Jack will speak tonight on the West Coast port shutdown, plus...
See details if you wish to join the call.
--Marjorie
Greetings Comrades and Friends:
Reminder -- our next remote study group session will be held TODAY, June
25th at 6:30pm NYC time. (arriving a few minutes early is highly encouraged)
*The meeting invitation has been sent out. If you'd like to attend and have
not yet received an invitation please send an email to
August.DR@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx <August.DR@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ASAP. *
*Moving forward there will be no need to request the invite on a weekly
basis. If you have attended a study group recently, your name is on the
list. Only first-time attendees need to request an invitation. *
This week's announcement has been recopied below.
Thanks,
-Zach
Dear study group participants,
Our next meeting will be held on Thursday, June 25 at 6:30 p.m.
As we have been doing during this COVID-19 lockdown, we will send out an
email soliciting a response from attendees. If you notify the specified
email address of your intention to attend, you will be sent a gotomeeting
invitation with a passcode.
[image: image.png]
*Jack Heyman speaking in Oakland at the ILWU port shutdown against racist
police terror, Juneteenth 2020. Jack will be speaking on this historic
labor action and many other struggles*. *Read about the struggle for the
port shutdown here:*
http://www.internationalist.org/ilwu-to-shut-all-west-coast-ports-against-racist-police-brutality-0620.html
[image: image.png]
*Jack Heyman addressing workers of the International Longshore Association
(ILA) in 2000, in the port of Charleston, South Carolina. These mainly
black workers were the object of a terrific union-busting campaign of
violence and frame-ups by the shipping companies working hand-in-hand with
the racist forces of "law and order" (i.e., the cops, the courts, the
government). Jack led a solidarity campaign of the West Coast ILWU. This
campaign was a vital part in the successful effort to free the "Charleston
Five"--dock workers whom the state framed up on bogus conspiracy charges.
Read about this key battle for labor rights and black freedom here:*
*http://www.internationalist.org/charlestonfive0601.html
<http://www.internationalist.org/charlestonfive0601.html>*
This week, we are very fortunate to have Jack Heyman to lead our
discussion. Jack is a longtime worker militant, with 40 years of militancy
in the maritime unions, including the National Maritime Union (NMU), as a
seaman on the East Coast, and the Inland Boatman's Union (IBU) and the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the San Francisco Bay
Area. Jack played a leading role in important Bay Area maritime strikes in
the 1980s. He was the inspirer and organizer of the 2008 May Day Shutdown
of all West Coast ports to demand the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and
Afghanistan. This latter action was carried through with the important
theoretical contributions and organizational support of the
*Internationalist* newspaper--for it is the ABC of revolutionary Marxism
that workers strikes against the bosses' imperialist wars is an important
expression of class consciousness and a significant political expression of
workers power. These are the kinds of actions that open the road away from
impotent peace marches and toward workers revolution.
[image: image.png]
[image: image.png]
V
*icious police attack against ILWU members and other anti-Iraq War
protestors , April 7, 2003, at the port of Oakland. Jack at left is
arrested then, fighting for the right of workers to protest imperialist
war. Read the report here:*
*http://www.internationalist.org/defendoakland251003.html
<http://www.internationalist.org/defendoakland251003..html>*
Jack has promised to speak on the importance of class-struggle leadership
in the fight against racism and capitalism. In college he became involved
in the civil-rights movement and SNCC. The lessons he learned in the
movement, on the true nature of the Democratic Party, on the role of the
police and the FBI, led him to take up revolutionary politics. This he did
early on as a member of a militant trade union caucus in the NMU, that
supported the *Workers Vanguard* newspaper, which at one time stood for the
revolutionary politics of Lenin and Trotsky
*.*
[image: image.png]
He will also speak on the importance of the Transitional Program. This is a
program developed by Leon Trotsky and other leaders of the Fourth
International, that helps revolutionary worker militants raise demands and
organize actions that bridge the gap between current worker consciousness,
often saturated with reformist illusions, and true class consciousness. For
example, we call for workers defense guards against the KKK-fascists and
company goons. The reformists call on the bosses' state (cops, army,
courts, laws, what have you). The Transitional Program is a tool, for
worker militants to help workers understand that they themselve have the
power--as the engine of society--to win struggles and ultimately to control
their own destiny.
Jack will also speak on his role and the role of the Internationalist
Group, in organizing the May Day 2008 shutdown of all US West Coast ports,
as an expression of workers hatred for the US imperialist wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. This historic action remains an inspiring example of
the Transitional Program in practice. Only socialist revolution can end
imperialist wars, and only the proletariat can make such a revolution. But
in order for that to happen, workers have to get used to exercising their
own power--and for American workers, the May Day 2008 action was one of the
most significant in this vein.
