How to Get an ILWU Boycott of Military Goods to Israel

Letter to the Editor of Workers Vanguard

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to Emily Turnbull’s letter to the editor printed under the title “Report from the Convention: ILWU Rejects Boycott of Military Cargo to Israel” in your September 28 issue. Yes, as she wrote, I initiated the resolution calling for the ILWU to refuse to handle war cargo to Israel, but once it was passed (unanimously) at the May Day union meeting, it became Local 10’s resolution. Referring to it as “Heyman’s resolution” throughout her long letter is a not-so-subtle attempt to make it appear as one person’s opinion.

The letter’s claim that the resolution “was not handed out for members to read” is, typically, bogus. Not only was it distributed at the main entrance to the union hall, and a stack placed with other union literature by the podium, as it was being handed out, she came up to get a few more copies. The claim that there was no serious discussion of what it would take to implement the resolution is just as bogus. The resolution was to be submitted to the ILWU Convention. As for the all too typical arrogant dismissal of it as one more “paper resolution” which are “a dime a dozen in Local 10,” this is downright ludicrous. The motion said specifically “the ILWU will refuse to handle military cargo to Israel” and “will honor picket lines protesting the war on Gaza.” The ILWU International leadership led by retiring president Willie Adams mobilized to defeat it precisely because it was a call for very definite action. So instead, he got the Convention to pass a motion calling for a ceasefire, which really was a meaningless paper resolution.

It’s obvious that if it had passed the Convention, the resolution approved by Local 10 could have sparked “hot cargo” solidarity actions of dock workers around the world refusing to load arms to Israel, as requested by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, Gaza. On top of that, for you to claim that this was an empty resolution is an affront to the former Militant Caucus of the ILWU, supported by the then-revolutionary Spartacist League (SL). In that tradition I fought for international union action in solidarity with the fired Liverpool dockers in 1997 and with the Charleston, South Carolina longshoremen (2000) battling a scab operation. As business agent I defended our union against a PMA lockout and the government threat to occupy West Coast ports in 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. But the in numerous key longshore struggles the SL was AWOL, or outright denounced them (as you did in the battle to unionize a scab facility in Longview, Washington). And you know it.

The May 2024 Local 10 Caucus resolution calling for refusal to handle war cargo to Israel cited the ILWU’s own actions in solidarity with the besieged working class in Chile (1978) and El Salvador (1980) by refusing to load weapons for the military dictatorships. The letter claims that by citing these examples, “Heyman significantly underplayed the obstacles to his resolution’s implementation.” So referring to the ILWU’s past actions refusing to handle war cargo is some kind of cover-up? What cynical, twisted reasoning! This is the rationale of defeatists and betrayers who have no confidence in the power of the working class to fight back against capitalism and imperialism. Yet another example of how, while your line keeps on changing, your modus operandi has not. The letter’s author maligned these historic actions as “one time actions taken in conjunction with a section of liberal Democratic Party opinion.” What does that even mean, that some liberal Democrats said they liked them? (Meanwhile, it is your organization that calls to “bring pressure down” on “liberal and progressive politicians.”)

The letter printed in your paper also smears Workers Vanguard’s coverage of those powerful actions at the time they occurred. Take the June 30, 1978 WV. The headline is “First U.S. Union Action Since ’73 Coup, ILWU Stops Bombs to Chile!”. It states: “The refusal of ILWU longshoremen to load the deadly cargo on any ship marks the first time since the CIA- backed Pinochet junta overthrew the democratically elected Allende government, outlawed trade unions, and jailed and killed tens of thousands of Chilean workers that an American trade union has implemented such a genuine act of solidarity with their Chilean class brothers.”

On the ILWU’s 1980 boycott of arms to the blood-drenched Salvadoran junta, look at the January 2, 1981 WV, headlined: “ILWU Boycotts Military Shipments to El Salvador!” It states: “This boycott is thoroughly needed and can be a powerful act of labor solidarity with the El Salvadoran workers and peasants.” As we say in Local 10: ’Nuff said. (Since you have wiped out years of articles from your web site, your readers can at least find older issues on the Marxist Internet Archives at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workersvanguard/index.htm)

The letter claims that Local 10’s May 2024 call for the union to boycott military shipments to Israel was, supposedly, “the kind of action that the ILWU has never [emphasis in original] undertaken because its leadership has always backed the liberal wing of U.S. imperialism.” Is that so? What about the April 1999 march in San Francisco of 25,000 protesters, headed up by an ILWU Local 10 contingent chanting, “An injury to one, is an injury to all – Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!” It was liberal Democrats who framed Mumia and have kept him in jail for the last 43 years for a crime of which he is innocent. Why this omission? Oh, that’s right, because the Spartacist League ostentatiously didn’t march and then arrogantly dismissed that remarkable action.

