Sam Hunt

1946-2006

Sam Hunt, a longtime cadre of the International Communist League, died in South Africa on June 2 at the age of 59. He resigned from the ICL in 1998. At the time, he lived in South Africa, where he taught history and basketball. Here we honor his almost 30 years’ work as a communist internationalist, which forms a deep strand in the living net that is our political organization. Sam was a cadre of the Marxist movement beginning with his fight inside the Socialist Workers Party for the Trotskyist legacy of James P. Cannon, a fight which led him to the Spartacist League. His ICL assignments spanned trade-union work in steel, oil and auto in the U.S. and later international work in Japan and South Africa, as well as enthusiastic research into the history of Trotskyism.

A comrade in Chicago, recruited to Marxism by Sam over 30 years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, wrote: “Sam was a very intense, self-taught guy with a penchant for drink. As long as that intensity was harnessed by the collective, Sam could make great contributions.... I told his daughters...that he was for the most of his life ‘one in a million.’ That is to say, in this reactionary time, one of the precious few who represent the future of mankind. But of course there is a great deal of pressure that goes with that position.” He noted Sam’s fondness for the music of Frank Zappa as well.

Sam was born on 4 September 1946. Like many of his generation, he was radicalized by the Vietnam War. When he was 19 and facing the draft, he “wound up doing a four-year hitch in the Air Force from 1966 to 1970,” as he wrote in 1990 to his Spartacist comrade Garry Gianninoto, who had been a Navy medical corpsman in Vietnam. Commenting on Garry’s article, “Vietnam: Racism and Rebellion Behind the Lines—A GI’s View of America’s Dirty War” (WV No. 513, 2 November 1990), Sam noted: “My experiences were stateside, and while we were not under fire, we had to put up with the chicken-shit saluting and ‘sir’ing of the ‘little shitfaced 20-year-old lieutenants’ you described. And the racism you described was just as intense at every base and fort. When I was...publishing an underground newspaper and held temporarily in the brig, the population inside this little prison was virtually all black.” Sam’s underground paper was called the Aerospaced, with the “o” as a peace symbol.

Sam wrote in 1990: “The point we’ve been making in the paper [WV] about how anti-war radicals did not spit on soldiers but tried to help them is very important. My experiences certainly testify to that. It was student radicals at Antioch College that helped us publish our newsletter…. The only people that ever spit on me when I was a soldier was the Klan and they were itching to do a lot worse.” Sam’s letter to Garry concluded: “My last point is about your description of the carnage American imperialism inflicted upon the heroic Vietnamese. In looking back to my days in USec [United Secretariat, the fake Trotskyists to whom the SWP was politically linked] I personally find the most disgusting thing they did was to adopt their social-patriotic line on the Vietnam War with their highlighting of ‘our boys’ in Vietnam. The SWP marched with ‘55,000 Americans killed’ on their banners but NEVER with banners paying homage to the MILLIONS of Vietnamese that were slaughtered by U.S. Imperialism.... We’re going to have to make this fight again today over a Persian Gulf war and I think your article will help a lot.... I bet you drank a few beers in 1975 when Saigon fell—I did. F--- the social patriots; f--- YAWF and today’s SWP—Vietnam was a victory!”

As Sam wrote, after he got out of the military he was “mad as hell and joined the first group I came into contact with—the SWP.” He ran for governor of Wisconsin on the SWP ticket. His real education in Trotskyism began in political struggle, in a series of oppositional groupings, against the wretched SWP leadership. Sam (who had been reading Cannon’s Socialism on Trial and about the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 before joining the SWP) later wrote, “While I thought I was joining the SWP of 1938, I began wondering why there were no trade-union fractions.” He joined the Proletarian Orientation Tendency (POT) of the SWP, which, as Sam described it, “challenged the party’s orientation but had no counterposed political program.... The bottom line is that the POT leadership thought we could bring the reformist SWP line to the working class and that would make a difference. So while bemoaning the Barnes leadership’s undemocratic functioning, they never challenged the political program that the organizational abuses flowed from” (“Memories of a 1970s SWP Oppositionist,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 38-39, Summer 1986).

In the SWP’s youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, Sam first met Martha Phillips; as another comrade recalls, Sam “thought very highly of Martha Phillips and of James P. Cannon. These two things are probably related (i.e., that she won him to understanding the importance of Cannon).” Sam joined Martha in the Leninist Faction (LF). Through internal struggle, he fought his way, along with eight other comrades of the LF, toward Trotskyist clarity, centrally on the necessity for a democratic-centralist vanguard party, and thus they all ended up joining the Spartacist League. “Letter of Resignation from the LF of the SWP” (WV No. 14, December 1972), signed by Sam and three other former LF members, describes this process. This was one of several regroupments of experienced leftists that forged the core of Spartacist cadres for many years.