In the readings, Jack has highlighted two figures that influenced him. One
was the radical black-freedom lawyer Conrad Lynn. At the behest of Robert
Williams, Lynn worked on the "Kissing Case" that we have been discussing.
He also defended our comrades on many occasions. A chapter from his
autobiography, *There is a Fountain,* is one of our readings this week.
[image: image.png]
*Conrad Lynn with Bill Epton, leader of Progressive Labor, at the time of
the Harlem uprising against police terror, 1964. Revolutionary Trotskyists
worked closely with Epton and Lynn in this struggle.*
Jack will also talk of his friend, labor martyr Byron Jacobs, a militant
longshore union leader and Lumbee Indian. Byron was inspired in his life,
so brutally shortened by capitalism, by his great grandfather, one of 1,000
armed Indians who drove off the KKK near Monroe, North Carolina.
Readings:
[image: image.png]
Conrad Lynn, "The Kissing Case," in *There is a Fountain: The autobiography
of a civil rights lawyer*, 141-57. (Attached below as a pdf.)
Jack Heyman, "The tragic death of Byron Jacobs" and "The Jacob Family's
Proud History," *Internationalist,* November 2018.
http://www.internationalist.org/byronjacobsheroegtstruggle1811.html
[image: image.png]
[image: image.png]
*Not so fast racist punks: *well organized Lumbee tribespeople (in first
photo at right) confront KK-cowards in Robeson County, North Carolina,
January 1957. Inspired by the self-defense organizing of Robert L. Williams
in nearby Monroe, the Lumbee drove out the Klan, which had intended to
terrorize them. Right: Victorious Lumbee tribesmen brandish the flag of the
defeated racist cowards, demonstrating the superior strategy of
self-defense. Byron Jacobs, the fifth-generation longshore worker murdered
by capitalism whom Jack Heyman eulogizes in his articles, was a proud
Lumbee Indian.
*Recommended:*
These are articles from the *Internationalist*,
1. on the 2008 West Coast port shutdown by the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union (ILWU)--real labor action against the US imperialist
war in Iraq--organized by Jack H., with the support of the Internationalist
Group;
2. a work stoppage by the ILWU demanding justice for Oscar Grant, a young
black man from Oakland executed by a member of the BART (commuter-rail)
police with a single shot to the head while in police custody on a platform
in the Fruitvale BART station. Jack H. played an important role in
organizing this action, which the Internationalist Group ultimately did not
endorse, since one of its main slogans was "jail the killer cops." While
this is a perfectly understandable expression of the rage felt by the black
masses of Oakland against the murderous police, it advances reformist
illusions in the capitalist system. The duty of revolutionaries is to
ensure that workers actions cut against liberal faith in the deadly
so-called "justice" system of capitalist America.
3. on the work stoppages demanding freedom for Mumia Abu Jamal, the
brilliant radical journalist and former Black Panther, framed up by the
fascistic Philadelphia police for killing one of their officers. He is
completely innocent but spent 30 years on death row. Since 2012 he has been
serving a life sentence. We have long battled to free this brave
revolutionary. The work stoppages were carried out in April 1999 by
education workers in Brazil and the ILWU in the US. Comrades and supporters
of the Internationalist Group and the Liga Quarta-Internacionalista do
Brasil were instrumental in these actions.
[image: image.png]
"The point," said Marx about the world which philosophers had only
interpreted, "is to change it." How? With the organized power of the
working class, acting as a class, and with a leadership that does not sow
illusions in the capitalist system. Revolutionaries at every opportunity
reinforce the idea that the workers have to rely on their own power, at the
center of capitalist society. If the workers decide, nothing in Mr. Boss's
world works. It is the idea ultimately of socialist revolution. This will
not be accomplished without revolutionary leadership, a revolutionary
party. And as one of our comrades recently emphasized in our discussion, we
as Trotskyists rely on the Transitional Program of Trotsky, which is filled
with the great revolutionary's wisdom on actions and demands that foster
the workers' own discovery of and reliance on their power in this society.
http://www.internationalist.org/lessons2008longshorestrikeagainstwar1805.html
http://www.internationalist.org/ilwuoscargrant1104.html
http://www.internationalist.org/brazilmumia0599.html
__._,_.___
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Posted by: Zachary Darr-Rodriguez <zacharydarr89@xxxxxxxxx>
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