Howard Keylor & the tragedy of the Militant Caucus

Trotskyist work in the ILWU 1974-87

“Everything depends upon the interrelation between the party and the class. A single employed Communist who is elected to the factory committee or to the administration of a trade union has a greater significance than a thousand new members, picked up here and there, who enter the party today in order to leave it tomorrow.”
Leon Trotsky, “What Next?” 27 January 1932

Howard Keylor, who was exactly the kind of worker-communist militant praised by Trotsky, died on 5 October 2024—two months short of his 99^th birthday. At a meeting held to honor Howard at the headquarters of Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in 2018, a variety of speakers celebrated his selfless devotion to the struggle for social revolution and human liberation. Comrade Henry Johnson, speaking on behalf of the Bolshevik Tendency (BT), observed:

“Howard is an incurable optimist who has always operated on the basis that a good example can be contagious, given the right set of circumstances. He has never been afraid to ‘call things by their right names’ and ‘speak the truth to the masses, however bitter it might be.’ Howard never curried favor or made political decisions on the basis of wanting to advance his career or get a pat on the head or avoid getting into ‘trouble.’ This attribute is unfortunately rather unusual in leftist politics.

“Howard learned long ago that those who look for short-cuts soon end up trimming their program and stretching the truth and before too long idealistic young subjective revolutionaries can end up in places they could never have imagined when they started out.”

Howard was an outstanding American communist trade-union militant—certainly one of the most important of his generation—and much can be learned from the work that he and his comrades carried out.

In an extensive 1998 interview on his political history Howard described growing up in a poor white Appalachian region of southeast Ohio. After finishing high school he enlisted in the U.S. Army and participated in the battle of Okinawa—the last major land conflict of World War II. His experience in the American military led him to the conclusion that a humane social order can be constructed only on the basis of cooperation rather than competition.

A few years after leaving the army, he joined the Communist Party USA (CP) in 1948, and in 1953 began work on the docks in Stockton, California and became a member of the ILWU. The ILWU, which was forged in the massive labor upsurge that culminated in a four-day San Francisco general strike in July 1934, had for decades been led by Harry Bridges and other militants associated with the Communist Party. In 1949-50 the ILWU was one of nine left-wing unions expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) on the grounds that they were “Communist-influenced.” Of the nine only the ILWU was relatively unscathed—seven others folded up while the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) survived but its membership was severely depleted as a result of raiding by anti-communist unions. The ILWU, which successfully defended its jurisdiction in Hawaii and along the Pacific West Coast, had a well-deserved reputation as America’s foremost left-wing union.

Howard led the CP’s small Stockton branch through the 1950s.^[1] While he spent more than a quarter of a century in or around the Party, he was never entirely comfortable with its unquestioning adherence to pronouncements from the Kremlin, nor with its chronic adaptation to the “progressive” wing of the American ruling class via electoral support to the supposedly “lesser evil” Democratic Party.

Howard broke with the CP in 1961 when it backed Harry Bridges’ Mechanization and Modernization (M&M) contract which split the ILWU into three categories—an “A list” of regular members, a “B list” with partial benefits and “casuals” with no rights at all. For over a decade he remained within the orbit of the party as a left-critic until, one day in 1974, while poking around in a second-hand bookstore, he came across The Prophet Armed, the first volume of Issac Deutscher’s monumental biography of Leon Trotsky. He stayed up all night devouring Deutscher’s account of the historic political struggle between the Leninist internationalism of Trotsky’s Left Opposition and the nationalist program of “socialism in one country” championed by Joseph Stalin. Howard said this suddenly illuminated many important historical questions which had long puzzled him—including how Hitler had so easily vanquished the powerful German workers’ movement in 1933, and why Franco had triumphed over the Spanish Revolution of 1936.

Once he understood that Trotsky, not Stalin, represented the authentic continuity of Bolshevism, Howard immediately began investigating all the various ostensibly Trotskyist groups in the Bay Area. It did not take him long to recognize that the Spartacist League (SL) was qualitatively superior to its competitors. He was impressed by the SL’s thoughtful, long-term perspectives for the trade-union work it undertook and was particularly interested in its strategy of building programmatically-based caucuses in unions with the goal of struggling for leadership.

Embracing Trotsky’s Transitional Program: a gestalt

Howard initially had reservations about trying to organize in the ILWU on the basis of an adapted version of Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Program but was won over on the grounds that this approach was based on “the fundamental thesis that capitalism cannot meet workers needs in the long run and that hard won workers’ gains are fragile and reversible.” He had long recognized that socialist revolution is necessary because capital accumulation, the alpha and omega of the “free market,” is counterposed to the interests of workers and the vast majority of the world’s population. Howard had joined the Communist Party because he understood this—and accepted the party’s reformist adaptations as necessary and “realistic,” while being uncomfortable with the logic of operating within the constraints imposed by the capitalists’ prioritization of profit maximization.

Howard observed that most ostensible Trotskyists active in the unions operated on a minimum rather than a transitional program “because they fear that talking about expropriation without compensation or a workers government will isolate them from workers.” But he came to understand that the only way to break through that isolation—without ceasing to be a revolutionary—was to win workers to a program that transcends the “reality” imposed by working within the framework of capitalist rule.

In a 1987 “Interview with a participant” Howard explained how he came to accept that the SL was correct to advocate an overtly revolutionary program in the unions, rather than one limited to immediate, “practical” demands:

“To oppose support to the Democrats you have to explain the class nature of the capitalist state, and that automatically raises the question of the workers government—just like any serious picket line situation poses in embryo the necessity for some kind of workers defense guards.

“The bottom line is that you can’t build a pro-socialist wing in the unions by hiding your politics—that’s always a sign of adaptation to the present backwardness of the class. You’ve got to be upfront about what you stand for and try to apply your program in a creative way to address the concrete questions which arise.”

He also discussed his initial reluctance to embrace the SL’s approach:

“We [the Militant Caucus] stood outside these [pro and anti-leadership] formations and acted as a very small, hard left political pole, and nothing like that had been done for a long, long time. I particularly suffered some difficulty, because in moving toward an explicitly socialist program based on the Transitional Program, I had to break with the whole anti-Bridges bloc that I had worked with for almost four years—some of whom were my close friends.”

On the other hand, the Militant Caucus (MC) was the answer to many of the problems that had perplexed him as a left-Stalinist, as he recounted in an 11 November 1996 contribution to an internal debate in the BT over the relevance of the Transitional Program (TP):

“A large component of my personal experience in being won from variants of Left Stalinism to Trotskyism was learning about the TP and how it can be used as a tool in raising workers consciousness. I early on saw that the reference in Trotsky’s [1938] discussion with SWP [Socialist Workers Party—from which the SL’s progenitors were expelled in the early 1960s] members on the possibility of a temporary stabilization of capitalism would require a ‘strategic retreat’ for the revolutionary party applied to the entire post WWII period. Whether Trotsky himself anticipated such an extended period of stabilization I found irrelevant, the real question remained of how to use the TP to raise workers consciousness in understanding that capitalism in this epoch could not guarantee job security and a decent living and how to use the method of transitional linked demands that are understandable and rational sounding and lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

. .

“On what kind of framework do we base our propaganda directed to workers? Our bosses and capitalism can’t guarantee our jobs. They will resist every improvement in working conditions and income to maximize their profits. They have the government and the courts and laws and police on their side. The history of the workers’ movement shows that we can’t win unless we are prepared to escalate and expand struggles so that it is too costly for the bosses and the government to smash us. Only workers’ solidarity across union and industry and national lines can guarantee success even in defensive struggles. Only militant workers’ mobilizations can defend workers in physical confrontation with the bosses and their state and their fascist tools. Racism, sexism [and] nationalism only divide workers and the social forces that are our allies. Only a union leadership that is not dependent on collaboration with the bosses and their state and political parties can even defend us effectively. No gains are permanent; only a workers’ party that leads workers in struggle to achieve a workers’ state that proceeds to expropriate production without compensation and establish a rational planned economy can ensure real job and income security. All of these can be posed in a way that appear rational and necessary and maybe even achievable. Takes skill and time but the payoff is there.”

Howard recalled that before he had discovered Trotsky and the TP, Gene Weisberger, an ILWU militant with syndicalist politics, had introduced him to the concept of demanding what workers actually need, rather than what the bosses can afford:

“The [TP] text makes it clear that dividing the work among all hands is the primary demand which directly challenges the concept of capitalist profit and the demand for a sliding scale of wages is to stop the employers from robbing workers of their wages through inflation.

“I can well remember when I first understood the relevance and practicality of this demand for sharing the work among all hands. It was during the 3 ½ month longshore strike of 1971-72 that a syndicalist longshore brother convinced me that our contract demand to protect our jobs by forcing the employers to strip and stuff all containers on the waterfront was unrealistic and unachievable; that the narrow failure of the demand for shorter work at no loss in pay at the 1959 [union policy-making] Longshore Caucus set the scale for the catastrophic loss of jobs from which we were suffering. I had previously co-authored a leaflet with [Asher Harer] the only remaining SWP member in the Bay Area longshore division which did not even touch on this demand. Anyway my dear syndicalist friend Gene [Weisberger] (who I had only met during the strike) and I co-authored a leaflet in which we called for reconvening the Caucus and making the shorter work shift with no loss of pay our No. 1 strike demand. We also attacked the betrayals and losing course of the strike by Bridges and company and called for rank-and-file strike committees to take complete control of the strike. Two years later when I finally read the TP, I was intrigued as to how the underlying framework and the use of the transitional method could be used to raise workers’ consciousness in a real way. I was induced to join the SL (which I perceived to be pretty bureaucratic) in order to try out this method embodied in the [Militant] Caucus program.”

Howard was concerned that many of the lessons of the Spartacists’ trade-union work in the 1970s would be lost as the militants involved gradually disappeared. He sought to do what he could to help document that experience, through interviews and making available copies of trade-union materials he considered particularly valuable:

“The iSt [international Spartacist tendency] never really explained this use of the TP either in the pages of Workers Vanguard or in internal discussion bulletins. There is in fact no real written record of how demands were formulated and linked to a given trade-union situation. The resulting tens of thousands of written pages for leaflets are available but wouldn’t make a lot of sense without explanation.”

Howard often expressed regret at not having the minutes of the meetings of the SL’s ILWU fraction and the Militant Caucus (for example during his 2 August 1998 interview). He recalled those minutes and other ancillary written materials as being sufficiently comprehensive to reconstruct many of the careful political deliberations that made the SL-supported work in the ILWU so effective.^[2] The cadres heading up the SL’s trade-union work understood that while standing on a “full program” provided a framework it did not, in itself, answer all questions—difficulties often arose over how and when to emphasize a particular part of the program as it related to a given concrete situation, in a way that would advance the struggle and raise political consciousness.

Howard on carrying out revolutionary trade-union work

Howard frequently remarked that the older he got, the more convinced he was of the validity of “orthodox” Trotskyism and particularly the effectiveness of the SL’s intelligent application of the Transitional Program in its heyday in the 1970s. In one of several sets of notes he made for talks on the topic of “A Transitional Organization for Communist Work in the Trade Unions” he noted “I came late to the theory of the transitional program as the basis of revolutionary trade-union work.” He explained that a trade union should be seen “as an ongoing working class defensive united front organization…. of a given group of workers.” The members of any union will adhere to a variety of political programs—whether explicitly elaborated or not—but the union represents a “united front” based on issues of immediate common interest (wages, working conditions, etc.)

Howard considered a programmatically-based trade-union “caucus” (like the MC) to be a “transitional organization” because it was intended to link the most politically advanced workers to the revolutionary organization. He distinguished this from a “commie caucus” made up exclusively of party members in a union. The MC and other SL-supported caucuses sought to recruit militants in a particular union on the basis of a series of key programmatic points ranging from workplace issues, through to the necessity for the absolute independence of the union from the capitalist state and culminating with the necessity for a workers’ government. In order to join the caucus workers would have to agree to uphold majority decisions—something Howard suggested was “not difficult for militant trade unionists accustomed to defending legitimate union discipline.” On the other hand, he said, members are free to say whatever they want on issues where the caucus had no position, something that could “even include the party question or the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat,” noting that the Militant Caucus had recruited a member with syndicalist, rather than Leninist, politics. While non-party elements never made up more than half the membership of any SL-supported caucus, Howard proposed that the optimal ratio of party members to non-members in a caucus would be roughly one to five, as many workers who are prepared to engage in serious class struggle have no interest in making a long-term commitment to a revolutionary organization.

Howard recalled how the “SL attempted to win me to establishing Longshore and Warehouse Militant Caucus by arguing the proposed caucus program point by point.” In hindsight he said it “would have proceeded better/faster if the SL had followed or traced historical roots in the CI [Communist International] and TUEL practice”. The Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) was a pan-union formation set up by the CP in the early 1920s, prior to the Stalinization of the Communist International, to recruit workers on the basis of agreement on key political questions. In another set of notes, Howard commented approvingly that the TUEL “entered blocs with bureaucrats on issues around which masses of workers could be mobilized in opposition to the bulk of the bureaucracy.”^[3]

In his notes Howard commented that successful trade-union work depends on revolutionaries acting in a way that wins the confidence of their fellow workers. Among other things Howard stipulated developing a profile as “extreme union defensists” who always uphold the overall interests of the working class against narrower, sectoral considerations. He also stressed the importance of being someone who provides a reasoned analysis of the “real situation and relation of forces” while avoiding “strike-mongering.” He considered it vital to never underestimate the difficulties that must be overcome in order to win a particular struggle, “especially when illegal.” While it was important to attempt to be among the “best informed of union members” and very familiar with the “contract and union rights,” it is also essential to be able to put “ideas into familiar and understandable language—avoid cant and sloganeering.” He considered it important for caucus members to adhere to agreed positions on key issues, but it was not a problem if they were to “abstain or even differ publicly on minor or peripheral questions in the union.”

1974 Chilean boycott—launching the Militant Caucus

The terminal disintegration of the New Left in the early 1970s provided a stream of new members for the SL and other far left organizations. One of the SL’s particularly outstanding new recruits was Bob Mandel, a dynamic young militant who was well known in the Bay Area left as one of the “Oakland 7” activists indicted in 1967 for opposition to the Vietnam war. Bob took a job in a warehouse organized by ILWU Local 6 with a perspective of conducting political work before he joined the SL.

Howard had won the respect of militants in Local 10 over his two decades in the union prior to his association with the SL. His recruitment reanimated Stan Gow, a long-time SL cadre^[4] who had originally joined Local 10 in 1959 but had lapsed into political inactivity. The prospect of initiating serious work in the strategic longshore sector represented a major step forward for the SL’s trade-union perspectives.

At Howard’s memorial meeting on 25 January 2025, Bob, who was the Militant Caucus organizer during the 1970s, described how it “was actually built on the heels of a massive defeat for the ILWU” after ILWU President Harry Bridges, a long-time CP supporter, scuttled the 1971-72 longshore strike:

“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 [West] 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 [in Chile] 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 27 September 1974 issue of Workers Vanguard (WV) ran an upbeat account describing the boycott as “a dramatic demonstration of the power of united labor action”:

“Responding to a call by the International Transport Workers Federation, longshoremen on both East and West Coasts refused to handle Chile cargo during a two-day international protest on September 18 and 19. This joint action was the first political labor boycott in many years….”

In New York the action was organized by the SL-initiated “September 19th Coalition For Chile Boycott” and endorsed by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). In Los Angeles, an SL-initiated “Ad Hoc Committee to Support the Transport Workers Boycott” organized a militant picket of 75 trade unionists (with members from at least half a dozen different left groups) to block Chilean cargo aboard the Santa Maria, a Prudential-Grace Lines ship, from being unloaded. ILWU dockers who refused to work the ship for several hours eventually relented when ordered to do so by Harry Bridges. Two days later, when the Santa Maria arrived in San Francisco, the “Committee to Enforce the Boycott” (which included members from the ILWU’s longshore, warehouse and clerical units–Locals 10, 6 and 34) prevented goods destined for Chile from being loaded. A 17 September 1974 leaflet promoting the action, entitled “No Goods to Chile’s Junta: a step forward,” was co-signed by Howard, Stan and four other ILWU members, most of whom became founding members of the Militant Caucus a few months later.

The Chile boycott was Howard’s introduction to working with the Spartacist League, and he was impressed—particularly by the successful challenge it posed to the Communist Party which had dominated the ILWU’s left-wing ever since the union’s inception. WV reported how the aggrieved Stalinists refused to permit the ILWU militants to speak at a Chile solidarity rally on 21 September, just a few days after the action:

“At yesterday’s Chile rally Bob Mandel of the Committee to Enforce the Boycott asked to speak but was refused by the Stalinists who controlled the microphones. Incensed at this bureaucratic suppression, the Committee members wrote on the back of their picket signs, ‘We stopped the cargo but they won’t let us speak!’ and held them up in front of the speakers’ platform. As members of the crowd shouted ‘Let them speak!’ the Stalinists lined up a goon squad on the platform and threatened to physically attack Mandel.”

For the next half dozen years the Militant Caucus gradually gained influence in the union at the expense of the CP which continued to lamely defend the capitulations of the union’s bureaucratic leaders.

On 16 December 1974 Howard, Stan Gow, Bob Mandel and three other militants co-signed the founding document of the Militant Caucus. A few weeks earlier Howard and Stan issued a joint program and announced that they were running for Local 10 Executive Board. Their nine-point program sought to address “the life and death issues facing our Local, the Longshore division, our whole union and the working class.” It included calls for aggressively organizing the unorganized and a fight for a shorter workday at no loss in pay with a 100 percent cost of living escalator. They combined a call for keeping the capitalist state out of union affairs with a proposal to wield the power of the union to advance the interests of women, minorities and those oppressed and exploited by capitalism at home and abroad. The program was capped with calls to break with the twin parties of American capitalism and nationalize the transportation industry without compensation as a step on the road to “a government, of by and for the workers.” Stan was elected, but Howard had to wait until the next year before he succeeded—after that he was re-elected 12 times in a row and remained on the Exec Board until he retired at the end of 1987.

1975 KNC Strike: MC’s spectacular debut

In January 1975, less than a month after its launch, the MC initiated mass picketing at the KNC glass company in response to management attempts to break the union with scabs and armed security guards. Bob Mandel, who had just won a seat on the Executive Board of ILWU Local 6 (Warehouse division) and two other MC members in Local 6, had made the proposal to prevent the scabs entering the Union City factory. The KNC strikers, most of whom were undocumented Latin American immigrants, responded positively and with the help of several hundred ILWU members from neighboring warehouses, Teamsters and Local 10 militants they successfully defied a court injunction and defeated the union-busting attempt. Years later, Bob Mandel recalled that during the strike some shipments of glass for KNC went missing on the waterfront during the strike, which impeded production and encouraged management to settle.

In a 25 January 1975 statement the MC characterized the settlement as a “limited victory” because “the scabs have been defeated at KNC and the union shop saved,” but also noted that the contract signed by the ILWU bureaucrats was “lousy and a sellout of the militancy and courage of the strikers.” The ILWU bureaucrats were also not happy with the outcome, but for different reasons. International Secretary-Treasurer Louis Goldblatt “warned” that the militants who he claimed had attacked the union should be expelled. The MC replied that they had acted to defend the union which had been endangered as a result of the passivity and class-collaboration of the bureaucratic leaders.

When the Local 6 leadership brought charges against Bob Mandel for “anti-union attacks in the literature he distributed,” KNC’s chief steward wrote a statement that was cosigned by every worker in the shop praising Bob for his initiative and denouncing the allegations against him. At the 27 February 1975 meeting of the East Bay division of Local 6 the membership decisively rejected the bureaucrats’ attack. The MC’s intervention in the KNC strike combined hard-headed political analysis with bold, physically courageous action. This single event established the Militant Caucus as the nucleus of a credible left opposition to the class-collaborationist Bridges machine. It was a brilliant beginning.

