More from a Labor Opportunist

(Letter)

We received this letter by e-mail.

19 June 2006

Dear Editor;

In WV #864 (17 February 2006), you devote over a page (titled “Jack Heyman: ‘In the Bag’”) replying to a letter I wrote criticizing WV’s skewed coverage of a Partisan Defense Committee rally last October where I spoke emphasizing the need for the workers movement to mobilize its strength to free Mumia Abu-Jamal and citing the 24 April 1999 West Coast ports shutdown for Mumia’s freedom. Your response says that my complaint was because your coverage criticized me. No, I objected because your coverage of the event (in WV #859, 25 November 2005) dishonestly distorted my remarks and tried to obfuscate the Spartacist League’s refusal to fight in the unions on this vital question.

Your reply continues this pattern. In it you make two main points: 1) On the call for a workers party: according to your account, it was hypocritical for me to raise this demand at an international labor solidarity rally in Tokyo because during the 2004 Million Worker March (MWM) rally, I supposedly disappeared it. 2) on labor’s defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, you say that I gave a “labor cover” to the reformist call for a “new trial” for Mumia.

First, on the workers party, you claim that at the October 2004 MWM rally in Washington, D.C., I left a banner calling to “Break with the Democrats, Build a Workers Party!” in the bag it had come in. What you fail to mention is that the banner was made, transported and left in the bag not by me but by an SL supporter. You know this, because he told you so. And I hardly dropped the question of a workers party. In my speech from the MWM podium, I said: “We need a party, a fighting workers party to represent us because the Democrats and Republicans, as Mumia said, never will represent us.” Your readers don’t have to take my word for it, they can listen and see for themselves because it was broadcast on C-SPAN and the video is available at http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/million.

It is the SL that has a history of leaving political posters in the bag when the going gets tough. During the 1984 longshore anti-apartheid ship boycott in San Francisco an injunction was imposed against ILWU Local 10. We, union militants, on the picket line tried to defy it, and continue the solidarity action in the face of police intimidation and Stalinists, fearful of a fine against the union. As in many situations in the class struggle, timing and the relationship of forces are decisive. At that critical moment the SL and its supporters, observing from the sideline with posters in their bags departed for a safer haven. Had you not abstained from that now-historic action and instead joined the picket line, we class struggle militants may have prevailed and similar actions could have spread to other West Coast ports, and perhaps internationally. Again, in 1997, you refused to participate in the Oakland picket line against the ship Neptune Jade in solidarity with the sacked Liverpool dockers.

As the MWM march was being organized, I called for a break with the Democrats and Republicans and for a workers party, as I regularly have done for decades. But after the October 2004 event I came to the conclusion that it was a mistake to have joined in the MWM because it did not represent a genuinely independent political mobilization of the working class willing to take on the AFL-CIO bureaucrats’ shackling of unions to the Democrat Party. Instead the MWM served as a “get out the vote” event for John Kerry (or Ralph Nader or the Greens) by the “anybody but Bush” people. I publicly stated this in an 8 July 2005 letter posted on the ILWU discussion list and various internet sites.

Second, on the April 1999 port shutdown for Mumia’s freedom, you write that the SL “made a mistake in not fielding ‘Free Mumia’ contingents in the 1999 protests.” But it wasn’t just that you didn’t have a contingent. You initially dismissed this work stoppage as nothing but a “two-hour” union meeting, supposedly intended to “minimize” the impact on port shipping.

Then, after the work stoppage, when I objected in a letter to the editor, you responded with a huge four-page spread (WV #714, 28 May 1999) claiming that the port shutdown was just “regular monthly meetings,” that I was guilty of “touting these as ‘work stoppages’,” that the impact of a longshore work stoppage was “minimized” because it “didn’t violate the contract,” and so on. So only a wildcat strike counts? You quoted a Pacific Maritime Association official, claiming that the stoppage would have little effect on shipping because it was announced weeks earlier. But while you were happy to parrot the bosses’ excuses, you didn’t mention that PMA threatened to take the Los Angeles ILWU local to court over this work stoppage.

Mind you, this stoppage simultaneously shut down every port on the West Coast for a full eight-hour shift, for the demand “Stop the Execution! Free Mumia!” It was the first time that workers in the U.S. had undertaken job action in defense of Mumia, something the SL had called for over the years, but had never carried out. Anyone seriously interested in defending Mumia Abu-Jamal should have hailed it as an important first step. But not you, at least not at the time. Since then you have been all over the map about the April 1999 port shutdown. In WV #815 (5 December 2003), editorial board member George Foster wrote a letter to the editor saying that the L.A. longshore local’s stop work meeting to rally support for the striking Safeway workers was not such a bad tactic after all. And that was one port in an economic struggle, not a coast-wide shutdown over a political issue.