Yes, the ILWU has had paper motions, like when it passed a resolution against the Vietnam War in 1971, but continued to load military cargo for that war, a betrayal that I criticized at the time as a supporter of the SL and have continued to do so. When I was a seaman in the SL-supported Militant-Solidarity Caucus of the National Maritime Union, we opposed the Vietnam War and called on seamen and other maritime workers to take actions against the war. Workers Vanguard No. 2, November 1971, headlined “For Labor Political Strikes Against the War,” and called for workers boycotts of war cargo. But when the basic issue was posed point-blank in late 2002 in the run-up to the Iraq War at the time of the lockout of the ILWU by the shipping bosses, you suddenly dropped the call to “hot cargo” war material and didn’t call to strike in defiance of the Taft-Hartley injunction. Too hot to handle, apparently.

And then there was the historic May Day 2008 shutdown of all West Coast ports in the U.S. and Canada protesting the imperialist war in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the initiative of the Internationalist Group, which I support, a resolution calling for that was hammered out and passed by Local 10, and then later by the ILWU Coast Caucus. But in an ostentatious display of abstentionist disdain, the SL again refused to join the union march calling for an end to the imperialist war as demonstrators proceeded along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, with the Brass Band playing the Internationale. You did nothing to build the first workers strike action in 90 years against a U.S. imperialist war.

In her letter/report, your supporter Emily Turnbull says she went to the ILWU convention in Vancouver last June “to fight for the resolution” calling for the union to refuse to handle war cargo to Israel. Except according to her verbatim account in the letter of her remarks at the Resolutions Committee, she talked about Biden and the war, but made no mention of the resolution or the call for the union to refuse to handle war cargo to Israel. I wonder why not. Was it because, as her letter said, she “knew there was little chance of the resolution passing”?

More recently, in the October three-day strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) on the East and Gulf Coasts, a September 17 Workers Vanguard leaflet/supplement says nothing about a union boycott of arms to Israel. Even after ILA president Harold Daggett ostentatiously declared that the union would “proudly continue to work all military shipments” during the impending strike, an October 12 WV leaflet could only muster a statement that longshoremen not handling military cargo would be a nice thing, without actually calling for it in the series of demands the leaflet raised.

Nor in Turnbull’s October 30 campaign flier for president of Local 10 was there any call for labor boycotts of war cargo to Israel. No mention of capitalism, either. As for the ILWU contract which gave the maritime bosses a green light to introduce job-killing automation so long as the work is under ILWU jurisdiction, her flier says the union should have “fought for better.” Sounds very much like the labor faker head of the old AFL Samuel Gompers who, when asked what he wanted, replied “More!” I.e., don’t abolish capitalism, just beg for higher wages. The Internationalist Group put out a leaflet calling to fight for union control of technology, a transitional demand. In contrast, recent SL-supported campaigns in union elections are a retreat into the old “mini-max” reformist model of a minimum program of strictly trade-union demands with general calls for a maximum program (workers party, black liberation) tacked on at the end.

To actually fight the trade-union bureaucracy, “the labor lieutenants of capital,” requires class-struggle caucuses or tendencies in the trade unions to oust the labor traitors, in conjunction with building a revolutionary workers party to fight against capitalist exploitation, racism and war, and for a workers government. That won’t be done by an outfit that keeps changing its spots but not its methods, while inventing excuses for not calling to “hot cargo” arms to a genocidal war.