The 4 April 1975 “Special Convention Issue” of Longshore-Warehouse Militant (No. 5*), produced for the union’s biennial international convention which was held that year in Vancouver, British Columbia, featured a report on Bob’s acquittal. It also denounced strike-breaking legislation aimed at Canadian longshoremen and attacked the Bridges regime for permitting diverted Canadian cargo to US ILWU locals while the Canadians were on strike. This was a hot topic at the convention, which Howard, Bob, Jack Dow and Stan Gow attended on behalf of the Militant Caucus.

Bridges’ response to his upstart “Trotskyite” critics was to personally lead a goon squad assault on the MC’s literature table. Outraged convention delegates spontaneously opposed this anti-democratic move and forced Bridges and his gang to back down. When Jimmy Herman, Bridges’ lieutenant who took over as ILWU president a few years later, proposed to muzzle unnamed critics—i.e., the MC—his motion was defeated by a majority of the delegates, many of whom had their own grievances against the Bridges machine. The CP’s People’s World (19 April 1975) was generally supportive of Herman’s proposal, while complaining that “a number of delegates said, however, that they felt Herman should have made an effort to distinguish these ultra-left forces [i.e., the MC] from the left forces largely responsible for helping organize the union in the 1930’s” [i.e., Bridges’ CP backers]. The Canadian CP’s Pacific Tribune headlined their coverage of the event “ILWU Convention: Ultra-Left Disruption Helps Labor’s Enemies.”

Very few people with long histories in the left are capable of successfully making the sort of radical political turn Howard did when he embraced the Trotskyist heresy he had been inoculated against a quarter of a century earlier as a young Stalinist. In his 27 February 1975 letter of application to the SL he observed:

“It must be a peculiar form of egocentric madness; a kind of galloping megalomania to think that 1 part per million (in the US) can have a significant effect on the working class. I am convinced however, that the SL analysis of the world situation, the role of the international working class, and the continued viability of Marxism-Leninism is most probably the correct one among many.

“Pragmatically (excuse the word) I am enormously impressed by the quality of your cadres, their openness and skill in applying class-struggle politics to the realities of US life.”

. . .

“My politics and style of work are still ‘soft.’ The separation between intellectual conviction and the habits of almost 30 years of revisionist class-struggle work will take much time and effort to overcome. The movement toward SL style of work is painful but incremental and certain.”

Even after he became disillusioned with the leadership of the Spartacist League, Howard remained convinced that the group represented a vital link in the chain of revolutionary continuity and the model it developed for conducting revolutionary activity in the unions was uniquely correct.

December 1976: SL ‘Active Workers Conference’

In his 1998 interview Howard said that in late 1976 he was taken aback when the SL leadership suddenly began to manifest “distrust and fear” of the trade-union cadres, declaring that “there was a revolt in the trade-union fractions” in auto that could result in a “Cochranite split in the party.” (In the early 1950s Bert Cochran, the leader of the SWP’s autoworkers’ fraction walked out of the party under the banner “Junk the old Trotskyism.”) In his 2 August 1998 interview Howard said it all seemed very mysterious when all SL trade-union supporters and senior cadres were directed to attend an emergency “Active Workers Conference” in Chicago over the Christmas/New Year holidays.

“So I show up in Chicago and discover it involves…two people in auto who had not openly supported an out-bureaucrat the caucus was not supporting and in the union had opposed this person and told everyone they were not going to vote for him. But in the secrecy of the voting booth had actually put an x beside [his] name on the grounds he was the lesser of two evils. Never told their fellow workers but reported back to the organization they had done it. And so the shit hit the fan and these guys were in serious trouble.

”They were put up on the podium in the front and forced to defend themselves…the leadership of the party…took turns gangbanging them for this major betrayal and the projection that this thing might be more widespread in the fractions and the party’s trade-union work than was known and that we had to nip this in the bud even if we have to get rid of a whole layer of active trade unionists.”

Howard said the matter could have been handled more pedagogically, “because the two comrades quite rapidly said, ‘yeah, I made a mistake—I shouldn’t have done it.’” He said he felt sorry for the two relatively junior comrades, but his main impression was “the leadership didn’t really trust the members of the fractions very much” and anticipated that an inability to stand up to pressure from the trade-union bureaucracy could “create a real problem or a split in the party.” Howard said he considered “this form of sanitation excessive”; the SL leadership was genuinely concerned but they also exaggerated the seriousness of the problem.

James Robertson, the SL’s historic leader, explained why he was worried to the attendees:

“The relative stagnation of the immediate past period has generated tremendous pressures of frustration upon the tiny American left, from which the SL is not immune. While the ostensibly revolutionary organizations, virtually without exception, have suffered profound crises, factional fragmenting and/or disintegration, the SL, guided by its Marxist analysis of social reality, has preserved itself from any severe dislocation or disorientation and has remained highly politically homogeneous.”

Robertson observed that pressures were building in the SL due to “the frustrations of the immediate past period, reflected in a widespread mood of apathy or cynicism among working people.” The SL’s membership had begun to contract and “prospects for substantial regroupments [of experienced cadre from other left groups] have become meager.” The leadership knew that the resulting “‘crisis of expectations’ had tended to weigh most heavily on the SL’s most vulnerable and submerged elements, our trade unionists” even though, at the time, WV reported:

“Despite almost five years of physically exhausting, unrelenting pressures—faced with alternating speed-ups and layoffs in their industries, working patiently without major victories in a milieu where, despite intense exploitation, massive class resistance has yet to erupt—the comrades demonstrated their revolutionary will to struggle and overcome the draining pressures upon them.”

The conference was officially called by the SL’s Trade Union Commission (TUC), headed by the late Chris Knox (Kinder)^[5], in early October 1976 in response to “a variety of deformations including the beginnings of programmatic generalizations of opportunist impulses.” The TUC pledged “to make this a sophisticated conference to provide the trade unionists with insight into problems of trade-union work in the framework of the state of the organization.” Four issues of a TUC Discussion Bulletin produced in preparation for the event centered on issues in the auto industry but also addressed other arenas including steel, phone and longshore.

Bob Mandel, as MC organizer, produced a “Perspective and Tasks” document^[6] which discussed the experiences of the previous two years and future prospects, noting that “politically the fraction still needs continual correction” from the SL leadership. He said there was frequently a tendency “toward over-activism, plunging into situations without sufficient thought and then being forced to react to them,” but sometimes “a certain bureaucraticphobia” led to being overly conservative.

In the Bay Area warehouse division (ILWU Local 6) where Bob won election to the Exec Board, “we have substantial roots and influence but lack decisive weight” but the balance of forces had made it unrealistic to have attempted to take leadership of a recent strike. Instead, “we should have focused on recruiting militants by predicting and explaining the betrayal of the strike while fighting to present an alternative strategy….”

Making real progress, he noted, would require “patience and perseverance,” although possibilities were opened up by the crisis of Maoism internationally, which had caused the influence of Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) collapse in Local 6, where their supporters had become:

“disoriented, their press irregular and they are boycotting the present [Exec Board] election. Their periphery is negligible and the other Maoids in the industry, with the exception of the [Beijing-loyal October League] OL, are exiting, discouraged by the failure of workerism. The open alliance of China with U.S. imperialism and the current [‘Gang of Four’] clique fight in Peking provides an excellent opportunity to demoralize the Maoists….The fraction must aggressively seek out opportunities to polemicize with them.”

Mandel noted that the “CP supporters constitute a far more significant opponent” in Local 6, although “their failure to distinguish themselves from the leadership’s increasingly discredited policies” made them politically vulnerable.

In Local 10, the longshore division, the MC was:

“in a unique position to discredit the CP nationally through our work….The polarized state of the local pressures the CP supporters to posture militantly, which leaves them wide open to exposure when they back down as they did on the contract fight and the Chilean and South African cargo boycott while our friends stuck by their guns.”

The history of betrayals of the Bridges leadership, which the CP uncritically supported, had generated a sizeable, but politically amorphous, oppositional milieu which gave the MC room to maneuver:

“Where only 18 months ago we were only a hardly known and very isolated left wing struggling to make our friends programmatically known, we are today a tiny but influential pole of opposition, able to get strike motions adopted but unable to organize a sufficient following to get them implemented. While the anti-International leadership [i.e., anti-Bridges faction] still has considerable prestige, their ranks are increasingly responsive to our ideas.”

Chris Knox wrote a document for the conference^[7] in which he reported that after a careful consideration of future “perspectives and priorities” the SL leadership had decided “to concentrate leadership cadre in the Bay Area in order to intersect class-struggle opportunities which were better there than elsewhere.” The early successes of the MC allowed it to expand its activity beyond the ILWU and get a hearing in important labor struggles in ways that would not be possible for the SL or its leftist rivals.

The possibility of a major breakthrough in the Bay Area was posed in spring 1976, when organized labor in San Francisco appeared to be on the brink of a general strike in response to the city’s frontal attack on municipal craft unions. Chris observed:

“The near general strike of spring 1976 in San Francisco demonstrated the ease with which the ossified labor lieutenants [of capital], given the right intersection of circumstances, could lose control of an elemental, class-struggle upsurge.”

He also noted:

“The grossly opportunist and, in some cases, adventurist behavior of the ostensibly revolutionary organizations in the near-general strike in San Francisco in spring 1976 brought home the bankruptcy of the U.S. left when faced with the prospect of a real class struggle situation….While the CP (predictably) concentrated its fire on the left in order to protect the bureaucracy, the SWP and the RCP actually opposed implementing the call for the general strike.”

Workers Vanguard (20 April 1976) reported how the Militant Caucus sought to promote the idea of electing rank-and-file committees to begin strike preparations:

“The broad support for an elected strike committee evident at a meeting held today in [the municipal workers’] strike headquarters demonstrates the rank and file’s growing consciousness that, unless they take direction of the struggle out of the hands of the treacherous labor fakers, they face imminent defeat. Among those backing such a proposal was Howard Keylor, a longtime waterfront union activist and co-editor of ‘Longshore Militant,’ an oppositional newsletter in Local 10 of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU).

“Keylor was roundly cheered when he urged that the ranks elect a picket committee, send a delegation to the Thursday night meeting of Local 10 and issue a call for a mass meeting of all San Francisco labor unions to plan an immediate city-wide general strike. He pointed out that his Local had approved a strike support motion last month, and that the strikers would have the longshoremen’s backing in shutting down the waterfront if they threw up lines at the docks.

“An April 5 leaflet issued by Keylor and other supporters of the ‘Longshore Militant’ and the Local 6 ‘Warehouse Militant’ pointed the way forward for the embattled city workers through a revival of the kind of active labor solidarity that turned the 1934 San Francisco general strike into an historic victory for the American working class:

‘With the warehouse contract coming up June 1, and a major Pay Guarantee Plan crisis facing longshoremen July 1. the time is ripe for the ILWU to call for a general strike. Such a call would find an immediate response from militant Muni drivers who once again-to a man-have honored the craft workers’ picket lines and whose own contract expires July 1.

‘An ILWU-initiated general strike could not only assure an end to all cuts in city services and victory for the city workers; it could win 100% COLA. high wages. and a shorter work week at no loss in pay for the entire area labor movement. It would turn the tide against the bosses’ offensive and keep San Francisco a strong union town.’”

In his 2 August 1998 interview Howard recalled that much of the time at the December 1976 conference was devoted to discussing developments in different industries and the difficulties and opportunities posed in each. He said he found this very useful, as were his subsequent chats with comrades in each of the various sectors. In general, he found the discussions at the conference to be “pretty useful and pretty high level, which was in contradiction to the previous gangbanging sessions.”

One area which particularly interested Howard, and which he thought the SL leadership had handled well, was the process through which implanted comrades raised their profiles in order to “surface” politically over an extended period of time. (Some aspects of this are discussed in an October 1976 directive to auto comrades in Detroit.)

WV’s report on the conference saluted “the revolutionary will to struggle and overcome the draining pressures” exhibited by the cadres of the “class of ’72,” who had been recruited from the “fracturing of the old New Left,” and implanted into strategic industries. Tragically, events over the next several years gradually revealed that the erosion of “revolutionary will” began at the top, as Robertson and his closest associates began increasingly to manifest the cynicism and other morbid symptoms^[8] they had sought to cauterize at the Chicago “Active Workers” conference.

1980 ANCAN—Militant Caucus at high tide

On 3 November 1979 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) thugs opened fire on an anti-racist rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, organized by the Communist Workers Party (CWP). Five demonstrators were killed and nine wounded. When the Klan announced plans to hold a celebratory rally in Detroit, Michigan, Spartacist League supporters in United Auto’ Workers (UAW) Local 600 at Ford’s River Rouge complex in neighboring Dearborn, took the lead in organizing a 10 November counter mobilization to abort the fascist provocation. This hastily-organized demonstration, which drew 500 largely black participants, including dozens of UAW members, successfully faced down Detroit’s Democratic civic authorities who attempted to ban it. Featured speakers at the rally included SL supporters from the UAW (Charles Dubois, Frank Hicks and Brian Mendis) as well as Jane Margolis, leader of the SL-backed Militant Action Caucus (MAC) in the phoneworkers union who flew in from California for the event. In her remarks Jane drew a link between the opposition of Democratic politicians in Detroit to anti-KKK protests and the scandalous assault on her several months earlier by the Secret Service on the floor of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) convention where she was an elected delegate:

“We cannot let the government characterize us who protest Klan murders as extremists. It was this government, particularly [US President Jimmy] Carter’s Secret Service that labeled me as an extremist because I wanted to give a speech at my union convention against the racist anti-labor policies of Jimmy Carter. And for that I was handcuffed, dragged off the floor of my own union convention, because I wanted to speak in defense of the workers against the racist anti-working class policies of the Democratic Party.”
Workers Vanguard (23 November 1979)

In November 1979 the Militant Caucus put forward proposals in both Locals 6 and 10 for an immediate Bay Area mass mobilization to protest the Greensboro massacre. Five hundred ILWU members signed an MC-initiated petition demanding an anti-fascist mobilization which included a call for “Union-Organized Labor/Black/Latino Defense Guards to Smash Klan/Nazi Violence!” and to “Uphold the Right to Armed Self-Defense! No to Gun Control!”

The bureaucrats dragged their feet but eventually rank-and-file pressure forced the leadership of Local 6 to invite the “Bay Area Labor Movement, community organizations and every concerned individual” to a 7 January 1980 planning meeting at their headquarters.

The meeting was given special urgency because only a month earlier, on 8 December, 15 gun-toting Klansmen had appeared in front of the San Francisco Federal Building while their leader attended a hearing on police/minority relations.

In addition to the two ILWU locals, the meeting was attended by delegates from the CWA, Service Employees, Retail Clerks and Letter Carriers along with representatives of various leftist organizations, including the SL and CWP. The ILWU bureaucrats running the event proposed a strategy of reliance on state authorities to curtail fascist activity and explicitly criticized the MC’s call for workers defense guards and its advocacy of the right to armed self-defense against Nazi/KKK terror.

The meeting was chaired by Joe Figueiredo, a leading Local 6 official and Communist Party supporter. His ruling that leftist groups (including the CWP whose members had been murdered) were not entitled to representation was challenged by Jane Margolis, whose proposal to give labor-socialist groups in attendance full rights was approved 10-6 by union delegates.

The convocation of a union-based anti-fascist united front represented a major accomplishment for the Bay Area SL and its trade-union base. It was inevitable that in any such body the political axis would revolve around whether to appeal to the capitalist rulers to suppress the fascist threat—the issue of the capitalist state being a key demarcation between reformists and revolutionaries. CP supporters and other pro-Democratic Party bureaucrats advocated pleading with civic authorities to ban the fascists and counselled reliance on the cops for protection. The MC counterposed a strategy of physically interdicting any attempt by fascists to appear in public.
Workers Vanguard (25 January 1980)

A subsequent announcement by the Nazis of a planned celebration of Hitler’s birthday in SF on 19 April 1980, was responded to immediately by the MC, Longshore-Warehouse MILITANT (14 February 1980) with a statement declaring: “Labor, organizing the black and latino communities behind it, must see to it that the Nazis don’t set foot in SF on April 19.” The MC reported that, “Due to the consistent demands of the ILWU membership, the Local 6 leadership is holding another public meeting [on 19 February] to lay plans for a mass anti-KKK/Nazi rally” and called for union members to attend and support “a counter-demonstration at the site of the planned Nazi rally to break it up.”

The MC’s perspective was sharply counterposed to the CP’s “peaceful, legal” strategy of reliance on Democratic Party civic officials and their cops. The CP was, by that time, the MC’s only serious leftist competitor in the ILWU. From its founding in 1934, the leadership of the ILWU under Harry Bridges had been roughly aligned with the CP, but by the late 1970s the party was losing its grip.^[9] While CP supporters often differed from the bourgeois liberal mainstream over issues involving the Soviet bloc, they routinely preached reliance on and subservience to, Democratic politicians as the “lesser evil” agents of the capitalist ruling class. Their supporters in the union generally did not object to this, but over the question of Klan/Nazi terror, Local 10’s largely black membership, like many other trade unionists and members of minority communities, were strongly inclined to a strategy of actively confronting the fascists.

The MC and SL took full advantage of this opportunity to discuss the role of the police and capitalist state authorities and how fascist gangs have often acted as extra-legal enforcers for the bosses. The treatment of labor/black defense guards as a practical, immediate necessity allowed the MC to pose the idea of a “workers government” displacing the existing capitalist one far more concretely in its discussions with union militants. The MC also began using the question of union defense guards as a criterion for electoral support, as Longshore-Warehouse Militant No. 11, 14 February 1980, reported:

“In the last two weeks, Militant Caucus members who initiated the drive for an ILWU-led rally and whose program included the call for labor/black/latino defense guards to smash KKK/Nazi violence have been elected to stewardships, executive board seat and Caucus and Convention delegate in both ILWU Locals 6 and 10. A brother who we supported [Rex Reinhart] and who also stood for militant union action against the fascists got 47% of the vote for vice-president in Local 10.”

The MC’s approach was counterposed to that of the ILWU bureaucracy and their Stalinist allies who argued that the only practical solution to the Nazi/KKK threat was to pressure the Democrats and rely on the police. The same issue of Longshore-Warehouse Militant reported:

“People’s World supporter Franklin Alexander said at the February West Bay Local 6 membership meeting that he didn’t want Tuesday’s [19 February] meeting to be a platform for white people and leftists to speak out against the Klan! So much for his ‘left-wing’ and ‘anti-fascist’ pretensions!”

The MC’s proposal to organize a mass rally of trade-unionists, leftists, blacks and other minorities at the same time and place the Nazis planned to celebrate Hitler’s birthday was widely popular. As momentum grew and it became increasingly clear that the anti-Nazi mobilization would go ahead regardless of attempts to intimidate the organizers, the Democratic city administrators realized that a major confrontation could only be avoided by pulling the plug on the fascist provocation. So the police contacted the Nazis to advise that they would be wise to abort their event. On 10 April 1980 the cops held a press conference to announce: ”the Police Department has discussed this matter with Mr. Allen Vincent of the Nazi Party and it is mutually agreed that the rally would not be held….” Chief Cornelius Murphy offered the following explanation for the decision to call off the Hitlerites’ birthday party:

“I just wanted to make it very clear to him [the Nazi leader] that we would to the best of our ability police the event, but from the intelligence that we had gathered, the groups that were going to counterdemonstrate, that there could be upwards of 5,000 people there and that would severely limit our ability to provide him with protection.”
Workers Vanguard (18 April 1980)

The April 19 Committee Against Nazis (ANCAN) event went ahead at the time and place of the aborted Nazi rally. Despite the widely publicized fact that the fascists’ event was called off some 1,200 people gathered to celebrate the victory. Bob Mandel, the MC organizer, who was the convenor called on various trade unionists, black and other minority spokespeople and leftists to speak. Jane Margolis, who marched into the rally at the head of a contingent of 50 CWA members, was one of several SL supporters who addressed participants. Statements of solidarity were read from a number of prominent figures who could not attend, including David Hilliard, former chief of staff of the Black Panther Party, and 81 year old Henry Schmidt, Harry Bridges’s close collaborator in the 1934 SF general strike that established the ILWU. Greetings were also heard from Frank Hicks, Charles DuBois and Ken Granquist of the SL-supported “Rouge Militant Slate” who had helped organize the November 10 1979 anti-KKK rally in Detroit.

