Lifelong working-class activist and longtime People’s World contributing writer Bruce Bostick died on Oct. 9, 2025, in Columbus, Ohio, after several years of declining health. Bruce served the people as a member of the Communist Party USA for 52 years.
Bruce was born in Richmond, Ind., in 1948. His parents were teachers. He was proud of the fact that his dad had been a member of the famous small-town Hoosiers basketball team that won the state championship and became the subject of the 1986 film Hoosiers.
Bruce was radicalized as a student in Eastern Kentucky. He was highly motivated by the fight against racism and opposition to U.S. imperialism in Vietnam. He was a member of the first Venceremos Brigade in 1969, braving the blockade to travel to Cuba with members of Students for a Democratic Society, CPUSA, and other allied organizations.
Bruce lived in a barracks in Cuba for months, cutting sugar cane alongside communist delegations from North Vietnam and the Soviet Union and native Cubans. He somehow managed to bring his cane-cutting machete back with him and kept it for the rest of his life.
I remember sitting in an Irish bar with Bruce as he recalled how unbelievably hard his Vietnamese comrades worked, setting a pace in the sugar fields that the young Americans struggled to keep up with.
This experience in Cuba inspired Bruce to a life working among the people. He found his calling as a steelworker in Lorain, Ohio.
He worked in the brutal steel industry for 30 years and loved to talk about daily life in the shop any chance he got. He was a highly respected, even beloved, shop steward and held many positions of leadership in the United Steel Workers over the years.
His role in the 1986 USX steel strike (Aug. 1, 1986 to Jan. 31, 1987), still the longest work stoppage ever in the American steel industry, is particularly notable.
Bruce summarized the experience later in life:
“The fight was tough, grueling and costly! We faced many arrests, and health problems developed. Money problems, foreclosures, and attempts to stop steel from being shipped out by rail occurred. Despite these challenges, we stood united.”
Bruce moved back to Columbus to take care of his aging parents and stayed there as he himself began to age. In retirement, Bruce was an active member in the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) and was vice president of the Central Ohio Labor Council Retirees.
No one would have judged Bruce for taking it easy in his final years, but he just wasn’t built that way. Even when he could barely walk, he was organizing. He formed a 2024 election committee at his retirement home that met regularly and conducted political work among the hundreds of residents. He gave away copies of Marx and Lenin writings to aides and housekeepers who stopped in to check on him if they showed the slightest interest in his political work.
Just three weeks before his death, he traveled with us on one last road trip to Cincinnati for our CPUSA Ohio District Committee meeting. His comments were focused on the next generation of communists.
I first met Bruce at the second Communist Party meeting I ever attended. Six people got together at Bruce’s place. He welcomed us eagerly, as he always did, into a humble home filled with mementos of a lifetime of struggle. He served a giant bowl of very burnt and extremely spicy chili, which absolutely no one felt was safe to eat. But the gesture was generous and much appreciated.
Another time after we got to know each other, Bruce told me what he thought a CPUSA meeting should look like:
“It should smell terrible, full of dirty, tired people. People should cuss and argue with each other. Their English should be bad and their comments crude. People carry with them all the baggage of a hard life of struggle—drug problems, family problems, health issues. That’s how you know you’re in the right place.”
I mean it as the highest compliment when I say that Bruce embodied all of this. He lived a hard life, and he wore his scars with pride. He was one of the people, a worn but undefeated steelworker from Cleveland.
At his 75th birthday in 2023, local labor leaders, fellow SOAR members, and his Ohio comrades held a People’s World fundraiser in commemoration of Bruce’s contributions to the movement. Over the past two years, Bruce was working on a memoir spanning his life’s experiences. He had hundreds of pages written, which we can look forward to reading.
Bruce woke up every day and found a way to fight. Those who knew him will be retelling his stories for a long time to come. It’s up to us to continue the fight now.
I can’t end on a serious note; Bruce wasn’t like that. One of the times Bruce was recovering in the hospital, we put together a delegation to visit him. I happened to walk in a few minutes before the others and found Bruce sitting on the bed smiling, his face swollen with two gruesome black eyes from a recent fall.
“Ok Dave, here’s the deal. You’re gonna tell the others when they see me that we got jumped by a couple a Nazi pigs, and we really messed those motherfuckers up before they got me.”
A celebration of Bruce’s life is planned for Jan. 17, 2026, from 2 to 5 p.m. at Dempsey’s Food & Spirits in Columbus, Ohio.
> Bruce Bostick wrote for People’s World and its predecessor publication, Daily World, for decades. Click here to read some of his articles.
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