December 2024
Deep-Sixing Their Own History
SL’s Latest Longshore Lies
San Franciso, 24 April 1999: As the ILWU shut down every port on the West Coast, longshoremen in San Francisco marched chanting, “An injury to one is an injury to all, Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” the latter-day SL refused to march.
(Internationalist photo)
We print below a letter by Jack Heyman, the longtime waterfront militant and retired member of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area, to Workers Vanguard, the newspaper of the Spartacist League. For the last several decades, the latter-day Spartacist League has pursued an unrelenting vendetta against Heyman. Almost without fail, whenever he was leading struggles, and they were numerous, the “post-revolutionary SL,” shall we say, would slander and/or boycott them.
To enumerate the examples would take many pages, but a case in point was the October 1997 Oakland picket by militant ILWU members and other labor activists of a ship, the Neptune Jade, in solidarity with the 500 dockers in Liverpool, England fired for honoring a picket line two years before. The picket was successful, and the ship was not unloaded, nor was it in other ILWU-organized ports as it moved up the West Coast, nor again in Japan. The Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) bosses were so incensed that they sued the ILWU locals, picket organizers (including Robert Irminger and Heyman) and individual picketers, seeking to squelch labor militancy on the docks. After many protests, including a July 1998 Local 10 port shutdown, in November 1998 the PMA dropped the last charges. The SL’s “contribution”? It blamed the militants for provoking the PMA’s witch hunt, by organizing a picket when the bureaucracy wouldn’t. And the SL didn’t lift a finger to help mobilize in defense of the militants against the maritime bosses’ attack.
Even more egregious was the SL’s reaction to the April 1999 port shutdown for Mumia Abu-Jamal referred to in the letter below. That coastwide action was the result of a motion, presented by Heyman and approved by the ILWU Coast Caucus, to shut down all West Coast ports to demand freedom for the foremost class war prisoner in the U.S. It was carried out in conjunction with a work stoppage the day before by teachers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, calling to free Mumia. These were the first major labor actions for Mumia, something the SL had long called for. But when they happened, the SL bad-mouthed the 24 April 1999 ILWU port shutdown, refused to march in a Mumia demonstration in San Fracisco that day, and has never even mentioned the Brazil stoppage that the ILWU cited announcing the shutdown (The Dispatcher, March 1999).
In response to a letter by Heyman setting the record straight and our article “WV Blames Victims, Distorts April 24 Shutdown for Mumia” (The Internationalist, No. 7, April-May 1999), the SL labeled Heyman a “bureaucrat” (because of his unpaid position as an elected member of the Local 10 executive board), claiming his motion endorsed the illusory reformist call for a “new trial” for Mumia (Workers Vanguard, 28 May 1999). It did not. On the contrary, it called the work stoppage to demand his freedom, saying that he could not get a fair trial in the courts. Years later, a 2004 conference of the SL cited its policy on the April 1999 ILWU port shutdown for Mumia as an example of its “stodgy, demoralized sectarianism,” saying it should have “commended the ILWU stop-work action.”
But the SL/WV kept up the smears and slanders, notably over the 2011-12 struggle to unionize the scab Export Grain Terminal being built in Longview, Washington. When Heyman and four other ILWUers spoke at a rally at the AFL-CIO Labor Temple in Seattle, a bureaucratic goon squad busted up the meeting, physically attacking supporters of Longview Local 21. Workers Vanguard (17 February 2012) positively grooved on this assault, saying the ILWU activists on the stage had “invited the disruption” by goons brandishing a letter from union president McEllrath opposing any work stoppage on West Coast ports. The Internationalist Group, which was there supporting Local 21, published a video on our site which documents this brutal attack. The SL added that those “like Heyman, the IG and others” fighting for militant labor action over Longview “reaped the fruits of their own grotesque opportunism at the Seattle meeting” (see “SL’s Wrong Lessons of Longview,” The Internationalist supplement, March 2012). What was truly grotesque was the SL/WV defense of this vile assault on workers democracy.
Today, as the latter-day Spartacist League has now become the born-again SL that dismisses almost its entire past as “sectarian,” it has taken a new tack: to feign approval while continuing to seek pretexts for slamming Heyman. His latest “crime”? A letter to the SL paper from a supporter excoriates “Heyman’s resolution,” passed by ILWU Local 10 (and actually voted for by that supporter), calling to “hot cargo” arms to Israel. The letter claims that the resolution whitewashed the ILWU’s history of boycotting ships with cargo for military dictatorships in El Salvador and Chile! Even after tossing out just about every distinctive policy of the Spartacist League when it stood for revolutionary Trotskyism, it is still fixated on demonizing Jack Heyman.