WV reported that a statement was also read from “Howard Keylor, member of the General Executive Board of ILWU Local 10 (SF) and editor of the ‘Longshore Militant’ newsletter [who was] prevented from attending by a serious industrial accident.” His injury, suffered several months earlier, took him nine months to recover from but he was able to contribute by working the phones to mobilize trade-unionists he knew.

In his 4 August 1998 interview, Howard said that the reason for the success of the effort to physically confront the Nazis, spearheaded primarily by the MC, was in part because “Bob [Mandel], who was in charge of the campaign, was an unusually able organizer [with] many roots in the left in the Bay Area.” In addition, Howard said, the MC:

“had a lot of contacts in the trade-union movement. …[including] lower-level officials. So that campaign centered around getting the left and primarily trade unionists to come out and blockade that location.”

Howard reported that, although “the SL actively solicited participation from every left organization in the Bay Area,” they all abstained, although some of their supporters did attend the rally.

SL gets credit for ANCAN: ‘You guys really know how to do things’

ANCAN’s spectacular success in defying San Francisco police and civic authorities, while successfully mobilizing a broad spectrum of support from unions, black and minority groups, made a major impact in the Bay Area. The MC, and to a lesser extent other SL trade-union supporters, won the respect of a significant layer of class-conscious workers, including, Howard recalled, from “a lot of black longshoremen”:

“ANCAN was a highpoint of the Spartacist League’s anti-fascist public work at that time, proving that it was possible to mobilize workers, leftists in direct confrontation with fascists….[it] raised the profile considerably of the caucus members. You know when you are out soliciting support from every trade-union or group of workers that you might come in contact with in an anti-fascist action which is successful, it does help build your prestige….especially in longshore and warehouse our prestige was considerably raised. I mean, a lot of black longshoremen who didn’t go to the demonstration told me later they regretted they didn’t—they didn’t think it would work, [but] ‘you guys really know how to do things.’”

The CP, the SL’s most important competitor in the Bay Area labor movement, was put on its back foot in the ILWU by ANCAN’s success. Some CPers openly admitted that it had been a mistake to boycott ANCAN and the party’s West Coast newspaper, People’s World (PW), felt it necessary to print, without comment, a scathing denunciation by William Mandel (Bob’s father) in its 10 May 1980 edition. Bill Mandel, a prominent figure in the CP milieu for decades and one of the speakers at the rally, thundered:

“PW prefers to know nothing, see nothing, and hear nothing when something happens under leadership it disapproves of. Your readers were not told that there actually was a rally against the Nazis at City Hall on April 19 attended, according to TV, by about a thousand. The attendance was obviously overwhelmingly of workers, not students or middle class people; that it was predominantly non-Jewish, and there was a very large minority of Black and Latino people present; that it was almost entirely of young people. I was there. Furthermore, it had an exceedingly impressive sponsorship of elected union activists on the unpaid level.

“But its organizers were Trotskyists, and that apparently made it a non-event to the PW. Such a news policy deserves no respect.”
–quoted in Workers Vanguard, 16 May 1980

The dissension in the CP’s base posed a real opportunity to engage the layer of politicized workers in the Bay Area who had been following the dispute over how the fascist threat could be countered most effectively. The SL leadership appreciated the significance of this development, observing in a 24 November 1981 Political Bureau internal statement that “Only in the Bay Area have we had consistent political combat with [Communist Party supporters] in the unions. Our ANCAN demonstration had significant effect on them.”^[10]

ANCAN also made a significant impact in the Bay Area’s substantial Maoist milieu. The “Anti-Klan/Nazi Coalition” composed of the CWP and a few other Maoist groupings rejected ANCAN’s proposal for joint action in favor of pressuring San Francisco’s Democratic politicians to revoke the fascists’ permit. The Maoist coalition, which explicitly renounced any intention of physically confronting the Nazis, organized a competing rally (which drew 350) a quarter mile from the fascists’ projected assembly point. Three months later at a public meeting, one of the Maoist organizers admitted that this “rightist line” derived from a “fear of confrontation with the Nazis.” Without explicitly admitting that the SL had been right, this was the unmistakeable implication of their “honest self-criticism”:

“Our main purpose for seeing it as an agitational rally and not as a purposefully aggressive, physical confrontation was that we thought the only people who would come to that were basically the people who may be in this room and a few others….Now, we may have been wrong…we did not bring a lot of mass elements to our rally, it was mostly communists and communist supporters. That in my view is an honest report of it. We did have some struggle inside [the Coalition] where the rightist line of a fear of any confrontation with the Nazis convinced people to stay far enough away. That was a rightist line that we all fell to, and that’s got to be an honest self-criticism.”
–quoted in Workers Vanguard, 25 July 1980

Social-democrats and Stalinists who advocate a path to socialism via class-collaborationist gradualism and rigidly adhere to the rules laid down by the class enemy are incapable of offering effective resistance to attacks by the bosses, who are always prepared to ignore legalities when necessary. ANCAN demonstrated that, with proper leadership, interdicting fascist groups in the egg is both effective and achievable—whereas reliance on capitalist “proper channels” has repeatedly resulted in defeat and demoralization.

The question of how to deal with an emergent fascist threat is one of many issues addressed in the Transitional Program, which advocates direct, class-struggle solutions to workers’ problems rather than reliance on courts, cops or other capitalist agencies. ANCAN provided the most spectacular demonstration of the efficacy of this approach, but the MC also undertook various less publicized actions, as Howard discussed in his 1998 interview. He mentioned how the MC encouraged unofficial “hot-cargoing” of scab goods in situations where the union bureaucrats refused to act, and cited as an example a strike at the Hormel meat company in the 1970s:

“we were able to get a few temporary boycotts on the docks of scab-produced products from Hormel. But these were frustrated by the leadership of the union because the actions were illegal—but we had some temporary success.”

He recalled that “we had people from the [Hormel] union out on the West Coast for a short period of time” who, on a couple of occasions, set up pickets the dockers honored. Little if any of this sort of limited and ephemeral activity was ever written up by either the MC or the SL, presumably to avoid providing an opening for attacks by union bureaucrats and/or bosses. While limited in scope and duration, these actions provided experience for those who participated in the potential leverage of effective “hot-cargoing” solidarity actions.

Lessons from MC’s best practices

“The fight for socialism is unthinkable without a fight for the revolutionization of the trade unions. That is what gives party trade-union work such transcendent importance.”
James P Cannon, Speeches to the Party

The struggle to “revolutionize” the trade unions requires a correct political program—but what is also critical is the ability to earn the confidence of more politically advanced workers in order to guide them to revolutionary conclusions based on their own experiences. Henry Johnson, a veteran of both the MC and the BT, alluded to Howard’s ability to do this at his 2018 birthday celebration:

“Howard’s exemplary work in the ILWU provides a model for future revolutionary activists. He was able to achieve what he did because, over the years, his fellow union members learned that he was honest, serious, steady and sensible. He was able to explain things, sometimes complicated things like the need for socialist revolution, in ways that made sense. He was also able to work with people on particular projects with whom he had very serious differences. Workers, including those who did not agree with his politics, respected him because they knew that he was absolutely sincere and that he could be trusted to do what he said he would.

“Howard understood that without revolutionary organization the working people are only material for exploitation, and recognized that the essential task is therefore to build a viable revolutionary organization rooted in the working class—something much easier said than done.”

While the MC consistently promoted the idea that workers’ interests trumped capitalist legality and advocated direct mass action as the answer to bourgeois court injunctions, the only time it actually implemented this perspective was in the January 1975 KNC strike. (Howard, basing himself to a large extent on the preparatory propaganda work of the MC, initiated several such actions after he broke with the SL as discussed below.)

While convinced that the key to promoting class consciousness lay through the direct involvement of workers in struggles with the bosses, SL trade-union supporters also took advantage of other openings to promote their ideas—including running for union office. For a dozen years Howard and Stan were routinely re-elected to the Local 10 Exec Board—in 1979 Howard also ran as the MC candidate for president, winning ten percent of the votes cast^[11]. In his 1998 interview he said that the MC had only taken this step because “there was no danger of being elected.” While caucus members did generally not run for offices they could not win, the 1978 election was seen as an exceptional opportunity to “project program.”

The campaign provided a way for the MC to contrast its class-struggle politics to the increasingly conciliatory policies pursued by the “former self-styled ‘anti-Bridges’ good guys” running the local who were cooperating with the “Bridges stooges” in attempting “to head off a fight for jobs while cooperating with the PMA” as the 12 December 1977 Longshore Militant put it.

Howard explained it would be a mistake to assume the leadership of a union without first winning the conscious political support of a majority prepared “to back you in the confrontations with the employers…and not leave you hanging out.” While the MC’s influence and support grew steadily in Local 10 they were never close to winning the allegiance of a majority.

How things worked in the MC

The relationship between the MC and SL in the 1970s was, according to Howard, on the whole, a good one. In his 2 August 1996 interview, he noted that historically trade-union political activity often tends to exert a parochial influence on the comrades involved. The SL sought to counter this by encouraging caucus members to engage in political activity outside the trade-union field—often by intervening on broader political issues at meetings sponsored by competing socialist groups. Howard recalled that caucus members were very useful in recruiting people to the SL, “because the weight and prestige of the caucus and…our profile was such that it was attractive to people who were subjectively revolutionary.”

He said that, as a rule, the Militant Caucus was most successful when its members were able to operate independently on the tactical level. In some cases, he recalled, attempts by senior party leaders to exercise too much control over operational issues was counterproductive. Al Nelson, Robertson’s longest-serving lieutenant, who was the primary SL contact for the MC, sometimes provided useful observations and picked up on things that might otherwise be missed. Howard recalled that Al failed to understand some things about the ILWU^[12] and “wasn’t the easiest person to work with;” he had a tendency to be excessively heavy-handed and often acted like he “enjoyed dumping on people.”

As a rule, Howard observed:

“Trade-union work is such that if you are successful at it you have to think independently frequently, you have to think on your feet….micro control doesn’t work. You have to have confidence in your people and [sometimes] take a chance.”

In hindsight, he said, “the micro input was often useful and probably necessary early on, but as the fraction and the caucus became more experienced it became less useful, and sometimes even a bit of a burden or a drag.” Howard had a very high opinion of Bob Mandel, the fraction head and MC organizer, whose inputs were often “invaluable.” Even though Bob was in Local 6, the warehouse section, “his insight into longshore was extremely good” and he earned the respect of all the longshoremen in the MC’s periphery.

In a contribution to the ET’s second 2^nd conference in September 1983, entitled “Thoughts on Tasks and Perspectives,” Bob recalled:

“In the SL, at least from the mid-70s on, there was a tendency for the leadership to substitute itself for the membership. Everything had to be cleared through the top. This tendency grew during the period of industrialization and the emergence of trade-union supporters. There was constant nervousness among the leadership that the pressures of the arena upon inexperienced cadre, most of whom had only recently been won to Trotskyism, could lead them astray. In fact, the increasing centralization, the position that everything had to be cleared through the top, atrophied the brain. People sure didn’t learn how to think on their feet. Recognizing the potential danger, for one brief year the [ILWU] fraction and to a lesser but still real degree the [CWA] fraction were given their heads (to be corrected, if need be, after the fact not before it). The fractions flourished and comrades developed writing, speaking and organizing skills hitherto untapped. When the leadership took the reins back after the purges [of leaders of both ILWU and CWA fraction in the Bay Area], hyper-centralism was encouraged throughout the organization of the type which presently manifests itself in purges over anticipated differences.”

Howard said Al’s attempts to exert “micro control” over tactical questions produced results that were “not always the best, and [in response] rather than fight on it we would often sort of proceed on our own,” in what he described as an “unspoken conspiracy.” As the leading MC comrades gained experience within the union, they became increasingly “self confident and sure of ourselves;” this led to occasional intimations by party leaders that perhaps the trade unionists were getting a bit too independent. Such tensions are probably inevitable, Howard reflected, but:

“It works best when there is a feeling or some expression by the leadership that their people are honest…and really mean to carry the work forward and defend the program. If you have …an undercurrent of fear and suspicion it is not the optimal relationship. All of us needed party life…political life outside the…trade-union work, which can be deforming.”

Howard said there was generally a “reasonable balance” between allowing caucus members the latitude to respond on the spot and the necessity of party oversight, yet:

“[Al Nelson et al] were always trying to find issues on which they could detect that we might be making concessions….This particularly developed around temporary action blocs or blocs around propaganda on a particular specific issue.”

In his 4 August 1996 interview Howard stated that he found the party leadership’s proclivity for “dumping on people” to be “counter-productive” because it made members insecure and undermined self-confidence. He observed that relations among waterfront workers—including in the MC–were generally characterized by compassion and camaraderie, but this was not characteristic of what “I found in the Spartacist League”:

“If the recognized political leader of our caucus, Bob, made a mistake people in the caucus would feel quite free to point it out….there was never any of the nastiness, never, that I encountered quite widely in the Spartacist League. It was like two different worlds.”

He recalled the “lively internal life in the caucus in terms of assessing and weighing everything we did or hadn’t done or proposed to do,” which the SL leadership characterized as verging on “cliquism.” While he had reservations about the leadership’s propensity for making exaggerated criticisms, “at the same time the political line of the organization was one I thoroughly agreed with and was quite lively and revolutionary. It was a contradiction.”

Howard’s ambivalent attitude toward SL leadership

In his 4 August 1998 interview, Howard discussed his impressions of life in the SL and particularly how uncomfortable he was with the exalted status of James Robertson, the group’s central figure. He said he had little contact with Robertson but did not like how he treated his son and was also put off by the obsequiousness displayed by Al Nelson and other top leaders in the founder/leader’s presence. He often found Robertson’s observations to be insightful and interesting, but “it was quite clear to me early on that he could do whatever he wanted—interrupt anyone whenever he wished when they were speaking.” Howard said he quickly understood that it was “absolutely” not possible to criticize Robertson, however inappropriate his behavior might be.

He did not like the way that the SL leadership tended “to put people in a bag” and frequently referred to comrades in a derogatory way; he was particularly put off by the way that Stan Gow was often described as “bumbling, inept, slow, or as Al Nelson referred to him, as ‘a blunted instrument.’ That’s not how you treat comrades.” This sort of behavior can only undermine the self-confidence of those subjected to it, Howard observed, and “If there’s anything revolutionaries need in order to cope with the struggle within the working class, it’s self-confidence.”

He said that soon after encountering the SL:

“I also perceived that people who were very political, if they weren’t careful, if they started getting too imaginative or come up with too many ideas about political questions or line, often got in a bit of trouble. So I quite consciously developed the kind of profile as someone who has an extreme interest in the trade-union movement, the working class, and a somewhat secondary interest in the larger political questions. I felt it was a safer profile.”

Howard said that:

“If you’ve been around a while you recognize this stuff. The Spartacist League always had problems with their former members of the Communist Party. They tended to recognize bureaucratic distortions before other people did.”

An additional complication for Howard arose after his daughter Aloha joined the Spartacus Youth League (SYL—the SL youth group) in 1976. She had previously been involved with some Filipino Maoists on campus^[13], but after a few “comradely father-daughter” political discussions, she began to attend study classes run by the SYL and soon opted for Trotskyism, “on her own initiative.” When asked whether, after she joined, he ever indicated any of his concern about the SL leadership to her, Howard replied that he “never indicated [his reservations on that score] to any human being.”

Mandel-Margolis purge: SL leadership’s autoimmune reaction

The political decline of James Robertson had some parallels with that of his one-time mentor Gerry Healy whose “orthodox Trotskyism” had turned into political banditry by the mid-1960s. When Healy expelled the SL from his “International Committee of the Fourth International” (IC) in 1966 for being insufficiently servile, Robertson observed that pre-emptively eliminating those who might, at some future point, possibly pose a political challenge would cripple the IC and ensure that it could never develop into the nucleus of a reborn Fourth International. The same techniques produced the same results for the Spartacist tendency.

The amazing success of ANCAN in April 1980 vastly enhanced the political authority and influence of the MC and SL and seemed to portend imminent major breakthroughs in the Bay Area. But this possibility was almost immediately aborted by the capricious and irrational hostility displayed by the SL leadership toward the group’s leading trade-union cadre. In his 2 August 1998 interview Howard recalled that the first intimation of this was Al Nelson’s casual observation at a Bay Area Spartacist meeting in 1980 that it sometimes seemed like “the trade-union fractions are more trouble than they’re worth.” He said, “my ears really went up on that one,” but at that point there was no indication of the purges and leadership-initiated “fights” that soon commenced.

In the same interview Howard commented that “the dismantling of the trade-union work began over issues that had nothing to do with the trade-union work.” It began with an intervention led by Bob at a public meeting of the reformist SWP in mid-June where SLers ignored the rules of the meeting, violated workers’ democracy and, in Howard’s words, “pretty much acted like assholes.” Howard said the SL never acted like that at other groups’ meetings and Bob had always displayed a lot more political and tactical sense. He said that Bob later told him he had wanted “to try to cover his ass by being super-aggressive” because the SL leadership had recently been criticizing him for being too “soft.” Howard suspected that campaign had probably originated with reports from his then-companion, Martha Phillips, of complaints Bob may have made to her about one or another leading cadre. Howard speculated that he may have remarked on Al Nelson’s “chronic laziness and rather brutal style of leadership.”

In any case, when Bob dutifully reported his role in the unprincipled disruption of the SWP meeting to Al, the SL honcho exploded with rage, pulled out a revolver and pointed it at the miscreant’s head. This appalling act, uncharacteristic of Nelson or any other SL leader, upset Bob who duly lodged a complaint with other leading members. Howard speculated that Bob’s mistake was to tell Martha (who tended to report whatever she heard to the leadership) about his concerns regarding “an imbalance between centralism and democracy in the organization” which meant that senior figures like Al Nelson could get away with practically anything.

Bob also told Jane Margolis, his former partner, what had happened. She was distressed enough to discuss the incident with a couple of SL comrades while they were out jogging. According to Howard, Jane’s query as to whether this behavior was Stalinist or merely Healyite (Gerry Healy had a reputation for physical attacks on internal critics) was duly reported back and, as a result, “the shit hit the fan.” A pro-forma criticism of Nelson for pointing a gun at a comrade was recorded, but this infraction, like Bob’s disruption of the SWP forum, was treated as vastly less serious than criticizing a senior SL leader. So Bob and Jane, who Howard (modestly) described as the SL’s two “highest profile” and “most competent” trade unionists, were branded as hostile, anti-party elements. Their removal from the organization was the centerpiece of the SL’s Sixth National Conference in August 1980, where the leadership led chants of “Our party, love it or leave it!” Howard was elected as a delegate to the conference because “going along with Bob’s exclusion gave the leadership the impression that I was super-loyal.” For turning in her partner, Jim Robertson personally awarded Martha a “gold chervonets” from the Soviet Union. This irregular procedure was symptomatic of Robertson’s elevation, which proceeded in lockstep with the SL’s degeneration.