Jack Heyman
retired member, ILWU Local 10
December 23, 2024

WV Reply to Jack Heyman

Though Jack Heyman, like Emily Turnbull before him (see WV No. 1182, 17 September 2024), has written to WV in support of the same resolution adopted by ILWU Local 10 but rejected by the ILWU International convention last year, any similarity ends there. Turnbull’s letter stressed that union militants must counter all sections of the pro-capitalist ILWU leadership and the individualistic consciousness that leadership reinforces among the ranks in order to make the resolution’s proposed boycott of military goods to Israel a reality. Heyman strongly objects to Turnbull’s letter—hailing Local 10’s “progressive” tradition, citing her alleged falsehoods and a litany of the Spartacist League’s past sectarian crimes and denouncing us both for supposedly having abandoned the hot-cargo call.

This style of point-scoring polemic—which we ourselves once specialized in—is not going to get us any closer to the actual mobilization of longshore workers for the desired end. After all, the hurdles to concerted anti-imperialist action are enormous, and the current forces working to bring it about precious few. The only issue that matters here is how to set the ILWU and the rest of the working class in motion against the U.S. rulers and Zionist butchers.

The resolution in question, which Heyman initiated, calls for open-ended refusal to handle arms to Israel—that is, a standing boycott. No doubt, precisely such action was and is urgently needed to win a lasting ceasefire and free Palestine. But simply passing a resolution does not make it so. This straightforward observation is not a denigration of any such resolution, but rather a recognition that this is still a far cry from implementation of the hot-cargo call. Every resolution is a paper resolution, regardless of content, until implemented or otherwise wielded to make a difference in practice.

To bridge that gulf, all the obstacles to action must be acknowledged and combatted. But it is these very obstacles that Heyman insists on largely sweeping under the rug, reducing the problem to the opposition of then-ILWU International president Willie Adams and his immediate collaborators in the union bureaucracy. But what about the allegiances of, say, the Local 10 leadership? Support for the liberal wing of U.S. imperialism is not simply the product of a “hard right” turn by the recent International leadership, but rather has been the calling card of the “progressive” component of the ILWU bureaucracy going back to the days of the union’s founder, Harry Bridges.

As Turnbull observed, “The ‘progressive’ union bureaucrats are no less a part of the problem; if anything, their occasional paper criticism of U.S. foreign policy allows them to more effectively demobilize union struggle.” At every level, the union is in the hands of those who consider the fate of longshore workers to be tied to the fate of U.S. imperialism. Compounding the problem, their betrayals over the years have severely weakened the union’s fighting capacity.

Step One: Face Reality Squarely

To be serious about building toward hot-cargo action, one must assess the state of the class forces in an honest fashion. On the one hand, U.S. imperialism is unwavering in backing the Zionist state and its genocidal war. This support is fundamentally based on strategic interests, not moral shortcomings. With the U.S. ruling class trying to claw back lost ground on the world stage, it is not about to tolerate even the slightest hint of opposition to those interests—witness the heavy-handed clampdown on the student encampment protesters, first by the Democrats and now Trump. And the encampments were not anti-imperialist in their objectives. How much more furious would be the response to workers causing waves to crash into U.S. imperialism’s military operation? Proper preparation to counter this inevitable blowback is of the essence.

On the other hand, the ILWU is heavily divided against itself. Turnbull expressed it well in her letter: “The ILWU tops’ enforcement of the division of the longshoremen into steady men, A’s, B’s and casual workers has created a dog-eat-dog mentality that is the main obstacle to collective action in defense of the union itself, much less the besieged Palestinians.” The corrosive tiers have fueled a scramble over jobs, and military cargo is the bread-and-butter of some ILWU members, especially in Local 23 in Tacoma. In short, union militants and the left must intervene to convince longshore workers that it is in their core interests to boycott military goods to Israel, spark broader labor action and deliver a resounding blow on behalf of the Palestinians and themselves despite the fact that doing so would incur U.S. imperialism’s wrath and result in some loss of work in the short term.

Turnbull’s skepticism about the prospects for the hot-cargo resolution at the ILWU convention was not an expression of defeatism, but rather a sober assessment based on her own experience. As a member of the Local 10 executive board at the time, she had pushed for a labor-centered stop-work rally in the Oakland port on May Day 2024 in defense of the Palestinians. The proposed rally would have provided an occasion to establish for longshore and other port workers the link between their interests and those of the Palestinians—a prerequisite to launching wider labor action, including a boycott of military goods to Israel. But the Local 10 tops quashed the proposal, and Heyman ignores this chapter of the struggle inside Local 10 to get it to meaningfully raise the banner of Palestinian liberation in action.

