Honoring comrade Howard
These slightly edited remarks were delivered by Tom Riley on behalf of the Bolshevik Tendency at a memorial meeting for Howard Keylor in the Henry Schmidt room in the union hall of Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in San Francisco on 25 January 2025.
Howard had a long and complicated life: he was, in my view, unquestionably the most outstanding communist trade-union militant of his generation in America. He was politically active for almost 70 years: first with the Communist Party, then the Spartacist League and, from 1982 right up until the end, the Bolshevik Tendency.
Much can be learned from his example. Let’s start with his commitment to the “Ten Guiding Principles of the ILWU,” which Jack mentioned, and was also in the publicity for today’s memorial. The following proposition is particularly important:
“We cannot adopt for ourselves the policies of union leaders who insist that because they have a contract, their members are compelled to perform work even behind a picket line. Every picket line must be respected as though it were our own.”
Howard and his comrades have consistently upheld this bedrock principle. In fact, Howard broke with the Spartacist League in 1981 over just this issue—when the SL leadership cynically told their members to “Fly, Fly, Fly”, while PATCO strikers picketed airports across the country.
I met Howard and his partner, Uschi, the next year in Vancouver, in July 1982. We spent several days in intense discussion about the Spartacist tendency and where it was headed. Three months later, along with four other comrades (including Bob Mandel, who is here today), we launched the External Tendency, to try to reverse what we saw as the accelerating degeneration of the SL.
Howard joined the CP in 1948, but by 1961, he was thoroughly disenchanted with its overtly reformist, pro-Democratic Party politics. In 1974, he discovered Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism, and before long, he encountered a few SL supporters in the ILWU, led by Bob, who were interested in starting a class-struggle caucus on an explicitly pro-socialist program. This appealed to Howard; he was initially somewhat sceptical, but after some serious discussion, he came to see how the Transitional Program, written by Leon Trotsky as a sort of summary of the positions taken by the Communist International under Lenin, could provide a template for developing revolutionary consciousness within the working class.
The appeal of the Transitional Program to Howard was that it provided a means to connect the struggles for immediate practical needs of workers with the historical necessity of overthrowing capitalist rule. The idea of conducting trade-union work on the basis of a transitional program as specifically adapted to a particular industry was one of Spartacist League leader James Robertson’s most important political contributions. Howard fully embraced the SL’s Trotskyist politics, but right from the beginning, he saw some things he did not like, including aspects of Robertson’s personal behavior. Howard was also uncomfortable with what he saw as the abject servility displayed by Al Nelson and other leading Spartacists in the presence of Robertson, and he did not like the unwritten rule that Robertson was above criticism.
Howard was an unusual and immensely valuable addition to the SL cadre. He was not only an experienced union militant with real political influence in Local 10 but was also a deeply committed revolutionary who was very knowledgeable, very well read. Howard was very familiar with the writings of Marx, Lenin and eventually, Trotsky. Only very exceptional people are capable of making such an abrupt political turn—from critical Stalinism to Trotskyism—in their late 40s. But Howard never missed a beat. He often remarked that the older he got, the more convinced he was of the validity of “orthodox” Trotskyism and the enormous potential of the Transitional Program, applied intelligently in trade union work. And he did apply it intelligently.
Howard was not only “a” founding member of the External Tendency; he was more like “the” founding member. In his September 1981 resignation statement from the Spartacist League, he clearly identified the Robertson regime as an obstacle to building a viable revolutionary leadership for the working class. He was harshly critical of what he termed the SL’s “increasingly cult-like internal life”, which he said was “characterized by a defensive, hierarchical regime combined with a personalistic, Jesuitical method of internal argument and discussion”, and a lack of tolerance for “even the slightest disagreement with the leadership.”
At the same time he said he would not go public with his differences because he continued to agree with the SL’s political program—the same policy that the ET adopted for our first few years. Howard’s resignation reads like a sort of rough first draft of “The Road to Jimstown,” the 1985 document in which we announced we were giving up on the SL, after its attempted wrecking of the 1984 Longshore Boycott.
In 1981, when he got pushed out for objecting to the SL leadership’s “fly, fly, fly” policy on the PATCO strike, Howard recognized the extent of the degeneration at the top of the SL—he certainly saw things much more clearly than we did in Toronto, where we had been purged a year earlier. We hoped that the leadership, in which we had far too much confidence, would one day admit that our purge had all been a mistake. That day never came, and Howard knew, better than we, that it would never come.
Howard valued immensely what he had learned from the SL’s trade union policy and knew that it would be criminal to abandon the work he had been engaged in for half a dozen years with the Militant Caucus in the ILWU. So, in January 1982, he and Uschi launched a new publication: Militant Longshoreman.