Howard bitterly regretted having gone along with the campaign against Jane and Bob, as he knew it would seriously set back the SL’s trade-union work.^[14] But he also knew that it would not be possible to wage an effective fight on the issue after both Mandel and Margolis had been browbeaten into confessing to being disloyal, anti-party elements. Howard observed:

“it was my perception that you had a very short half-life in the organization if you raised a serious protest or objection to what the leadership was trying to do….To my shame I did not intervene in opposing this totally unnecessary and ridiculous attempt to destroy the two most able leaders of the organization’s trade-union work, but made the obligatory short speech that the key question [was] about the existence of organization and its role in trying to carry forward Trotskyism was to try to keep a cohesive leadership and that Bob and Jane’s criticism undermined that and it was not something we could tolerate.”

Bob’s removal was an extremely serious blow to the work of the MC, but it was also acutely embarrassing for the remaining caucus members who had to explain to those workers who supported them why such a dedicated militant, who for years had courageously stood up to both bosses and union bureaucrats, had suddenly quit and disappeared without any explanation. Howard recalled that MC militants who subsequently rose to speak at union meetings often faced heckling from Stalinists and bureaucrats asking: “What happened to Bob Mandel?” It was a question for which they had no good answer.

Jane’s abrupt exit from the Militant Action Caucus, which she had led for years, was no less devastating. MAC had a history that went back to 1969 (see: “Class Struggle in the Phone Company”) and by 1980 had established a national profile as the leading leftist opposition to the CWA’s overtly pro-imperialist leadership. Jane, particularly after she was seized by Secret Service agents and dragged off the floor of a national CWA convention, in plain view of her horrified fellow delegates, to prevent her from embarrassing US President Jimmy Carter, was by far the union’s best- known militant.^[15] Margolis, with the support of the SL leadership, successfully sued the Secret Service for their grossly anti-democratic behavior. But daring to criticize Al Nelson’s thuggish behavior to fellow SL members meant that she was no longer considered qualified to continue her trade-union work.

Margolis and Mandel both abandoned their unions out of misplaced political loyalty to the SL leadership which they believed still embodied the Trotskyist program. Howard described their loss as the “decapitation” of MAC and the MC, both of which “limped on” for a few years before disappearing. The loss of these two outstanding militants, only a couple of months after the enormous success of the ANCAN campaign, dealt a huge blow to the SL’s influence in the Bay Area workers’ movement.

Howard described the removal of Jane and Bob as a “major turning point…in the destruction of [SL] trade-union work,” and said he could see that rather than drawing back, the leading cliques’ hostility to the trade-union cadres was growing:

“There appeared to be some kind of crisis of expectations developing in the SL leadership….they were really panicking over the fact that there were people who had their own base in the working class, [the] self-confidence to carry forward political struggles and, while they were not in any shape or form an opposition, could at some point in time be rather dangerous or threatening.”

In 1981, during what was designated a “purge period” in Detroit, much of the SL’s implantation in the auto industry was liquidated. One departee, Rouge Militant Slate member Ken Granquist (Gates), wrote a damning 2 March 1981 letter which was reprinted without comment in a May 1981 internal bulletin.

Ken’s statement came in response to a “request that I provide a written explanation for my resignation [two days earlier]” and stipulated that “There is not a single item in the program and perspective of the tendency with which I disagree.” But, the comrade reported, an ongoing campaign by the leadership had forced him to choose between “either membership or sanity. As you know, I came down on the side of sanity.”

After Bob left the MC, Howard said “the life and activity of the caucus and the fraction declined measurably” in both warehouse and longshore; “the drive, the inspiration, the élan had been diminished considerably….Bob had been a very important component of the work.” There was demoralization but no overt dissent and the caucus members all “came on board in one way or another,” even if most of them “weren’t all that enthusiastic.” For a brief period he and Pete Woolston (“Woolie”) took over the leadership of the work, “and then quite soon afterwards Jack Heyman was brought out from the maritime fraction on the East Coast to assume the leadership of the Longshore-Warehouse Militant Caucus.” Jack tried hard, but “the work didn’t proceed too well because he simply didn’t know enough about the milieu, he wasn’t working in the industry. Things sort of limped along.”

Early 1981—the gathering storm

In early 1981, an incident in which Howard felt his daughter (then the youth organizer in Los Angeles) was treated unfairly by the branch leadership, accelerated his “growing conviction that the organization is severely bureaucratically deformed.” Aloha, who was more of a regime loyalist than her father at that point, reported their conversation. Howard’s suggestion that she had been treated in a “bureaucratic” fashion qualified him as a suspected “anti-party” element—a category that usually ensured a short half-life in the SL. In his 4 August 1998 interview he described how he had attempted to deflect suspicion by minimizing the significance of his comments, but said that was the first time he felt, that, one way or another, his time in the SL was limited. One reason he said he generally kept his criticisms to himself was to avoid risking his new relationship with Uschi (Jensen) who had recently transferred from the SL’s German affiliate Trotzkistische Liga Deutschlands (TLD) to live with him. Howard’s central role in the strategically important ILWU Local 10 made the SL leadership more reluctant of course to give him the chop than most other cadres.

In 1981 the administration of Ronald Reagan was deeply involved in a struggle to crush the leftist insurgency in El Salvador led by the “Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional” (FMLN). While the reformist left raised pacifist calls for “No More Vietnams,” the SL correctly counterposed the call for military victory to the FMLN. Anti-war sentiment was strong enough for the ILWU bureaucracy, aligned with Reagan’s Democratic Party opponents, to call for an arms boycott of El Salvador’s right-wing regime. In covering this significant development, WV featured commentary by “Longtime ILWU Local 10 Exec Board member Howard Keylor”:

“This boycott is long overdue. It’s the first ongoing boycott in 40 years that the International has called for more than one day or one shipment. An ongoing boycott could be effective if it’s carried through, but it’s being carried out in such a way as to leave us open to reprisals and retreats.”
Workers Vanguard (1 February 1981)

In the Bay Area several union officials launched a “Trade Union Committee on EI Salvador” which held its first public meeting in January 1981. WV’s account of the event, criticized the left-posturing bureaucrats for having “refused to turn the ILWU’s paper boycott of military goods to EI Salvador into a working-class challenge of Reagan’s imperialist threats” and for proposing nothing besides holding a rally and buying a newspaper advertisement:

“However, longshoreman Howard Keylor, a member of ILWU Local 10’s Executive Board and spokesman for the Militant Caucus in that union, raised a program of resolute working-class action against imperialism and its puppets, both here and in EI Salvador:

“’This meeting calls upon the American labor movement to hot-cargo all military goods destined for El Salvador and further calls for military victory to the left-wing insurgents in EI Salvador. We urge our class brothers in EI Salvador to politically break with the patriotic bourgeoisie and to struggle for a workers and peasants government in EI Salvador and throughout Central America, U.S.-OAS-Latin American bourgeoisies—all hands off EI Salvador!’”

The headline on the WV article, “Union Boycott of Military Goods to EI Salvador Ruled ‘Out of Order’” was not strictly accurate, as Retail Clerks Local 1100 president Walter Johnson, who chaired the event, had actually shelved Howard’s motion on the grounds that “We don’t want to be telling the peasants in whatever countries what to do,” as WV reported.

WV did not, of course, mention that the motion Howard put forward had been somewhat controversial within the MC. Al Nelson wrote a remarkably candid account of the whole affair entitled “Howard the Coward and the Popular Front,” dated 10 January 1983, which appeared in one of several SL internal documents cranked out in response to the October 1982 launch of the External Tendency of the international Spartacist tendency (ET, precursor to the BT). Nelson described how the MC/SL had initially planned to put forward “a call to boycott all military goods headed for El Salvador. The local longshore union had passed such a motion.” When he and George Foster learned that several leftist opponents would also be in attendance at the meeting they phoned in “a broader programmatic motion aimed against Popular Frontism in order to sharply differentiate ourselves.”

Several MC members subsequently “expressed differences with the motion,” so the SL leadership convened an internal fraction meeting to straighten things out:

“At the fraction meeting in February everyone involved in the intervention acknowledged there had, in fact, been a political flinch from raising our program and showed some insight into their respective programmatic impulses—except Harlan [i.e., Howard]. He had wanted two separate motions—one on the boycott, one on the pop front. He insisted that this was purely a ‘tactical’ question and spent three frustrating rounds sniping and blowing smoke about ‘tactics.’ Not once did he offer any substantive political remarks. It was classic centrist methodology whereby questions of principle are reduced to tactical considerations.”

Howard was not the only MC member who could see the advantages of making the fake-left bureaucrats squirm by putting a separate motion calling for an arms boycott—a demand that resonated with a lot of trade unionists. Attaching that motion to the far less popular Trotskyist critique of the popular-frontist program of the FMLN (and its political arm the “Frente Democrático Revolucionario” [FDR]) made it easy for Johnson and other left-talking bureaucrats to avoid having to take a stand on an arms boycott. Howard did not oppose raising “broader programmatic” issues—he simply anticipated that any denunciation of the FMLN’s popular-frontism would allow the bureaucrats to sidestep the awkward arms boycott issue with a lecture about not telling the oppressed Salvadoran masses what to do. And that is exactly what happened. Howard’s proposal to split the motion and raise each issue separately was, as he said, “purely tactical”—but it takes smart tactics to turn abstractly correct positions into effective action.

Nelson made a big issue out of Howard’s refusal to confess to a “political flinch” on popular-frontism because Howard’s insistence that dividing the motion was tactically superior, clearly implied that Nelson/Foster’s tactic was wrong. In the SL circa 1981, such lèse-majesté was an intolerable affront. Al was so used to operating in an echo chamber where the leadership was always right that, even in hindsight, he was apparently unable to see why Howard’s approach made sense. Ironically enough there was an actual “flinch” on popular-frontism a couple of months later—when the SL leadership decided it would be a smart tactic to carry the FMLN/FDR flags of the Salvadoran popular front at a 3 May demonstration in Washington, DC. We criticized this opportunist deviation in our October 1982 founding declaration and later in “FMLN Flag: Who Fooled Who?” which appeared in ET Bulletin No. 1.^[16]

Howard’s refusal to knuckle under at the February meeting rankled the SL tops enough that they brought the issue up again two months later at a subsequent fraction meeting, a few weeks before Howard was slated to represent the MC at the ILWU’s biennial convention. Once again, Nelson reported, Howard had impudently refused to admit to flinching and instead described the whole affair as a witchhunt, with the SL leadership determined to “find problems where there aren’t problems.” This suggested to Al that Howard was a “political coward” who would soon “leave the party“:

“At the 18 April fraction meeting (which is on tape) Harlan launched a far-reaching attack on the fraction and the party. The discussion on the El Salvador intervention had been a ‘witchhunt’ against him; others had ‘confessed’ and some kind of confession was expected of him; this ‘methodology’ creates a climate of fear and suspicion on the part of the ‘victim’; this results in a fear to think, a loss of IQ points; people are still ‘falling into line,’ acting like ‘handraisers’; Nelson was like a ‘shark’ at the last meeting, setting the tone. ‘You’re not going to drive me out!’ he said.”

. . .

“Harlan stated his central premise: ‘A fact of life in organizations that are small, isolated, they’re not leading masses of workers, with periods when repression against them is mounting, there tends to be…a tendency to reach, find problems where there aren’t problems. That’s what took place here.’ After these remarks by Harlan it was no longer a question in my mind if he would leave the party, but only when. These themes have since become the core of the ET documents.

“Taken together these are the rationalizations of a political coward….Lacking the courage to raise his differences openly, he accused the party of a ‘witchhunt’ when we perceived programmatic departures and required him to defend them. Hence his vicious contempt and hatred of the Leninist party, its discipline, leadership and membership, who to him are ‘bureaucrats’ and ‘handraisers.’”

The SL leadership’s unwillingness to tolerate any difference, even on tactics, contributed to Howard’s growing conviction that there was something profoundly wrong with the regime, despite the pristine Trotskyism of the group’s formal political program. The fact that, at the January public meeting, he had loyally put forward the motion despite his doubts about its tactical efficacy, was not enough—he had to confess to “flinching.” Nelson’s projection about Howard being on his way out was accurate enough, because by that point in the SL it was not sufficient to adhere to the majority position—dissent, even on a tactical issue, was treated as an insufferable assault on the prestige of the leadership. Al was quite right that Howard’s objection to the bullying that increasingly displaced rational discussion was at the “core” of the ET’s insistence that “the regime question is a political question.”

In his 1998 interview Howard recalled “it took them about seven months [after the April 1981 fraction meeting] to finally get rid of me, because they couldn’t put their finger on anything I had done wrong.” He said that the leadership let it be known that he should be regarded “as a dangerous anti-party person who could not be depended upon.” Yet despite this, he “didn’t feel isolated in the caucus” because only Woolie and Jack (who as fraction heads were subject to the greatest pressure) had “entered reluctantly into the ‘gangbanging’.”

Howard said that while all this was underway:

“I perceived that there was an opportunity in longshore to perhaps make a leap. The employers were on an unusually aggressive stance toward the workers. The workers showed an appetite to fight back….there was a good chance of my being elected business agent of the union [an officer elected directly by the ranks to handle on-site issues who is traditionally more answerable to the membership than union officialdom] and…at least for a good period of time exercise leadership that the majority of longshoremen would support—that we could perhaps make a leap that would enable us to raise our profile and recruit more members to the caucus or even the organization.”

He could hardly have been surprised when his proposal was rejected with the suggestion that it revealed adventurist/workerist and/or bureaucratic appetites.

Blocking with Harry Bridges at 1981 Longshore Caucus

Howard’s growing problems with the SL leadership contrasted sharply with his rising status among the Local 10 longshoremen who elected him as a delegate to both the 1981 ILWU Longshore Caucus and the subsequent International Convention. WV (27 February 1981) correctly described these victories as reflecting “a desire on the part of the membership to elect militants who will fight for the union”:

“Militant Caucus candidate Howard Keylor won election on February 13 to the ILWU’s Longshore Caucus, which sets union policy on upcoming contract bargaining for West Coast dock workers. Campaigning for a solid strike against the bosses’ ‘takeaway’ offensive, Keylor was also elected delegate to the bi-annual International Convention of the ILWU to be held in April in Hawaii. Keylor received 254 votes, placing ninth out of ten delegates elected. Fellow Militant Caucus member Stan Gow, who was elected two years ago as convention delegate, received 209 votes placing fourteenth.

“Running on the same Militant Caucus class-struggle program that recently got him and Gow re-elected to the lLWU Local 10 Executive Board for the seventh year in a row, Keylor beat out the local’s newly elected vice president, two former presidents, two dispatchers and one business agent. Significantly, both Gow and Keylor showed stronger backing than longtime do-nothing Peoples’ World supporter Leo Robinson. Thus the current round of elections indicates a desire on the part of the membership to elect militants who will fight for the union in this important contract year.”
Workers Vanguard (27 February 1981)

At the Longshore Caucus, which met in April to set demands for contract negotiations, Howard put forward two fairly radical motions, both of which were discussed seriously and although defeated, received substantial support. In the course of an internal discussion in 1996 on the applicability of demands in the Transitional Program, Howard observed:

“[Spartacist] trade-union fractions found that the demand for a sliding scale of hours provided an excellent tool for raising workers’ consciousness over the sanctity of the bosses’ profits. While it is true that only in longshore did we reach the point of moving over to agitation and win a sizable number of workers to begin to think in these terms, the demand for some form of the sliding scale of hours often proved to be one the most useful tools in demystifying the iron laws of capitalism.

“During the [April 1981] Caucus I put forward a motion for a bottom-line contract demand for an immediate 6-hour work shift for 8 hours pay. To my astonishment the motion was seriously debated and lost by only one vote!“

In his 1998 interview Howard recalled:

“The other motion I got on deck that was seriously debated was the one that went completely against the no-strike clause of the contract and arbitration and called for abolishing these sections of the contract and settling disputes with job action, going back to putting the power in the hands of the rank and file….To my shock and surprise, Harry Bridges, who was out of office and retired, seconded the motion and voted for it.”

As this was the first time the MC had managed “to get serious discussion on pretty advanced motions” at a national event, Howard interpreted the unprecedented level of support for radical measures as indicative of a potential opening for the MC to make significant advances.

In 1979, when Stan was elected as a delegate and Howard as an alternate to the ILWU convention, WV ran an article on their intervention. Longshore Militant No. 46 (6 June 1979) reported how the bureaucrats had refused to permit MC motions to be tabled at either the Longshore Caucus or the Convention. After the 1981 Longshore Caucus, Howard drafted an outline for a report on the successful intervention, only to be told by Al Nelson that “there isn’t going to be a Longshore Militant on this—we’re not an information bureau.” Howard said “That told me quite clearly that this was an attempt to undermine my credibility in the longshore local, because it was just unheard of.” He said he had difficulty explaining to the workers who had voted for him why there would be no report this time, aside from the seven minutes he was given for an oral presentation at the monthly membership meeting. Howard saw Nelson’s edict as “a pretty clear indication that I was on my way out [of the MC/SL].” This impression was confirmed by the fact that everything he did was intensively scrutinized and frequently subjected to petty criticisms—as an example, he recalled being accused of a “workerist deviation” for casually suggesting going to a plebeian Mexican restaurant after a meeting, rather than the more upscale one favored by leading comrades.

Debating El Salvador & Solidarnosc at ILWU convention

A few weeks after the Longshore Caucus, Howard went to Hawaii for the international convention. Because the union provided “twice as much money as I needed” he “used part of that to bring Jensen with me.” Al and Woolie also attended as SL/MC monitors and sat in the observers’ section throughout the proceedings. Howard again managed to get a couple of politically significant motions on the floor, including one critical of the ILWU leadership’s endorsement of the counterrevolutionary Solidarność movement in Poland. Once again, he and Harry Bridges were in agreement, as Workers Vanguard reported:

“[ILWU president] Jimmy Herman joined the bosses’ anti-Soviet chorus with a resolution against USSR intervention in Poland. Parroting the Carter/Reagan war program of a ‘Russian threat,’ the officers’ resolution ‘calls on the Soviet Union to refrain from intervention, an act which could only be interpreted as union busting, pure and simple.’ It was Herman’s way of sending an oath of loyalty to the butchers in Washington. The fact that the only place a ‘Soviet intervention in Poland’ exists is in State Department handouts doesn’t bother these social-democratic Cold Warriors.

“The now-retired founder of the ILWU, Harry Bridges, spoke out against the resolution, noting the very real possibility of capitalist counterrevolution in Poland, and urged postponing action until the union could send a team to Poland to ‘find out what is going on.’ Delegate Howard Keylor from ILWU Local 10 and a member of the Militant Caucus (MC) submitted a minority resolution which correctly noted that ‘the Reagan administration is seeking to exploit this situation [in Poland] in the most grossly provocative manner’ and that ‘the only reason therefore, for the officers to come forward at this time with their statement on Poland is to try to look good to the U.S. government, thereby falling in line with Reagan’s and Haig’s Cold War drive.’ Keylor’s resolution called on the union to take ‘no position on the internal situation in Poland at this time.’”

In his 1998 interview Howard recalled his bloc with Bridges over Solidarność but did not remember WV’s coverage of it. Nor did he recollect that WV reprinted the motion he managed to get on the floor regarding El Salvador:

“During the 24th biennial convention of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), held in Honolulu April 27-May 2, Howard Keylor of the Militant Caucus (a class-struggle opposition in the union) presented the following minority report on El Salvador.

. . .