In that same WV #714 article you attacked the Internationalist Group for objecting to WV’s smears and distortions, but you didn’t mention that the IG’s supporters in Brazil had sparked a union work stoppage in the schools of the state of Rio de Janeiro calling for Mumia’s freedom, which was held in conjunction with the ILWU port shutdown. As far as I know, you have never acknowledged the Brazilian work stoppage for Mumia’s freedom.

To justify your vituperation over the 1999 port shutdown, you argue that it was just “window dressing” for the demonstration held that day which called for a “new trial” for Mumia. Yes, calling for Mumia’s freedom and calling for a new trial represent two different perspectives, because the latter presumes that he could get justice in the capitalist judicial system. But the resolution I put forward in the ILWU said explicitly that “the organized labor movement has the power through action to ensure justice for this principled and courageous freedom fighter, which he can’t get in the courts,” and gave that as a reason for calling to shut down the ports for the demand “Free Mumia.”

When the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal was trying to build support in the unions for the work stoppage, you outrageously accused me in WV #711 (16 April 1999) of wanting to “go after the reds” for having requested from the PDC (as we did of other organizations that supported Mumia’s defense) a list of labor endorsers. You’ve added to this slander, claiming that “Heyman himself signed on to a list of ‘Labor Organizations Calling for a New Trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal on the occasion of the Millions for Mumia marches, April 24, 1999’.” This is false, and you know it. Chris Kinder, initiator and coordinator of the LAC, wrote a letter to the editor of WV (10 October 1999) stating that ALL unions that defended Mumia in one way or another were included on the list, erroneously including “New Trial” in the title. Kinder accepted responsibility for this error. But you never published his letter criticizing the SL, and now you repeat the lie that I signed a list calling for a new trial for Mumia.

WV is correct WV #872 (June 2006) in criticizing the reformist resolutions that emanated from the 2000 “Labor Conference for Mumia”, initiated by the LAC. With our small forces we sought to gather together workers across the country, especially those engaged in militant struggles like the predominantly black Charleston longshore union, to take up Mumia’s defense. Neither the LAC nor the SL participants supported the reformist resolutions. But then the SL didn’t support our resolution “For a Nationwide Day of Labor Action for Mumia!” in which we prevailed against an attempt to substitute “new trial” for “free” Mumia.

Kinder, by the way under the name Knox, was WV editor in 1971-72 and then Trade Union Director of the SL/U.S. in the ’70s. He was the author of a seminal document on “Communist Work in the Trade Unions” and a series on “Trotskyist Work in the Trade Unions,” published in 1973, which along with Trotsky’s Transitional Program served to guide the work of building class-struggle caucuses in the unions and recruiting workers to the then-revolutionary Spartacist League. But the SL has long-since abandoned building militant union caucuses. I challenge you to let your readers read Kinder’s letter to WV.

One has to ask, what is the purpose of this skewed and dishonest reporting? It is to excuse your own zigzagging and a kind of paralytic abstentionism from the class struggle that has characterized the SL increasingly in recent years and to disparage those who carry on your principled, earlier trade union work.

Your reply to my recent letter refers readers to your article “A Hard Look at Recent Party Work and Current Tasks” (WV #841, 4 February 2005). Your reaction to the April 1999 port shutdown was yet another example of what you called there “stodgy demoralized sectarianism.” But there is another issue here. What is written in WV and what SL supporters do in practice are often quite different. This is a hallmark of centrists, who “talk the talk but can’t walk the walk.” WV #862 (20 January 2006), for example, quotes a speech by Rachel Wolkenstein, staff counsel of the PDC, who said: “Imagine what it would mean if New York transit struck—not only to secure a decent wage, health care and job conditions, but to demand Mumia’s freedom.” So have transit workers who are SL political supporters fought for the union to strike for Mumia’s freedom?

In our exchanges over the last several years, I’ve challenged you to show where SL supporters in the trade unions have called for work stoppages to defend Mumia, i.e. unleashing the social power of the proletariat. This is especially of critical importance today when various liberals and reformists are pushing the dangerous illusion in the capitalist courts that Mumia is “one court decision away from either execution or a new trial and freedom.” Your latest response is that my challenge is an “ignorant statement that conflates the trade unions—the mass organizations of the working class for their defense against the capitalists—with a revolutionary Marxist political party.”

