World-Outlook is publishing the obituary that follows with the author’s kind permission. The article first appeared as a Facebook post. We also want to inform our readers that John was a supporter of World-Outlook from its inception in January 2021 through his death four years later. John made regular financial contributions to help us maintain and improve the site. We join Pete Seidman in saying, “John, presente!”

— World-Outlook editors

By Pete Seidman

My friend John Gaige, longtime labor activist and socialist, died on January 28 from a brain injury resulting from a fall. He was 77 years old.

The youngest of three, John was born in Sylvania, Ohio; his father was a plumber and his mother a librarian. An all-star basketball player for Sylvania High School, he graduated in 1965. In 1969, he received his bachelor’s degree from Defiance College, affiliated with the United Church of Christ.

Inspired by a group of migrant farm workers organizing in northwest Ohio, in 1971 John joined the staff of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee led by Baldemar Velasquez. His experiences there put a stamp on the rest of his life. Recognizing that the issues faced by migrants and the entire working class were the result of the reign of the capitalist system, John joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1975.

Over the next two decades, John became a leader of the SWP and a student of Marxism and advocate for the struggles of workers and farmers around the world. As the socialist candidate for mayor of Toledo, then for lieutenant governor of Ohio, and later for U.S. Senate in Maryland, John championed revolutionary Cuba as an example to workers around the world trying to break the yoke of U.S. imperialism.

A leader of the effort in the late 1970s to root the SWP in the industrial unions, John worked in United Auto Workers-organized plants in Toledo, Ohio, and Metuchen, New Jersey, and in union garment shops in Baltimore, Maryland.

After leaving the SWP in 1993, John moved to Miami, Florida, eventually hiring out as a railroad signalman at CSX Transportation. He served as local chairperson for the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, helping organize a fight to maintain union protection and benefits as the state — one in which “right-to-work” laws prevail — took over CSX trackage in South Florida.

International solidarity

In Miami, John continued to build solidarity with working-class struggles around the world — defending longshoremen in Charleston arrested for protesting a Danish shipping company’s use of non-union workers, who became symbols of the fight against racial discrimination and worker repression; joining protests to support restaurant workers fighting wage theft by their employers; and supporting efforts to bring teachers, students, and parents together against over-testing and over-crowded classrooms in Miami-Dade schools.

John was also a leader of efforts in Miami by Cubans and others to build a united-action movement opposing the U.S. blockade of Cuba. It was in this work that I had the opportunity to collaborate closely with John in recent years. He brought a depth of experience to the work of building and defending unions, as well as an appreciation of the importance of socialist theory and practice as a guide to political action, that greatly enhanced our discussions of day-to-day work in Miami, helping us rise above petty factionalism and routinism in the challenging fight here against the blockade.

During this period, John resumed his formal education, completing a master’s degree in labor studies from the University of Massachusetts in 2014. There he connected with a layer of young trade unionists, many of whom were trying to figure out how to break the hold of the conservative union bureaucracy and reinvigorate the labor movement as a fighting force.

John was the very opposite of an “America First” narrow trade unionist. He firmly believed that workers and their unions need a foreign policy the very opposite of the one that the employers and their government pursue. He traveled extensively over the years to conferences and meetings in Europe, Iceland, Cuba, Nicaragua, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.

Active in retirement

After his retirement in 2016, he bicycled in Ireland and Spain; joined political tours to Paraguay, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cuba; and traveled to China, Hong Kong, and North Korea. His mission was to learn first-hand the conditions facing workers and farmers in these regions and exchange ideas with fighters pursuing a better world.

In 2020, John and his companion Yvonne Hayes moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The two continued their travels, including a daunting three-and-a-half-month road trip with their two cats to Alaska and western Canada. John continued to immerse himself in the ongoing struggles to defend women’s right to abortion and in opposition to the Israeli government’s war on the Palestinians.

John jumped at the chance to work with a group of graduate students at the University of New Mexico trying to form a union. Out of this campaign, he found young people interested in his decades-long Marxist study and practice. Most recently, this work included leading a seminar on Marx’s Capital with another former railroader and a young organizer for the nurses’ union.