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That the ILWU:

1. Call for military victory to the left-wing insurgents in El Salvador;

2. Call upon the American labor movement to hot-cargo all military goods destined for EI Salvador and other Central American dictators;

3. Urge our class brothers and sisters in El Salvador to politically break with the capitalists and to struggle for a workers’ and peasants’ government;

4. Demand an end to all U.S. military and economic aid to the Salvadoran junta.

5. Demands U.S./OAS/Latin American capitalists—all hands off El Salvador and Nicaragua!

While pleased that he was able to get Poland and El Salvador on the agenda for discussion, Howard said he did not enjoy having “Al Nelson looking over my shoulder” waiting to pounce on any minor mistake he might make. Al found nothing to complain about, but Howard said that their somewhat strained relationship made the lengthy debriefings by his SL minders after each session “very tense and very exhausting.”

In his 1983 document, Al complained that Howard “essentially ran an independent operation for over a week obstructing and avoiding fraction and party guidance and scrutiny,” noting that “on at least four evenings he had socialized (dinners, tours) with presidents of other union locals. Time for union bureaucrats but no time for the party.” Obviously, over his 28 years in the ILWU Howard had developed connections with a wide variety of militants in the labor movement, including many outside the Bay Area. Howard’s network of contacts was useful both in building the 1980 ANCAN mobilization and several subsequent struggles that took place after he was pushed out of the MC.

The last straw: ‘Fly, Fly, Fly’ during PATCO strike

On 3 August 1981 12,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike; US president Ronald Reagan, in a move that stunned the entire labor movement, responded by firing all of them. “Nothing like this has happened in the American labor movement within living memory,”

observed, noting that Reagan had “declared war against the U.S. workers movement.” The article contrasted the response of Canadian air traffic controllers, who “defied their own government and refused to handle flights to and from the U.S.,” with the cowardice of the American trade-union bureaucrats who “turned to the empty moral gesture [of] asking consumers not to fly” rather than undertaking effective solidarity action.

Longshore-Warehouse Militant No 15, 17 August 1981, echoing WV, denounced the cowardly labor bureaucracy’s focus on consumer boycotts:

“This strike could have been won already, but the labor bureaucrats haven’t done anything but issue paper resolutions and call for impotent consumer boycotts….

. . .

“On Friday, August 21 there should be mass labor rallies and a solid picket line at the Bay Area airports. At the August 13 Local 10 Executive Board, Militant Caucus members Howard Keylor and Stan Gow called for Local 10 to shut down the port and join the PATCO picket lines to close the airports down on that Friday. Local 6 and the rest of labor in the Bay Area should join in this action.”

Absent from both the LWM and WV commentaries was any mention of the secret, internal decision of the SL leadership to ignore the boycott and “fly, fly, fly” during the strike—a position counterposed to the impulse of every trade-union militant who refused to fly while PATCO was picketing the airports. The SL leadership’s scandalous secret position was hinted at in “Bureaucrats and Boycotts,” an article in the 11 September 1981 issue of WV, which asserted: “Any union president worth his salt would have taken the first plane home to pull his union out the day the strike began.” It is a safe bet that no union president who set foot in an airport while the PATCO picket lines were up, would have done so in order to organize militant solidarity action. WV reported that Harry Bridges, infamous for crossing the picket line of ILWU clerical staff in 1975, “recently declined an invitation to spend his 80th birthday in the Soviet Union out of supposed respect for the picket lines of the striking air traffic controllers.”

In his 2018 remarks to the celebration of Howard’s 93^rd birthday at Local 10 headquarters in 2018, Henry Johnson sketched his role in organizing support for PATCO when the strike commenced:

“The SL policy had been to agitate for mass solidarity union to shut down the San Francisco airport. The idea was that if this happened it might be a springboard for launching a general strike. Howard, a member of the Local 10 Exec Board, was ideally situated to head up this work. He arranged for PATCO reps to speak to Local 10 and other unions and was invited by PATCO to sit in on their strike strategy meetings. And then the SL leadership suddenly announced an internal policy, not to be publicly advertised, of ignoring the union boycott of the struck airports: ‘Fly, Fly, Fly’ was their new slogan.”

Howard opposed the “fly, fly, fly” policy but found little support in the SL membership. At the 15 August East Bay SL meeting, where he debated the issue with George Foster, he put forward a motion noting:

“This position makes it easier for the cowardly trade-union bureaucracy to demagogically appeal to trade unionists’ sense of workers solidarity in an attempt to discredit our organization and our trade-union supporters.”
—SL Internal Bulletin No. 39, August 1983

Howard’s motion failed 25-1. After a subsequent debate with Foster two weeks later at a special Bay Area District Conference on 30 August, a motion was passed (59 to 3 with one abstention) which characterized Howard as “unfit for membership in the organized Marxist movement.” The three who opposed the resolution (Howard, Uschi and Lisa S.) were all signatories to the ET Declaration released a little over a year later. Stan Gow’s abstention was explained in the following somewhat enigmatic “paraphrase” appended to the minutes of the meeting: “Stan did not want to see Howard pushed out of the party through his (Stan’s) vote, which might have had more significance to Howard than others’ votes.”

In the resignation he submitted a week later^[17], on 5 September 1981, Howard wrote:

“If I were to attempt to remain within the SL the tensions deriving from my distrust of and contempt for the central leadership and the expected ongoing campaign to destroy and discredit me politically will inevitably result in a confused, unclear confrontation over secondary questions.

“I would have preferred to remain in the organization and attempt to open a fight over the real question of the defensive regime, the increasingly cult-like internal life of the organization, and the consequences of these trends in the work of the SL.

“For about a year [i.e., since the Mandel/Margolis purge] I have been moving toward the conclusion that distortions in the leadership of sections, locals and fractions have developed and matured—at least in part from an internal life characterized by a defensive, hierarchical regime combined with a personalistic, Jesuitical method of internal argument and discussion.”

1981: ‘purge period’ result: ‘need to reindustrialize’

The enormous damage inflicted on the most important sectors of the SL’s trade-union implantation—in the UAW, CWA and, most importantly, the ILWU—was demoralizing to the core cadre. A 24 November 1981 document by the SL Political Bureau (PB) implicitly acknowledged the devastation of the group’s few toeholds in the working class and projected a “need to reindustrialize.” But this was complicated by an acute lack of personnel to carry out such a turn—a problem that resulted in part from the “clone purge” which had gutted the youth group a few years earlier and reduced new recruits to a trickle. So the PB projected several approaches to gaining influence in key sectors of the proletariat without actually having cadres on the ground. One idea was to recruit via “WV readers clubs”:

“In areas such as Detroit and the Bay Area where we have substantial numbers of contacts in the plants and/or a significant subscription base among industrial workers, WV readers’ clubs can serve as a useful tool for education and recruitment.”

Another, not particularly original, proposal was to try to recruit workers directly from the shop floor:

“In developing a program of reindustrialization, our ability to recruit should not be overlooked. Implantation efforts will be central, but September 19 [a major union mobilization in Washington, D.C.] and experiences in Detroit and elsewhere show our industrial base may and must be broadened and deepened through successful recruitment.”

As many American leftists had previously discovered, this is far more easily said than done.

A less ambitious suggestion was to revive the moribund Trade Union Commission which had declined after the departure of Chris Knox who had overseen the SL’s successful trade-union turn during the mid-1970s:^[18]

“A plan of reindustrialization and expansion of trade-union work requires the recreation of an effective Trade Union Commission in the center. Without central supervision, experience shows that costly errors are made and lessons often painfully learned in one fraction or region are lost to other fractions or locals, resulting in a repetition of the error. In particular, our trade-union experience of the West Coast has not been available to other fractions in the party to the extent that it should.”

With or without “central supervision,” it was hard to make progress when the key trade unionists who had spearheaded ANCAN and other successful actions on the West Coast had been trashed. The damage inflicted on the MC and MAC rendered the surviving “active workers” too politically disoriented to impart many lessons to anyone. If Robertson and his coterie imagined that the trade-union cadres they had so capriciously tossed aside could be easily replaced, they soon learned otherwise.

The PB ascribed the attrition in the SL’s former trade-union stronghold to the personal inadequacies of the individuals involved:

“The pressures of trade-union politics are strong on revolutionaries operating in this milieu and it is no accident that a number of West Coast trade unionists, incompletely assimilated to Bolshevik politics, succumbed to milieu pressures and have broken from our organization. In the majority of these cases we have been able to recoup our losses, but these defections from our program have set back our work.”

The self-inflicted “losses” of Mandel, Keylor, Margolis and various others did not in fact result from “defections from our program,” they were “own goals” scored by the leadership. None of these losses were ever “recouped.” If the SL’s trade-union work had been seriously “set back” by 1981, over the next few years it was to be almost entirely liquidated.

The highly politicized cadres who had become successful SL trade unionists had, for the most part, years of experience in the New Left and/or rival ostensibly revolutionary organizations. By the early 1980s, with the far left in retreat, there were few opportunities to recruit cadres of the caliber of Howard, Jane or Bob. They represented precious political capital which could not be easily replicated: it was their commitment, connections and experience, wedded to the “orthodox Trotskyist” program long championed by Robertson, that briefly elevated the Spartacist League into a dynamic factor in the Bay Area left and workers’ movement before the leading clique’s mania for total control^[19] derailed it.

Howard rejects political suicide—exits Militant Caucus

Howard remained in the Militant Caucus for a few months after leaving the SL until the leadership “demanded that I cooperate in my own political suicide in the union” by not seeking reelection to the Executive Board of ILWU Local 10. Unlike Bob and Jane, Howard had no intention of acquiescing to the SL leadership’s demand that he withdraw from union activity. Unlike most of the cadres purged during this period, Howard clearly understood the signs of the SL leadership’s qualitative degeneration. He never forgot what he had learned from the SL about how to do revolutionary trade-union work and knew that it would be criminal to throw away all the gains the MC had made during the preceding half-dozen years. At the age of 56 he was prepared to begin all over again and push the work initiated by the MC forward despite the terminal political decay of its leadership.

A few weeks after leaving the MC Howard began publishing Militant Longshoreman. Uschi’s background in newspaper composition ensured that it was comparable in quality to Longshore Militant. The first issue, dated 31 December 1981, endorsed the MC program and advised Local 10 members to “Re-elect KEYLOR and GOW to Executive Board.” While Howard was guarded about the reasons for his break with his former associates the MC was less inhibited. The 6 January 1982 Longshore-Warehouse Militant, headlined “No Vote For Keylor,” characterized Militant Longshoreman as “a deliberate and outrageous fraud,” “a counterfeit,” and a “small-minded and cynical stunt.” It asserted that, “Keylor quit the Militant Caucus because he no longer supports the Caucus’ program….Keylor has no intention of building a new leadership” and described him as being in “rapid motion back to the opportunistic politics he came from.” The next issue of L-WM, which did not appear until a year later (14 January 1983), was also headlined: “No Vote For Keylor.” Citing the MC’s earlier estimate that Howard “is now simply another individual running for office who puts out slick election leaflets” and asserting that “talk is cheap but what you do counts,” it included a self-critical repudiation of several recent actions by Stan. He confessed to having marched in an October 1982 “Vote Labor for Jobs and Justice” demonstration of 50,000 organized by the union bureaucrats to hustle votes for the Democratic Party, and asserted, accurately enough: “Howard Keylor marched that day too but doesn’t think it was a mistake.” Stan also admitted: “My motion for Local 10 to support the December 11 [1982] Oroville ‘anti-Nazi’ march was wrong, because I learned later that the real organizer was a pro-Democratic Party outfit….”^[20] Howard responded the next month in Militant Longshoreman No. 5, 4 February 1983,  with a critique of the MC’s “self-isolating sectarianism”:

“the Militant Caucus’ developing position that anyone is a hopeless case who is at this time pro-Democratic or supports the strategy of pressuring the Democratic Party. That makes it OK to boycott their activities (the anti-Nazi march in Oroville) or even to urge workers not to demonstrate against Reaganism under the present pro-Democratic Party union leadership….In effect Stan and the Militant Caucus have said: accept our leadership or we’ll have nothing to do with you. This policy is out and out self-isolating sectarianism.

“Until recently the Militant Caucus and their co-thinkers would have been in Oroville (as I and other longshoremen were) carrying signs aimed at winning the anti-Nazi demonstrators over to the winning strategy of labor/black/latino defense guards instead of essentially abandoning Oroville’s black community…. Until recently the Caucus would have been in the labor parade with signs calling for a break with the Democrats and for a workers party as they did in last year’s SF Solidarity Day with PATCO labor parade. This year Stan marched with the 50-70,000 other unionists who deeply resent Reagan’s policies which breed unemployment, cuts in medical care, cuts in care for the aged, etc., but he marched with no sign distinguishing him from the pro-Democratic ‘Vote Labor for Jobs and Justice’; and when I was subjected to an anti-communist exclusion for carrying a sign calling for a workers party and specifically for a vote for the Spartacist candidates for SF Supervisor, Stan kept right on marching without a word of protest.”

ET critique of SL trade-union liquidationism

The ET’s October 1982 founding declaration charged the SL leadership with winding the film of trade-union implantation in reverse:

“The industrialization program of the early 1970’s which was a crucial part of the ‘transformation,’ represented a major step forward in establishing the SL/US as a stable propaganda group. Over the years the organization invested a great deal of time and effort building the fractions and caucuses which, in a limited but important way, provided cadres with experience in leading political and trade-union struggles in the working class.

“In several important industrial unions the caucuses were able to develop authoritative spokesmen and were seen by both the ranks and the bureaucrats as increasingly viable embryonic alternative class struggle leaderships. The successful trade-union work also had enormous propaganda value for the entire tendency….

“In recent years, however, the central leadership of the SL/US has been running the film of fraction building in reverse. This was foreshadowed by their repeatedly expressed fears that the independent sense of social reality gained by cadre with a modest but real base in the workforce could someday provide a focus for opposition within the organization. Under the banner of ‘trade-union consciousness is bourgeois consciousness’ and with many references to the spectre of Bert Cochran, Foster, Nelson and Robertson proceeded to attempt to demoralize, politically destroy and eventually drive out most of the SL’s leading working-class spokesmen (particularly on the West Coast) and many of the trade-union cadre.”

The declaration recounted how, months prior to the PATCO strike, Howard and Al had clashed over prospects for the American trade-union movement:

“Coincident with the bureaucratic destruction of the fractions a political shift in the assessment of the trade unions began to emerge within the leadership. In the spring of 1981 Al Nelson put a motion forward at an East bay local meeting which characterized the unions as so completely in the grip of the cowardly bureaucracy as to render them impotent and ineffectual vehicles for working class resistance to the mounting capitalist attacks. Nelson’s motion made no differentiation between the trade-union bureaucracy and the ranks. When comrade Harlan commented that members should not take the motion to mean that the SL regards the unions simply as instruments of the bourgeois state whose only role is to stifle workers struggles (as does the Maoist RCP [Revolutionary Communist Party]) Nelson angrily countered that Harlan’s comments derived from his anti-leadership impulses.”

The ET Declaration also noted the diminishing attention paid by the MC to workplace issues like speed-up and employer abuse on the grounds that:

“what is important is El Salvador, Reagan’s anti-Soviet war drive and fascism. Reflecting this kind of thinking, caucus leaflets are tending to downplay the perspective of building alternative class-struggle leaderships in the unions. In place of the united front action campaigns of the past the caucuses now tend to substitute sterile witnessing or shrill calls to action under SL leadership.

”….The long-awaited and inevitable upsurge of American workers will come and when it does it will be expressed through the only working class organizations in the US, the trade unions. Without an early political and organizational corrective, the SL/US will be in no position to take advantage of it, thereby losing the opportunity to build the core of a Bolshevik workers party.”

The SL leadership, seeking to somehow fill the gaping hole left by the destruction of union work, and knowing that fantasies about recruiting workers directly from the factory floor or via WV readers clubs were non-starters, projected community-based “Labor Black Struggle Leagues” (LBSLs), run by the SL, as a possible short cut to mass influence. This policy was advanced at the same time that the SL had its supporters in the CWA, their most significant remaining union implantation, resign their positions as stewards, thereby turning their back on a working-class base won in the course of a decade of difficult political work. As soon as we learned of this, Bob Mandel drafted a document for the ET entitled “Stop the Liquidation of the Trade Union Work” calling on the SL’s remaining trade unionists to rise up:

“We urge those who still hold executive board and other official union positions, together with other SL cadre, to declare a faction. Refuse to resign your positions and demand that no more resignations be carried out until the upcoming National conference. This conference has the authority to halt the destruction of the trade union centered caucuses and international work. SL cadre must insist on their right to form a faction and their right to retain membership. If you are loyal to the traditional Spartacist program, it is time to stand up and fight, knowing full well that the SL leadership will immediately move to purge you.”

The document charged the SL leadership with liquidating the union work out of fear that class-struggle militants with a proletarian base could provide a potential rallying point for internal opposition:

“It is no accident that the LBSLs are being announced at the very moment that the caucuses, as we know them, are being liquidated. The LBSLs are designated to replace the union centered caucuses as the SLUS’ main transitional organizations. The tactic of the LBSL is fine; it is only wrong if it is counterposed to and built on the corpses of the union centered caucuses.

. . .

“Without the anchor of the trade unions and the nucleus of their leadership in the caucuses, the effect of anti-Nazi/KKK mobilizations, however powerful, will tend to be dissipated back into the amorphous community. This is an ABC lesson about work among the unemployed and the unorganized drawn by Cannon from the CLA’s [organization of American Trotskyists] experiences in the 1930s.

. . .

“At a time when the fascists are on the offensive, trying to polarize the US working class along race lines, it is critically important that revolutionaries remain in the integrated industrial unions and seek, by building alternative leaderships around the transitional program, to turn the unions into ‘instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat’ as Trotsky advocated in ‘Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay’.”

The document charged that by liquidating its union work the SL was forgoing the “opportunity to build the core of a Bolshevik workers party” in periods of sharp class struggle. The practical implications of this turn became very clear as Howard, following his ejection from the MC, played a central role in organizing three major struggles (in 1983, ‘84 and ‘87) while the MC’s activities on the waterfront were limited to a few ineffectual stunts. The most prominent of these was in March 1983, when Stan appeared as the only longshoreman on a “picket line” set up in the Lafayette, a ship bound for El Salvador (see “Militant Caucus’ Third Period Tactics,” ETB No. 2.)

1983: Mass pickets at Richmond—a significant defensive victory

In its 24 November 1981 memo the SL political bureau pointed to the necessity of resisting the Reagan administration’s vicious anti-working-class offensive:

“A lot depends on cracking the no-struggle ‘strategy’ of the union tops and winning even some defensive victories—something our small propaganda league can’t do much to bring about.”

This pessimistic estimation was falsified later in June 1983 when ILWU militants at Levin Terminals won an important, if limited, “defensive victory” in Richmond, a small city on the northeast shore of San Francisco Bay. This struggle originated when Howard’s motion for mass pickets to stop Levin’s scab operation was passed by Local 10’s Executive Board after months of agitation among the rank and file. Four months earlier Militant Longshoreman (No. 5, 4 February 1983) advised:

“Construction at Yard 3 is rapidly nearing completion as a coal exporting facility and Levin management is up front that the ILWU has no place in their plans.”

. . .

“How can we protect our jurisdiction? Mass pickets to stop scabbing and union solidarity to avoid isolation are the only weapons that will work. A handful of token ‘informational pickets’ helplessly standing in the street while scabs drive past splashing mud on them won’t protect our jobs. But (we are told) if we do try to stop scabs the courts will issue injunctions limiting us to a few token pickets and the cops will beat on us while they escort scabs past us. For the last 35 years the Taft-Hartley law has given judges the right to issue ‘restraining orders’ against mass picketing and ‘secondary boycott’ picket lines. Thousands of strikes have been lost when workers obeyed strike-breaking, union busting court orders.