There is a straightforward reason for this vindictive and seemingly bizarre behavior. As he demonstrates in his letter below, in order to attack the Local 10 resolution, Workers Vanguard contradicts the policy of the Spartacist League at the time of those historic boycotts. And that is no accident. A main reason for the vitriol is the fact that, inspired by the revolutionary program the Spartacist League used to stand for, Heyman kept organizing class-struggle actions as the SL used to do. The vehemence and obstinacy with which the latter-day and now born-again SL demonizes Jack Heyman come from the fact that it is polemicizing against its own, once-revolutionary self.
Interestingly, there is another actor which has taken a similar tack on Jack Heyman: the sellout ILWU bureaucracy.
Letter to the Editor of Workers Vanguard
Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to Emily Turnbull’s letter to the editor printed under the title “Report from the Convention: ILWU Rejects Boycott of Military Cargo to Israel” in your September 28 issue. Yes, as she wrote, I initiated the resolution calling for the ILWU to refuse to handle war cargo to Israel, but once it was passed (unanimously) at the May Day union meeting, it became Local 10’s resolution. Referring to it as “Heyman’s resolution” throughout her long letter is a not-so-subtle attempt to make it appear as one person’s opinion.
The letter’s claim that the resolution “was not handed out for members to read” is, typically, bogus. Not only was it distributed at the main entrance to the union hall, and a stack placed with other union literature by the podium, as it was being handed out, she came up to get a few more copies. The claim that there was no serious discussion of what it would take to implement the resolution is just as bogus. The resolution was to be submitted to the ILWU Convention. As for the all too typical arrogant dismissal of it as one more “paper resolution” which are “a dime a dozen in Local 10,” this is downright ludicrous. The motion said specifically “the ILWU will refuse to handle military cargo to Israel” and “will honor picket lines protesting the war on Gaza.” The ILWU International leadership led by retiring president Willie Adams mobilized to defeat it precisely because it was a call for very definite action. So instead, he got the Convention to pass a motion calling for a ceasefire, which really was a meaningless paper resolution.
Jack Heyman at December
2023 Bay Area “Labor for Palestine” march. (Internationalist Photo)
It’s obvious that if it had passed the Convention, the resolution approved by Local 10 could have sparked “hot cargo” solidarity actions of dock workers around the world refusing to load arms to Israel, as requested by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, Gaza. On top of that, for you to claim that this was an empty resolution is an affront to the former Militant Caucus of the ILWU, supported by the then-revolutionary Spartacist League (SL). In that tradition I fought for international union action in solidarity with the fired Liverpool dockers in 1997 and with the Charleston, South Carolina longshoremen (2000) battling a scab operation. As business agent I defended our union against a PMA lockout and the government threat to occupy West Coast ports in 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. But the in numerous key longshore struggles the SL was AWOL, or outright denounced them (as you did in the battle to unionize a scab facility in Longview, Washington). And you know it.
The May 2024 Local 10 Caucus resolution calling for refusal to handle war cargo to Israel cited the ILWU’s own actions in solidarity with the besieged working class in Chile (1978) and El Salvador (1980) by refusing to load weapons for the military dictatorships. The letter claims that by citing these examples, “Heyman significantly underplayed the obstacles to his resolution’s implementation.” So referring to the ILWU’s past actions refusing to handle war cargo is some kind of cover-up? What cynical, twisted reasoning! This is the rationale of defeatists and betrayers who have no confidence in the power of the working class to fight back against capitalism and imperialism. Yet another example of how, while your line keeps on changing, your modus operandi has not. The letter’s author maligned these historic actions as “one time actions taken in conjunction with a section of liberal Democratic Party opinion.” What does that even mean, that some liberal Democrats said they liked them? (Meanwhile, it is your organization that calls to “bring pressure down” on “liberal and progressive politicians.”)
The letter printed in your paper also smears Workers Vanguard’s coverage of those powerful actions at the time they occurred. Take the June 30, 1978 WV. The headline is “First U.S. Union Action Since ’73 Coup, ILWU Stops Bombs to Chile!”. It states: “The refusal of ILWU longshoremen to load the deadly cargo on any ship marks the first time since the CIA-backed Pinochet junta overthrew the democratically elected Allende government, outlawed trade unions, and jailed and killed tens of thousands of Chilean workers that an American trade union has implemented such a genuine act of solidarity with their Chilean class brothers.”