John also loved the opera, Miami Heat basketball, sci-fi and Nordic noir, and sampling the coffee and ice cream of countries all over the globe. He left a desk covered with some 40 books on politics, art, and fiction, notes on his travels and Spanish vocabulary, and a nearly finished paper on the transition in China from a state-run economy to capitalism.

John is survived by his brother Charles Gaige and sister Mary Mantel as well as two nieces, a grandniece, and three grandnephews. A family gathering will be held in southern Michigan in late March and his ashes interred in a family plot in Sylvania, Ohio.

A celebration of John’s life will be held in South Florida in several months.

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Postscript by World-Outlook

By Argiris Malapanis

John played a key role in the early to mid 1980s in organizing labor solidarity for family farmers in the Midwest — Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North and South Dakota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. These farmers held tractorcades and organized other actions to try to stop bank foreclosures of their land, agricultural implements, and homes.

At that time, loan sharks used local sheriffs and other police forces to try to sell family farms in public auctions after their owners fell behind in mortgage payments. These farmers were in dire financial straits after being squeezed between low producer prices on the one hand and rising interest rates and skyrocketing prices of seeds, fertilizers, equipment, and other implements on the other.

During these anti-foreclosure actions, farmers and their supporters would flood the steps of town halls, drowning, sometimes for hours, those attempting to carry out the auctions with chants such as, “This land is our land,” and “No sale, no sale!”

I was fortunate to witness John lending a useful hand in the success, even if temporary, of these magnificent acts of resistance. John helped mobilize supporters from the region — including airline workers, miners, meatpackers, auto- and steel-workers, nurses, teachers, and students — to augment the numbers of farmers and their family members participating in the efforts to stop the foreclosure auctions in sparsely populated rural areas.

The farmers, workers, small business people, and others participating in these actions often faced sheriff’s deputies and National Guard troops that came to enforce the bankers’ attempted land grabs. During these confrontations, John was instrumental in helping to organize defense guards to minimize victimization of the farmers and their supporters.

John put into practice his conviction that an alliance of workers and exploited farmers is a necessary basis for maximizing the chance of success in the struggle to build a society based on human solidarity and social equality.

For example, John helped lead a large caravan that included many farmers resisting foreclosures throughout the Midwest to the United Steelworkers union hall in Virginia, northern Minnesota. The farmers reciprocated for solidarity received by bringing truckloads of fresh food and other material aid to embattled iron miners fighting for a decent contract.

An internationalist to the core, John helped bring farmers he met during these struggles in contact with peasants and other exploited producers in the Americas. In January 1985, for example, John took part in a tour to Nicaragua where family farmers from the United States met with their Central American counterparts and learned, among other things, about Nicaragua’s land reform during the heyday of the Sandinista revolution in that country.

Reporting about this experience, John wrote: “Most, if not all, tour members saw the sharp contrast between U.S. farm policy, which is driving family farmers off the land, and Nicaraguan policy, which helps anyone willing to produce. We saw the way the U.S. war disrupts agricultural progress in Nicaragua and why the Nicaraguans say all they want is peace and the opportunity to develop their country.

“Tour members discussed ways to spread this information in the United States — through slideshows, press conferences, material aid projects, urging others to visit Nicaragua, and speaking out against the U.S. war.

“We kept in mind what Daniel Nuñez [President of Nicaragua’s National Union of Farmers and Ranchers, which hosted the tour] told us: ‘Internationally, we have knocked hard at the doors of solidarity. Maybe we broke a window. I hope you can help us break down a door.’”

Back in the Midwest, John helped to spread that message. His activities included helping to organize a tractorcade of farmers in January 1986 to support meatpackers striking the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota; lending a hand in building a 10,000-strong rally in Chillicothe, Missouri, in May of that year to support farmers fighting foreclosures; and participating in and reporting on a September 1986 national conference of nearly 2,000 farm activists in St. Louis, Missouri, to assess the devastating attacks on working farmers and draw plans to fight back.

These memories of my work with John are indelible.

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