“This doesn’t have to go on. Even the government has been known to back off when faced with massive union action. Several years ago the State of Washington tried to break the Inland Boatmen’s Union manning Puget Sound Ferries. A state-wide strike of all ILWU locals supported by the IBT [Teamsters union] made the State back down and saved the IBU. We must organize now for just such port-wide strike action the minute another non-ILWU operation (barge or ship) begins in Richmond. The full power of our union to shut down the port and put thousands of men on the picket line will be. necessary to make clear to the murderous Richmond cops that union busting and scabherding will not be permitted.”

Howard wrote an (unsigned) account of the defensive victory at Richmond for the first issue of the ET Bulletin which we reprinted in the special edition of Bolshevik^[21] produced for the 25 January 2025 memorial meeting honoring him. At that event Tom Riley pointed to some of the lessons of that struggle:

“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.”

Howard regarded the Richmond strike as a significant event^[22] which, as he noted in his 1998 interview, was essentially an extension of the MC’s work—an aspect he thought he had perhaps underplayed in his article for the ET Bulletin:

“But perhaps what doesn’t come clear in that bulletin: in a peculiar way this strike was a strike in which several different elements that we had been propagandizing, and agitating, or even organizing around, for years, came together in one strike. The interesting thing is how longshoremen had assimilated these ideas to the level at which they would carry out these actions. And this was a strike that involved mass picketing, defiance of injunctions, violations of the contract, shutting down the port to defend the union and involving other maritime workers in the strike to make it more effective. While not going into detail, it was a partial victory….

“But that was the astonishing thing to me, the way that workers during these events would come up to me and reiterate or repeat how it was necessary to defy…the injunction. It was nice to see them tearing up the injunctions and throwing them on the ground. And the mass mobilization of cops never even dared to come very close to us—no attempt to break the strike. And this was in an area where cops had an unusually brutal history against the black population and against picket lines….

“The entire port was shut down. It was quite nice. The other interesting thing is that the Spartacist League totally misinterpreted or couldn’t understand what was going on, and during the one eventful day when the major struggle was going on, the Spartacist League who had been at previous smaller picket lines, selling and agitating, didn’t appear and even Stan [Gow] didn’t show up. Because as they later wrote, the whole thing was petering out, nothing was going to happen, and the employers were going to win and the bureaucrats, with the help of Keylor, were going to defeat the struggle. They totally missed the boat on that one.

“But again it convinced me that my decision to try to carry the work forward, to take advantage of the base we had and of the level of consciousness…or understanding of the workers in longshore on the primary questions…had shown some advance and was real, and it was necessary to try, with the greatest difficulty, to carry forward this work. Even the tactical questions; I played a major role in making the motions at the right time in the Executive Board to escalate the action to where workers demanded of their officials that they shut down the port. That’s detailed, I think, in the ET Bulletin.”

Howard’s article forcefully rebutted Workers Vanguard’s pessimistic assessment:

“The three-day Bay Area longshore strike verified in a dramatic way what the Militant Caucus had been patiently arguing for years — that militant mass picketing and maritime workers solidarity would successfully back off the courts and defeat the employers. Workers Vanguard dismisses the fact that the ILWU got away with ignoring the court injunction, openly violated their contractual ‘no-strike’ clause, and won the active support of a key maritime union. Workers Vanguard virtually disappears these important achievements with its false conclusion that the strike was lost.”

. . .

“Longshoremen’s participation in the first mass waterfront picketing in decades and their militant determination to fight, which was enough to force the bureaucrats to ignore court injunctions and defy contract arbitrators, should be seen as a verification of years of Militant Caucus propaganda work within the union. This work has been continued by ET supporter Howard Keylor since he left the Caucus in November 1981 over his refusal to abandon his position on the Executive Board of the union and leave the field free for the reformists and bureaucrats. Keylor has never lost confidence that workers would fight and could win when they were shown the way forward.”

The SL’s absurdly negative assessment of the successful resistance in Richmond was subsequently replicated every time Howard (or, subsequently, Jack Heyman) initiated any action. The SL lodged baseless, or grossly exaggerated, condemnations against the actions initiated by its former supporters, which the MC generally refused to endorse or participate in. After a few years during which it undertook no significant actions on the waterfront it lapsed into complete inactivity.

One reason that Howard wielded more influence than Stan in Local 10 after he was pushed out of the MC was that he retained the support of Fred Addison^[23], an influential union militant who had been a member of both the Communist Party and the Black Panthers. In his 2 August 1998 interview Howard said the only time he deliberately ignored an instruction from Al Nelson was when he was told to push Fred away because, although Addison agreed with the MC’s program, he was reluctant to join. Al did not want supporters who insisted on remaining formally independent, however valuable they might be. Howard said that Stan carried out the directive, but he did not.

In “Thoughts on Tasks and Perspectives,” a contribution he wrote in the lead-up to the ET’s September 1984 conference, Bob Mandel observed: “Right now we are public in precisely one place: T-2 [longshore]. In T-2 we deal [with the SL] from relative equality….” Under the subhead “T-2 Caucus,” he observed:

“If the work is to be anything but exemplary (Harlan’s not distant retirement) we must recruit. With [Bob returning from Cleveland to be] in the Bay Area, we’ll be able to keep somewhat a better balance in the overall ET work so the argument that a caucus would distort our BA perspectives is somewhat diminished. The fact is that the T2 work distorts our work there anyway, so let’s make the best of it. The personnel for the core of a caucus are there: Harlan, Fred [Addison}, [Henry Johnson]. ([Bob] can help given his roots in the industry and relationship with these individuals.)

“Fred is pushing Harlan to run for President [of Local 10] and both of them apparently think Harlan could win. Propose the following deal to Fred: you run for Exec Board on a slate with Harlan who runs for Exec Board, Caucus and Convention and Vice President. The latter is a modestly authoritative post which I believe isn’t involved in the day-to-day running of the local. We certainly are not ready for Harlan to run for President (despite my first having raised it)—he’d be eaten alive. The point, electorally and otherwise, is to build an organization.”

Fred turned out to be no more inclined to sign up with an ET-backed caucus than he had been with the MC but continued to collaborate closely with Howard in Local 10. An article they co-signed in December 1983 Militant Longshoreman No.6 (1983) calling for a San Francisco general strike in defense of striking Greyhound bus drivers referred to the successful use of hard, class-struggle tactics in Richmond earlier that year:

“The ILWU’s recent strike in Richmond shows there’s another way—a way to win. When Levin Terminals tried to bring in outside labor to steal our jobs; when the [ILWU] international officers ruled our strike illegal and our business-unionist local officers vacillated—we massed more than 1,200 strong in Richmond. Our union backed off the notorious Richmond killer cops. In solidarity, we shut down all Bay Area ports despite our contract which said we couldn’t. Our action beat the injunction, stopped the union-busting, won a union contract, and stopped Levin’s bid to take the auto work, container and break bulk cargo from longshoremen.

“That’s what’s needed with Greyhound. If [Democratic mayor Diane] Feinstein’s cops attack the pickets, the whole city should be shut down. Nationally, a San Francisco general strike could spark a needed solidarity strike of all the transport unions to support the ATU [Amalgamated Transit Union].”

1984 anti-apartheid Longshore Boycott

The November-December 1984 longshore boycott of South African apartheid cargo was initiated, like the Richmond action a year and a half earlier, by a motion Howard proposed to the Executive Board of Local 10. The 11-day boycott, the most celebrated event in the ILWU’s recent history, was documented in several items published in the May 1985 issue of the ET Bulletin (No. 4). These included Howard’s account in Militant Longshoreman and a lengthy 27 January 1985 letter to Workers Vanguard co-signed by Mike Adams, Jack Heyman and Chris Knox, three former SL cadres who worked closely with the ET throughout the boycott. The letter, which we entitled “Third Period Robertsonism at Pier 80,” described how instead of “united fronting” the action, the SL attempted to wreck it on 24 November 1984:

“a handful of SL-backed trade unionists set up their own ‘picket line’ [with only Stan and one other longshoreman] making no attempt to change the union tactic beforehand. All who ‘crossed’ this ‘picket’—including the longshore militants going onto the dock to carry out the boycott—were denounced as ‘scabs’ by SL supporters!”^[24]

The SL provocation fizzled out but a few days into the boycott the militants faced the more daunting prospect of a court injunction. Howard addressed this issue in Militant Longshoreman No. 11, (27 November 1984), by referring to Local 10’s successful defiance of a court injunction during the Richmond strike:

“If the courts issue an injunction we should simply ignore it. An injunction is just a piece of paper. Our brothers and sisters in South Africa almost daily stand up to army and police bullets, beatings, arrests, mass firings, and deportation. The capitalist courts are our enemies as they’ve proven again and again when we are dragged into court as in the Gibson and Golden cases. In the case of South African cargo, with the Reagan regime closely and openly allied to the apartheid butchers, a judge can easily be found to order us to work the cargo.

“But we proved during the Levin strike in Richmond that injunctions can be beaten. When the employer hired non-ILWU labor to steal our jobs, we responded to the injunction and to the presence of Richmond’s racist killer cops with mass pickets and by shutting down every ship in the Bay Area. The employer backed down and the injunction was quickly forgotten.”

On the eighth day of the action, speaking at the ET’s first public event, Howard described the political framework for the boycott as “a series of overlapping united fronts”:

“The very effort to get the boycott approved by the overwhelming, almost unanimous, membership of the longshoremen in this port was a united-front movement from the beginning where those of us who spoke on it and pushed it to some degree compromised on what we thought perhaps were better tactics or different tactics in order to get something that we knew that we had a chance of implementing. And the implementation of it, the rank-and-file committee, is a united front…That united front extends over to the officers [of Local 10] who we’re able to hold from gross betrayal…and be quiet while we do the best we can.

“So you have a series of overlapping united fronts so to speak, united fronts within united fronts, and then of course, it goes to the outside as you saw today. Pacifists, Democrats, ostensibly revolutionary organizations, peaceniks and what have you. It’s o.k. So you maintain the momentum of an action like this; maintain the morale of the workers and you maintain the united front.

“Sure, united fronts split, and this one’s going to split too. As soon as the injunction comes down, probably Monday…we’ll start seeing this series of overlapping united fronts splitting. You’ll see probably first the Democrats fading away. You’ll most certainly see many of the ostensibly revolutionary organizations fading away in this period….So the united front will split.

“Quite possibly even the rank-and-file committee that’s carrying it out will split. But we’re going to carry this action as far as we can and come what may, it’s a historic action when a group of workers carry out a political strike in this country.”

Three days later, on 4 December, when the injunction came down, the united front did indeed split. Howard defiantly called for the 200-odd anti-apartheid activists at the pier to set up a picket line and maintain the boycott:

“There was a court order and an injunction yesterday to supply men to work this ship. The executive board of the union voted last night eleven to five to comply with the court order. Longshoremen were told this morning that we had to work the ship. I personally am not going to work this cargo. I’ve encouraged my brother longshoremen not to work it, and I encourage you to put up a picket line. With a picket line I don’t think the ship will work.

“In the court order I was named as one of the co-conspirators. That doesn’t make any difference. If there is a picket line here, I’m going to be on it. I would encourage you to set up a picket line over here at the gate, now!”

The assembled militants followed Howard’s direction and managed to hold up traffic at the pier for an hour. SL supporters present, including Stan Gow, stood aside and refused to join the line, while CPers actively assisted the San Francisco police efforts to disperse the pickets which ended the boycott.

In Militant Longshoreman No. 13 (7 January 1985) Howard argued that the injunction could have been successfully defied and again mentioned the victory at Levin Terminals in Richmond:

“If Local 10 had officers and an Executive Board worthy of our fighting membership, officers willing to risk jail if necessary, we could have won outright. From the moment the membership voted to act, our officers should have been inviting union and community support and publicly demanding that [ILWU] International President Herman sanction the action and extend it coastwise. Instead, our officers were telling the media that our action was unauthorized and individual. Our officers should have sent delegations to the other ports to meet with other local officials and to appeal directly to all longshoremen to refuse to work the blood-stained cargo. When PMA proposed to unload the Nedlloyd Kimberley in Stockton, Local 54 told them to go to hell. With support like that, and backed by the thousands of Bay Area residents who wished us success, we could have defeated the injunction, like we did at Levin. Instead, the officers and the Executive Board caved in and ordered us to work the Nedlloyd Kimberley.

“Make no mistake about it: the PMA and the capitalist government were scared. They recognize how deeply black Americans feel about the oppression in South Africa and how popular our union action was. That’s the main reason why they were so slow in arbitrating and in imposing an injunction, and that’s why so far the fines/damages have been suspended. When the continuing rebellion of the black trade unions and the South African masses stirs us to act collectively again, it is precisely that community support, properly organized in our defense, and spread to other unions which can help us smash the injunction.”

In the aftermath of the boycott the bureaucrats attempted to victimize Jack Heyman, at that time a member of the Inland Boatmen’s Union (IBU—an ILWU affiliate whose members work on barges, ferries and tug boats), for his role during the struggle. Jack wrote to the ET on 21 May 1985, “to thank you for your tireless efforts in the campaign to defend me against company victimization for my role in the longshore anti-apartheid cargo boycott….” He commented:

“Your ability to play a leading role in this heroic boycott action was made possible by your correct appraisal of the situation and application of the united front tactic. The enthusiastic participation of a layer of former Spartacist cadre, with many accumulated years of work in the trade unions, was an active component which assisted and encouraged your leadership in the longest political strike in years in this country.”

Jack contrasted Howard’s courageous defiance of the injunction with the “wretched sectarianism” of the SL:

“While the Stalinists were aiding the police in clearing the gate of picketers, the SL stood on the sidelines silent in their complicity. Howard alone amongst the longshoremen called for defiance of the bloody injunction.”

“From the beginning of the action, the SL opposed the anti-apartheid ‘hot cargoing,’ calling the longshoremen ‘scabs,’ rather than offering critical support. Consistent with this wretched sectarianism and breaking from their impeccable record of partisan defense of workers against the capitalist class, the SL refused to aid in my defense after repeated requests both informal and formal.”

In December 2014 at a Bay Area forum marking the 30^th anniversary of the boycott, Howard pointed out that the employers judged the situation to be too volatile to risk any punitive actions against either Local 10 or the individual militants involved:

“There were no Federal reprisals against either the local or the longshoremen. The PMA probably feared that reprisals would cause the strike/boycott to reignite.

“The injunction and the civil lawsuit for one million dollars against Leo Robinson and myself were left in place as a Damocles sword hanging over the local.”

Howard also mentioned that two years later, he and other BT comrades helped initiate a student/community blockade of the Nedlloyd Kembla in San Francisco:

“At the suggestion of Bolshevik Tendency supporters, the East Bay Campaign Against Apartheid blockaded another Nedlloyd Line ship with South African cargo at pier 80 in 1986 (see “Smash Apartheid! For International Labor Solidarity!“, 1917 #2, 1986) This was successful for two whole shifts in spite of the entire Mission district police force trying to disperse the pickets. There were a few photos of that at the end of the video shown earlier. The next day Mayor Diane Feinstein sent the Tac Squad to arrest the demonstrators. This action had come as a complete surprise to the cops and the employers who were not prepared. The Local 10 officials were aware of the impending blockade and the longshoremen happily stood by or went home on the first day.”

Jack’s bloc with Howard/BT in 1987 IBU strike

In his remarks to the 2014 forum Jack talked about Howard’s pivotal role in launching the longshore boycott and the impact it had in South Africa:

“The important thing is to have a class-struggle program and an organization in the trade union that’s going to advance the struggle. But there is another somewhat intangible element necessary for success: you need to be bold. When the time is right you have to be able to strike, to take action. It is not just a matter of knowing your history and reading the textbooks and putting forward positions. It is not enough to be organized. Although both of these are necessary, you need a third element, which is when the time is right, you have to be able to move quickly and act decisively. I think that these three ingredients resulted in the 1984 action. So with a somewhat rudimentary form of organization and a clear class-struggle program, embodied by an experienced individual who had the respect and support of the best elements in the local, we were able to prevail for 11 days despite the fact these were the Reagan years, the trade-union bureaucrats were sticking their heads in the sand and much of the left was gripped by a sense of defeatism. And as you saw in Nelson Mandela’s remarks in the film [shown at the start of the meeting] it was a real inspiration to the workers in South Africa to know that workers in this country were striking on their behalf.”

Jack also discussed how the boycott impacted the political consciousness of the workers involved who participated in subsequent struggles:

“One important aspect of the 1984 action was that it was the first political strike for a long period of time. When the Vietnam War was going on there were a lot of anti-war protests, but the ILWU, like the rest of the unions, didn’t really take any actions against the war. There were members who demonstrated against the war, and endorsements of protest marches and so forth, but the ILWU kept loading the military cargo for Vietnam. So one very significant thing about the 1984 anti-apartheid action is that it paved the way for further actions down the road because, despite the existence of a standing injunction against the union, the members felt they had the power to take action.

“Following the 1984 action, in 1987, the Inland Boatmen’s Union, an affiliate of the ILWU, struck Crowley Maritime. They brought scab ships into the port at Redwood City. We had a connection in the clerks union, Gene Weissberger, the same clerk who was spotting when the Australian cargo finished and they got down to the South African cargo on the Nedlloyd Kimberley. Gene got through to the clerk’s president and said, ‘Look, there are scabs working these barges in Redwood City. We’re going to shut the port down.’ And all the ports in the Bay Area—seven ports—were shut down. Longshoremen joined the Boatman’s union in fending off the police, armed police, and putting an end to the scabbing. We marched down to the vessel and chased the scabs off. That was directly related to what happened in the anti-apartheid strike at Pier 80 a few years earlier.”

Howard retired at the end of 1987^[25], and the IBU strike was the last struggle he participated in as an active longshoreman. Jack was elected head of the IBU strike committee in the Bay Area and collaborated closely with Howard who remained on the Local 10 Executive Board. In an April 1987 internal BT discussion Howard stated: “my main job [in the IBU strike] is to work to maintain solidarity actions by the strategic local [i.e., Local 10].” Uschi explained that “All Hayden [i.e., Jack] has to know is where the barges are and Harlan tells him that and Hayden puts up a picket line. Harlan’s job is to make sure that the [Local 10] workers do not work this stuff.”

Bill Savery^[26], a BT supporter who had previously worked with Jack in the East Coast seaman’s union, was in the IBU in the Bay Area and played an active role in the strike. George Gutekunst, a Bay Area IBU militant with a syndicalist political bent, was closely aligned with Jack, Howard and Bill throughout the strike^[27] which began in February 1987 when Crowley Maritime proposed to break the union with a new contract featuring huge wage cuts and an end to the hiring hall. The IBU leadership offered substantial concessions but Crowley refused to budge. A month before the strike began, in Militant Longshoreman (ML) No. 17, Howard explained why an IBU victory was vitally important for longshore workers:

“Crowley is demanding 33% wage concessions and an end to the union hiring hall. These [12 separate] contracts cover tug and barge work from Alaska to Los Angeles. Crowley is a PMA member and has contracts with the ILWU longshore division in Hawaii and the northwest [Seattle, Portland]. Full longshore support to the IBU-ILWU to defeat Crowley’s takeaway demands would be a signal to PMA to back off any concession demands.”

The next issue of ML (No. 18, 6 February 1987) called for “A militant coastwise strike backed up by mass ILWU pickets to defeat scabbing…[to abort] non-union longshore operations undermining our jurisdiction on the waterfront.” The 13 March 1987 ML (No. 19) identified the “main danger” to the IBU strike as “the apparent fear of [ILWU president] Jimmy Herman, [IBU president] Don Liddle and the IBU leadership that a tough, effective militant strike will antagonize Crowley and make it impossible to ‘cut a deal’ with the company.”

