At "Labor Conference to Stop the War" Workshop

Labor Opportunists, Renegades Embrace Bill Logan

In the last issue of Workers Vanguard we printed the preface to the recently published International Communist League bulletin “The Logan Dossier,” documenting the facts and findings leading to the expulsion of one Bill Logan from our international tendency in 1979 as a “proven, massive liar and a sexual sociopath who manipulated the private lives of comrades for reasons of power politics and his own aberrant appetites and compulsions in the guise of Marxism” (see “The Logan Dossier,” WV No. 900, 12 October). Among his crimes, Logan used his organizational position as chairman of our Australian section to break up couples and to try to force a young woman to get an abortion and, failing that, to give up her baby. Today, Logan heads up a dubious outfit calling itself the International Bolshevik Tendency (BT). As we wrote in “The Logan Dossier”: “In publishing the documentary record of the Logan trial, we aim to make clear to a new generation of leftists that the likes of Logan have no place in the workers movement.”

Yet at an October 20 Bay Area “Labor Conference to Stop the War,” Logan masqueraded as a bona fide “workers’ leader” from New Zealand. He participated in a workshop on “Class Struggle and the War” chaired by Jack Heyman, an executive board member of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 and the central chairman of this “labor conference.” Logan retailed stories of “historical examples of workers political action against imperialist war.” To hear this man, who apes all the attitudes of class privilege and imperialist elitism of the long-decayed British empire, cynically intone the Wobbly slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all,” which the ILWU adopted as its own, was an outrage. A Spartacist League speaker intervened to expose this revolting and dangerous fraud: “I am offended and disgusted that this man, Bill Logan, is welcomed at this conference. He has committed crimes against communist morality and against working people.”

Heyman tried to interrupt our speaker and defended Logan against what Heyman called “personal slanders.” Far from slander, our exposure of Logan’s crimes is an elementary defense of the workers movement. Yet sitting silent through Heyman’s attack on our speaker was none other than Internationalist Group (IG) leader Jan Norden. When he was still a leading member of our organization, Norden powerfully and rightly indicted Logan as “a criminally sociopathic individual who should be removed from all working-class organizations and other working-class organizations should be warned” (“On the Logan Regime Part III,” International Information Bulletin No. 16, November 1983, which is available to the public). Now, taking the floor not long after our comrade at the conference, Norden’s only mention of Logan was a brief, oh-so-comradely criticism of Logan’s description of a 1930s Australian labor boycott of pig iron to Japan as an example of working-class struggle against war. Thus, Norden joined the labor opportunist Heyman and the renegades of the BT in legitimizing the twisted monster Logan as part of the workers movement.

When Norden and his small coterie of followers defected from our organization in 1996, Logan’s BT hoped to woo them on the basis of shared hostility to the Spartacist League, the BT’s central animating principle. At the time, Negrete, a present leading member of the IG, responded on behalf of the Norden group: “I personally witnessed the BT’s lies, provocative behavior and unashamed orientation to the white labor aristocracy from the beginning…. The bottom-feeding scavengers of the BT live off anti-communism.” (Negrete’s 25 July 1996 “A Note on the ‘Bolshevik’ Tendency” was included in the Norden group’s anti-Spartacist diatribe, From a Drift Toward Abstentionism to Desertion from the Class Struggle.) But politics makes for strange bedfellows and common bottom feeders.

In its propaganda, the IG issues thundering cries for the defeat of U.S. imperialism, promoting its credentials for “uniquely” calling for labor strikes against the war. But the real face behind the IG’s bombast is the trade-union opportunist Jack Heyman, a buddy the IG shares in common with Logan’s BT. There was much mutual flattery among them as Logan saluted Heyman for his role in “militant labor actions,” while the IG promoted Heyman’s conference as a potential “important step toward bringing to bear workers’ power against the imperialist war” (“ILWU Dock Workers Under Attack,” Internationalist, October 2007). Far from pointing to the mobilization of the power of labor against the brutal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, this conference was little more than a talk shop for a bunch of sometimes left-sounding bureaucrats and a gaggle of reformists and liberals to peddle their wares in the shadow of the Democratic Party, the other party of U.S. imperialism.

In his remarks at the opening plenary session, Tim Paulson, the head of the San Francisco Labor Council, gave the game away as to what kind of “labor action” was being promoted here. Appealing for trade unionists to join the labor contingent at the October 27 antiwar protest in San Francisco, initiated by the ANSWER coalition and United for Peace and Justice around the social-patriotic call to “Bring the Troops Home,” Paulson boasted that this contingent would have as its speaker Democrat Barbara Lee, “the first and bravest of all the Congressional people.” Such “unity” with the parties of the capitalist class enemy has long meant going after the revolutionaries by any means necessary. Trotting Logan out at this conference was a calculated provocation orchestrated by his BT, not only against the Spartacist League but against the workers movement as a whole. But for the IG, embracing Logan, the revolting antithesis of the liberating goals of Marxism, was the admission price, happily paid, into the pro-Democratic Party “antiwar” swamp in the Bay Area.

We intervened in this conference with our revolutionary program against imperialist war. We also urged participants to join us in labor-centered protest action to free death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a number of people signed on to a Partisan Defense Committee statement demanding that this innocent man be freed. We are committed to arming the working class with the consciousness, confidence and fighting spirit needed to wage real combat against the imperialists and their dirty wars against the workers and oppressed of the world. Our exposure of Logan’s crimes is part of that commitment. As we wrote in the preface to “The Logan Dossier”:

“We strive for a society in which all forms of social oppression, exploitation and degradation—the warped byproducts of material scarcity—will be things of the past. To this end, we seek to make the proletariat—though shaped by the deformities of capitalist class rule—conscious of its historic role as the gravedigger of the capitalist system, and of class society as a whole. Power politics, lying and sexual manipulation are antithetical to this purpose.... There is no place for the likes of a William King Logan in our movement.”