I’m not going to spend the money on a thousand-page book by Palmer. I caught him falsifying a reference in another book and wrote him about it. His reply didn’t add up. He had alleged that the history of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific was published by Rutgers University, giving it some credibility. In fact, it was initially published by the Institute for Contemporary Studies, a Reaganite think tank with CIA connections. The author, Lulu Schwartz, was outed as a federal informant by her own admission in a KRON-TV special “Private Spies.” Even Palmer’s sources here in the SF Bay Area Trotskyist movement acknowledge this. I have not trusted Palmer since then.
I note that he devotes eighteen pages to the SWP ‘getting its sea legs.’ I assume this is an account of the alliance between the SWP and the Sailors Union officialdom. It was not the sort of entry they brag about in the Minneapolis Teamsters, and for good reason. The Sailors were an overtly racist union; their union rivals, the National Maritime Union and the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen Union, were integrated. The CPUSA made a point of organizing those unions with a specifically anti-racist strategy. The SWP remained silent about, and complicit in, the racism of the Sailors. When a left challenge to the racism of the Sailors occurred it came from Stan Weir, a Shachtmanite. He received no support from the SWP.
In the mid-1970’s I was a member of the Sailors (SUP) while a revolt was brewing over jurisdictional raiding, company unionism, and internal democracy in west coast maritime labor. I was well-positioned to intervene, and I did. The SWP had no interest. Instead, they urged me to quit the SUP and go to work in a steel plant for Sadlowski. They had no clue about how to organize among union ranks, and self-isolated as insular newcomers. I turned my back on them and immersed myself in SUP activism, eventually winning an internal democracy and membership rights fight. To this day, after all my contacts with west coast Trotskyism, none of that ilk has said anything positive about that.
My experiences with Palmer’s friends here in the bay area are that their M.O. is slander of anyone who does not show fealty, false claims to leadership, and attempts to sell out good struggles like the 2014 Zim Line pickets, that succeed in spite of, not because of, their wrecking efforts. If I get a chance to read Palmer’s account of the SWP presence in the SUP, I will. But I talked to Frank Lovell about it myself, and he admitted they made big mistakes. Siding with racism was certainly one of them. I can tell you from my extensive conversations on that issue that the CPUSA never let them forget it. I will add that I have always been an opponent of Stalinism and have sided with Trotskyism in every partisan struggle over their differences. But I will not run cover for the whitewashes of their failings.
-Pete Turner
