Internationalism Will Defeat Racism! — The Juneteenth Port Workers’ Strike

Though the attitude of the state and the action of the police against workers of color, specifically black workers, has not changed over the course of American history, neither has the reciprocal push labor has taken to stand against the racism of the state. Nothing more exemplifies these actions against racism than the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU) of North America. For more than a century the ILWU has wielded its class power at the ports along the west coast of the United States to oppose racism and supported black workers across the planet: from striking after the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. and the apartheid regime of South Africa, to establishing housing coops and providing training and education the union has shown the power working people have as an international class.

In their demands and in its opposition to employers for racial equality through the years, the ILWU has also shown that the working class is international in character, standing together against this oppression strengthens ties of the working class across countries and racial lines. Even within their own organization, the ILWU has been able to combat the pervasive racist sentiments that are encouraged in capitalist society. The economic system, and the political state that maintains the economic dominance of the ruling class, benefits from the indiscriminate killing of workers of color. Labor itself has a massive role to play in the protests against this pervasive social relationship. Society depends on the flow of commodities both in the market and across the globe to stay profitable; and it is this profitability above anything else that capitalists and their institutions listen to. The flow of commodities is where the working class can make its actions noticed! This fact is what has given the ILWU the ability to defend its members through a strike.

Anti-racism, especially that which has grown and been the cause of waves of protests and riots across the United States, can only be functional and potent in bringing racism to its knees by the international union of the working class. Racism has been historically enriched and perpetuated to the benefit of the ruling class and capitalist institutions. By allowing this division among the working class internationally, between white and black workers especially, capitalist society is able to prevent the class from uniting under a common banner to make its demands known and realized. From the continuation of discriminate killings of black people by the police across the globe to the quietly ignored but ever more apparent profiling of communities through redlining, the historic racist policies of the various capitalist states comes out from under its pleasing mask of democratic representation.

And so it is the case that on the 19th of June, the ILWU takes actions it has taken in the past to protest the racism that has been perpetuated against so many black people, in particular the killing of George Floyd. The union will walk off the ports, 29 across the west coast, to make their demands, much like in the 1973 strikes against apartheid. The impact to the shipping ports will be a loss in profits to capitalist institutions across the globe, as this wretched economic system is starved of it’s own life blood, the actual products that make it function.

Except, the union will have little power to make the demanded changes to the state that have been called by many across the country. What lessons the ILWU’s actions show the working class is that it’s power is at the workplace and in the fact that it can stop the flow of commodities; it is not only the class that produces them, it is the class that distributes them too! Without the coordinated effort of the working class across the whole planet, united as the working class of the whole of society, these demands will slide into the background, as capitalist institutions play their impotent parliamentarian games in hopes that they will be able to hide their half-hearted legislative attempts to balance their favoring of capital over human lives. They only give in to the demands of the working class to placate a revolt on the scale of a social revolution! But the working class can only see the change they demand from the state through this revolution, a coordinated effort of the united international class, using state power by their own hands and the destruction of the state that exists to perpetuate capitalism! This effort can and must be achieved, realized only by walking hand in hand with the class party, the international communist party, who has been able to guide the class through the quagmire of capitalist democratism and the racial divides that have plagued society for centuries. It isn’t any one movement of workers in any one specific location or industry that will put a stop to racism, it is the international working class that will make that possibility a reality.