Spartacist League Retracts Slander

On 18 January, a week prior to a memorial meeting to honor our comrade Howard Keylor at the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 hall in San Francisco, we received a letter from the Spartacist League (SL), repudiating allegations made by Workers Vanguard (25 April 1986) that Howard had been some sort of “union narc” (see our pamphlet, Revolution and Truth). The letter (see PDF below), signed by Jon Brule, on behalf of the SL Central Committee, concluded that “in memory of Howard Keylor, we are retracting this slander.”

The SL did not attend the memorial at which, Tom Riley, speaking for the Bolshevik Tendency, commented:

“We welcome the retraction, in the latest issue of Spartacist, of the filthy smear that Howard and his comrades were somehow associated with COINTELPRO or the Mossad. We particularly appreciate that the SL responded to our request that they specifically retract, in time for this meeting, the slander published in Workers Vanguard in 1986 that Howard was some sort of ‘union narc’…. Jon Brule’s letter, on behalf of the SL’s new management, is in our view, an exemplary act of elementary proletarian decency. This kind of principled behavior is unfortunately all too rare on the left, even among those who claim the heritage of Trotsky’s struggle against The Stalin School of Falsification. It would be gratifying if the comrades in the IG [Internationalist Group], whose principal leader, Jan Norden, edited WV at the time the slander was published, would follow the SL’s example on this.”