By Barbara Dorn
19 November 2024
Howard in 1984, in 2015 and at the 1990 BT/PRG fusion conference.
Howard Keylor, who has died in California at the age of 98, was a founding member of the IBT, a revolutionary organizer, a militant trade-unionist, a teller of tales, a collector of facts and a stubborn and tenacious fighter for all he believed in. His contributions to the revolutionary movement were exemplary and significant.
I first met Howard in 1989 when he came to New Zealand as a representative of the North American Bolshevik Tendency (BT) to check out the Permanent Revolution Group (PRG), of which I was then a contact. We liked him and he liked us and that visit smoothed the way to the fusion that took place between the two organizations the following year, roughly a decade after the founding individuals had been expelled or forced out of the international Spartacist tendency.
That year, Howard moved to Hamburg with his partner Uschi and was present in Berlin later in 1990 at the fusion with the Gruppe IV Internationale (GIVI), also led by former Spartacists. These three groups came together on the basis of a shared political program to found the International Bolshevik Tendency. It is no exaggeration to say that Howard held the new German section together, composed as it was of former GIVI and BT comrades who did not always see eye-to-eye on things and were not afraid to say so, plus new recruits, particularly a group of younger comrades from the Ruhr. I was new to this, of course, but I saw in Germany and internationally that a fusion is not just about agreeing on a document but was a real process of growing collaboration, mutual respect and understanding—one of the many lessons Howard taught me.
Traveling in Europe in the early 1990s and settling in London, I visited Howard frequently. He and Uschi lived incongruously in a tower block in a village outside Hamburg, in an apartment full of books, where he immensely enjoyed just talking—mainly about contrasts between US and German culture and workers' movements, past and present, all illustrated with oddities retained in his scrap-book memory. And he told me his political history, first radicalized during WWII in the Pacific, then in the US Communist Party, then being inspired by Isaac Deutscher's biography of Trotsky and meeting and joining the Spartacist League through his work as a longshoreman at various harbors on the US west coast. He was a proud member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), where he worked in a militant caucus in political sympathy with the Spartacist League, fighting for a transitional program linking the immediate demands of his union brothers and sisters to the need for a workers' government.
In 1981, he was forced out of the degenerating Spartacist League and the Militant Caucus, in part over his opposition to the SL leadership's insistence on flying during the PATCO air controllers' strike while the workers picketed airports and called on the public to support them by refusing to fly. Two years later, the SL criminally wound up their trade-union caucuses and Howard, as a leader of the External Tendency of the iSt (later Bolshevik Tendency), was at the forefront of denouncing them for it (see Stop the Liquidation of the Trade Union Work!).
As an individual militant in ILWU Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area, he maintained his revolutionary profile and links with fellow workers, publishing a bulletin called the Militant Longshoreman and running for union positions on a revolutionary program. In 1984, he put forward a motion on the Executive Board of his local and in the branch proposing that the longshoremen should not work the next ship carrying cargo from apartheid South Africa. He confessed to being surprised that the motion passed (albeit watered down to target only the South African cargo), as he had been attempting similar initiatives for many years. In the end, this illegal action lasted 11 days and its influence still resonates around the world from dockers in Liverpool to anti-apartheid fighters in South Africa. Howard's memories of the event 30 years later can be heard here Memories of the 1984 Anti-Apartheid Longshore Boycott or read, along with other recollections, at Class Struggle on the Waterfront.
Howard knew very well that an 11-day strike was not going to change the world on its own but that its significance lay in the example it set for other political labor actions in the future, a tradition continued by Local 10 for many years past his retirement. Even more important to Howard, and the revolutionary legacy he leaves behind, the 1984 longshore strike showed that a revolutionary profile in the unions is not a road to isolation, but in fact works. Howard had no time for strategies of hiding behind anti-union laws and bureaucratic maneuvers—being an open revolutionary and advocating for what is needed was the only way he knew.
I last saw Howard a decade ago at an IBT conference in the western US. Well into his ninth decade, he was as good company as ever, although differences that later saw him parting ways with the IBT were brewing. Howard fought all his life from within the belly of the beast, critically defending the Soviet degenerated workers' state. As a resurgent Russia pushed its way forward in the intensifying imperialist rivalries of the post-Soviet world, this was a changing reality he found difficult to understand.
Howard fought in counter-revolutionary times, whether the 1950s or the 1990s. He knew his history but always sought out young people to talk to and those involved in the class struggle here and now—he was always looking to the future. We remember him by doing the same. It was an honor to have known and worked alongside him.