You add, “If we had influence in the unions,” then you would “fight it out over what kind of actions the unions should undertake to win Mumia’s freedom.” This is a new twist, and one that is apparently being used to justify the SL’s capitulation to union bureaucrats. In response to a letter from the SL supporter mentioned earlier, WV #872 (9 June 2006), where he asks why the SL leaflet on the transit strike doesn’t criticize TWU head Toussaint, who was obviously prepared to sell out the strike from the beginning, you write: “The leaflet did not directly attack Toussaint. Since we could not point to an alternative leadership of the strike, to do so would only have served to weaken the strike.”

This is astounding. Leave aside the fact that the later dates from December, and you are only now answering it, indicating that you have had a whole discussion about this policy. So now you are not going to criticize union leaders during a strike until there is an alternative leadership? What about the numerous WV articles about the 1978-79 coal miners strike slamming the sellout leadership of Arnold Miller? Was there an “alternative leadership” in the UMWA then? Who? And calling for union action to defend Mumia is wrong until you have “influence in the unions”? This is quite a self-indictment, since SL supporters have been in New York transit for more than a quarter century. But do they fight for leadership, or for union action? For Mumia’s freedom? For workers’ strikes against the war? Apparently not.

The threat of repression against the transit union over the December 2005 was very real. And the best way to counter that was to spread the strike, which even a relatively small class-struggle opposition could have done, which would have meant a fight against the Toussaint leadership (and a challenge to the anti-Toussaint dissidents who complained about his do-nothing leadership but did nothing themselves). In the wake of the New York transit strike, WV launched a campaign to appeal to union bureaucrats to sign a petition (no union action required) to defend Toussaint and oppose the fine against the union. A united-front defense is supportable, but is no substitute for a class-struggle caucus to fight the bosses, the state and the class-collaborationist union bureaucracy.

Nowadays, the Spartacist League has opted for “softer” defensive postures in the trade unions. In the ILWU’s contract struggle in 2002, you took a similar tack, warning against state repression while soft-peddling criticism of the social-patriotic, business union bureaucracy. You didn’t even call for rejection of the concessionary contract or preparation for strike action, saying that “If workers in one of the most powerful unions in the country feel they have little choice but to vote for this contract, it is a searing indictment of the labor bureaucracy” (WV #795, 17 January 2003)!

With its obsession of defense work over other aspects of party work, one has to ask: Has the PDC eaten the SL?

All this adds up to a hard right turn by the Spartacist League, and not just on the trade unions. In WV #868 (14 April 2006) you call for “the right of self-determination” for Puerto Rico, without mentioning that the SL used to call flat out for independence for that U.S. colony. When I was an organizer in the Militant-Solidarity Caucus of the National Maritime Union, a class-struggle opposition group supported by the SL, “independence for Puerto Rico” was a key demand in our internationalist program, understandably because there was a large number of Puerto Ricans working aboard ships. Dust off the archival copies of “The Beacon” and let your younger members see what class-struggle work in the trade unions looked like.

Mobilize Labor Action to Free Mumia!
Jack Heyman

WV replies:

It seems that we stung Jack Heyman with our answer to his previous letter. For years an International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 official, Heyman is particularly exercised by our exposure of his opportunism over the October 2004 Million Worker March (MWM). As we wrote in “Million Worker March: Tail of Lesser-Evilism” (WV No. 831, 3 September 2004) and “Exchange on the Million Worker March” (WV No. 834, 15 October 2004), left-talking elements in the labor bureaucracy built a facade of working-class “independence” for a demonstration whose purpose was to corral disaffected workers into voting for John Kerry. Chris Silvera of the Teamsters made this clear at the time in a letter posted on the MWM Web site, declaring: “The Million Worker March is a crucial vehicle for voter mobilization.”

Heyman is like a bad carpenter who keeps hitting his thumb instead of the nails. Now he tells us that some nine months after the event—when AFL-CIO bureaucrats themselves had awakened with bad hangovers after backing the loser Kerry—he saw the light and realized that the MWM was not “a genuinely independent political mobilization of the working class.” This is sheer cynicism. Heyman continued to be an active builder of the MWM even after Democratic politician Jesse Jackson was invited to speak at the rally. And barely three weeks before Heyman “publicly stated” his about-face, he had written an article, dated 14 June 2005, for Socialist Viewpoint (July-August 2005) that still described the MWM as “an independent mobilization of workers”!