Howard understood that the Transitional Program, used properly, is a tool for mobilizing the working class in the direction of struggle to create a workers’ state to replace the existing capitalist one. One key element in this is demystifying the “majesty of the law.” In the Bolshevik we handed out at the door, we reprinted Howard’s account of the defensive struggle at Richmond in 1983, which he initiated, as an example of how this can be done. When Local 10 shut down the port and mobilized 1200 union members to run the scabs off the docks at Levin Terminals, everyone who participated knew it was “illegal.” But they also knew it was necessary if the ILWU jurisdiction was going to be maintained. Howard regarded remarks by workers who participated in that action that “the law” was really nothing more than a tool wielded by the bosses to enforce their own interests, as evidence that they had made an important step forward in understanding how class society operates.
Those workers did not become revolutionaries overnight, but they learned, through their own experience that, with competent leadership, in some situations it is possible to defy capitalist legality and win. The ILWU had suffered a string of defeats up to that point, as a result of the leadership’s policy of adhering to the bosses’ rules. Richmond was an exception—it was later reversed, but the contract they got maintained the ILWU jurisdiction for the time being, which was what was at stake. Instead of a defeat, the union won a limited defensive victory by direct action—by “illegal” activity. The next year, in arguing for the “illegal” action at Pier 80 against apartheid cargo, Militant Longshoreman referenced the Richmond success several times….
One of Howard’s great strengths was his ability to think for himself; he was able to correctly assess complex situations, as he and Uschi did in East Germany in 1989-90 after the wall came down. His innate political intelligence was complemented by the capacity for improvisation and a “feel” for rapidly developing situations. It is essential to grasp the “big picture” in politics, but that is not enough. As Trotsky and Lenin taught, the masses of the working class are not educated by clever analysts and propagandists—what is crucial is the intervention of militants capable of gaining their trust and guiding them to revolutionary consciousness through their actual experiences. And Howard was able to do that, at least to a limited extent, in the major struggles he led.
Revolutionary class consciousness does not arise spontaneously within the working class. Howard knew that it involved the assimilation of lessons from the past, via participation in the struggles of today. He also knew that, however marginal the cadres who embody the core elements of the revolutionary program may be at any given moment, they are precious, because, when opportunities arise, the influence of a relatively small organization with the right ideas can expand exponentially. But, conversely, a revolutionary cadre cannot be improvised on the spot. That is why he worked for decades to try to lay the basis for a viable revolutionary organization. He did not want to waste time reinventing the wheel—he called himself “Longshot O’Leary” and he knew that a successful socialist transformation requires organized continuity with the work of the revolutionary giants of the past.
No organization gets everything right. But every historical moment has its own key programmatic issues that differentiate revolutionaries from pretenders. Howard was a practical guy, like Lenin, who believed that making compromises on secondary issues was often critical to being able to go forward. Questions that are of burning importance at one moment can, over time, become issues of chiefly historical significance.
Today, for example, some of the major issues that distinguish actual revolutionaries, include the following:
1) standing for a Russian military victory over NATO and its proxies in Ukraine,
2) defending the Palestinians against Zionist genocide, while advocating the creation of a bi-national, secular workers state as part of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East and
3) defending the Chinese deformed workers’ state against imperialist aggression and domestic counterrevolution, while advocating a workers’ political revolution to overthrow the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy.
The two most important struggles that Howard led—the 1983 Richmond strike and the 1984 anti-apartheid boycott—grew out of work initiated by the Militant Caucus in the preceding period. The SL leadership crippled the Militant Caucus by decapitating its leadership—i.e., Bob and Howard. Howard’s Militant Longshoreman work, in turn, laid the basis for the valuable subsequent initiatives taken by Jack Heyman, the most important of which was the Mayday 2008 shutdown of every port on the US West Coast, to protest the imperialist occupation of Iraq.
As the SL leadership abandoned work in the unions, it substituted a series of attempted short cuts—waving the flag of the Salvadoran popular front, trying to hitch a ride on the coattails of Soviet bureaucrats like Yuri Andropov and General Snetkov. All to no avail. As time went on, the SL became increasingly disoriented and eventually, in 2010, ended up arguing that the imperialist U.S. military was the only agency that could rescue the starving masses in Haiti.
To cover its many egregious departures from the Trotskyist program it once championed, the Robertson regime began to resort to slandering its left critics—initially just the BT, but eventually the Internationalist Group (IG) as well. 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 (WV) 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, whose principal leader, Jan Norden, edited WV at the time the slander was published, would follow the SL’s example on this.
The clock is ticking for those of us from the “Class of ‘68” who participated in the SL trade-union work in the 1970s, the flagship of which was the Militant Caucus in the ILWU. It is important that we do what we can to pass on the lessons of that experience to the younger comrades who will be leading the struggles of the future. This is a period of great danger in America and internationally, but with that will come real revolutionary opportunities. The best way to honor the life and work of Howard Keylor is to carry forward, as best we can, the struggle to open the road to a socialist future.