Of course, some of the same officials later voted for the hot-cargo resolution. Did they oppose the former and support the latter because they judged a one-time stop-work rally insufficient to champion the Palestinian cause? Hardly. These seemingly contradictory votes can easily be explained, though. Local 10 leaders did not want to commit themselves to any protest that might put them at odds with U.S. imperialism on the burning question of the day, while feeling it necessary to preserve their “progressive” credentials, safe in the knowledge that the convention would not go for hot-cargo action.

Heyman refuses to recognize this dynamic when doing so is essential in order to exploit contradictions, unmask the pretenders and better press for hot-cargo action. Instead, he objects to Turnbull’s references to “Heyman’s resolution”—a nod of credit—as an attempt to paint it “as one person’s opinion” and insists it be called “Local 10’s resolution.” But if this resolution represented Local 10’s strongly-felt opinion, where were the Local 10 officials clamoring for its adoption at the convention? Where were the Local 10 statements denouncing its suppression by the International? Where was the subsequent push to disrupt business as usual at the Oakland port to aid the Palestinians?

The very burial of the hot-cargo resolution at the convention would seem to suggest a serious discussion of what it would take for it to be implemented was merited. But Heyman shoves aside any consideration of the barriers to its realization, reducing the question to whether or not the motion was run up the chain of command in the union. As should be obvious, though, the closer the ILWU bureaucracy got to being associated with hot-cargo action, the greater was going to be its resistance—which only a groundswell from the ranks could have broken through.

Over the decades, the ILWU leadership has only ever sanctioned hot-cargo action reluctantly in response to sustained pressure from below—and then only when the shifting winds of liberal ruling-class opinion could be reconciled with such action (more later). The ILWU’s one-time refusal to handle war cargo to Chile in 1978 and El Salvador in 1980 was preceded by the SL-supported Longshore Militant Caucus’s years-long intervention to rally support for standing boycotts. Heyman handing out the recent resolution for the first time shortly before the start of the meeting where it was voted barely gave workers time to read the resolution, much less be steeled in their support. Sometimes the press of events necessitates the launch of a campaign in such a last-minute fashion, but then one follows up afterwards by taking the question to the membership in a systematic way. This did not happen. Now, Heyman dismisses any suggestion that more needed (and needs) to be done to solidify longshore workers in this fight to force the hand of the ILWU bureaucracy.

Step Two: Recognize the Obstacles

Preparing a sustained union battle against U.S. imperialism is not possible unless one is clear in every respect. In response to Turnbull’s remark that an ongoing boycott of military shipments is “the kind of action that the ILWU has never taken,” Heyman begins to inventory ILWU actions of recent decades. But these were all one-day port shutdowns, usually organized in accordance with the contract with the PMA bosses, which allows for monthly union stop-work meetings. Such protest, no matter how just the cause, is not one and the same as the standing boycott mandated by last year’s resolution.

If the ILWU’s May Day 2008 mobilization against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had carried over into a blanket refusal to handle war material, the stakes would have been significantly higher. To be clear, this is not to sneer at the protest that occurred or to downplay the problem of our sectarianian failure to fight to put it on an anti-imperialist footing at the time. The living struggle provides a testing ground for the contest of program that can propel workers toward more open confrontation with the ruling class.

With this in mind, support to an exemplary action and ensuring its success must always be accompanied by an exposure of the bureaucracy as a brake on the struggle. Heyman, though, does the exact opposite: Despite hailing numerous ILWU actions from the 1970s to the near-present, he offers not a word of criticism of the union bureaucrats who sanctioned these actions. For example, Heyman points to May Day 2008 as “the first workers strike action in 90 years against a U.S. imperialist war,” full stop. But while the coastwide port shutdown that day was a powerful display of the kind of working-class action needed to end the imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the ILWU International and Local 10’s “progressive” leaders sabotaged its potential impact by tailoring it to promote the candidacy of Democrat Barack Obama, who was making hay out of worries in bourgeois circles that the quagmire in Iraq was costing U.S. imperialism more than it was worth. They even censored speakers against the war in Afghanistan, which Obama wanted to intensify.