On the ILWU’s 1980 boycott of arms to the blood-drenched Salvadoran junta, look at the January 2, 1981 WV, headlined: “”ILWU Boycotts Military Shipments to El Salvador!” It states: “This boycott is thoroughly needed and can be a powerful act of labor solidarity with the EI Salvadoran workers and peasants.” As we say in Local 10: ’Nuff said. (Since you have wiped out years of articles from your web site, your readers can at least find older issues on the Marxist Internet Archives).
The letter claims that Local 10’s May 2024 call for the union to boycott military shipments to Israel was, supposedly, “the kind of action that the ILWU has never [emphasis in original] undertaken because its leadership has always backed the liberal wing of U.S. imperialism.” Is that so? What about the April 1999 march in San Francisco of 25,000 protesters, headed up by an ILWU Local 10 contingent chanting, “An injury to one, is an injury to all – Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” It was liberal Democrats who framed Mumia and have kept him in jail for the last 43 years for a crime of which he is innocent. Why this omission? Oh, that’s right, because the Spartacist League ostentatiously didn’t march and then arrogantly dismissed that remarkable action.
Yes, the ILWU has had paper motions, like when it passed a resolution against the Vietnam War in 1971, but continued to load military cargo for that war, a betrayal that I criticized at the time as a supporter of the SL and have continued to do so. When I was a seaman in the SL-supported Militant-Solidarity Caucus of the National Maritime Union, we opposed the Vietnam War and called on seamen and other maritime workers to take actions against the war. Workers Vanguard No. 2, November 1971, headlined “For Labor Political Strikes Against the War,” and called for workers boycotts of war cargo. But when the basic issue was posed point-blank in late 2002 in the run-up to the Iraq War at the time of the lockout of the ILWU by the shipping bosses, you suddenly dropped the call to “hot cargo” war material and didn’t call to strike in defiance of the Taft-Hartley injunction. Too hot to handle, apparently.
And then there was the historic May Day 2008 shutdown of all West Coast ports in the U.S. and Canada protesting the imperialist war in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the initiative of the Internationalist Group, which I support, a resolution calling for that was hammered out and passed by Local 10, and then later by the ILWU Coast Caucus. But in an ostentatious display of abstentionist disdain, the SL again refused to join the union march calling for an end to the imperialist war as demonstrators proceeded along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, with the Brass Band playing the Internationale. You did nothing to build the first workers strike action in 90 years against a U.S. imperialist war.
In her letter/report, your supporter Emily Turnbull says she went to the ILWU convention in Vancouver last June “to fight for the resolution” calling for the union to refuse to handle war cargo to Israel. Except according to her verbatim account in the letter of her remarks at the Resolutions Committee, she talked about Biden and the war, but made no mention of the resolution or the call for the union to refuse to handle war cargo to Israel. I wonder why not. Was it because, as her letter said, she “knew there was little chance of the resolution passing”?
More recently, in the October three-day strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) on the East and Gulf Coasts, a September 17 Workers Vanguard leaflet/supplement says nothing about a union boycott of arms to Israel. Even after ILA president Harold Daggett ostentatiously declared that the union would “proudly continue to work all military shipments” during the impending strike, an October 12 WV leaflet could only muster a statement that longshoremen not handling military cargo would be a nice thing, without actually calling for it in the series of demands the leaflet raised.
Nor in Turnbull’s October 30 campaign flier for president of Local 10 was there any call for labor boycotts of war cargo to Israel. No mention of capitalism, either. As for the ILWU contract which gave the maritime bosses a green light to introduce job-killing automation so long as the work is under ILWU jurisdiction, her flier says the union should have “fought for better.” Sounds very much like the labor faker head of the old AFL Samuel Gompers who, when asked what he wanted, replied “More!” I.e., don’t abolish capitalism, just beg for higher wages. The Internationalist Group put out a leaflet calling to fight for union control of technology, a transitional demand. In contrast, recent SL-supported campaigns in union elections are a retreat into the old “mini-max” reformist model of a minimum program of strictly trade-union demands with general calls for a maximum program (workers party, black liberation) tacked on at the end.
To actually fight the trade-union bureaucracy, “the labor lieutenants of capital,” requires class-struggle caucuses or tendencies in the trade unions to oust the labor traitors, in conjunction with building a revolutionary workers party to fight against capitalist exploitation, racism and war, and for a workers government. That won’t be done by an outfit that keeps changing its spots but not its methods, while inventing excuses for not calling to “hot cargo” arms to a genocidal war.
Jack Heyman
retired member, ILWU Local 10
23 December 2024