When our comrade Martha Phillips was murdered in Moscow in 1992, Sam was in Tokyo. He wrote us on February 14 of that year about Martha: “We were very close friends for 22 years but lived in the same city (Madison and the Bay Area) for only about 6 or 7 of them. But that never bothered us. We were very happy to be in the same party fighting for the same program. I remember many times we would go drinking together in a bar in Japantown in San Francisco…. On bar napkins we would try to write the Russian and Japanese alphabets while sharing our hopes to do political work in new countries. And we were plotting to some day go drinking together in Vladivostok.”

Sam’s comrade Pam E., who also came over from the Leninist Faction, recalled their days in the Cleveland local, when Sam worked at the U.S. Steel plant in Lorain. Pam wrote that Sam “was a rigger at one point and he would have to get on top of the pipes that were being loaded on the back of trucks—which required good balance—and not slip off or lose his footing. He did well there.... He was not a trade unionist in the party, but a communist in a trade union. He helped build the steel fraction by taking a disparate group of young comrades from all over the country (some fresh off a college campus) and honing their skills and talents.” Sam went on to other industrial union jobs in Chicago, the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

Sam was a mainstay of security details. He was also a party educator, as well as a good writer and reporter. “Sam was the WV reporter during the Morenci copper miner strikes,” wrote one of his former organizers. She recalled the time “when the strikers came under attack and took special care to protect Sam from harm, recognizing that he would tell the story from their point of view.”

Diana Kartsen, the librarian of the Prometheus Research Library, told WV: “Sam did extremely valuable archival work for our party. It covered quite an international array in the history of Trotskyism—from Frank Glass and work in China to Baruch Hirson in South Africa to Dick Fraser in L.A. You’ll see in the PRS bulletin in memory of Dick [No. 3, “In Memoriam—Richard S. Fraser: An Appreciation and Selection of His Work,” 1990] a letter written by Sam about his experience with Dick. As an associate of the PRL, Sam established a friendly relationship with the Workers Library in Johannesburg.”

The Prometheus Research Library in New York has a copy of Sam’s September 1988 senior thesis, “A Short History of Chinese Trotskyism 1928-1941,” which was inspired by Sam’s interviews with Frank Glass. Glass was then 86 years old, in a Los Angeles nursing home where he was “left to wilt on a vine,” as Sam put it, by “an ever increasingly bizarre Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that jettisoned their senior members.” Glass, originally a South African Trotskyist, had been a leading member of the small Trotskyist organization in China prior to World War II—and Sam found him through his connection with Dick Fraser in Los Angeles, thus tying another knot in the net of our history.

In 1988 Sam transferred to Japan. A comrade of his there notes that “most of the articles on Japan and South Korea that appear in WV from 1989 to 1995 were written by him.” He wrote Heroic Defenders of the Red October Revolution: All Honor to Richard Sorge and Ozaki Hotsumi (Spartacist Group Japan pamphlet, November 1994), commemorating these Soviet spies on the 50th anniversary of their execution by the Japanese state.

The last assignment Sam fulfilled was assisting in establishing a section in South Africa. Comrades in South Africa wrote us of their sadness that “such a unique political person died outside our ranks. We believe Sam would have been quite pleased to know that his fine and broad-gauged library is now in the hands of the section where it will be a tool in training future African recruits in a Trotskyist worldview.”

Sam’s skills and political enthusiasms came together in one episode that we can now reveal. In the San Francisco Bay Area in 1984, under the regime of Democratic mayor Dianne Feinstein, a Confederate flag was flying from a Civic Center flagpole. The Spartacist League undertook a campaign to remove this eyesore and incitement to race terror—Richard Bradley twice scaled the flagpole and tore down the flag, making a third climb to install the Union Fort Sumter garrison flag. When “Dixie Dianne” (now Senator, and today, appropriately, a Homeland Security groupie) ordered that flag shredded and put up yet another Confederate flag, we reported that “In the early morning hours of June 29, militants took down not only the banner of the slaveocracy but the entire pole” (“Militants Bring Down Confederate Flag…And the Flagpole,” WV No. 358, 6 July 1984).

WV then printed a letter from “A Worker” (“Timber!” WV No. 359, 20 July 1984) that recounted:

“Myself and a few trusted union brothers entered SF City Plaza…. Using an acetylene cutting torch we first cut out a wedge, or fish mouth, to determine the direction of the fall.... Despite being delayed by a few passing patrol cars we dropped the pole exactly where we planned.... Most important was that nobody was hurt. We regret not having the time to torch the flag itself but we know this downed flag pole delivered a strong message to Feinstein and Co. that this is a union town and that flag will stay down. By doing so we salute the Union Army that fought to rid this country of the barbaric institution of slavery.”

Now, with sorrow at his death but pride in his work, we can tell our readers that “A Worker” was Sam Hunt.