Heyman’s story about the workers party banner at the MWM is beyond pathetic. He worked with a union activist—who has also worked with the SL for many years—to make the banner and bring it to D.C. with them. On site, as Heyman helped mount several official ILWU and MWM banners, the workers party banner never saw the light of day. Seems that when Heyman arrived at the demo, he just got cold feet. And now he leaves this union activist holding the bag for Heyman’s own opportunism. (How seriously Heyman takes the call for a workers party can be seen in the inane slogan that concludes his Maritime Worker Monitor No. 7, 13 October 2004: “Build a Workers Party to Fight for Workers!”)

As for Heyman’s truly skewed and dishonest rendition of the ILWU’s 1984 Nedlloyd Kimberley ship boycott, we refer readers to our article on page 8. The article also recounts Heyman’s role in the 24 April 1999 “Millions for Mumia” protest and ILWU stop-work action. Heyman initiated the ILWU motion that explicitly endorsed the Millions for Mumia rally with its central demand for a “new trial,” a fact he continues to slither around. We have commented extensively on this matter in “Fight Government Repression!” (WV No. 859, 25 November 2005) and “Jack Heyman: ‘In the Bag’” (WV No. 864, 17 February). Readers are also referred to the article cited by Heyman, “A Hard Look at Recent Party Work and Current Tasks,” which acknowledges our mistake in not fielding “Free Mumia” contingents at the April 1999 rallies. The article also acknowledges that rather than commend the stop-work action as a taste of the kind of social power needed for Mumia’s defense, “we effectively equated the action with Heyman’s pandering to the call for a ‘new trial’.” These articles are posted on the ICL Web site.

Heyman complains that the inclusion of his name on a list of “Labor Organizations Calling for a New Trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal” was due to an “error” committed by one of his allies. Does this ring a bell? At any rate, Heyman’s appearance on that list was perfectly consistent with his ILWU motion. What Heyman did on the Millions for Mumia rally podium was typical of his opportunist m.o.: He threw out some left-sounding talk without saying a word against the “new trial” demand that promotes faith in the capitalist courts. Five years later, at the MWM, Heyman worked some verbiage into his speech about a workers party as a left cover for a pro-Democratic Party mobilization.

Who is Heyman to pose as a spokesman for “those who carry on your principled, earlier trade union work”? At one time Heyman was a member of the Militant-Solidarity Caucus (M-SC), a class-struggle opposition in the National Maritime Union whose work was politically supported by the SL. But that was then. Heyman long ago abandoned a class-struggle perspective, becoming instead a house leftist for the ILWU tops. His occasional militant rhetoric serves only to cover the union bureaucracy’s policies of class collaboration.

A case in point is his San Francisco Chronicle (5 March) op-ed piece, “When ‘Port Security’ Targets Workers.” Heyman notes that the hysteria over “port security” has been a battering ram against the longshoremen and their union. But this is window-dressing for his conclusion: “Real port security means inspecting all containers offloaded and ending imperialist wars abroad that spawn terrorists, not stifling the free-speech rights of those who work in the ports.” Here is pure Heymanism: mouthing progressive sentiments about ending imperialist wars while reassuring the government and his employers that he is in favor of one of the main planks of the “war on terror.” No wonder he denigrates our work in defense of labor and democratic rights in this period as an “obsession.”

This consummate labor faker complains about our reply to a letter we printed in our last issue where we explained why an SL leaflet issued in support of the December NYC transit strike did not go after Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 president Roger Toussaint. It is “astounding,” Heyman blusters, for us to assert that it would only have weakened the strike to directly attack Toussaint when he and the union were under attack by the bourgeois state for having defied the Taylor Law, and when we could not point to an alternative leadership.

During the 1966 TWU strike, a Spartacist leaflet was issued after the arrest of Mike Quill and other TWU leaders, calling on all unionists to support the strike—including by engaging in sympathy strikes against the injunctions and arrests—and raising such demands as a shorter workweek to create more jobs. The leaflet did not directly attack Quill, who was a notorious anti-Communist and local bigwig in the Democratic Party. In a New York Spartacist League Local meeting, a motion by Harry Turner objecting that the leaflet did not single out the Quill leadership for criticism was defeated. Quill died shortly after his release from jail and was considered a labor hero for the strike.

