environment for Socialist Viewpoint. We did have a difference with him on the issue of nuclear power, which he opposed but which we are for, with necessary safeguards. When he was in New York on May Day 2016, Chris marched with the Internationalist Group contingent with a sign saying “Wall Street = War Street, Defeat U.S. Imperialism.” Despite our differences, we shared the conviction that a small revolutionary Trotskyist party with roots in the working class can play a vital role in important class battles.

Where the revolutionary SL called for workers strikes against the war, the IG/LFI continued to do so and on that basis was instrumental in initiating the 2008 May Day shutdown of all West Coast ports protesting the U.S. imperialist wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq. The inspiration for those interventions was the conception of building a revolutionary pole in the mass organizations of the working class put forward by Chris Knox more than 50 years ago. He will be remembered for his important Marxist contribution to the class struggle for proletarian revolution. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

Return to THE INTERNATIONALIST GROUP Home Page