Correction

In our article on the historic May Day 2008 ILWU longshore union strike that shut down all West Coast ports against the U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (The Internationalist No. 27, May-June 2008) we stated incorrectly, and have repeated since, that this was “the first time ever that an American union has struck against a U.S. war.” Actually, it was the second such strike action. Class struggle militant Jack Heyman, a retired ILWU Local 10 longshoreman who played a key role in the 2008 strike, clarified this at a November 12 forum in San Francisco on the Russian Revolution and its relevance today.

The first American labor industrial action against a U.S. imperialist war was organized by the longshore union in Seattle in 1919. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, a revolutionary fervor spread throughout Europe and North America sparking revolutions (in Hungary and Bavaria), general strikes, occupations and other forms of militant labor action which challenged the rule of the capitalist class in Belfast, Barcelona, Glasgow and elsewhere.

The Seattle Central Labor Council, a strong defender of the Bolshevik Revolution, published and distributed in its journal the Seattle Union Record, 20,000 copies of Lenin’s speech to the Congress of Soviets in April 1918 on the task of consolidating proletarian power. It was reportedly “avidly read by radicals up and down the Pacific coast as well as in Seattle’s shipyards.” A strike by maritime workers in the Seattle shipyard led to the Seattle General Strike in February 1919.

According to one account, later that year Seattle dock workers noticed a mysterious shipment of 50 rail cars destined for Vladivostok labeled “sewing machines”. When a savvy longshore gang suspicious of the cargo intentionally dropped a crate load on the dock, stacks of rifles bound for the counterrevolutionary Kolchak White Army were revealed. The longshore union declared that its members would not handle the cargo, forbade any terminal to handle it and notified all ports of their action. The Seattle Central Labor Council backed the longshoremen. The 20 September 1919 Seattle Union Record reported:

“Pacific Coast longshoremen will tie up the coast from Seattle to San Diego before they will load rifles or munitions for Siberia or any part of Russia…..”

This solidarity strike was directed against Russian counterrevolutionaries and their backers, the imperialist Expeditionary armed forces of the U.S., Britain, France and Japan. In fact, this Seattle longshoremen’s “hot cargo” action in support of the Russian workers revolution was the first U.S. workers strike against U.S. imperialist military intervention. May Day 2008 was No. 2, and no less significant for that. ■