A surprising deviation

Jack Heyman’s apologetics for Harry Bridges

On 25 January nearly 100 people attended a memorial for Howard Keylor in the headquarters of San Francisco’s Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Howard, a well-known and well-respected class-struggle waterfront militant, was one of the seven founding members of the External Tendency of the international Spartacist tendency, the forerunner of the Bolshevik Tendency (BT). The event was chaired by Jack Heyman, a longshore militant who had worked closely with Howard in many waterfront struggles.

Like Howard, Jack was a trade-union supporter of the Spartacist League (SL) in the 1970s. Today Jack is aligned with the Internationalist Group (IG), whose founders were driven out of the SL in 1996 and like the BT, claims the programmatic legacy of the Spartacist tendency in its revolutionary period—a heritage the current leadership of the SL has essentially jettisoned.

One of the SL’s most important contributions, celebrated by several of the speakers at the memorial, was its attempt to build class-struggle caucuses in various unions on the basis of Trotsky’s Transitional Program, an openly socialist guide to mobilizing the working class to struggle for state power. During the 1970s, SL supporters in the ILWU, organized as the Militant Caucus (MC), won a significant following and were able to carry out some important struggles.

Howard was one of the founding members of the Militant Caucus, which was launched in December 1974, with Bob Mandel as its central organizer. Bob spoke at the memorial and provided a thumbnail sketch of some of the MC’s early activity, including its role in organizing mass pickets that successfully faced down cops, scabs and company security thugs and won a strike at the KNC Glass Company in January 1975. Bob identified the background of previous union defeats under the then-president Harry Bridges, as a key reason for the MC’s rapid emergence as a significant factor in the union. In 1934, when the union was founded, Bridges was one of the young militants associated with the Communist Party who played a heroic role in the battles that established the ILWU as a union with a reputation for militancy.

The following are extensive excerpts from Bob’s remarks, (beginning at 1:39:37 in the video of the memorial):

“So I want to talk a little bit about how the Militant Caucus was built. Because it was actually built on the heels of a massive defeat for the ILWU. It was built after the 1971-72 longshore strike, variously reported as 130 or 143 days; doesn’t matter, the strike was over jobs, defending jobs. The strike was over shortening the work week so that as containerization took over, jobs were preserved. And some of you may remember the Bay looked like a parking lot. There were 80 ships tied up in San Francisco Bay alone.

“The union struck for about 60 days; the government struck back with a Taft-Hartley injunction, rightly known as a slave labor law because it reversed the victories of the 1930s battles by reinstating the right of courts to enjoin strikes; reinstating the right of judges to say, you can have six people on a picket line when there are 200 scabs, including scabs with guns and clubs.

“The ILWU’s history was that it was the first union to be hit with the Taft-Hartley in 1948, and while Jack and I have slightly different recollections of how the union defeated it, I will repeat two of them, because they are relevant, because that law exists today. Because [in October 2024 President Joe] Biden threatened to use it on the ILA [International Longshoremen’s Association]. Because Musk and Trump will use it against all of the beginnings of labor struggle today: Amazon, or Starbucks or any further attempts to expand the UAW’s [United Auto Workers] jurisdiction or the heroic strike, political strike, by the student workers throughout the UC [University of California] system in defense of the Palestinians.

“Now, after 60 days the government enjoined the [1971-72 ILWU] strike. Harry Bridges, who at one time in his life was a revolutionary and had played a valuable role in building things—Harry had given up. Harry had shifted over to essentially trade, craft unionism: protect one group of workers, sacrifice others. The deal that he was willing to make was to protect the veterans, sacrifice everybody else.

“So Harry went to every port, every port on the Coast, and said, you will go back to work, or you will be expelled from the union. And if you were expelled from the union then you didn’t have the right to work on the waterfront, because it was a closed shop.

“So what happened—we were born out of that defeat. People were shocked, they did not know what to do. The Pinochet coup happened, and the ILWU leadership, on paper, spoke out against the coup as workers did all over the world, and unions all over the world. And they did nothing.