A contrary experience occurred in 1937 when Socialist Labor Party (SLP) supporters distributed a leaflet to steel workers at Indiana Harbor, near Chicago, in the midst of an industry-wide union organizing drive. Workers incensed at the leaflet’s attack on John L. Lewis for being a murderous labor bureaucrat (true enough) not unreasonably thought that the SLPers were anti-union, particularly as their attack echoed the steel bosses’ vituperations against Lewis. Trotskyist militants at the time defended the SLPers by pointing out that they were not enemies but simpleminded sectarians.

Heyman throws out a red herring by contrasting our 2005 TWU strike leaflet with WV’s coverage of the 1977-78 coal strike and our treatment of United Mine Workers leader Arnold Miller. During the nearly four-month-long coal strike, miners increasingly reviled Miller for his attempts to sell them out. They demanded his resignation, stormed the union headquarters and sent him into hiding. Unlike the transit strike, it wasn’t the state that was screaming for Miller’s head but the union members! As for Heyman’s complaint that we don’t sufficiently criticize the union bureaucrats, he sure howls when we criticize him.

Heyman charges the SL with “abstentionism” because, for example, we do not currently urge our supporters in the unions to launch oppositional caucuses. Supporters of our views seek to win co-workers to the urgent need for class struggle against the capitalist exploiters and for the complete independence of the working class from all agencies of the class enemy. A caucus is specifically an internal union formation to vie for leadership of the union.

In the late 1960s-early ’70s, at a time of heightened social and labor struggle, the SL’s growth and transformation into a fighting propaganda group laid the basis for extending our efforts in support of class-struggle caucuses in the unions. The Militant-Solidarity Caucus, for one, was defined by its programmatically based opposition to the corrupt NMU leadership under Joe Curran. The M-SC raised a program of transitional demands, including for a workers party and a workers government, and was known for its opposition to the bureaucracy’s protectionist calls to “save American jobs.”

This is in marked contrast to what Heyman appears to want us to do in TWU Local 100, which is to vilify Toussaint in the midst of the transit strike. In the NMU, the opposition led by James Morrissey centered its campaigns on the Curran regime’s corruption and violence. Morrissey early on suffered a vicious beating by Curran’s goons and increasingly turned to the capitalist courts in his drive to oust Curran. Heyman used to be a member of the M-SC, so he should know better.

Today we are faced with a different conjuncture than in the ’60s and ’70s. Decades of capitalist attacks, combined with the effects of deindustrialization in the U.S., have greatly set back the unions. The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 has served to throw back proletarian consciousness generally, albeit unevenly. Under these conditions, for two or three supporters lacking a solid programmatic base of support to form a caucus would serve to unnecessarily set them up for victimization and/or lead to their accommodation to the labor tops, likely through a bloc with trade-union careerists. Heyman has taken the latter course, as exemplified by his support for Brian McWilliams for ILWU International president in 2000 despite McWilliams’ explicit support for the capitalist Democratic Party.

The fight for a new labor leadership based on a class-struggle program and the principle of working-class political independence is essential if the unions are to be transformed from serving as a secondary instrument of capitalist-imperialism for disciplining the workers into organs of the revolutionary struggle of the workers. But the forms this effort takes are not and cannot be the same in all periods or in all unions. A relevant historical example is the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) founded by the Workers (Communist) Party in the early 1920s. The TUEL was launched in the period marked by the victory of proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917. Its purpose was not to contest for leadership in the unions but to educate workers in the program and principles of the October Revolution, seeking to recruit the more conscious workers to the revolutionary party.

In today’s period defined by “death of communism” ideology, basic Marxist education, including through struggle, is the order of the day. One vehicle for such education is the Labor Black Leagues, which are currently engaged in the urgent effort to mobilize labor’s power in the struggle for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s freedom. Heyman can rest assured that supporters of our views in the unions are actively engaged in this work, which is vital to winning workers to the understanding that the fight for black emancipation is central to the emancipation of the entire working class.

As a Marxist propaganda group committed to building a revolutionary workers party, our task is to lay the political groundwork for the emergence of a class-struggle leadership in the unions when the inevitable upsurges in struggle occur, propelling workers toward an alternative to the pro-capitalist misleaders. This perspective will be carried out in sharp opposition to the likes of Heyman, who, as we observed in “In the Bag,” “reveals himself as nothing more than a component of the labor bureaucracy whose support to the capitalist profit system has sapped the workers’ fighting spirit in the face of the bosses’ one-sided class war over the past several decades.”