DAVID SCHWARTZMAN — Metro DC DSA comrade, chair of the DC Statehood-Green Party, and treasured fixture of political life in DC — passed away on July 1, 2025 at age 81. His passing leaves a void for the DMV left; his lifetime of political work leaves a legacy for comrades across the region to build upon.
David grew up in a working-class Jewish community in Brooklyn, and he was deeply and profoundly anti-fascist. His perpetual joke about the fact that he was born nine months to the day after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad (the turning point of World War II) spoke to a serious truth — fascism must be resisted at every manifestation. Hence, his awareness of the dangers Trump posed to our country and to DC residents.
But David, a committed revolutionary in the truest sense of the word, also understood that it isn’t enough to just fight against something; we have to fight for the world we believe is possible. He was a stringent ecosocialist, scientist, and scholar — professor emeritus in the Department of Biology at Howard University — who held faith that humanity could birth an alternative to the social tragedy and ecocide driven by capitalism. David fought for that alternative, something he labeled “solar communism,” in various ways and formations throughout his life.
Since its foundation, David’s heart remained with the DC Statehood–Green Party. He helped bring about the merger that created the party, which kept an independent party alive in the District, gave the Greens a locally rooted perspective that connected environmental justice with organizing against racism, and tied statehood to the struggle against economic inequality.
David was also a member of the Communist Party for decades. When it split in 1991, after the dominant leadership failed to grasp the potential for socialist renewal opened up by Gorbachev’s initial policies in the Soviet Union — nor the radical potential of Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in the US — David’s critique of the CP’s weaknesses, its schematism, was incisive. He then joined the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a Marxist organization that split off from the CP. Frustrated with the C of C’s failure to live up to its potential, he subsequently joined Metro DC DSA. It was there that David witnessed and helped foster the rebirth of the American left. He welcomed the young people who flooded into DSA after Occupy, after Bernie’s presidential campaign, and after AOC’s election. In the Green New Deal, he recognized DSA’s willingness to take ecosocialism seriously and lay the groundwork for more fundamental policies to address climate change. He worked with Metro DC DSA in local campaigns on housing, tax policy, public banking, and DC’s budget. And he supported DSA’s rejection of Zionism and participation in the struggle against the genocidal war in Gaza.
Maybe most notably for newer socialists, David practiced his politics in an ecumenical spirit. He remained close to friends who stayed with the Committees of Correspondence and with the Communist Party, working with the Claudia Jones School in recent years, and willingly collaborated with others from different left political backgrounds without fear of disagreement.
While David’s political affiliations varied, his convictions remained consistent. They manifested in his consistent participation in the fight for DC statehood and against child poverty, hunger, lack of housing, and racism in the District; in his opposition to war and militarism, evidenced by his solidarity with the South African and Palestinian struggles against apartheid and for liberation; in his approach to climate change as a matter of necessity and as solvable, both technically and politically; in his intellectual engagement as a scientist, as a Marxist, and as an open-minded thinker seeking to understand the nature of those struggles to build a way forward; and in his sense of humor and warmth as a human being.
David's attributes and more were celebrated at a memorial to David that filled the Josephine Butler Parks Center in Washington, DC, on August 2, 2025.
Maurice Jackson, an author, longtime activist, and associate professor of history and African American history at Georgetown University, talked about David’s genuineness in his commitment to racial and economic justice, his value as a friend to Jackson and his family, and his gift as a scientist and teacher — including opening up the wonders of nature to his children.
David’s older son, Peter, spoke about the values with which he was raised, values that embodied the ideals of a human community in which we are each unique and yet each alike. He remarked how appropriate it was that the memorial was being held at the Josephine Butler Center. Jo, a friend and comrade of his father’s, had arranged for Peter to attend a conference in the Arctic region of the Soviet Union in 1984. That international gathering of young people interested in the sciences made those values real to him.
Peter set the tone for remarks that followed, all of which touched on David’s qualities as a thinker, as someone deeply engaged in the issues of our day, and as a person who retained friendships through shared commitments and across lines of disagreement. Family members, not all of whom looked at the world through the same lens as David, affirmed that last quality. Speakers — some who had known David for decades, some from only the past several years — all attested to his impact. They were DC Statehood–Green Party members, candidates who David ran against for office, science colleagues, community members from WISH (Washington Inner-City Self Help), activists from Code Pink, and people from other spheres of his life. DC Councilmember Janeese Lewis George talked of David’s influence on her as a socialist activist and read a tribute to him passed by the Council. Each person talked not only about David’s political and intellectual achievements but what he meant to them as a person: the repeated fact that he became a friend as well as a comrade to those he knew.
David served on boards and committees not to collect places to hang his hat but as a means to act. Two speakers from the DC Fair Budget Coalition noted that he joined a meeting a week before his death, his mind and heart still in the fight to the end. And they noted that the atrocious, recently passed DC budget — with its giveaways to the Washington Commanders and takeaways from working people and the indigent — served as a reminder of how much his voice is still needed and will be missed.
