‘Unshakeable revolutionary loyalty’

On the loss of ET/BT founder Howard Keylor

Howard (right) discussing tactics with tugboat crew during successful ‘illegal’ strike to remove scabs from Levin Terminals, June 1983

On 5 October 2024, just two months short of his 99^th birthday, our comrade Howard Keylor died. Howard was one of seven founders of the External Tendency of the international Spartacist tendency (ET) in October 1982 and he remained a vital component of its successor, the Bolshevik Tendency (BT), for the next three and a half decades—including our 2008-18 internal political struggle over Russian “imperialism.” Howard was a lucid political thinker who had a gift for explaining complex Marxist ideas in ways that made sense to ordinary working people. His revolutionary optimism and selfless dedication to the struggle for a socialist future inspired those who worked with him over the years. Howard was regarded as a “working class hero” by much of the left in the Bay Area, including many militants who did not agree with his revolutionary Trotskyist position on various questions.

Leon Trotsky’s 1931 salute to Kote Zinzadze, a Left Opposition cadre, as “the living negation of every sort of political careerism, that is to say, of the capacity to sacrifice the principles, the ideas and the tasks of the cause for personal ends,” perfectly describes our comrade Howard. He exemplified Trotsky’s observation that “the revolutionary begins there where personal ambition is entirely subservient to a great idea, submitting itself voluntarily to it and merging with it.”

In June 1983, Howard proposed a motion in the executive board of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 to shut down a scab operation at Levin Terminals in Richmond, California, with “illegal” mass pickets. The action, which featured the first mass picketing seen on the waterfront for decades, won an important defensive victory and safeguarded the union’s continued jurisdiction over the facility (see ET Bulletin No. 1, pp. 6-10). The next year, Howard was the initiator and a central leader of the historic 11-day boycott of South African apartheid cargo (see: “11-Day Anti-Apartheid Struggle On San Francisco Docks“, Local 10 Shows the Way!” and “Letter from South Africa: ‘I am deeply impressed…’” – excerpts from ET Bulletin No. 4). He was involved in many other important struggles over the years, including the fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the impact of his work was felt far beyond the Bay Area, as is evident in the messages of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and Liverpool dockworkers.

Howard Keylor lived his life as an exemplary proletarian revolutionary—we grieve his passing and honor his memory.