Labor: Break with Democrats, “National Unity” Patriotism!

ILWU Shuts West Coast Ports on May Day

U.S. Out of Iraq, Afghanistan Now! For Class Struggle at Home!

OAKLAND—Movement of cargo at the 29 West Coast ports was brought to a virtual standstill for eight hours on May 1, as members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) refused to work the day shift. Called as a “No Peace, No Work” protest against the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the ILWU work stoppage was also a powerful show of union power in the midst of ongoing contract negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). It took place in open defiance of an April 30 arbitrator’s decision that ordered the union to instruct its members to report for work as usual on May 1. The PMA has cried foul and may be preparing reprisals against the union—the entire workers movement must rally to the defense of the ILWU.

We salute the more than 27,000 longshoremen, both registered men and casuals, who withheld their labor. The ILWU port shutdown points the way to the kind of working-class action that needs to be mobilized against the bloody U.S. imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. But the ILWU leadership politically undermined this action by channeling the ranks’ anger at the Iraqi occupation and desire to defend their union into pro-Democratic Party “national unity” patriotism. Around the same time that the May Day action was first announced, the ILWU endorsed Barack Obama for U.S. imperialist Commander-in-Chief, citing his “opposition to the Iraq war.”

Obama staunchly supports the murderous occupation of Afghanistan. His call for a partial withdrawal of troops from Iraq—sooner (but not immediately) rather than later—reflects that wing of the U.S. ruling class that wants to cut its losses in Iraq in order to better pursue its interests in Iran and elsewhere, with an eye on the huge prize of capitalist restoration in the Chinese deformed workers state. Obama has called for an additional 92,000 combat troops to “build a twenty-first-century military” and threatened to bomb Pakistan.

Imperialist war is not the result of “bad” government policy. Imperialism is capitalism in its prolonged death agony, where a handful of major capitalist powers compete, including through war, for control of markets and raw materials around the world. Workers must take up the struggle against the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the struggle against the capitalist system that breeds imperialist wars. This needs to be linked to the unconditional military defense of China and the other bureaucratically deformed workers states—Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam—against imperialism and internal counterrevolution. You can’t fight against imperialist war by supporting the parties of U.S. imperialism!

On May Day, as a show of their loyalty to U.S. imperialism, the ILWU Local 10 tops in the Bay Area dispatched longshoremen to the Concord Naval Weapons Station to work military cargo aboard the USN Tripoli. Local 10 Executive Board member and elected dispatcher, Mike Villeggiante, told KTVU Channel 2 News that evening, “We feel an obligation to the military to make sure no supplies stop to the troops. We support the troops, we’re just not in support of the war.” Earlier that day, ILWU International President Bob McEllrath issued a grossly chauvinist statement declaring: “Big foreign corporations that control global shipping aren’t loyal or accountable to any country. For them it’s all about making money. But longshore workers are different. We’re loyal to America, and we won’t stand by while our country, our troops, and our economy are destroyed by a war that’s bankrupting us to the tune of 3 trillion dollars.”

McEllrath’s patriotic rant, widely quoted in the media, is an outrageous affront to the May Day tradition of international workers solidarity, as well as to the many foreign-born workers in the ILWU. It was read out from the platform at the ILWU-sponsored antiwar rally of some 1,000 in San Francisco held during the work stoppage. The rally included over 100 longshoremen from Local 10 and the Local 34 clerks union. At the rally, greetings from black death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal were played as protesters chanted, “Free Mumia!” The ILWU International withdrew its request for an officially sanctioned stop-work meeting after the PMA turned it down. However, in Los Angeles, ILWU Local 13 announced and held a stop-work meeting that some 1,000 longshoremen attended. Spartacist supporters at the San Francisco rally and at the L.A. meeting distributed Workers Vanguard and argued against the labor bureaucrats’ declarations of fealty to U.S. imperialism.

While the capitalist rulers enlist the sons and daughters of the working class as cannon fodder for their imperialist military adventures, these are not “our” troops. Nor is the bloody U.S. government “our” government. Soldiers in the bourgeois army serve to defend the rule of the capitalist exploiters, at home and abroad. During the 2002 West Coast port lockout, on the eve of the Iraq invasion, the Bush White House—with the backing of leading California Democrats—invoked Taft-Hartley and threatened to send U.S. troops to occupy the docks. In Iraq, U.S. troops are the enforcers of a vicious occupation that by late 2006 had cost the lives of an estimated 655,000 Iraqis.

In the lead-up to the invasions, we emphasized that the international working class, particularly in the U.S., must stand for the defense of Afghanistan and Iraq against the U.S., while politically opposing the Taliban reactionaries and Saddam Hussein’s bloody capitalist regime. We raised the call for class struggle against the capitalist rulers at home. Today, workers must also take a side: against the occupiers and their allies. Any setback for the imperialist aggressors redounds against the same ruling class that is looting, fleecing and shredding the rights of workers in the U.S., that abandoned the black and poor of the Gulf Coast to Hurricane Katrina. Insofar as the forces on the ground in Iraq aim their fire at the occupiers and their Iraqi lackeys, we call for their military defense against U.S. imperialism, while vehemently opposing Islamic fundamentalism, nationalism and the communal slaughter devastating the Iraqi population. All U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan now!