Yet it was David as a human being, not only an activist or thinker, who was memorialized. His generosity as a person was remarked upon by every speaker, most eloquently in a letter written by Steven Greenfield (read by David’s younger son, Sam). Steven wrote of a 70-year friendship that began in Brooklyn and at Camp Midvale, a left-wing workers camp run by the German American Nature Friends. David’s search to understand life began, Steven recalled, in the woods and soil at Midvale, a place which also nurtured a commitment to peace and solidarity. Steven stressed that the values of David’s political activism were as one with the values he brought to friendships — unbreakable and genuine.
I came to know David in different ways, in different stages of my life.
As a child I knew him at Camp Midvale, where I hung out with a group of kids my age, including David’s much younger brother, Kenny. David, 11 years older than me, was already a teenager — something of a smart aleck, always ready with a comeback when talking to adults, which I thought was very cool. And, in a predictor of his future as a geologist, he was already into snakes and bugs of all sorts.
That camp was filled with people who survived fascism and McCarthyism, and David imbued its values — a genuine sense of dignity and respect for the knowledge, learning, and capacity to learn of all people. Those qualities contributed to the impact of his political activism, and, I’m certain, to his ability as a teacher. But while he imbibed the values of the camp, he was from a young age open-minded, searching, asking questions. Too many who are engaged in the struggle for socialism become trapped in dogma at a certain point. That was never true of David.
Midvale was burned down in 1966 by local fascists. While some people stayed in touch, others of us scattered to the winds. I didn’t see David again until about 20 years later, when Hosea Hudson, a Communist and Black steelworker from Alabama, gave a talk in DC about his memoir. David didn’t recognize me, and while I was pretty sure who he was, I wasn’t completely certain. So I let the moment pass.
I didn’t have a chance to introduce myself again until a few years later, in the early 1990s, at a time when various left organizations were dissolving, reforming, rethinking. David was at an informal “left unity” meeting I attended. As the meeting was ending, I casually mentioned that we knew each other from long ago — and it was the only time I ever saw him do a double-take in surprise. He recalled that I knew Kenny, asked about my folks; it was probably the most personal conversation we had.
Soon after that meeting, I ran into David the activist at an upscale hotel — on a picket line in support of striking workers. David was fully in his element, unreserved in the invective he heaped on the well-heeled guests who were crossing the line.
Subsequently, I saw him at countless meetings, rallies, and demonstrations. Two qualities shined through: he was an incisive thinker, well-read and intellectually sharp and, at the same time, politically engaged in every sense of the word. Engaged not as an intellectual come on high to tell people what to think, but as an activist like other activists, putting his time and his body on the line for the causes and values that motivated him. David could and would talk extensively, but he would also listen and absorb what others were saying. I found in David a level of creativity — in political discussions, in discussions about Marxist theory, ecology, and the history of natural science — that is all too rare in our world.
David immediately and without hesitation stood with me after my arrest. (I had long-standing ties to East Germany and was charged years after the Berlin Wall fell with espionage — I contested the accusation at trial, lost, and thus spent years in prison.) David thoughtfully brought a Monopoly get-out-of-jail-free card to the visiting room — the guards wouldn’t honor it, but hey, a person has to try. More importantly, and something I would only fully appreciate after my release, is that he was great with my kids during that time. His sense of humor, appreciation of the absurd, and willingness to take them seriously were perfectly in tune with the needs of young teens. Before then, David and I were friends the way many of us in the movement are: getting together at or after meetings or rallies, but rarely outside that context. After my release, our true friendship blossomed, facilitated by his partner, wife, and comrade, Joanne. Unexpectedly, that meant reconnecting with others who spent part of their youth at Camp Midvale. We traveled different paths; our values, rooted in respect for human dignity, remained.
David was never trapped by the lines that segment too many people’s lives and thinking, catching us in the narrow tracks that bourgeois society seems to always create and recreate. He could shift his focus from discussing thermodynamics, to talking about Bigfoot, to explaining how to distinguish one mushroom from another — then move on to how to understand the political moment, left political strategies, Marxist thought. And he would follow up with action. Once, when visiting my home, he looked at our books and noticed that I had several volumes by the German Marxist Ernst Bloch. What followed was an opportunity for me to speak at a Left Forum panel alongside David and Joel Kovel, known by some as the “founder” of ecosocialism.
Moreover, because he had a holistic view of life, David retained his optimism; an optimism rooted in a sense of the possibilities of progress, rooted in confidence in working people that remained despite all the setbacks, all the losses, all the defeats and shattered illusions endured through the years. His understanding of natural science and of political movement enabled him to recognize the existential danger posed by climate change and to organize based on the conviction that it could be overcome — and thus his writings on and advocacy for “solar communism.”
David was always curious, alive to what was newly being born. He adhered to the “warm stream” of Marxism — grounded, to be sure, in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, in the traditions and very real achievements of the socialist and communist movements — but alive to every strand of radical thought, alive to every popular insurgency, alive to the possibilities that lie within people who are indeed capable of bringing a new world from the ashes of the old.
In that sense, David remains alive to me, remains alive in what he brought to so many, to what he sought. He will be missed; he will not be forgotten.
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We will solve the Energy Problem!
We will do it with EVERYONE in mind!
We will do it T-O-G-E-T-H-E-R!
We will do it in the 21st Century!
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Read a collection of David Schwartzman’s writing for the Washington Socialist.