Heyman’s consistent silence on the motives of the union’s “progressive” officials is a telltale sign that he does not recognize these left-talking class-collaborationists as an obstacle. Such prettification of pro-capitalist leadership runs throughout his letter. Hence, Heyman asks: what does it even mean when Turnbull noted that the ILWU’s job actions that stopped the shipment of war material to Chile (1978) and El Salvador (1980) were “taken in conjunction with a sector of liberal Democratic Party opinion”? The answer is contained in the very WV articles that Heyman cites:

“Whatever the truth about the murky chronology of events that underlie the abrupt reversal in ILWU policy, what seems unmistakable is that the actions of [ILWU International president] Jimmy Herman & Co. have been closely synchronized with a shift in the attitude of Democratic Party leaders toward the Pinochet dictatorship. After a period of pressuring the junta to adopt cosmetic reforms, the Carter administration has recently begun openly expressing displeasure with Pinochet—an obvious invitation to a palace coup to overthrow the tyrant the U.S. helped install. Herman’s June 14 press release announcing the boycott was swiftly followed by an endorsement from Senator Ted Kennedy.”

“This boycott is thoroughly needed and can be a powerful act of labor solidarity with the El Salvadoran workers and peasants. But why is it so belated? Herman’s press statement explained: ‘Our policy in this matter is in line with the suspension of military assistance ordered by President Carter.’”

Crucially, the Longshore Militant Caucus had been fighting for years for the ILWU to make good on its paper resolution calling for a boycott of arms to Pinochet’s Chile. But even then, the timing of the bureaucracy’s decision to relent and sign off on these actions coincided with growing concerns within the Carter administration that Pinochet and the El Salvadoran junta were damaging the “human rights” image of U.S. imperialism. We saluted both actions at the time (and today), while warning in the words of the Militant Caucus that “genuine acts of solidarity can’t be carried out by those reformists who tie themselves to the dictates of the imperialist U.S. government.” In the case of the genocide in Gaza, Democratic Party support to Israel has been ironclad, and thus the ILWU bureaucracy has been steadfast against an arms boycott.

Step Three: Challenge the Obstacles

Local 10’s “progressive” leaders have long aligned the union with Democratic Party liberals, whose economic pounding and moral blackmail of workers sent many into Trump’s camp. Now, as right-wing reaction guns for the most vulnerable sections of the working class and by extension the unions themselves, they have no means of uniting labor across the partisan divide to make a much-needed defensive stand other than appeals to past tradition and abstract principles that do not put food on the table. The task of the hour is to lay out before the working class as a whole that its immediate and long-term material interests are bound up with repelling Trump’s attacks on immigrants, federal workers and all other working people. But that is impossible while limiting oneself to general appeals to solidarity and refusing to reject the poison of liberalism.

In her letter, Turnbull describes how the Biden-Trump polarization—that is, support to one or the other of the competing factions in the imperialist ruling class—hung over everything at the ILWU convention. Aware of this state of play, Turnbull focused her comments to the Resolutions Committee on the need for the union to break free of Democratic Party opinion. For the record, these comments began, “I spoke and voted for this resolution in Local 10, and I urge the convention to adopt it.” She emphasized: “It is a crime that our union leadership is fully in the pocket of Genocide Joe. To tell the workers that Biden is the only alternative for the working class is to fuel the polarization. It’s time we fought back!” Since then, new ILWU International president Bobby Olvera has sworn off automatic ILWU support to the Democrats, which is simply a recognition that Trump now has final say on who gets the scraps from the imperialist table.

Under conditions of a union bureaucracy thoroughly aligned with imperialist politics and rock-solid U.S. imperialist support for Israel, how are longshore workers to be galvanized to compel the ILWU to initiate an arms boycott? Those delegates who spoke in favor of the hot-cargo resolution advocated adoption on the basis of moral obligation, invoking the horrors in Gaza and the “progressive” tradition of the ILWU. This certainly was not going to do the job.

A case in point is the November 2023 “block the boat” protests. When pro-Palestinian protesters learned that the Cape Orlando—then moored at a storage dock in the Port of Oakland not worked by the ILWU—was scheduled to transport military goods to Israel, they assembled a picket in an effort to prevent the ship from sailing. By leaping into action, they succeeded in delaying its departure. The protesters, though, were hamstrung by liberalism. They called for Biden and Pelosi to “do right” by the Palestinians, appealing to workers to participate without making clear that the goal must be to bend the will of the imperialists, not seek their moral enlightenment. Most Local 10 members did not even know about the picket, and work at the port continued as usual. There was no official ILWU contingent, much less one ready to pack a punch against the imperialist oppressors of U.S. workers and the Palestinians alike.