The San Francisco May Day rally was politically no different from the many liberal peace crawls. This rally, organized by ILWU Local 10 Executive Board member Jack Heyman, was politically dominated by capitalist politicians. Speakers included a representative for black Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, and Cindy Sheehan and Democrat Shirley Golub, both of whom are challenging Nancy Pelosi for her congressional seat. To fight for its own interests as well as those of all the oppressed, the working class must be mobilized independent of and against all capitalist parties. This requires a political struggle against the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, which ties workers to the class enemy, and a fight for a new, class-struggle leadership. This is part of the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party. Break with the Democrats and Greens!

A class-struggle leadership would fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants. On May Day, a number of the largely immigrant and unorganized port truckers turned their rigs around, refusing to cross a picket line set up by Direct Action Against the War and Code Pink at the Union Pacific intermodal facility, which connects the Oakland port to the rail lines. The ILWU should be fighting to extend its wages and working conditions to the poorly paid port truckers and helping to organize them.

Left-Talking Labor Fakers

The call for a “No Peace, No Work” May Day was authored by Jack Heyman in a motion passed in February at the meeting of the ILWU Longshore Division’s Coast Caucus, its highest decision-making body. While the motion itself called for “an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East,” its content was immediately dumped by McEllrath, who described the projected May Day action as one to “honor labor history and express support for the troops by bringing them home safely.” All mention of the occupation of Afghanistan was deep-sixed.

From the outset, Heyman gave a left cover, including through silence, for the International’s red-white-and-blue patriotism. While an April leaflet by Heyman denounced “phony appeals to patriotism,” he has made clear his own appeal to patriotism. At an April 29 press conference sponsored by the Oakland Education Association, Heyman declared: “We want the troops home. That’s what our members said at a meeting we had back in February and it was our Vietnam vets who brought the point home, very close to their hearts. And they said enough is enough, people are dying over there for nothing. It’s not a war about democracy, it’s for oil and empire.”

Heyman made but a nod to the over two million Iraqis killed by the occupation and the UN starvation sanctions imposed by the Clinton administration in the 1990s. He casts opposition to the occupation in terms of the cost in American lives. Local 10 executive board member Clarence Thomas, who emceed the San Francisco May 1 rally with Heyman, denounced the Iraqi occupation from the platform because “It’s killing our children and diverting resources from domestic needs” (emphasis added). The “Call to Action” issued by the Port Workers’ May Day Organizing Committee, led by Heyman and Thomas, was a “butter not guns” appeal to “stop the war.” Its purpose is to reinforce illusions that—with enough pressure and the right Democrats in office—the capitalist government will “change” its priorities.

The trillions now being spent on the occupation in Iraq weren’t being spent on health care, welfare and education before the invasion, including under the Democratic Clinton administration. The capitalists spend on the welfare of the working class only what is necessary to ensure the continued exploitation of labor—or what is wrested from them in hard class struggle.

Double-talkers like Heyman and Thomas politically disarm the working class by giving a “progressive” gloss to the treacherous class collaborationism of the ILWU bureaucracy, of which they are an integral part. At the May Day rally, Heyman’s polemical fire was aimed not at his fellow bureaucrats but rather at Code Pink. Bizarrely, he depicted these overwhelmingly middle-aged, liberal women as veritable wild-eyed radicals who had wanted to jump the gun on labor action against the war. Heyman left his call for “a workers party that is going to lead us to power” to a brief speech at the end of the rally, when most of the participants had left.

Heyman & Co.’s role stands squarely in the tradition set by Communist Party fellow-traveler and historic ILWU leader Harry Bridges, a point that Heyman himself repeatedly makes. Bridges sometimes talked out of the left side of his mouth, but he was also a solid advocate of class collaboration and generally supported the Democratic Party. He supported the U.S. imperialists against their Japanese and German rivals in the interimperialist slaughter of World War II, including by enforcing the “no-strike” pledge. In contrast, Trotskyists opposed all the belligerent imperialist powers, going to jail for their opposition to U.S. imperialism, while at the same time defending the Soviet Union. When the ILWU struck in 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War, Bridges made sure that military cargo headed to Vietnam was worked, even as the union passed many paper resolutions opposing the war and was hailed for joining in antiwar protests.

IG: Apologists for the Labor Fakers

For its part, the Internationalist Group (IG) has downplayed the pro-capitalist politics of the May Day protest organizers and uncritically enthuses over left-talking bureaucrat Jack Heyman. In a 19 April article in its Internationalist, the IG declares: “When we broke the story last month, many rubbed their eyes in disbelief. Yes, it’s for real.” Actually, we rubbed our eyes because we needed a magnifying glass to find in the IG’s earlier March 1 article a brief mention of the patriotism that drenched the ILWU bureaucracy’s promotion of the May Day action.