Howard also reported how IBU regional director, Rich Estrada, had removed Jack Heyman and George Gutekunst, “from the elected strike committee in spite of the widely recognized fact that they had organized an unusually effective strike in the Bay Area.” In the subsequent election Jack and George were overwhelmingly re-elected to the strike committee. Militant Longshoreman No 19 reported that the two militants:

“issued a joint election statement which has most of the ingredients for what they call a ‘Program for Victory’. A) Winning support and cooperation from longshoremen and clerks. B) Mass Picketing to stop scab operations. C) Defiance of court injunctions that would limit mass picketing or allow scab operations.”

Howard also identified a significant shortcoming in the statement:

“Unfortunately, the two brothers did not clearly warn their membership in their election statement that Herman, Liddle, Estrada and their cronies will sabotage such a winning strategy short of victory, because they don’t believe it’s possible to win in open battle. Gutekunst and Heyman failed to advise the IBU membership that they, the rank-and-file, will have to control the strike, overrule or replace their leadership when they try to sow confusion and demoralization in the ranks. Even if the ranks don’t like to hear this necessary criticism of their leadership they must be told the truth if the strike is to be won.”

This was not abstract criticism—the same issue of Militant Longshoreman reported that the bureaucrats were concealing the fact that three more barges loaded in Hawaii were headed to the West Coast where Crowley had already sought a Federal Court order to force ILWU members to work them:

“If the IBU and the longshore division capitulate to court injunctions it will be a major blow to an otherwise effective strike. We can expect no help from Herman and the Coast Committee. In both the [1983] Richmond Levin action and the [1984] Longshore South African cargo boycott the International sided with the PMA in finding Local 10 in violation of the contract leaving us open to legal actions.”

The next issue of ML (No. 20, 24 March 1987) reported how ILWU militants spiked Crowley’s attempt to have scabs unload barges in Redwood City on 20 March:

“It all came together when Crowley, the largest tug and barge company in the world, brought three struck Hawaii Marine Lines barges into the port of Redwood City [27 miles south of San Francisco]. At about 7:00 AM scabs began discharging containers….After the word reached San Francisco, Walking Bosses, Clerks, Longshoremen and Ship Scalers left every job in the Bay Area and headed for Redwood City. When several hundred ILWU members headed down the road toward the pier the scabs took off running and abandoned the barge. Not one container has left the port! For weeks these struck barges have been towed up and down the coast like the Flying Dutchman, while Crowley’s customers have been crying for their cargo.”

In a 5 April 1987 internal BT memo, Howard observed:

“Given that the essential tactics: mass pickets, illegal violation of the strategic union contracts and exemplary solidarity actions (all the verification and culmination of 13 years of propaganda and agitation [that began with the September 1974 Chile boycott] identified now with BT) were taking place.”

. . .

“…the actions of the strategic local [i.e., Local 10] from the first day of the strike in stopping all Crowley ships, almost all bunkering, and repeated refusals to work scab HML barges are resulting directly from Harlan’s influence in that local and the ancillary local….There were NO longshoremen working at Redwood City [on 20 March, the day of the confrontation]. Longshoremen and Clerks violated their contract, violated federal law, quit all jobs in the entire Bay Area to converge on Redwood City and invaded the pier in the presence of the police to protect their own jobs.

“The strike has reached a number of crossroads, turning points and crises. In every case, instead of being defeated, the strike has succeeded, stopped Crowley operations and gone on toward another crisis….”

The dramatic (and “illegal”) victory in Redwood City spread the strike to Los Angeles and electrified the Bay Area labor movement. Workers at six Bay Area shipyards, who had not had a pay raise for seven years, spontaneously walked off the job. The local capitalist press began speculating about the possibility of another labor upsurge on the scale of 1934 which broke the bosses’ open shop system and unionized the Bay Area waterfront. In Militant Longshoreman No. 20 Howard asserted that the initial success in Redwood City provided a template for reversing the declining power of the ILWU by eliminating the “non-union cancer” promoted by Crowley:

“There will be shrill voices raised (especially from [ILWU Coast Committee offices in] Franklin Street), that we can’t win, that the police will bust heads, that the courts will seize our funds, that each longshoreman will have his savings seized and our noble leaders will be jailed if we refuse to surrender our jobs meekly. We can win only if we are prepared to fight as hard to defend our gains of the past 53 years as our brothers fought to establish our union in 1934. It’s not just the organized labor movement that is watching this battle and can be brought in to man our picket lines and stop Crowley cold. Millions of workers who yearn for job security and livable wages can be inspired by our successful battle that they too can hope to win union conditions and wages.”

Howard concluded bluntly:

“There is no place to hide—either we do what we have to do to defend our jobs, or roll over dead! Either we stop Crowley at Redwood City, or our union will be gutted by union busters. That means we have to be prepared to defy court orders!

“Stand Our Ground! Mass Pickets at Redwood City to Stop Scab Longshore Operations and Defeat Injunctions!”

The successful dispersion of the scabs on 20 March proved the highwater mark for the strike. In a 3 April 1987 report to the BT leadership, Howard, then 61 years old, noted that: “My active intervention into the strike came to an effective halt about ten days ago due to my illness and loss of voice.” He also reported that six days after the success at Redwood City, “the president and secretary treasurer [of Local 10], in the presence of another executive board member” had “made a firm commitment that if the employer attempted to again work the three struck barges that they would again pull down the whole port to stop the operation” in defiance of any injunctions. Crowley opted to back off and play for time after the set back in Redwood City on 20 March.

The ILWU tops were anxious to settle and recognized that the leftist opposition in the Bay Area had become a major factor in the IBU strike. In an internal 20 April 1987 report to the BT, Howard stated: “The employer opted to avoid confrontation. Substantially, the employer is out of the business [of Hawaiian barges] and it would appear that most of his major customers have gone to other companies.” Crowley’s tactical retreat after the showdown in Redwood City was successful; Howard observed that a month later in the Bay Area “the strike has lost momentum.” The intervening events are worth reviewing in some detail as they hold significant lessons for future class struggles.

In a 30 March internal discussion in the BT, Bill Savery described how volatile the situation was and noted that the fact that the union’s left wing was only partially consolidated limited the possibilities:

“It is a complicated issue in some ways because we don’t have a real, hard, fraction. On the other hand we are winning people towards us, we are the outspoken militants, we have pushed the bureaucracy to the left to go further than they intended in the strike. We are getting a lot of attention that way, particularly Hayden and Harlan look like leaders in this situation. And now the shipyard workers are being drawn into this; who knows how far this will go—it’s on a coast-wide basis. I don’t know how far it will go…. Just walk into our [IBU] union hall and you see this oppositional literature against the bureaucrats like wallpaper. Harlan’s leaflets, George G.’s leaflets, Hayden’s leaflets calling for mass picketing, for linking up with the rest of labor, calling the bureaucracy, from Jimmy Herman on down, sell-outs. This is openly posted on the walls of the [IBU] union hall. And it’s moving forward, cutting down more and more of Crowley’s operations, [Local 10] is increasingly seeing this strike as theirs. Teamsters have joined, there is pressure to work with OCAW [Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union].”

The fact that most of the struck operations were in the Seattle/Puget Sound region of Washington state proved an important factor in the struggle. The most politically advanced militants were concentrated in the Bay Area and lacked connections in the Seattle area which was a daunting 14-hour drive away. Yet, as Howard reported to the BT on 20 April:

“we’ve discovered that there was a rank-and-file revolt and a mass picket halting the oil barges in the Puget Sound area. By and large that area of acceleration and confrontation that could have led to considerable confrontation with the state have been fairly successfully blocked off by the international union and local bureaucrats.”

Howard described how the ILWU/IBU bureaucrats got a scare when three IBU executive board members from the Bay Area, who were not employed by Crowley:

“went to the Puget Sound area with all the leaflets put out by the dissenters [in the IBU, i.e., Jack and George Gutekunst] plus mine on the strike [Militant Longshoreman] and distributed them widely. Those leaflets were picked up, reproduced by the thousands and were sent on to Alaska and got wide distribution. It created a real reaction as one would expect from the the bureaucrats because prior to this time they had successfully sealed off this region from what was happening in the rest of the union. Which they’ve run with an iron hand, without an elected strike committee, everything from the top down.”

Howard said that the ILWU bureaucrats’ response to the challenge posed by the militants was remarkably sophisticated:

“The bureaucrats moved in three areas….they got a motion passed that in effect said that the ancillary local [Local 6 warehouse workers] would deal only with the officials [of the IBU regarding handling Crowley scab shipments]. Precluding any relationships between rank-and-filers, dissidents, etc. They projected a…probable defeat of the strike. There was a major attack on the…propaganda that had been put out by the dissidents around injunctions with the bureaucrats warning that this was an irresponsible move to destroy the union. Probably the most effective red-baiting that I’ve seen in this union in 15 years. Very sophisticated, skillful, identifying all the militants as secret revolutionaries whose only purpose is to get the union into bloody conflict with the government….

“They also charged the dissidents in the San Francisco region with wanting to break away from the coast wide strike and go it alone. They made quite an effective propaganda campaign. One of the things that came out in this discussion, interestingly enough, was that there was a split, as I suspected, in the International over the Redwood City action, with the two [ILWU] international officers who directly administer [Local 10’s] contracts condoning the action and the international officers, including the president, trying to stop it. They papered that difference over but it did exist at the time.”

. . .

“The most sophisticated thing they did was to suddenly hold an election that took place within a period of four days for strike director. The post that is now held by the [IBU] top bureaucrat. An election held coast-wide with nominations and election. Our friend Hayden fell into the trap. He allowed himself to be nominated and put out a piece of literature on his nomination. The one thing he did that was smart, was that he and another dissident went to the Puget Sound area. That’s like walking into the lion’s den but they did find some dissatisfaction. Not organized, not directed, not cohesive, but a lot of dissatisfaction with the way the strike is being run.

“I didn’t know what the issue was in this election [for strike director]. I was originally given to understand that…all of those posts [on the executive council which had been running the strike] were up for election and that Hayden was running for strike director of the region here where there is a strike committee in place without a strike chairman. But then when I discovered after he’d left [for Puget Sound], what was really involved, I immediately got hold of the other bloc members, got them lined up, and when he got back intervened with him…to disengage as much as possible. It was too late to get off the ballot and too late to ask for a boycott of the election but I got him to put out a leaflet attacking the post as a ‘strike dictator.’

“What they should have counterposed in the beginning was elected strike committees that would coordinate the activities of the strike. But that was the best we could do.”

The bureaucrats mobilized heavily and pulled out every vote they could to defeat Jack. Howard reported that in the Bay Area, where only half the members voted, Jack outpolled his opponent 17 to 12, but in the Puget Sound region, where voting was also light, he received only two votes:

“So the result was that we now have, on paper, a repudiation of the militants…and a codification of the strike dictator because they made it very plain that the purpose of this job of strike director [was to ensure] that any dissident literature after the election and people would be brought up on charges and possibly expelled from the union. That any speaking in public or addressing other unions, anything that is not authorized by the bureaucrats will be subject to the most extreme repression. It was pretty skillful actually. The kind of thing one would expect from Stalinists. Pseudo-democratic.”

Despite the heroic resistance put up by the semi-organized militant bloc and the willingness to fight exhibited by the membership, the combined efforts of the union bureaucrats and Crowley management proved insurmountable; after losing momentum for six months the strike was finally scuttled in October.

The IBU/ILWU Redwood City action, like that in Richmond four years earlier, demonstrated the effectiveness of intelligently implemented class-struggle tactics. The Militant Caucus, which had abstained in Richmond, was out of business four years later when Jack and Howard collaborated to run the scabs off the docks in Redwood City. In the aftermath of the defeat, Jack addressed a bitter letter, dated 16 December 1987, JH to WV on Redwood strike falsifications:

to Jan Norden, editor of Workers Vanguard,^[28] charging:

“Your coverage of the Inlandboatmen’s Union (lBU) strike (WV #440, 13 November) was a shameless web of lies, distortions, omissions and ludicrous assertions woven to cover the Spartacist League’s sectarian abstention from class struggle.”

He concluded with the following prediction:

“Unless the SL breaks out of its self-imposed isolation and participates in supportable and necessary class struggle actions like the boatmen’s strike and the [1984] longshore anti-apartheid action, it will doom itself to irrelevance, notwithstanding the faultless leadership of ‘big fish’ like Jim Robertson.”

Following his retirement at the end of 1987 Howard moved to Germany with Uschi and spent the next decade there.^[29] After returning to the Bay Area in the late 1990s, he resumed close collaboration with Jack, who had meantime become a member of Local 10. Over the next dozen years Jack spearheaded a series of class-struggle actions in a continuation of the work begun by the SL/Militant Caucus in the 1970s and carried forward by Howard during the 1980s.

In his remarks at the 2014 meeting marking the 30^th anniversary of the anti-apartheid boycott Jack described an important action he initiated while Howard was still in Germany:

“In 1996 when the Liverpool dockers were locked out, we put up a union-centered picket line—mostly ILWU members and retirees—in front of a ship from England. The longshoremen of course knew the pickets and so they honored the line, and the Neptune Jade, the ship, wasn’t worked for four days in Oakland. It eventually left and headed up to Vancouver, Canada, and it wasn’t worked there. The same situation—a picket line was set up. It went to Yokohama, Japan, and, for the third port in a row, that ship wasn’t worked. Once again this was inspired by the 1984 anti-apartheid action.”

On 24 April 1999, as a result of Jack’s intervention at the longshore convention a month earlier, every port on the US West Coast was shut down in solidarity with former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. We wrote a short article pointing out the links between this action and earlier initiatives of SL and ET/BT supporters on the waterfront.

In 2008, again at Jack’s initiative, the ILWU shut down every port on the US West Coast to protest the imperialist war against Iraq. We organized a public meeting in Toronto, which Howard attended, where Jack reported that this was “the first strike ever held in the United States against a war.”^[30] In 2010 Jack was instrumental in yet another Bay Area port shutdown—this one to protest the lenient treatment of Johannes Mehserle, the racist cop who murdered Oscar Grant, a 22 year-old black man who had been handcuffed and held face down on the ground. The “Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal” (a coalition in which Jack, Howard, Chris, Bob and many other activists participated) reported: “the longshore membership [of Local 10] has voted for a port shutdown as well, to say: Justice for Oscar Grant! Labor Unity With the Community! Jail Killer Cops!”

The SL refused to join a demonstration in support of the ILWU action because it opposed the demand to “Jail Killer Cops.” (This is one of several sectarian errors that has recently been corrected by the SL’s new leadership). The IG, which had vigorously promoted all Jack’s previous actions, ignored this one, but after some prodding, explained that, like the SL, they also regarded the demand to “Jail Killer Cops!” as unsupportable. The IG has yet to formally repudiate this mistake, but we were pleased to note some progress in that direction during the 2020 Black Lives Matter mobilizations.

In 2010, the year that Jack retired, he and Howard, along with many other union militants, co-signed a statement demanding that the ILWU cease handling scab Boron shipments. In 2011-12 they were also both involved in supporting ILWU Local 21 (Longview, Washington) against a vicious union-busting attack.^[31] In one of the most degenerate and incoherent polemics WV ever published, the SL attacked Jack for his attempt to build support for the beleaguered militants in Longview—we subsequently reproduced this absurdly sectarian attack with critical annotations.^[32]

Howard’s last major political act on the waterfront was in 2014, when he joined Jack and hundreds of other militants in the mass pickets that prevented Israeli Zim line ships from unloading cargo in the Bay Area.

Opportunity costs of wrecking the Militant Caucus

By the late 1970s, the SL had managed to establish a few strategic toeholds within the American working class where they were able to exert real influence over a layer of more politically sophisticated union militants and, as a result, began to emerge as a viable left opposition which the labor bureaucracy had to take seriously. This was an impressive accomplishment, all the more so because it was achieved on the basis of openly advocating a transitional program that explicitly linked key immediate issues facing the working class to the historic necessity for socialist revolution (i.e., a “workers’ government”).

The SL’s leftist rivals, whose attempts to build a base in the working class had generally been considerably less successful, all viewed the attempt to carry out union work on an explicitly socialist basis as a “sectarian” error. Without exception they backed various “reform” candidates sponsored by the “Miners for Democracy” or the “Teamsters for a Democratic Union” despite their willingness to collaborate with the capitalist courts and US Labor Department in challenging the corrupt “business unionists” at the top of the entrenched bureaucracy. The SL, by contrast, drew a hard line against all candidates who countenanced any sort of government intervention in the labor movement.

Similarly, unlike most of its various leftist opponents, the SL opposed demands for “preferential layoffs” as a means of redressing historic injustices against women, blacks and other minorities and defended the seniority system as the cornerstone of union power. The revolutionary SL of the 1970s supported every concrete struggle against racial or sexual oppression and advocated the active recruitment of women, blacks and other disadvantaged sectors into industry. At the same time, it sought to popularize the Marxist view that the fundamental interests of working people and the oppressed are incompatible with the maintenance of the straitjacket of production for private profit:

“It is self-defeating to accept capitalism’s stacked-deck framework that workers and poor people must compete among themselves to preserve their ‘slice’ of a shrinking capitalist ‘pie.’ The working class and its allies must understand that the elimination of inequality and want will proceed, not from tinkering with tokenistic or utopian schemes for ‘redistribution’ of wealth and social services, but from expropriation of the rapacious capitalist class, the smashing of its repressive state apparatus and the liberation of the productive forces from the fetters of private ownership of the means of production.”
WV 112, 4 June 1976

The ability to tell the truth and “swim against stream” rather than adapt to whatever ideas were currently popular (i.e., backward consciousness) resulted in the influence of SL-backed trade-union caucuses expanding, albeit modestly, at a time when their leftist rivals were in retreat.

Revolutionaries gain influence in the working class chiefly through demonstrating that they know how to get results—something that requires more than an abstractly correct political program. It means being able to correctly read situations, to act decisively when openings appear and to provide intelligent tactical leadership in real time. Howard often remarked that the willingness of the Local 10 membership to engage in an “illegal” anti-apartheid boycott in 1984 was largely attributable to the success won by “illegal” tactics in Richmond the year before.

At the 2008 meeting in Toronto celebrating the historic strike against imperialist intervention in Iraq, Jack saluted Howard for upholding the legacy of class-struggle trade-unionism in the ILWU after the default of the SL and MC:

“The first important campaign that I was involved in out there [in the Bay Area] was in 1984, around the question of apartheid in South Africa. And from that struggle I learned a lot of my politics and how to function as a revolutionary within the trade-union movement. I credit a lot of what I learned—those lessons—to someone who’s here tonight, and I want to acknowledge him: Howard Keylor….

“Howard was able to raise a resolution within our local that became the basis for an 11-day anti-apartheid cargo boycott—an action that, in 1984, built or reignited the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. That’s not my opinion—that’s what Nelson Mandela said when he was freed from prison and he did a world tour. He came to the Oakland Coliseum, and the first thing he said was that he credited the longshore union for reigniting the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. The spark that struck off the anti-apartheid movement came from Howard Keylor’s motion. Thank you, Howard.”

If the MC had not been decapitated and the SL had built the boycott as it had ANCAN four years earlier, the popular impact could have been immensely greater. Apartheid was a hot issue and Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory a few weeks earlier was resented by millions of youth, working people and minorities in the Bay Area. A few thousand posters and mass distribution of a punchy, agitational WV supplement by a couple of dozen cadres assigned to agitate outside workplaces, black neighborhoods, campuses and high schools could have vastly expanded popular participation. If, instead of drawing 500 people, the rallies to support the longshore boycott had attracted five or ten thousand, the odds of successfully staving off a federal injunction would have been vastly improved and the political cost to the ruling class of attempting to spike the action could have been enormous.