The Cape Orlando sailed to Tacoma to have its military cargo loaded. There, unlike in Oakland, the ship was expected to be worked by the ILWU—in particular Local 23, whose leadership makes little pretense of being “progressive” and membership includes many Trump enthusiasts. Moreover, their bread-and-butter is in no small part work for the U.S. military. Instead of seeking to generate broader support in Local 23 for hot-cargo action against the U.S. ruling class that has made life miserable for large swaths of this country’s working class while wreaking carnage in Gaza, protesters again limited themselves to moral appeals for a better U.S. imperialism.

Local 23 members honored the picket line at the Cape Orlando. But they did so on the basis of a contractual provision that allows longshoremen to stop work in the face of threats to their health and safety (until an arbitrator rules otherwise). In the past, Local 10 leaders have invoked the same provision to justify honoring “community pickets” against Zim ships. Far from building support for international labor solidarity, such “health and safety” threats have bred cynicism and increased opposition to losing pay in support of “outside” causes,” including in Local 10.

Predictably, the U.S. army moved in swiftly to load the Cape Orlando, which set off with only a minor delay. To have achieved any better outcome would have required a determined membership combined with an anti-imperialist leadership possessing a plan to counter this very possibility. Instead of helping raise consciousness that the struggles of U.S. workers and the Palestinians advance together, the Cape Orlando picket line only cemented opposition in Local 23 to the Palestinian cause. Most of the Tacoma delegation at the union convention a few months later spoke against the hot-cargo resolution on the grounds that they feared further loss of military work.

As Turnbull argues in her letter, “The only way to move the workers to action to free Palestine is by making clear that doing so is crucial to advancing their class interests at the expense of the common enemy”—U.S. imperialism. This isn’t a matter of repeating revolutionary-sounding slogans, but actually challenging the false consciousness of the workers and demonstrating that their interests are not going to be met unless they pursue a different course. How are longshore workers to be mobilized in action to stop arms shipments to Israel when even the most elementary union solidarity with one another on the job has been eroded by tier divisions that pit worker against worker in a struggle to get, or stay, ahead? Cutting through the every-man-for-himself consciousness that the bureaucracy has bred in the membership is crucial for the ILWU to be able to unleash its collective power in defense of itself, as well as oppressed peoples abroad.

Turnbull, who founded the Committee to End Tier Segregation early last year, has put the battle against the tiers on the map in Local 10 to an extent it never was before. The current ILWU leadership, which upholds the tier divisions in collaboration with the PMA, has overwhelmingly obstructed this struggle. In his letter, Heyman is silent on the work of the Committee. But one concrete way that Heyman could contribute to transforming the ILWU into a fighting force for the interests of the workers and oppressed the world over would be to advocate for the resolution initiated by Turnbull and passed by Local 10 (at the same meeting as the hot-cargo motion) calling for immediate full basic pay, medical benefits and PMA-paid, union-run training for casuals. If implemented, this would make a real difference for the casuals and be an important step toward undermining the tier system.

Formulas Do Not Make the Revolution

In his letter, Heyman goes to some pains to proclaim the insincerity of our support to hot-cargo action and trace our alleged retreat into reformism. To make his case, he trades on the notion that a revolutionary intervention into the unions consists in simply repeating a particular demand like a mantra—a notion that we ourselves embraced for many years. If we have kept count correctly, Turnbull’s election program for Local 10 president last year has three strikes against it: it includes the bad demand “fight for better,” omits the good demand “for labor boycotts of war cargo to Israel” and neglects to mention “capitalism.” Three strikes—she’s out as a revolutionary!

Never mind that Heyman’s preferred fight for “union control of technology” is nothing but a “fight for better.” Or that a “boycott of war cargo to Israel” is just a concrete expression of Turnbull’s call on the union to “oppose U.S. military operations, whether involving Ukraine, Israel or China.” Or that her election program is self-evidently against “capitalism”: It links immediate measures to strengthen the ILWU to broader ones, advocating that the ILWU, in addition to the above, end the tier system, fight for a shorter workweek at no loss in pay, oppose the Democrats and Republicans and build a workers party that aims to put working people in charge of the U.S. from top to bottom. If this is not an application to the ILWU today of Trotsky’s Transitional Program for the mobilization of the masses around key demands to prepare the conquest of power, what is?