“So Howard and I and Stan [Gow] and Dave Ramet and John Dow circulated a petition in Local 10 and Local 34 (the clerks’ local) saying we call for the immediate boycott of Chilean cargo. And we organized it from the inside, using the International’s own rhetoric, because the International was saying we’re against the slaughter in Chile. We built the action and we pulled it off [in September 1974]. It was the beginning of the revival of political strike action in the ILWU. The last, previous, one had been in the early 50s in the Hawaiian Islands when the longshore section of the union shut the ports down for four days to defend Jack [Hall] the elected Communist president of the ILWU [local]….” [1:45:50]

.                              .                              .

[1: 50:46] “Howard, uniquely, may be one of the only people in the world to have been assaulted physically by Harry Bridges….in our generation the strike at Boron was the same thing [i.e., a sell-out by the union leadership] and the International permitted massive scab-herding, ordered longshoremen to handle scab goods.

“We fought that and, as a reward for fighting it, when three of us were delegates to the international convention in 1975…Harry Bridges, then a geriatric, organized a goon squad to come out and attack us and throw over the [Militant Caucus] table and rip down the ‘No More Boron’ signs. And these things have to be said, not to slander, these things have to be said to understand that the pressures capitalism brings to give in, to concede, to advance one section of the workers at the expense of others, is interminable and we have to face that.”

Jack took advantage of his position as chair to immediately rebut Bob and lamely attempted to defend Bridges, by recalling that he had not always been so bad:

[1:55:18] “So, we’re going to have differences here, and this is a democratic gathering. So I will say this, I’m sure that many of the things that Bob said about Harry Bridges was true, there were undemocratic actions that he and his union leadership did against opponents. But in defense of Harry Bridges I would say he’s conflicted, like so many of the leadership. But he did things in the interests of the working class that others didn’t do. For instance, at the height of the McCarthy period, where people were keeping their mouths shut, burying their heads in the sand, he defended Korea. He opposed the Korean War. You tell me another union bureaucrat in America that did that.”

What Bob said about Bridges’ goon squad assaulting Howard and (unsuccessfully) attempting to suppress the Militant Caucus at the 1975 ILWU convention was true, as was his assertion that under Bridges’ leadership “the International permitted massive scab-herding, ordered longshoremen to handle scab goods.”

Bob’s account of how the Bridges regime’s betrayals set the stage for the rise of the Militant Caucus is amply confirmed by the statements published by SL union supporters at the time, many of which are reprinted in Howard Keylor—Communist Trade Union Work in the ILWU, the book produced for the 25 January memorial. One of the MC’s earliest statements, dated 31 December 1974, entitled “Defend the ILWU—Stop Bridges’ ’75 Sell-out,” forthrightly declared:

“As long as our union is run by bureaucrats like Bridges and [vice-president Bill] Chester, who are more concerned with keeping their alliance with [Joe] Alioto [then San Francisco’s Democratic mayor] and other capitalist politicians than with defending their membership our ability to fight PMA [employers’ association] is hamstrung.”

The 4 April 1975 issue of Longshore-Warehouse Militant had a headline reading “For a Militant Democratic ILWU! Oust the Bridges Machine!” The 25 June 1975 issue of Longshore Militant (No. 8) was headlined “Bridges Declares War On Longshoremen! He proposes to starve us out!” There are many similar examples that could be cited; the SL’s ILWU supporters were not afraid to tell the simple truth that between 1934 and his retirement in 1977 Harry Bridges had devolved from a heroic militant into a sell-out bureaucrat.

In correspondence with Bob after the event, a BT comrade wrote:

“I cannot believe that the IG can agree with that [Jack’s defense of Bridges]. If someone had remarked that [Max] Shachtman was bending to ruling class pressure in 1939-40 when he set out on the Third Camp road to ‘State Department socialism,’ would Jack have jumped up to ‘disagree’ on the grounds that in 1934 Shachtman had done some good work in Minneapolis with [James P.] Cannon, or that in 1937 he had combatted [James] Burnham and [Joseph] Carter on the Russian question? Jack’s reflexive defense of the sellout you criticized was flatly counterposed to Trotsky’s injunction to ‘tell the truth.’ Jack was pretty obviously aiming to stay in with some Bridges loyalists in the audience by making clear that he disagreed with your ‘Trotskyite’ critique.”

The IG comrades, who have recently taken up the cudgels to defend Jack against the SL,  must be embarrassed by his defense of Bridges. If they are not, they should be.