Had the MC/SL led the boycott it could have significantly increased its following in Local 10 and recruited new, younger, members to the MC. It would certainly have vastly raised its prestige connections in the labor movement—both at home and internationally and established its credentials as a “tribune of the people” that could get things done. This would have translated into recruiting black youth and worker militants across the Bay Area and contending for hegemony in the burgeoning campus-centered anti-apartheid movement. The SL’s far-left opponents in the US and internationally would inevitably have also been impacted, because nothing succeeds like success.

The opportunities for the SL to regroup subjectively revolutionary elements from other left groups would have been vastly greater than those that presented themselves to the tiny ET. Yet, despite our meagre resources and the fact that prior to this event we had almost no prior public profile, we recorded some significant successes. The Left Trotskyist Tendency, a left split from the Internationalist Workers Party (American followers of Nahuel Moreno) were won to the BT largely as a result of Howard’s role in the longshore boycott. Through our connection to the LTT, Howard established contact with left-wing elements of the disintegrating Workers Revolutionary Party^[33] who arranged for him to tour Britain to discuss the political lessons of the boycott.

Had Howard led the boycott under the banner of the MC (which would only have been possible had the SL not qualitatively degenerated) it is highly probable that the SL’s vastly greater resources and political weight would have resulted in recruiting at least a couple of dozen former WRP cadres, in addition to the LTT and other subjective revolutionaries in the US and abroad. The most important potential recruits would have come from South Africa where the cargo boycott had a particularly substantial impact. While it was still underway the Council of Unions of South Africa issued “Solidarity Awards” to Howard and other leaders of the action. Nelson Mandela’s salute to the internationalist solidarity shown by the militants of Local 10 when he visited the Bay Area six years later reflected how deeply the expression of solidarity resonated within South Africa’s combative black working class at the time.

In our account of Howard’s 1987 British tour we reported:

“In Derby, Keylor shared the podium with Frank Murphy, Educational Director of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the second largest union in COSATU [Congress of South African Trade Unions]. Brother Murphy told the audience that during the 1984 San Francisco cargo boycott a FOSATU (a forerunner to COSATU) representative appeared on television in New York and praised the longshoremen’s action and called for similar direct industrial actions by other U.S. workers.”

Had the MC been leading the action, instead of opposing it, the door would have been opened to seriously politically engage with the flourishing black “workerist” movement in South Africa whose rejection of the Communist Party/African National Congress (SACP/ANC) class collaborationism put them in a Trotskyist-adjacent position on the political spectrum.

But by 1984 the SL had become a very different organization from what it had been a decade earlier when it organized a united-front campaign to implement the labor bureaucrats’ rhetorical calls for boycotting Chilean cargo. While still nominally adhering to Leninist democratic-centralist norms and its formally Trotskyist program, the SL had undergone what the ET characterized in “The Road to Jimstown” as a “gradual molecular transformation….into an obedience cult (a process which had been underway for some years)” and had “reached the point of no return.”

Trotsky observed in The Revolution Betrayed that, “A revolution is a mighty devourer of human energy, both individual and collective. The nerves give way. Consciousness is shaken and characters are worn out.” The same phenomenon operates in very small revolutionary organizations like the Spartacist League of the mid-1970s that Howard joined. By the early 1980s, when he was forced out, the decay was already well advanced, with many core cadres manifesting the morbid symptoms Trotsky described—political consciousness declining and character “worn out.”

Revolutionary class consciousness does not arise spontaneously within the working class or the oppressed. It can only be gained through understanding and assimilating the lessons of the past through participation in contemporary class struggles—this is the only path to building a movement capable of leading a socialist revolution. Howard understood this and was profoundly convinced that the nightmare of capitalist irrationality and bloodletting can only be ended through following the example of Lenin and Trotsky in October 1917.

Despite his acrimonious separation from the SL in 1981, Howard always upheld the legacy of the revolutionary Spartacist League—he knew that its conception of how to do trade-union work was superior to every other organization standing in the Trotskyist tradition, including James P. Cannon’s SWP (see: Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions). Howard learned a lot and also made significant contributions to the Militant Caucus during his seven years with the SL. This legacy must be critically assimilated by future militants who aspire to function as revolutionaries in the trade unions.

Howard was profoundly convinced that, however marginal they may be at any given moment, the cadres who embody the program of authentic Trotskyism are precious, because as long as capitalism exists, revolutionary opportunities will present themselves and, at the right conjuncture, even a very small organization can be scaled up rapidly—whereas a Marxist cadre cannot be improvised. Howard devoted his life to the struggle to forge a viable revolutionary organization—he was exquisitely conscious of the fact that a successful socialist transformation requires organized continuity between the giants of the past and the leaders of a future world socialist revolution.

In his moving tribute to Howard in 2018, his old comrade Henry Johnson observed:

“Like all great revolutionaries, Howard is motivated by concerns that go far beyond his own immediate personal interests. His life spent participating in a struggle vastly larger than himself has not negated his individuality but fulfilled it. His devotion to fight on behalf of all the ‘wretched of the earth’ has lifted him up and sustained him and made him the person he is—a working-class hero who is among the very finest human beings who walk this earth. He fought the good fight and never flinched. He put all his strength and all his ability into the class struggle, and he has made a difference.”

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Notes:

1. Howard and his wife Evangeline’s activity in Stockton was touched on in a 1967 hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on “Subversive Influences in Riots, Looting, and Burning.”Howard sent this link to the HUAC hearing with the following note:“Howard Thompson, who had been in the Stockton Communist Party for 12 years (1948-1961), testifies before the House Unamerican Affairs Committee. For all of those 12 years he was an informer for the FBI. You will note that I was in the same club all during that time and early on my wife and I charged him and his wife Lulu May Thompson with being informers.“How the CP ineptly dealt with our charges, reprimanded us for bringing those charges, and promoted them to leadership says a lot as to how the CP operated at that time.“This link was sent to me by my daughter who now that she is retired from work has time to research family history. She remembers the Thompsons and remembers FBI agents coming to our house and maintaining regular surveillance.” ↑
2. Hopefully this documentation survives in the archives of the Spartacist League’s Prometheus Research Library and will one day be made available to researchers. ↑
3. More than 20 years earlier, in a 1982 contribution to a discussion in the ET, Howard emphasized the importance of being willing to participate in principled blocs and united fronts:“Revolutionary organizations with even tiny forces in the class have to be on the look-out for situations where a skilful, principled bloc or united from tactic can have a multiplier effect which in turn can have the potential of affecting objective reality, not just an abstract literary group of honest and principled ‘nay-sayers’. The author was first attracted to the MC [Militant Caucus] because I saw the transitional program embodied in the transitional organization as the key which could unlock the militance of the working class and move the class forward in organized strength and consciousness. The experience of the last decade has convinced me even more that there is a way that revolutionaries can recruit and build their forces within the organized industrial working class.” ↑
4. Stan was a member of a left-wing faction of Max Shachtman’s group (along with James Robertson, Shane Mage, Tim Wohlforth and a few others) who joined the SWP in 1957 and subsequently launched the Revolutionary Tendency—the SL’s precursor—in 1961. ↑
5. Chris died in April 2025: see “Remembering Comrade Chris.” ↑
6. See SL TUC Discussion Bulletin No. 2, November 1976 ↑
7. See SL TUC Discussion Bulletin No. 5, December 1976 ↑
8. The BT’s Tom Riley sketched this process in a 2018 retrospective on the SL’s political degeneration:“Robertson lacked the character necessary to sustain revolutionary activity as American society drifted relentlessly to the right from the mid-1970s. As prospects of imminent revolutionary breakthroughs receded, he opted for the petty pleasures available to the big frog in the little pond of the Spartacist tendency. Gradually the unaccountable founder/leader’s materially privileged lifestyle was normalized within the group, while other full-timers were expected to eke out an existence on minimal subsidies. This all went hand in hand with the effective elimination of any real internal democracy in the iSt.”https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/04/14/from-trotskyism-to-neo-pabloism-2/ ↑
9. The Socialist Workers Party historically wielded little influence in the ILWU, although for a very brief period in 1957, when the CPUSA was roiled by Khruschev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes and divided over the Soviet intervention in Hungary, things opened up a bit. On 14 October 1957 Asher Harer, the SWP’s lone supporter in Local 10, wrote to SWP leader Tom Kerry about “the extremely friendly reception that our candidates [for municipal office in San Francisco] have received in the unions.” Harer reported: “We’ve spoken to approximately two dozen trade-union bodies, the most important of which was the ILWU Legislative Council.” At that event, when the chair refused to allow him to nominate two SWP candidates for endorsement:“a longshore delegate, who is chairman of the Stewards’ Council, and also the principal CP stalwart in Local 10 (sells 100 PWs [People’s World] a week), arose and placed the names of both Barbara and Jordan in nomination! You could have knocked me over with a feather….”When the question was called, “four out of the five votes [for the SWP] came from brothers close to [the] CP.” ↑
10. SL IIB, No. 36, <p 26> ↑
11. See Longshore Militant No. 47, 26 December 1979 https://bolsheviktendency.org/2025/07/25/lm-issue-47-dec-26-1979/ ↑
12. In a 9 November 1998 contribution to an internal discussion on the Transitional Program, Howard recalled Al’s somewhat rigid ideas about the applicability of demanding a “sliding scale of wages and hours” in the ILWU:“in connection with the form in which we raised the sliding scale of wages and hours, 6 hours work for 8 hours pay in longshore (we were paid on a daily basis for work performed under the contract), I wanted to write that the enormous increase in ship loading and unloading productivity resulting from the revolutionary institution of containerization enabled the waterfront employers to grant 6 for 8 (and even better) and maintain the same level of jobs and to still make a healthy profit….Al Nelson et al refused to let me write this on the grounds that the sliding scale of wages and hours could never be achieved under capitalism. He refused to acknowledge that in this unusual and specific situation this demand in itself didn’t easily and logically lead to the D of the P [dictatorship of the proletariat]. On the other hand he never quite understood that the employers could not continue to recognize de facto union control over the job through the hiring hall, that their demand for ‘steady men’ on skilled jobs was for them an absolute necessity for which they would really go to the mat….The present global economic system rests among other factors on the ability to transport enormous amounts of goods without interruption from uppity dockers; thus the extreme expense and effort laid out by shippers to smash or render ineffective dockers unions.” ↑
13. Howard’s first wife, Evangeline was a member of a family with deep connections to the Communist movement in the Philippines. In 1948, the year he joined the Communist Party, Howard dropped out of university to participate in a major strike by Filipino asparagus workers in Stockton California. The strike was led by Larry Itliong, a prominent organizer for the Communist-led Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union.
    

    With this family background, it was hardly surprising that Aloha initially gravitated toward Filipino Maoists on campus.In 1986, at the time of the overthrow of the rightist dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Fred Ferguson interviewed Howard on the history of revolutionary struggles in the Philippines. The interview, which was never published, is an example of Howard’s broad historical knowledge and sophisticated political understanding. ↑

14. Howard alluded to his failure to intervene in defense of Bob and Jane in his remarks to a 2015 meeting in San Francisco marking the 50^th anniversary of the 1965 United Farm Workers (UFW) Grape Strike:“During the repeated purges in the UFW by the Chávez/[

    ↑

15. Jane’s arrest was featured on the front page of WV’s 20 July 1979 issue:“Jane Margolis is a spokesman for the Militant Action Caucus, an opposition group in the union which has repeatedly protested government interference in the labor movement, particularly by the CIA in Latin America. Earlier in the day she was prevented by the chair from presenting a motion that the union convention not allow itself to be used as a platform for the anti-labor strikebreaking policies of the Democrats. Clearly, a key purpose of the hamfisted, blatantly illegal action by the Secret Service was to keep union delegates from registering any dissent against Carter and his energy speech.“In New York, James Robertson, National Chairman of the Spartacist League/U.S. immediately issued a vehement protest upon learning of the seizure of Margolis, an SL supporter and long-time personal friend. ‘What the Secret Service did to Jane is an outrage against organized labor,’ he said. ‘We don’t have kings here. According to the law, every citizen is supposed to have equal rights. But Jimmy Carter’s personal goons simply march into a union convention and mug a woman who is an elected union official!’” ↑
16. See ET Bulletin No. 1 pp 11-12 “FMLN Flag: Who Fooled Who?” pp 11-12  ↑
17. Reprinted in Honor Howard – Special Edition of Bolshevik p2
18. In 1977 Knox was sent to head up the Spartacist operation in Australia where he was one of the targets in a demoralizing, pseudo-political “fight” a few years later. We discussed this episode under the subhead “The 1981 Purge of the Australian Section,” in a December 1996 letter to the Internationalist Group (pp 3-5). https://bolsheviktendency.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IG-letter-1996.pdf ↑
19. By the early 1980s the Robertson regime exhibited many of the characteristics associated in American pop psychology with “control freaks.” This was combined with occasional attacks on underlings, usually branch organizers, for the sin of imagining they ran a “100%” regime. It was not that Robertson et al did not make mistakes which they would admit to, but the cadres were well aware that it was unwise to try to identify them until they were announced from on high. ↑
20. See ET Bulletin No. 1 pp 14-15 article on Oroville demonstration ↑
21. https://bolsheviktendency.org/2025/01/30/honor-howard-special-edition-of-bolshevik/ pp3-7 ↑
22. Howard’s notes on “A Transitional Organization for Communist Work in the Trade Unions,”  written some 20 years after his retirement, include the following:“every programmatic demand CAN lead to the question of class power—workers versus capitalists. It is up to the [revolutionary] caucus to provide links over a period of time—lead to transform consciousness of workers in direction of consistent class-consciousness and class struggle—build confidence of workers.“Richmond strike in ET Bulletin good example how several main elements came together after…years of patient work in [ILWU Local 10]—most OTOs [ostensibly Trotskyist organizations] lack the patience for this kind of work.
    1. Defy injunction—violate contract—violate federal law
    2. Get support of other unions
    3. Mass picketing to stop scabbing
    4. Don’t rely on bureaucrats

    “After [nine] years of propaganda and agitation and organizing in [ILWU Local 10] built self-confidence of workers—successful action partly betrayed by inadequate contract—SL totally failed to understand coalescing of consciousness into workers action to force all of the 4 above. Abandoned scene.” ↑

23. Fred wrote an important article on the “Gibson Case” which appeared in Militant Longshoreman No. 3 (10 April 1982) The issue was whether Local 10 should pay a proportional share of the cost of settling a case involving racist discrimination during the 1960s by Local 40 in Portland, Oregon. The parallel “Golden” case involved a court suit to expand the number of women in the ILWU in Los Angeles. Howard and Fred argued that abandoning the longstanding policy whereby all locals shared the costs of attacks on any of them would weaken the union and invite increased intervention by the capitalist courts. Local 10 eventually adopted this position. ↑
24. Gerald Smith, a former Black Panther who later belonged to the SL for a number of years, was one of those who participated in the SL “picket line” on the first night of the boycott. A year earlier he had been approached by the SL to sign up as the national figurehead for the LBSLs. He declined this honor when he learned that the LBSLs were intended to be front groups which would not make their own decisions. Gerald, who had continued to have great confidence in the SL leadership, was so shocked and disgusted by their attempted wrecking that he immediately broke politically with them and came over to the ET. ↑
25. The BT was well aware that Howard’s retirement would be a real setback:“For five years the premier asset of the ET/BT has been the trade-union work of our supporter in longshore. That will be a thing of the past when he retires at the end of the year. It is an honorable end to an outstanding career as a class-conscious worker militant. Most of the big opportunities which we have had have derived, whether directly or indirectly, from this work which has been exemplary in every way and carried on resolutely in the face of tremendous adversity.”—“Tasks and Perspectives, 1987”What we did not fully anticipate was how much important and effective work Howard would do after retiring, as discussed below. ↑
26. https://bolsheviktendency.org/2019/03/24/comrade-bill-savery/ ↑
27. By this point the Militant Caucus was effectively defunct (see: “Keylor Upholds Class-Struggle Program in ILWU: SL Absence Marks End of Era”). ↑
28. Comrade Norden now edits The Internationalist, which recently featured an article entitled “SL’s Latest Longshore Lies” which complained:“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.”In fact as Jack’s 16 December 1987 letter proves, the “vendetta” was already underway in the 1980s while Jan Norden was editing WV. After citing several examples of recent malfeasance, the Internationalist Group (IG) credits the SL for characterizing its refusal to support the April 1999 port shutdown action for Mumia Abu-Jamal initiated by Jack as “stodgy, demoralized centrism.” The SL has also recently repudiated its 1986 slander of Howard as a “union narc.” https://bolsheviktendency.org/2025/01/30/spartacist-league-retracts-slander/ We suggest the IG emulate this by acknowledging that WV’s coverage of the 1983 Richmond strike, the 1984 boycott and the 1987 IBU strike exhibited many of the same sectarian characteristics for which they chastise the SL:“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.” ↑
29. Howard and Uschi remained vital and highly effective cadres of the BT. In November 1989 Howard was sent to New Zealand to investigate the Permanent Revolution Group (PRG) led by Bill Logan and Adaire Hannah, two former Spartacists. The “Logan regime” in the Australian Spartacist League was a sort of “outback” replica of Robertson’s SL/US in which many of its most undesirable features were somewhat exaggerated. In 1979 Logan was hypocritically expelled from the Spartacist tendency for various bureaucratic and abusive actions that had previously been condoned by the SL/US leadership. After observing and talking to the entire membership of the PRG for a month, Howard reported that the group seemed essentially healthy, which opened the door for the subsequent BT-PRG fusion in 1990.Immediately prior to Howard’s departure for New Zealand he and Uschi had drafted a careful account of the precipitous decline of the TLD (the German Spartacist section) which concluded:“The TLD is, without question, the most brutalized and degraded of all the satellite organizations of Robertson’s American-centered ‘international.’ At this point the TLD has become an obstacle to the organization of a nucleus of an authentically Trotskyist organization in Germany. Its erratic and cynical behavior tends to give Trotskyism a bad name among people new to politics, and to discredit its honorable early history among more experienced leftists.”The article was never published because as it was being edited it was eclipsed by the terminal crisis of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR, aka: “East Germany”) Stalinist regime. Howard and Uschi intervened actively in these events and wrote several important statements, including an initial assessment of the situation in January 1990 and a March 1990 statement giving critical support to the Spartacist candidate in the DDR election. ↑
30. Two members of the Trotskyist League (TL—the SL’s Canadian affiliate) in attendance were highly critical of Heyman and the BT, as we reported:“The SL once had considerable influence in the ILWU, but abandoned its trade-union work in the early 1980s. The first TLer to speak, Arthur Llewellyn, conceded that the May Day strike ‘does point the way to the kind of working–class action that needs to be mobilized,’ and even ventured to ‘salute the workers who withheld their labor during the port shutdown.’ He then spent the rest of his time denouncing Heyman and the other militants who organized the strike, as well as leftists who supported them. Llewellyn charged: ‘The BT provides a left cover for Heyman, who in turn covers for the ILWU tops, who in turn chain the union to the Democratic Party.’ The spontaneous laughter provoked by this and similar idiotically sectarian comments became so loud that at one point the chairperson had to request members of the audience to contain themselves.” ↑
31. Howard described the deal foisted on the Longview dockers by the ILWU bureaucracy as “The worst contract I have ever seen“: On 29 July 2012 Howard and Jack were among the speakers at a meeting in San Francisco entitled “Lessons from the ILWU Battle Against EGT [grain conglomerate] in Longview and the Struggle Ahead.” ↑
32. The WV screed appeared in its 17 February 2012 issue as Lessons of the Battle of Longview. We responded a few weeks later with: “SL Sides with Bureaucrats against Occupy and Union Militants”  ↑
33. The history of our political engagement with these comrades is in “Jimstown as we knew it” under the sub-head “Healyism Implodes—Spartacists Miss the Boat.” ↑