(Likewise, the dubious Bolshevik Tendency [BT] barely mentions the “patriotic spin” given to the action in a 19 April leaflet, even as it cites Rosa Luxemburg’s famous statement that the choice before the working class is socialism or barbarism and opines that “the ILWU’s action points the way forward.” It is obscene for the BT—an outfit led by the sociopath Bill Logan, who was expelled from our tendency in 1979 for “crimes against communist morality”—to cite the great revolutionary internationalist Luxemburg, using her as a left cover for the chauvinism of the ILWU labor tops.)

The IG’s April article complained that the union tops were presenting the May 1 action “in a ‘social-patriotic’ light.” Proclaiming this to be contrary to the original resolution drawn up by Jack Heyman, the IG neglects to mention that the Caucus resolution’s demand for “an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East” never saw the light of day in any of the union leaflets mobilizing for May 1. That includes Heyman & Co.’s “Call to Action.”

In their first article the IG didn’t even mention the ILWU’s endorsement of Obama. In their second article they lamely opined that “The ILWU leaders’ endorsement of Obama hurts rather than helps the struggle against imperialist war and undercuts the May 1 work stoppage.” How delicately put! The union’s endorsement of Obama provided the entire political framework in which the May Day action played out.

In the IG’s follow-up article on May Day, “Historic ILWU Dock Workers’ Action Points the Way,” Obama again goes unmentioned. The prominence of Democratic and Green Party politicians at the rally is only described as one of its “weaknesses,” which the IG lays at the feet of the ILWU International and San Francisco labor tops. The “butter not guns” appeals at the rally are attributed to unnamed “union speakers,” while Heyman is touted as the spokesman for working-class independence. Left unsaid is that he pushed the very same “butter not guns” reformist politics. Citing Heyman’s remark that the May Day action “was raising the level of struggle from protest to resistance,” the IG pronounces that “it raises the challenge ahead: to go from resistance to a struggle for power” (emphasis in original). But to struggle for power assumes that you oppose the existing power!

As Trotskyists (i.e., genuine Marxists), our purpose is to arm the proletariat with the consciousness and leadership necessary for combat with the forces of the capitalist class. This means taking on the class-collaborationist politics of the trade-union bureaucracy (as well as the politics of those who falsely claim to offer a revolutionary alternative). Not so the IG, which obscures the fact that the trade-union bureaucracy criminally subordinated the May Day work action to pro-Democratic Party pressure politics.

Since at least the 2001 Afghanistan invasion, the IG has issued bombastic proclamations calling to militarily “Defeat U.S. Imperialism” and to “Drive U.S. Imperialists Out of Iraq.” Now, in its article on the May Day action, the IG conveniently omits any mention of taking a side with Afghanistan or Iraq against the U.S. Also left unmentioned is the fact that the ILWU worked military cargo on May Day! For all their hot air about “workers strikes against the war,” this is the same outfit that in 2001 denounced our call for “Class Struggle Against Capitalist Rulers at Home” as “nationalist, economist social-pacifism,” writing, “the emphasis on ‘at home’ is counterposed to the call to defeat the imperialists abroad” (Internationalist, November 2001, emphasis in original). As we wrote in “Worthless Pilots in Stormy Weather” (WV No. 797, 14 February 2003):

“The IG’s oh-so-militant sloganeering has nothing to do with the fight to mobilize workers for a political confrontation with the forces of the capitalist enemy. Instead, the IG denigrates the fight to advance the consciousness of the proletariat and, by so doing, sows illusions in the capacity of the present labor misleaders to lead a fight against the bosses and their state.”

This is exactly what played out on May 1.

The IG is right, however, in pointing out that the “Labor Conference to Stop the War” last October in the Bay Area “set the stage” for the “No Peace, No Work Holiday.” Both the IG and the BT promoted this conference, organized by Jack Heyman and supported by Local 10, as a step on the road to independent working-class action against the war. In reality, this conference allowed occasionally left-talking union bureaucrats and their reformist hangers-on to peddle their wares in the shadow of the Democratic Party and, incidentally, tout sociopathic BT leader Bill Logan as some kind of workers’ leader (see “Labor Opportunists, Renegades Embrace Bill Logan,” WV No. 901, 26 October 2007). At the opening plenary session, San Francisco Labor Council head Tim Paulson gave the pro-Democratic Party game away by appealing for support to the labor contingent at an upcoming antiwar protest calling to “Bring the Troops Home.” Paulson bragged that the planned contingent speaker was Barbara Lee. On the day of the protest, the contingent’s main chant was “Barbara Lee speaks for me.”

Longshoremen are in a position to inflict a direct setback to the imperialist war machine through political strikes and hot-cargoing military goods. But this tremendous power is kept in check by their current leadership, which understands that militant action would tear into their reactionary game of preaching reliance on the bosses’ state and its political agents, particularly those in the Democratic Party. For labor to take the offensive against imperialist war will require a different kind of leadership, one guided by a program of class struggle and able to instill class consciousness, educating workers on the way to defeat imperialism. The attacks by the capitalist ruling class and its government against working people at home and abroad underline the need to build a multiracial workers party to fight for a workers government. The only way to put an end to imperialist war and capitalist exploitation and oppression is through international socialist revolution.