Jack Heyman: ILWU: on the anti-war dockers strike and Barack Obama
http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/2258
Jack Heyman: ILWU: on the anti-war dockers strike and Barack Obama
ILWU (US dockers union) Executive board member who organised first strike against Iraq war on mayday this year, speaks about the recent strike against the war and Barack Obama.
The Mayday action was the first labor strike against any war in the US, not just Iraq, that was a critical fault of the anti-Vietnam war movement, that we weren’t able to link up the labor movement with the anti-war movement. I know its happened in France, Austrialia and some other countries but never the USA.
Background to the ILWU
The ILWU really became a force within the labor movement based on the 1934 strike, when all ports on the west coast were on strike and there was a general strike in SF. A large part of the leadershpio of that strike came from the CP. The politics of our union came from the Stalnists of that time. In 1995 there was a founding conference of a labor party in the USA, we attempted to intervene on the basis of a labor party that would fight on a programme in the working class. But it was an idea that dried on the vine, in large part because the TU bureaucracy in the USA is joined at the hip with the Democrats and they will do whatever they can to stop an independent working class movement in the US.
Barack Obama
Barack Obama is not the first black to run for the President of the USA, when I was a college student, I 1964 the SWP, which was a Trotskyist party in the 1964 ran a black candidate called Clinton DuBarry, that is the only time I voted for a presidential candidate in the USA.
But Obama is the first candidate of a major party, and he’s also the candidate the trade union bureaucracy including the ILWU have supported, but Obama is cut from the same cloth as all the other standard bearers of the Democratic Party. He has already said, he’s not going to withdraw troops from Iraq and that the major draw down of troops with start two years from now. Four years ago at the Democratic Convention, Obama said that the USA should attack Iran if they were attempting to develop nuclear capability and at the Apec the Zionist lobby group a couple of weeks ago he re-iterated his ardent support for Israel and called for Jerusalem to be the sole capital of the Zionist state, shunning the Palestinians altogether, on Cuba he initially said that he would meet with anyone, now what he says that is he would sit down with the Cuban government on condition that the Gusanos, the right wing Cuban reactionaries were also present and that’s just not going to happen. On the black question he has said very little, in terms of being the great black hope, I suppose a lot of blacks and not just blacks believe that he is going to bring change, but its clear from his remarks and how he has voted he’s a traditional capitalist politician and not eve that liberal.
In the state of Georgia there will be a primary with a black liberal woman, Regina Thomas running against a white conservative John Barrell, who is conservative and pro-war. Obama supports Barrell. The trade union bureaucracy will support Obama. The workers don't need him.
What labor needs
What labor needs to do to build a working class party is to begin to organise actions independent of the government like the ones we did around the Iraq war. Laying the basis for a political separation from the capitalist parties. When I run for union I stand for an independent working class party based on a class struggle programme, but its never really been successful. So what kind of a party needs to be built in the USA?
We don’t need the kind of a labor party that you have in Britain, that enforces anti-union legislation, that supports imperialist wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, or like they have in Brazil, they are throwing peasants off the land, they support Nafta, they support free trade and privatisation, which the Liverpool dockers were up against a few years ago, it is in the concrete that the character of the party is determined.
The kind of workers party we need in a the USA is a revolutionary party, like that which made the revolution in Russia, of Lenin and Trotsky. And that might sound far fetched but workers are being oppressed throughout the capitalist world, some people were cynical that there could even be strikes against the war, by reaching to workers were they are now we can start to raise the class consciousness of the workers.
How we won the strike
The resolution that we came up with for an action, appeared fiction to some people, they thought it really wasn’t possible in the working class in the belly of the beast. Our union has done actions in the past, but never against the war. In recent history, we had in 1984 a struggle on the docks against apartheid in South Africa, for 11 days we stopped a ship that had come from South Africa with cargo. A community picket line was put up and the longshoremen honoured that picket line. The union officials worked with the community groups, because of the anti-union laws. It was sent to other ports on the west coast and they refused to work the ship as well. And that took palce in the Reagan years when people said that it was a period of reaction and they acquiesced to that. And given the political context in which it took place it made it that much more important.
In 1999 we took action on the case of Mumia Abu Jamal, who was framed for killing a police officer, the evidence is quite clear that he didn’t do it, including a witness who confessed to the murder but who is not allowed to testify. So in 1999 we shut down all the ports on the west coast to demand freedom for Mumia Abu Jamal, and that was the first strike in defence of a political prisoner, thatwas a one day strike from Canada to Mexico.
In 1997 I went to Liverpool to bring solidarity to the dockers, at that time the dockers were very isolated, Bill Morris of the TGWU did not give them support they were obeying Thatcherite laws. But the Liverpool dockers are cut from a different kind of cloth, so when the younger lads set up picket lines the veteran dockers refused to cross that line and they were all sacked, 500 Liverpool dockers. So because they were isolated by Bill Morris and the TUC they decided to spread the strike internationally and they put up picket lines in New York and New Jersey which were honoured by the east cost longshoremen. The year after we took action on the west coast against a ship from Liverpool, we refused to off load the cargo, from Thamesport for 4 days. That was a significant struggle because it was the first time we conducted an international campaign of solidarity. That ship went from Oakland to Vancouver Canada and longshoremen refused to off load that ship and at two ports in Japan dockers refused to off load the ship. We know that strike was effective because the web site we set up was hit many times by the maritime employers.
The resolution on the Iraq and Afghanistan war was introduced to the longshoremen caucus, which is the democratically elected body which represents every port on the west coast from Bellingham near Canada down to San Diego near Mexico, and in the past because the trade union bureaucracy is conservative and because ports reflect the areas that they come from they hadn’t really considered anti war action, but this time it was different we put forward a motion, that characterised the action as an imperialist war we openly criticised the democrats who have a majority in Congress but continue to fund the war, we called for action at the point of production because that’s where workers have their power. The only class who are capable of making a revolution.
The members debated it back and forth, but what was different is that the veterans from the Viet Nam war said enough is enough, we’ve been lied to about the war, the democrats aren’t going to end it, demonstrating in the streets isn’t going to end it, you had a demonstration here in London of two million, I know because I was there and spoke with Bob Crow from the platform and it didn’t stop the war. We’ve had millions of people demonstrating world wide against the war. The veterans said that demonstrating isn’t enough, we have to raise the level of struggle, we have the power to shut down every port on the West Coast, let’s do that. And the enthusiasm was tremendous.
The bureaucracy tried to undermine it, but they couldn’t every port was shut down. The bureaucracy gave it their own tilt, they made it sound like some patriotic gesture, but believe me if you were at the caucus you would know it was anything but patriotic, we wanted to get the troops out of there, out of the middle east, it wasn’t just about Iraq and Afghanistan, to withdraw them immediately.
The bureaucracy then capped it off by saying they supported Obama, but none of that was in the resolution, in fact it criticised the Democratic party, that’s why we need a fighting programme to oust the bureaucracy, its not just the TUC, or Bill Morris, in the USA the bureaucracy is holding the workers back from building its own party and waging struggle against imperialist war.
Wed 13, August 2008 @ 11:41