Viewing things through the prism of phraseology and not purpose can take one to some strange places. For all Heyman’s protestations, we have to ask: Should ILWU members have fought for better during the last contract battle or not? What made AFL founder Samuel Gompers his execrable self was not his reply of “More!” In fact, that was probably the least objectionable thing Gompers ever said. No, the problem with Gompers was his purpose and strategy: his pushing of unvarnished race and craft prejudice, his promotion of the labor aristocracy at the expense of the working masses, his firm attachment to ascendant U.S. imperialism, etc. This not only helped the bosses hold down the vast majority of the working class, but also prevented its top layer from getting more. Believe it or not, there is a way for the ILWU to fight for better that can bridge divisions, unite it with the working class more broadly and put it on its own two feet against U.S. imperialism. And if we revolutionaries are not trying to chart that path, then what is it that we are doing in the union? It is in the course of just such fights that the capacity and consciousness to effect a revolution can be established in the working class.

If the only yardstick for judging the revolutionary vigor of a program is the number of properly worded traditional transitional demands contained therein, then our task would be quite simple—always recite lists of those demands. But we want to impact the real world, so it is far more useful to intersect felt needs in order to orient workers in a direction that can satisfy those needs—i.e., a revolutionary direction. Practical measures to reinvigorate the union right now—making it possible for longshore workers to take additional steps toward putting themselves and the rest of the class in a better position to beat back the current capitalist offensive and in the process look to turn the tables on the brutal U.S. rulers—are integral to a transitional perspective to take us from the present to workers power.

To put it another way, when Shawn Fain raised a version of the classic Trotskyist transitional demand “30 for 40” prior to the 2023 UAW auto strike, was he flirting with becoming a socialist? Of course not. In his hands, “30 for 40” was just another “mini” demand to get a slightly fairer shake for workers under capitalism—and one he quickly dropped in the face of staunch resistance before the strike. In all cases, one has to consider above all the purpose to which a demand is being put. Otherwise, like Heyman extolling Local 10 officials for passing a hot-cargo resolution that they only paid lip service to, one ends up apologizing for left-talking bureaucrats.

Workers move toward revolutionary conclusions through the practical experience of struggle—we have to immerse ourselves and actively unmask the dead-end strategy of the misleaders of the class, including the “progressive” pro-imperialists. Demonstrating to workers in the concrete how their interests are betrayed by the entire union bureaucracy is how class-struggle oppositions can oust the labor traitors. In contrast, arcane disputes over word choice among a handful of leftists who all seem to be fighting for the same thing can only turn off workers or leave them scratching their heads in confusion.

So, while Heyman considers it evidence of betrayal that we did not raise the demand to hot-cargo military goods at the end of our article “ILA Tops Scrapped Powerful Strike—Longshore Workers Prepare for Next Battle” (WV No. 1183, 18 December 2024), everybody else who read it got the point. Our exposure of the union bureaucracy for ensuring the movement of military cargo during the strike certainly was not lost on ILA International vice president Dennis Daggett, who went out of his way to write a letter of rebuttal. In his letter, posted on the union website, Daggett argues that our taking the ILA bureaucracy to task for undermining the union’s strike last October by ensuring the flow of military cargo was “both deeply irresponsible and deeply offensive.”

Heyman is scathing against our previous sterile abstentionism—and here we agree. Without offering a course of struggle in opposition to those binding the workers to the U.S. rulers, our proclamations of the need for revolutionary leadership were completely hollow. But the same is true of giving a pass to the bureaucracy’s “progressive” layer—a practice Heyman continues to this day. As against both sectarianism and opportunism, revolutionaries must always try to find a lever to break the hold of the union bureaucracy and further workers struggle today. Heyman’s letter kicks up a lot of sand while avoiding this question. An exchange of views on what should now be done not only would be a refreshing change of pace, but also could shed some light on the way forward for pro-Palestinian struggle in the ILWU and beyond. In the face of Israel’s unrelenting genocide in Gaza, it is more urgent than ever to take a proper gauge of the situation and seek opportunities to mobilize longshore and other workers in defense of the Palestinians.

—11 June 2025